Bronte Media

After flirting with the idea of learning how to become a documentary filmaker, I randomly stumbled across this interesting posting on Craigslist New York.

Basically it is a poker player who is offering to teach people wanting to learn poker five at a time, and entirely managed online.

There is no fee. And in the post it requires the potential player to be:

“New to online poker (does not have a Partypoker account) “

What a great idea. Affiliate payouts on poker now tend to be a % of the money gambled, so can be quite lucrative. You almost have to wonder if payouts are at the stage where it is worth infiltrating investment banking firms to teach newly enriched partners how to play the game.

This is too funny to pass up. I am struggling to link it to media in some way - perhaps it offers a counter-point to the theory that editors are better than machines?

From an Oscar-wrap article in the WSJ today, making it quite clear who the editorial department of the esteemed newspaper thought was the ‘bitch’ in the relationship:

“The film stars Mr. Ledger and Ms. Gyllenhaal as Western roughnecks who share a summer of love while tending sheep together in the 1960s, then carry on a lifelong romance they conceal from their families. Ms. Williams co-stars as Mr. Ledger’s wife, who overlooks her husband’s affair to try to hold her family together.”

If you’d like to read about how the VC industry is changing, and a thoughtful examination of what the industry is doing to react to those changes, read this. If you like authoratively written diarrhea, are one of those people that watches late night tv and orders abdominal step crunching machines and wants to reform-the-vc-industry-in-five-easy-steps, read this. Easy steps people, easy. Like 1-2-3-err-5!

Let’s get real. MSN is not a serious competitor to either Google or Yahoo. They have had a year and a half do something, after changing ‘focus’ toward Internet media, and they are failing to keep up with the overall online ad industry let alone the big two.

This from their most recent earnings:

“Advertising revenues grew 12 percent year-over-year at MSN in Microsoft’s fiscal second quarter amid ongoing investments in the area the company said would continue.”

“While overall ad revenue, including search, was up, display ad dollars saw an even bigger gain, growing 20 percent in the quarter as compared to the year-ago period. Part of that increase came via a hike in advertising rates, said Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell.”

Both data points are indicators that the firm is continuing to do pathetically and cannot keep apace even with the overall online advertising market.

If display is growing at twice the average rate of growth, they must be losing a ton of search share. Granted, the experimenting with the transition to Adcenter will have skewed the result negatively.

But c’mon. AOL is doing better than them for god’s sake.

It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee: Microsoft versus Google may make a great Businessweek headline but it could not be further from reality.

While the echo chamber will no doubt lather itself in a stupor over rumors that a small social news site with growing traffic maybe acquired for $35m, elsewhere real money sounds like it is poised to change hands.

Jay Weintraub, who uncomfortably picked, from a legal standpoint, the pricegrabber acquisition a long time before it was announced, says that Mr Diller is poised to buy Nextag. He had heard Quinstreet, a lead generator in the online education space was nearly going to buy them but now Diller is the favored suitor. In a wildcard scenario Jay says Diller may buy both Quinstreet and Nextag.

Diller has struggled with developing a comparison shopping service of his own and Pronto debuted to a lukewarm reception. But that’s not likely the driver of the love of Nextag.

Through lendingtree he has developed a taste for mortgage leads, where Nextag has best carved out its niche.

If this does indeed go through, and I can’t imagine it would be for less than $500m and perhaps might push $800-900m, Diller will have proven himself a shrewd investor once more. And then no doubt he will prove himself a less-than-shrewd operator as the firm grows nicely but not fantastically once more.

One of my favorite movies is startup.com, a documentary that shadows the explosion of govWorks.com. It captures the personalities in such a raw and vivid way, reminds the world that at one point in time the Internet was cool and is of course on one of my favorite topics - starting an Internet company.

There hasn’t been much geek chic business since. Recently there was Aardvark, a story of a team of young nerd interns who build a software product that allows support staff to fix PC problems. It was OK but not great.

The time for really good documentaries on web companies is probably gone but the rise of broadband and the ever lovable long-tail still produces small gems like this one [caution: .mov opens in browser]. It’s a short <5 min documentary on Yelp.com, a company I have talked about here a few times that is a consumer-written yellow pages firm. The short film embodies all that’s great and inspiring about small startups.

The venerable marketing director of Yelp, Nish Nadaraja, even gets his very own documentary on The Nish. Great stuff.

