Bronte Media

Joel has a good interview with Dave Wengel of TargusInfo around Mortgage lead scrub rates. Specifically that lendingtree and lowermybills have a 15% scrub rate whereas the free ipod guys (lure people in with promise of a free ipod but they and their friends have to signup for credit cards, netflix and talk to mortgage brokers to get it) have around a 50-60% scrub rate.

If you are following Alley Insider’s meme of mortgage being the canary in the ‘next slowdown’ of online advertising, this to me would say Valueclick rather than Experian or Bankrate.

Also, here’s a well-thought out contrarian position on the impact of the credit crunch on mortgage online advertising.

I am on the fence on this one at the moment. In the end, if consumers are buying less homes and it’s harder to get a mortgage then that’s bad news. And if exotic mortgage products that generate huge fees, a percentage of which flows down to lead generators, have dried up, then that is equally bad news.

Frank Quatrone, former head of CSFB’s tech IPO unit, has been proven innocent after four years trying to clear his name. He was originally charged because he dolled out shares of hot IPO companies that ‘popped’ to curry favor with other Internet execs and clients. Who then usually promptly sold those shares at the end of day 1 of owning them.

Personally, I had nothing wrong with it. Perhaps Frank institutionalized the process too much, but to think that the world operates in any different way is naive. Particularly for a service-based business like Investment Banking.

Frank is now allowed back in the securities industry. Shame for him that hedge funds and private equity ballooned and blossomed over those same four years and those that rely on cheap credit to leverage up investments have choppier days ahead. He’ll have to find something else to specialize in.

Either way, it is a fascinating case and one covered in excellent detail by Chris Nolan over the years.

[Via Alley Insider]

On Monster’s announcement that 1.3m customer records had been stolen and that it pales in comparison to what was stolen in the past, comes this less than traditional mea culpa:

“To be safe, he said, each Monster.com user should assume that his or her contact information has been taken.”

Just to be safe.

Danny ‘f-bomb’ Sullivan on a lengthy takedown of the bone-headed Robert Scoble and his “search wisdom”.

“We then learn from Robert that Google can’t change to be like Mahalo because it has algorithms that are “stuck in sand, stuck in cement” and shifting will “prove impossible.”

Insane. Seriously, like you want to scream stop talking. Robert’s a personally likable guy, but watching him make statements like this is like watching someone driving a car full speed toward a concrete wall while yelling “It’ll be OK — we’ll get through.”

Through the news of Intuit shutting down their efforts in their consumer-created yellow pages foray, comes some interesting comScore data at the end of this Techcrunch post covering the news.

Specifically, that comScore thinks that Insider Pages has 50% more Unique Visitors than Yelp.

Frequent readers will remember a theme of mine in 07 is dead companies doing well. Or alternatively, how media opinion diverges from reality. My favorite is Friendster, who is doing tremendously well and will achieve a huge exit for the VCs (DAG and Kleiner Perkins) who have stuck with them. Even though they are dead. And “pummeled to near oblivion”, according to this bright spark recently at Wired Magazine.

But I digress. Another example is Insider Pages, who was essentially bought for the capital the company had taken by Citysearch back in January. Since then they have done tremendously well, in terms of traffic. Compete.com doesn’t say better than Yelp, but they still pick up the same trend as comScore. The question about the value of actually having a huge amount of people read reviews about restaurants still rages on in my mind. I.e. After ten years, Citysearch is still searching.

Either way, Insider Pages was an incredibly smart acquisition and will return a huge multiple on the amount IAC spent acquiring it. And is another outstanding member of the ‘living dead’.

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about mob behavior amongst the machines. Essentially, the huge decline in quant funds (who electronically trade based upon computer models) in recent times was to do with the funds owning the same shares and selling on the same signals. That is, the humans who create the models, codified a characteristic of human behavior perfectly: the fact that mobs panic.

Jay Weintraub is back blogging, fresh from moving on from his previous employer, Oversee.net. His first post deals with the University of Phoenix buying an online marketing firm Aptimus, essentially it looks like, to get ready to dump Advertising.com, who were until recently the other party in a flagship exclusive online advertising deal.

Couldn’t give a shit about an online education leads contract? Well if you find AOL’s ‘recovery’ interesting, you should. Advertising.com is the fastest growing division and the Apollo/University of Phoenix agreement is their largest.

And in any case if you have anything to do with online direct marketing, be sure to subscribe to Jay’s blog.

Not that MSN is a filet mignon, perhaps more of a chuck steak? From Got Ads:

“On August 29, you don’t have to make any changes and your ad groups will automatically expand to hybrid distribution, meaning they will distribute to search and content pages.”

Rich Skrenta, founder of Dmoz and Topix.net (err .com now), has a fantastic post with thoughtful advice and tactical tips for Mahalo.

And then Jason Calacanis waffles on in a response that basically says Mahalo is different to Dmoz because Dmoz has spam. Great. Thanks for your time Mr Skrenta!

I don’t know why this bothers me but it does. I guess because Calacanis has built a ‘PR platform’ around the web having low quality SEO spam pages and Mahalo saving the day that his message would be diluted in saying that he plans to make high quality SEO pages.

There is a very real way to see though. Jason could post what percentage of his traffic in December (enough time to get at least some Mahalo pages included in Google and trusted to some extent) came from search engines and what percentage typed in the URL directly. I would bet Jason a lunch at Nobu (I hear he likes it and it’s around the corner from my office) that it is 70% or more. How’s that for lunchbait?

Let’s hope Murdoch and his Australian minions start to clean up sloppy journalism such as this, in an article about the NFL Network:

“A former sports cameraman for a Milwaukee TV station, Mr. Bornstein joined ESPN in 1980. Back then, all major live sporting events in the U.S. were on broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC and supported solely by advertising. ESPN was relegated to obscure sports like table tennis and Australian-rules football.”