Bronte Media

On Monday my bags are packed and I am moving to the city of light, Paris!

One of the reasons I started Homethinking and my own company was to have the flexibility to do something like this. It may be a complete abject failure but I am going to give it a shot at least until the end of the year, and then re-evaluate at that point.

My plan is to not a change a thing work wise but simply do that work from a different city in the world, and one I have always wanted to live in (not to mention be able to sample the delights of RyanAir and EasyJet flights throughout Europe).

Homethinking has 8 people and me, and five of those people are in Eastern Europe, so if anything that is a plus with the timezone.

Then through the wonders of the Internet I can have a US number ring my Skype Phone and a US postal address that scans, stores, shreds Mail on my remote demand. No one will even know I am not in the US.

Why Paris? It is one of the world’s great cities and I will finally force myself to learn French. It will also allow me to continue to follow my gastronomic calling and indulge in more food-related hedonism.

The downside? Well the US dollar is dropping like a rock and if it moved to 2 to 1 or 2.5 to 1 then the economics would be harder. But that’s all the reason to start now.

As for this blog and it’s topics? Nothing will change there either (my thinking will still all be around the same things) but there may be the odd photo of a baguette.

I would love to get more involved in the entrepreneurial or Internet community in Paris. So if you know anyone be sure to introduce me (niki dot scevak at gmail).

Thank you New York City. Five great years on, I’ll always have a special place in my heart and may return in the future!

Color me skeptical. Jingle, the free 411 provider, is saying that they are profitable on a per call basis. And at the same time they are announcing the CEO is leaving, they are closing down their California office and they are re-organizing.

My original analysis of the industry from way back in 2006 is here, here, here and finally here.

The Techcrunch post says the company has their per call cost down to $0.10, which is signficantly down from the $0.25 the company reported in October 2006.

I should also say that the original post relating to the economics received a fantastic reply from Lyn Chitow Oakes, SVP of Marketing, which I was very grateful for. The current management team page on their site, which she was listed on at the time, shows no mention of her now but her LinkedIn profile does say she still works for the company in that capacity.

Warren Buffett on Berkshire Hathaway versus Private Equity:

“You can sell it to Berkshire, and we’ll put it in the Metropolitan Museum; it’ll have a wing all by itself; it’ll be there forever,” he says at the February meeting. “Or you can sell it to some porn shop operator, and he’ll take the painting and he’ll make the boobs a little bigger and he’ll stick it up in the window, and some other guy will come along in a raincoat, and he’ll buy it.”

From an interview with Ken Miller, founder of Anchor Intelligence, a click fraud company:

“[Question]: And you charge these clients on a monthly subscription basis?

[Answer]: Processing is a per-click subscription.”

A click fraud company that is paid on a per click basis. Now that wouldn’t create the wrong incentives would it?

C’mon, who are we deluding? Yahoo is the loser in all of this takeover battle and Microsoft has tipped it in a death-spiral? No fucking way.

Yahoo induced itself into its own death spiral. More specifically, Yahoo’s management.

Microsoft’s offer for the company temporarily juiced the share price but it is now right back where it started. In fact, it wont be long until other private equity or competitors launch competing bids (and they wont be at $30+ a share).

And so when people write of the ‘exodus’ at the company and how they are losing rockstars like the Flickr and Delicious founders, I scoff. Why? Those are entrepreneurs waiting to vest. Watching Flickr’s growth explode was probably really exciting but watching the paint dry on new releases (Flickr video anyone?) was painful. As a Flickr pro user I don’t really care about how many people use the site, but I do care about a kick ass photo site. On the ownership side of the table the founders are probably in a similar situation.

Yahoo needs new leadership. Yahoo needs a mass exodus of all the people who can’t get passionate about building Yahoo. All of this is necessary for it to regain its footing. As bad as it sounds, nearly every one of those senior management people should have left because they presided over the failure in the past few years.

Is it going to be easy to turn around? Is it going to be easy to find the right people to turn it around? No and no, but nothing is easy and I have 100% confidence they will turn it around. But they need new blood.

When all is said and done and the music has stopped the one without a chair isn’t Yahoo but Microsoft. We are nearly there. It is jaw dropping to see the media swarm around Yahoo and proclaim death and yet the limp Microsoft on life support is portrayed as a savvy market player.

This wont last for long. A few quarters of financials and the truth will no doubt bubble to the top.

God bless you Danny Sullivan. He has made a name for himself by reverting mob behavior/thinking back to reality and this is yet again a fine treatise. Go read it.

Regular readers will know of my experiment last November to register around 100 real estate related domain names (<little -town>realestate.com). People showed up to the domains when I originally parked them with services TrafficZ and Sedo but I hardly made any money.

So I changed the template (example here) and my strategy somewhat.

How is that working out? Firstly to the analytics. Sedo said I got 300 people in November to the domains, 500 in December of 07 and just 180 people in January (when I decided to change).

According to Google Analytics 362 people visited the domains in the past month.

They seem to be ranking well. Take centertonrealestate.com which is the number 2 result on Google behind Yahoo for the query ‘centerton real estate’.

But what about the moolah? The cheese? The greenbacks?

Well surprisingly the click through rates have sky-rocketed but the numbers are still so miniscule that the portfolio doesn’t make money. In fact, the click through rates have risen to 49%.

We had 39 clicks on the search the MLS link which yielded $9.80 for the month. There was also 40 clicks on the foreclosure link, but since that is a CPA deal and no one actually ended up buying a foreclosure subscription it yielded nothing. Similarly, we had 44 clicks on the mortgage lead gen page that didn’t yield a conversion.

And then there were 60 clicks on Realtors that lead back to Homethinking, which are worth something, but hard to value. Another value element, as you can see in the Google ranking of some of the domains, is the link juice passing.

So what do I need to make money? Well I need to make $2/day and instead I am making roughly $0.33 a day. So traffic would need to be roughly 1,800 per month at the current conversion rates, a six fold increase. Or alternatively, if one of those conversion offers converts then that would bring earnings up to nearly break even.

So my RPM at the moment is $27 ($9.80/(362/1000)), which sounds about right and way up from the miniscule $5 RPM I was getting from the parking companies.

Time will also give the domains to earn trust in Google (usually there is a 1 year sandbox penalty for really small sites). And then there is also other content I can add from various places to the template to help it rank better.

So all in all it’s looking like I should make the decision to at least keep some of the domains when they are up for renewal in November.

The experiment continues….

From a Blackstone IPO redux in Bloomberg:

“For a Blackstone insider, that IPO was perfectly timed,” said Ryan Lentell, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. in Chicago. “For a common holder, the timing was the worst.”

Long time readers know that when these types of firms went public, I thought management were sending the clearest of all signals that the market had disconnected from reality if they were willing to sell.

This so perfectly captures Australian culture/sports that I had to post it:

“You know, if they stopped paying me [to play Rugby League], I’d still turn up to training,” he’d say. Then he would turn his eye to the [beer] can. “But if they stopped me drinking, I’d give it away.”

Long time readers will know of my fascination with Friendster: That rather than a lesson in why ’social networks are transient’ and a complete and abject failure it is instead a roaring success.

Venturebeat has an article analyzing the company’s huge growth in Asia and making a prediction it could be the world’s number one social network.

For those who say non-American people are worth less than American people; you are right, but only temporarily.

The problem is those same people say Facebook have been a stunning success even though nearly all of their usage increase in the past year has been from ‘international’ countries.

Friendster was re-capitalized in August of 2006 and has raised a suprisingly small amount of capital in aggregate. The investors in that round, as well as the management who were around at that time and since, will hit an unqualified home run in investment terms.