Bronte Media

The podcast meme missed the mark with me. Maybe it was because I was an iPod wearing New York subway drone and never really consumed that much radio. But over the past month or so, I have found myself listening to an increasing amount of podcasts, mainly at night and instead of watching the New York Knicks lose.

I’d heavily recommend readers subscribe to Venture Voice by Greg Gallant. His recent shows with Fabrice Grinda and Randy Komisar have been particularly fantastic.

There is also the Stanford Technology Venture Program, which is now podcasting its Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar series. The list of speakers is also similarly inspirational.

Go subscribe to them both. And if you have any others in a similar area, post them in the comments, I’d love to check them out.

Direct Response, an affiliate ad network, search marketing bid management vendor and coupon delivery vendor among other things, announced that it has added a pay per call pricing option to its affiliate ad network.

Because the ‘ad’ in a pay per call environment is so undefinable, giving freedom to affiliates to tailor a message around calling the consumer to an action (in this case a phone call) is a great idea.

One of the unfortunate things about Ingenio, who are a fantastic company, is that the listings in their ad network are fixed with a short company detail and then opening hours. That makes it tough, at least initially, to integrate with Homethinking, where our profiles (or listings) are the site’s differentiation.

Similarly for Ingenio to syndicate to consumer written yellow pages sites like Judy’s Book, Yelp and Insiderpages, the profile integration will be tough.

Rather than become an ad network, with fixed creative, perhaps pay per call advertising firms need to embrace the lessons of affiliate marketing instead (basically more control on the sell-side in the form of a publisher being able to tailor the layout but guided by the advertiser).

Update: Oops, forgot to mention that Voicestar is the company that is powering the network and is getting more involved from an ad buying and selling standpoint too. We went with Voicestar because of their more flexible API and the freedom to innovate on our side - not to mention the potential to possibly cross-polonate with other clients like Yelp and Insiderpages.

Jay Weintraub has the news that Experian, owner of Lowermybills and other Internet assets, will likely announce the acquisition of Pricegrabber on Wednesday for around $470m.

More than that, he profiles the company, Valueclick and alludes to “capital events” for Nextag and Quinstreet (I imagine a VC firm with private equity ambitions might be interested in liquidating the founders). The reason being, the firms are already profitable and there is no real need to spend $2m/year on SOX compliance by going public (if you’re market cap is anything less than $700m, it’s probably not worth going public these days).

As talks of AOL narrow to a simple search syndication agreement, something struck me: For MSN to win, they would have to sign a significantly loss-making commitment. Here’s why:

1) Raw number of advertisers. MSN has only just begun building direct relationships with advertisers and has far less than Google. It’s not hard to get critical mass, but it will still take 18-24 more months.

2) Yield management. The yield improvements ($ per search) Google has been able to eke out through technology and science in recent times is nothing short of amazing. Even if MSN had the depth of advertisers it still would not be able to earn as much money per search.

Now given that Google already gives 85+% of the revenue to AOL, and will likely be happy to share a few more points, that means that a profitable deal for MSN would be impossible.

Even if they gave 100% of the revenue to AOL it still would not be enough. That’s because 90% of the revenue Google is able to deliver per search is still well in excess of 100% of the revenue MSN could deliver. Further, it is likely to be that way for at least the next two years.

Therefore, it would be very surprising if AOL decided to switch and instead it just makes fiscal sense to keep tarting around and squeezing a few more points from Google.

Brian from AdWeek who introduced me to CitiMove, the company I mentioned before in the review fraud post, also pointed me to a story written up about them in the NYTimes a few months back. You can go read an open copy of the article here. I highly recommend you do if you think about local advertising.

A little more information on the business model: they charge 50 cents for each bid that is entered by a mover, which seems quite low. A 20% cut of the final fee seems like a better model. Although it looks like transaction volume is quite nice (one of the top rated movers has more than a thousand reviews). They advertise through Google and for free through craigslist.

I’m going to try and meet up with one of the founders and if I do, I’ll post tidbits of our conversation here.

I think their move to migrate the bid outcomes on to the web and open the metrics important for future customers (while restricting the non-useful data points like their personal details) is one of the better ideas around local search and am intrigued to find out more.

