Bronte Media

Long time reader will know the domain experiment I set up a few months ago. The basic summary thus far has been: people are showing up to the domains but the templates I have been parking the domains at suck.

So I have a new template and have pasted it with affiliate links. Here is the site for La Feria, a small city in Texas. We’ll see how I go. I know that I can get 15-20c CPCs, and the sites at the moment are getting $0.06 for whatever reason.

Here’s an update on the stats in Nov (part of the month they were with another provider), Dec and Jan:

Not sure if it was because the domains were removed from Google’s index because they were with Sedo or not (parking services don’t tell you if the source of your traffic is direct type in or from search engines).

Either way, now we have Google Analytics tracking everything on a domain by domain level (very easy to do, thought it would be a nightmare with hundreds of domains).

Another secondary goal is to get the domains indexed and ranking as they integrate Homethinking data and the better the domains do, the more meaningful the links back to Homethinking are.

When a startup sells out of something you should be worried not elated. Case in point: Jingle announced they have sold out of their sponsorship inventory.

Greg says that the company is processing around 20 million calls a month, a meaningful amount. The only problem? In September of 2006, they were reporting around 15 millions calls per month, which is a 25% increase in 16 months.

The economics of 411 are brutal. I was fascinated by the industry a few years back. See part I, part II and part III.

It might be cool to call this a disruptive market but the reality is that, more than other markets, free 411 companies are jumping off a steep cliff and building a parachute on the way down.

PEHub reported a few weeks back they had raised another $13m which the company has thus far neglected to announce (after raising a $30m C Round before that to much celebration and raising over $75m thus far).

Assuming the $30m round lasted them 14 months, the $13m round will last 6 months at the same burn rate. The trouble with the company’s burn rate, as I mentioned above, is that it is not so much in fixed costs but rather marginal costs to service the call. So they have less control. Firing dozens of people, for instance, would have less of an effect than in other types of businesses. They literally would have to hang up on their customers. The moderate call growth in the past 16 months and the curious $13m size (versus $30m each they were able to raise in B and C rounds) doesn’t smell right. Stay tuned.

Longtime readers know that I am in love with Etsy, a marketplace for handmade goods. The CEO, Rob Kalin, is even more remarkable.

Today, they announced a $27m round of founding and Rob maps out what he plans to do with it and why they raised the money. The post is much better than the PR fluff we see too much of.

This company is a complete homerun for their investors, including Union Square Ventures. This investment will eventually return multiples of their entire $125m fund size.

Today is a great day in food.

First comes the cheeseburger in a can.

Then comes real time tracking of Dominos pizza orders from the order acknowledgement, to the oven and finally to being dispatched.

The world is a marvelous place.

Via ffffound

The most jarring of statements in Yahoo’s horrible fourth quarter earnings and guidance: “Spending by advertisers in the financial, travel and retail areas declined or grew more slowly in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier, Yahoo President Susan Decker told analysts during a conference call.”

The only problem: those three categories are the most sophisticated spenders and account for more than a half of all online advertising. A haunting sign that the leading categories are experiencing weakness. Much better if they were to say CPG and Auto.

Something is going to happen to Yahoo and soon. My golden rule of Internet businesses is the one with the largest consumer audience captures the majority of share. That’s why Ask and AOL get 90%+ of the revenue share from their Google agreements. But because Yahoo is in such dire straits and because Google is practically the only one that can help juice it in the very short term (i.e. appease public market investors), they are at the mercy of the ‘plex. If I were Google, I would refuse to deal with Yahoo this year and then take a front seat and watch the stock erode in value in 2008 and then jump in and gobble up the company (even at $30 a share). Then immediately make that price work by migrating everything on to Google’s ad platform.

God. It seems that it’s time to break out that phrase again. “Flight to quality”. For me, that is basically step 1 in a downturn. Where a few less than reputable companies report hiccup results. Then the others that haven’t reported bad results start saying there will be a “flight to quality” in a market. But what happens is everything goes down. Like oceans and tides bringing up all boats, when oceans and tides fall they bring down all boats. That’s when people don’t mention “flight to quality” and that’s when I would buy stocks because a sector is trampled and many of the better companies undervalued.

p.s. The original mention that spurred this post was by a video interview with Fred Wilson by Portfolio magazine. I still don’t see why the playas are hating on the magazine. It’s a million times better than Forbes and 100,000 times better than Businessweek and Fortune. If you don’t subscribe to the magazine you should. Video is below.

Neat profile of Jupiter founder Josh Harris, also of pseudo fame. He may be bizarre but the guy at least believes in what he does.

Of course the credit crunch wont have an effect on online advertising:

“this is the second [lowermybills affiliate] cut this year and moves the payout from the original price of $40 to $20 and now $6. LendingTree also cut their affiliate payout today as well. I have not confirmed the amount of LT’s cut, but this also would be the second time this year they made a cut as well.”

This may seem weird but…

1. I recently bought the wireless Apple keyboard and it has materially increased my enjoyment of using a computer each day. I feel like more of an artiste. Paired with a wireless mouse, the elimination of wires has cleared the clutter of my desk in a satisfying way.

2. Heath Ledger’s death is effecting me in a weird way. I feel a connection like a driver of a certain car does when they glance sideways on a freeway and sees another driver of that same type of car. Lives lived in parallel. He was the same age as me, he loved Bronte (the same Bronte in this blog’s title), he moved to Sydney at the same time I did and he moved to New York at roughly the same time I did. The main connection comes from a movie he was in, Two Hands. The movie’s title song was ‘These Days’ by Powderfinger, one of my favourite bands. I used to listen to that song every day before I went to work at my first job. I’ve been listening to a lot of Powderfinger in the last few days and for some reason I feel I need to reach a conclusion as to whether his death was accidental or deliberate. Thank you for letting me share.