Bronte Media

Given that the fourth quarter of last year is likely to be the new normal in online advertising, I thought I would scour each and every publicly listed online advertising company’s fourth quarter earnings and 10-Q I can find.

Here is my target list so far. Just let me know if I have missed any one by commenting. I’ll give each firm a post and opinion as they announce.

Big 4
Google
AOL
Yahoo
MSN

Searchy/Local
IAC (Ask.com, Servicemagic)
Marchex

Vertical
Internet Brands
Move
NCI (real estate)
Monster
Housevalues/Market Leader
Bankrate
TheStreet

Ad Networks
Valueclick

UPDATE: Added TheStreet thanks to Kwan and Valueclick thanks to Henrik. Keep the suggestions coming.

Truth:

“B. Ramalinga Raju, founder and chairman of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. — “satyam” means truth in Sanskrit — said in a letter of resignation that he also overstated profits for the past several years, overstated the amount of debt owed to the company and understated its liabilities.”

To date, the slowdown of eBay’s core business and now the holiday disintegration has largely been framed as a discussion around eBay vs Google AdWords or more recently eBay vs pimply startups who are licking their lips at the demise but have no progress beyond their ambitions as yet.

But each of those discussions are entirely missing the point: The real game for small retail merchants is between eBay and Amazon. The lightbulb really went off in my head when I moved to Paris and sold all my miscellaneous crap. For the books, I listed them on Amazon and was blown away by the simple experience. Now it seems that folks are not only listing books and that the second hand/third party goods sold on Amazon are starting to rise.

And as a little salt in the wounds of a budding competition, Amazon decided to drop eBay’s Bill Me Later option from the site. Amazon accounted for roughly 10-15% of the activity on the service. Although I am more inclined to agree with Arrington in that Bill Me Later is probably getting hit hard by credit default rates just like any other provider of debt and probably has to raise its fees/interest rates.

In any case, I expect the migration of eBay seller activity to Amazon to provide a major growth driver for the company (much more than cloud computing). The only trouble: Amazon’s investors already agree and have priced in such a trend with many others at its current valuation.

First off, apologies for the lag in posting due to the holiday festivities. Stumbling through Techcrunch’s roundup of the largest ’social media’ properties, I spotted Geocities still chugging along with 69m uniques a month and the sixth largest on the list. If there ever was a finer example of why traffic numbers shouldn’t excite you, Geocities is it. I am sure it brings a smile to folks like Fred Wilson who made a fortune for himself and limited partners when it sold to Yahoo for nearly $5bn in 1999.

The one reason Yahoo bombed Q3 was the complete disintegration of its international business. So it is interesting to see this little nugget appear on the eve of Toby Coppel’s, the head of Yahoo Europe, departure.

Kara Swisher got ahold of Sue Decker’s farewell note, in which there was this little nugget:

“Market share gains in our display business in all markets over the past 12 months”

There are two international regions that matter: Europe and Asia. And in Asia the most important market is Japan, which Yahoo has an investment and seems to be doing OK.

But in the third quarter Yahoo’s international revenue was down 12% year over year. A lot has to do with Google running over it in search but truth be told there wasn’t much to run over: Google has always commanded 80%+ market share in international markets versus the US where it had to gain market share at a steady pace. So in other words, there wasn’t much Yahoo international search revenue to lose in the last year.

It’s incredible that Decker can say that they have gained display market share. I just can’t see how. The IAB UK, which is not reliable but is something, says that advertising in the UK was up 21% in the first half of this year. The UK is the most important European online ad market.

So what am I missing? Is Decker’s comment some sort of investment-bank inspired analysis where they inevitably find themselves at the top of the leader board in transactions in Rhode Island that are more than $34m but less than $56m?

How can Yahoo’s international revenue decline 12% in the third quarter and they still claim to have outpaced the European display market?

“There are no scotches or whiskeys or hairy wrists wearing expensive watches resting on the bar.”

From a NY Post article on the declining plight of gold digging women in Manhattan:

Seth Godin has an excellent post up on what he thinks the New York Times should (have) done. And they are excellent suggestions, so go read his post. They distill down into:

- Should have leveraged their excellent restaurant review into Yelp/Zagat but didn’t

- Have a minor league system of bloggers trying to get carriage on the central mothership

- Make it all about the columnists

- More best seller lists other than books.

And you know even though they have missed the boat on all of these opportunities the embarassing thing is they could probably start now and have a fair shot at creating something of size but their time is literally running out. By May of next year, the paper may be in bankruptcy.

Comes from Andrew Shotland on covering Kelsey’s conference and specifically Rodney Rice, founder of Servicemagic:

“It’s nice to see Rodney here. The last time I saw him it was around the year 2000 and he was kicking me out of his office after I and a couple of goons that I worked with at Homestore.com tried to bully him into giving us a huge percentage of his company for the privilege of putting his brand on our site. The goons are now in jail on various SEC violations and Rodney seems to be doing fine.”

p.s. Also from the Kelsey conference, an update on InsiderPages, one of my favorite ‘dead companies doing great‘ (the prime example of this category is Friendster):

“March 07
2.5 million uniques
6 million page views/mnth
550,000 reviews
negative cashflow (to say the least)

October ‘08
5.5 million uniques
13.7 million page views/mnth
1,000,000 reviews
positive cash flow”

Regular readers will know of my obsession with all things Murdoch. Recently he recorded a series of lectures for ABC radio (Australian version of NPR for those American viewers). This week he discusses the future of newspapers.

For media watchers it’s a must listen. Or if you simply like Australian accents, it’s also a must listen.

His view? Delivery methods (print) will be dead and complacency from sucking at the teet of a monopoly for 100 years will be dead but news will only grow larger. If companies don’t focus on the one essential thing: its bond with its readers, it will be dead. But if they do, there is a chance.

“Prisoners of the past versus enthusiasts of the future,” as Murdoch puts it.

My view is a lot more pessimistic: The tide of classifieds has left the world to see the natural business of news is naked and weak.

I stumbled across a fascinating study that examined the choice goalkeepers make when trying to save a penalty. The result? Goalkeepers should stay put but they don’t.

There is actually two choices a goalkeeper faces if he chooses to move: To jump or stay still and then secondly to jump left or right.

The authors propose that this is because “the norm is to jump, norm theory (Kahneman and Miller, 1986) implies that a goal scored yields worse feelings for the goalkeeper following inaction (staying in the center) than following action (jumping), leading to a bias for action.”

What happens though, is that roughly equally the kicker chooses right, center and left but the goalkeeper chooses to jump right or left 94% of the time. As humans we’d rather be wrong with action than wrong without action.

The full study can be downloaded here.

p.s. I decided to setup a slinkset.com, a white-label digg provider, account and focus on Quantitative Sports (a.k.a Moneyball for all sports). I registered the domain, playistics.com, for $7, the account is free and the design is simple and very customizable.

Highly recommend the experience so far so if you want an easy way to setup such a thing, go for it. And if you are interested in the moneyball of sports, please post articles to www.playistics.com