[Via Battelle via Paid Content]: Jonathan Rosenberg, VP-product development at Google, at a UBS investor conference on pay per call: “Interesting model. … Our general experience has been the more we show advertisers specifically the results we’re delivering the more they spend. … I think we will see cost per call increasingly more successful.”

One of the most frequent questions I got when we launched Homethinking this week was “What will you do if someone writes something bad about a realtor and the realtor doesn’t like it?”

As consumer’s publish more information online, the issue will become ever more important.

Ernest Hemmingway once said that “all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

One site that does a great job of enforcing credibility of the reviews is Citimove.com, a removalist bidding and review site. They seem to check all sorts of things like email address and IP address. Design wise the site looks like it is trapped in 1996 but still it is an incredibly useful resource. One fascinating thing they have done is to put the bidding proposal online. So after the job is finished the quote/project spec gets put online. It’s great context for when you are reading “this guy is great” type comments. Incredibly, Service magic haven’t done this too.

As for Homethinking, we ask for the address of the house the reviewer sold with the realtor and the approximate price range. We don’t disclose that anywhere on the site but we use that to run an audit against the county records to see if that house was indeed sold for that approximate price range. That adds another step of authentication, but it still is an issue that we’ll continue to grapple with. That said, the reviews from the beginning will be a whole lot more credible than the category reviews of say Insiderpages and Judy’s Book in their real estate category.

If you are hoping to establish credibility about others through reviews, sites will have to take many steps themselves to become credible in the minds of users.

I may be terribly naive, and this may not be something new, but I just thought I would throw it out there: in Firefox 1.5 if you type in generic words without the dotcom it redirects you to the site occupying the first Google result for that keyword phrase. That is, if you type in “Digital Camera” it directs you to dpreview.com rather than digitalcamera.com.

IE 6 returns an MSN search results page, which makes me think that this is not something new and that the Direct Navigation industry has been suriving fine without the browsers trying to add a .com onto the phrase.

I wonder what kind of hit the traffic to the sites took when the browsers changed the way they handle the generic keywords. And what percent of traffic to the domains are referred by search engines versus people explicitly typing in the domain name.

Pace Media Group has been acquired by ICON advertising solutions, an ad network.

From the email release:

“What’s the news? Namely, that ICON Advertising Solutionsa specialized media representation company with access to nearly 1.3 billion monthly impressionswill be purchasing PaceMG. As a result of this acquisition, the New Media Report and the New Media Spotlight you have come to love will be merged with new content to form an original interactive advertising publication called ADOTAS. It is with deep melancholy that we report we will no longer be publishing ADBUMb.”

Instead everything will be consolidated into a new newsletter called ADOTAS.

One of the areas that my thirst for knowledge is near unabated for is affiliate marketing. So the news is a shame. But it also gave me an idea to replace the reading with something else. And so I am turning to you to expand my reading list.

I also read affiliate tip and affiliate cluetrain when it posts, but they are so so. Other very good direct response advertising blogs (which incorporate more than affiliates) are Jay Weintraub, John DeMayo and Greg Yardley.

Are there any great blogs that I should be reading about direct response online advertising or affiliate marketing? Leave a comment.

Wow. The WSJ reports that Verizon is seeking a seller for its directories unit that could net the company $17bn and is expected to happen next year.

The company is essentially betting on pay television and giving up on directory advertising and online search. My context is obviously heavily skewed, but what a monstrous strategic mistake.

I have never understood, having moved to America a few years ago, why US telcos have an almost laguna-beach-daughter relationship with their directories unit - treating it with indifference while plumbing it for cash to pay for their partying.

The graph in the WSJ shows a steadily declining revenue but these things are so profitable. Alone in 2003, Verizon cut the number of employees by a third. That’s right, one third! The businesses are to the stage now where they are just cash registers. There has been little investment in their online arms and overall product development (although to be fair, Verizon has done a lot more than anyone else). But even Verizon has decided to hawk it off (the others sold them to private equity firms a few years ago because the bankers came knocking after the telcos spent too much on fiber in 2000).

The option value on the online arm is worth at least a few billion alone. Sometimes I wish I was in private equity so that I could buy the whole thing, load up on debt, spin the print directories out into a separate entity, keep the sales force and charge an exhorbitant management contract with the print arm and focus on local online advertising with superpages.com. And then other times I realize that even if I was in private equity, the people I would be working for probably wouldn’t let me do that.