I know it must seem that I relentlessly beat up on the newspaper set but I really do want to change. And credit where credit’s due. In this case, Careerbuilder, which has been on a tear of late.

Go and take a look at Monster’s stock price in the last little while. It has significantly outperformed even the holiest of holy, Google.

Now take what Monster is doing and Careerbuilder is doing even better. It has nearly taken over Monster’s number one position from a significant distance behind only a few years ago. And now they are even beginning to open a gap between itself and Monster in usage. And revenues are nearly there too (you can piece it together via the newspaper firm’s earnings calls).

So what do the newspapers try to do with this wildly successful beast? Well one part owner wants to sell it. Great jobs guys! Shit. I promised myself I was going to be nice to the newspaper industry in this post.

What do you do when your audience shows an irrefutable preference to consume the part of your business that generates nearly all of your profitability on the Internet instead of in traditional print? You try to force them to consume it on an even more unsuitable medium, that’s what!

And so it was that The San Francisco Chronicle announced that it was launching a half-hour television program that will feature employment classifieds and run three times a week at 5:30am in the morning. Each classified job ad will appear for 30 seconds.

I know what you’re thinking: what a great idea! Waking up at 5:30am in the morning to search for jobs on a medium where you have zero control over the navigation! Brilliant! Tap whoever thought of this idea to, if the rumors are correct and quite frankly when is the New York Post not correct?, replace Llyod Braun over at Yahoo - this is media convergence at its best baby!

*shudder*

Continuing my role as Ombudsmen for the New York Times technology section, comes this article today on user reviews:

Mr. Hunt said NetFlix’s recommendation system collected more than two million ratings forms from subscribers daily to add to its huge database of users’ likes and dislikes.

Mr Hunt’s (the firm’s Chief Product Officer) breathless optimism is unfortunately then offset by this:

The company credits the system’s ability to make automated yet accurate recommendations as a major factor in its growth from 600,000 subscribers in 2002 to nearly 4 million today.

To digest the two million-reviews-a-day assertation, or a ‘conservative’ annual run rate of three quarters of a billion reviews a year, you have to believe not only that half of Netflix’s customers log on to their web-site but that each of those people are filling out a review. Every. Single. Day.

A pace only Roger Ebert could keep up with.

Netflix is one of the most impressive examples of user generated content because it draws so heavily on not only self-reported (reviews) but observed data (usage) as well. Why they need to lie to the press, we shall never know.

UPDATE: Sean of organized shopping points out the fact that he mentions ratings not reviews and therefore not apples to apples, which could be conceivable. But still, 50% of your customers rating every single day? It just seems like an enormously engaged audience. I did try to rate as a non-Netflix customer and I couldn’t (or couldn’t see how to do it).

One of the fundamental beliefs I had when founding homethinking.com was that lead generation firms that coaxed a consumer into filling out a form around categories like mortgage, real estate and online education were doomed, paradoxically as they rise to prominence. Or at least set to dramatically decline.

First of all, there is very little that differentiates each firm. They are all standardizing on common fields, which is great from an advertiser point of view, but from a competitive advantage standpoint it is horrible. Literally it is at the stage where each firm is displaying *exactly* the same form.

Efficiencies and advantages in media buying can only last so long.

Two of the largest competitors to homethinking (in that they both help the consumer make the same decision) is Housevales.com and Homegain.com.

I have written about Housevalues quite a bit on this site, and I will imagine I will do so a lot in the future as well. Financially, they are doing exceptionally well. Strategically, however I think that they must change.

Take a look at these reviews of Housevalues and reviews of Homegain on Alexa:

“I’ve been looking to find out how much my home was worth and used a few sites… and this one.. well, I started getting calls from agents who wanted to sell it for me, then started getting even more spam then before!!”

and the ever helpful: “Homegain or is Homeshame? Homelame? Homedisdain?”

I don’t mean to put the spotlight on Housevalues and Homegain, as there are literally thousands of others who are very similar and worse. But those two are the two market leaders in real estate and I selfishly care about them the most.

Dark curtain lead generation sites ultimately lead to a lose-lose-lose scenario. At least, that’s my opinion. Would love for you to disagree with me in the comments.

If you agree with me, go and write a review of homethinking.com on Alexa. No, I’m serious. It’s Friday afternoon, after all.