Peter Chun

After years of telling advertisers that the way they place ads is totally wrong, Google is finally coming around to accommodate Madison Avenue on its own terms. By perfecting paid-search and contextual ads, Google has done a lot to reinvent advertising. But old habits die hard, and advertisers still like to target ads based on good old demographics. Google will be doing a lot more of that now that it owns DoubelClick. But it is also starting to incorporate demographic targeting into AdWords itself (in a very limited fashion).

As of last Friday, advertisers could target their ads by age or gender on 31 participating sites in Google’s ad network that provide such information. The most noteworthy ones are MySpace, Friendster, and YouTube. The rest, with a few exceptions, aren’t exactly the type of sites that big advertisers clamor for, so this isn’t going to have a big immediate impact. (Here is a list of the participating sites). AdWords already lets advertisers target demographically by site, taking generalized demographic data for entire sites from comScore. But this is different because it allows targeting by individual user.

You’ve got to wonder if this is how Google hopes to fix its MySpace problem. Google watchers will recall that when the company missed its fourth quarter earnings, it partly blamed the poor performance of its ads on social networks (read: MySpace). By offering demographic targeting on MySpace and other social sites, perhaps Google is hoping to turn that around. It certainly needs to do something to make all of that social-network ad inventory pay off.

Marrying demographic targeting with keyword targeting should yield better results in theory. The issue, though, might not be the targeting. It might be the people. Or rather, it might be that the people you find on social networks are just better at tuning out ads. Perhaps they are less receptive to traditional advertising in what they consider to be a semi-private space. So it may not be so much the targeting as the ad units themselves that need fixing. They need to seem less like blaring come-ons and more like social invitations. And there is not much Google can do about that.

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It’s been a whole year since the launch of live video streaming site Justin.TV , and there is no shortage of competitors (Ustream, BlogTV, Kyte, Stickam, Mogulus, Yahoo Live, LiveVideo). (See more of our coverage here). But Justin.TV looks like it is holding its own in this still-nascent part of the Web. “So far,,” notes CEO Michael Seibel, “Justin.tv has more than 50 years of video stored in its archives and we have accumulated 10 of those years over the past 30 days.”

Here are some more stats provided by the company, both cumulative for the past year and for the past 30 days:

1 Year Statistics:

* 87,331,037 pageviews
* 24,954,403 unique visitors
* 57 years of archives
* 28,106 total channels
* 356,197 registered users
* 73,754 user created video clips

Last 30 day stats

* 21,409,755 pageviews
* 5,963,775 uniques
* 11 years of archives
* 6,954 new channels
* 73,534 registered users
* 26,500 user created video clips

Peaks:

* 3.6 gbps video
* 32,000 simultaneous viewers

Update: Here is a graph from Justin.TV, of only its site’s pageviews, unique visitors, and returning visitors (worldwide):

Here are the comScore stats for the site alone. (Justin.TV is the red line). Note that these tell a very different story, with only 293,000 uniques in February (compared to the 6 million claimed by the company). These are all U.S. stats, but the trends roughly match the worldwide stats from comScore as well. I present them here only to give a sense of how it is doing as a destination site versus some of its competitors. (Here is Alexa and Compete). As a destination site, it looks to be doing better than UStream and BlogTV:

But not quite as well as Kyte.TV or StickCam (although the numbers are so low for all of these sites, that it is still anybody’s game):

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Think you are good at trading stocks? Here’s a good Friday afternoon time waster for those of you who prefer more grown-up games than you can find on Mytopia.

Test your trading skills at Inspectd. The site, which has been around for a while, shows you a historical stock chart with nothing more than the price and the moving average. You are given $100,000 in fake money and you have to decide whether to buy, skip, or sell based on nothing other than the price. Once you decide, it tells you the name of the stock, what it actually did over the next 20 days, and adjusts your account accordingly.

It is pretty addictive, and cheaper than day trading with real money.

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There is a new casual gaming network in town that’s got some serious cross-platform chops. Don’t be fooled by the cutesy graphics. Today, Mytopia is simultaneously launching across Facebook, Bebo, MySpace (currently pending approval) and its own Website with eight games (Chess, Backgammon, Sudoku, Dominoes, Bingo, Spades, Hearts, Video Poker). On Monday, it will release the same games across the major Web and desktop widgets: iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets.

Here’s the thing: the games work across all of these platforms. You can be on Facebook playing cards with one friend on MySpace and another on Bebo. And you can control what people on each network see about you. For instance, you can present your real profile to your friends on Facebook, and a different Mytopia avatar to everyone else. These are the sort of apps that could one day break Facebook’s, or any social network’s, hold on its members.

Mytopia was founded by a young Israeli American, Guy Ben-Artzi, and his sister Galia Ben-Artzi. They grew up in Silicon Valley, but now split their time between the U.S. and Israel. Nearly all the company’s engineers are in Israel. Guy wants to bring the computing architecture and game-play behind massively multiplayer online (MMO) games like World of Warcraft to casual games with broader appeal. Guy explains:

What we have done over the past year is look at all the massive multiplayers and tried to analyze what makes those sticky and social. What is great about all of these massive multiplayers is you have people playing in guilds and trading with each other. We are building the MMO backend minus the 3D perspective and hard core genre.

Mytopia games include the ability to join teams, compete in matches, send in-game messages, win points for different skill levels, collect virtual currency and trade in-game items with other players. The company plans to explore different ways to make money including in-game sponsorships, premium subscriptions, and micro-transactions linked to game items and the in-game economy.

In May, the startup plans to open up its casual gaming platform to other developers. By delivering this write-once, deploy-anywhere capability, it hopes to challenge other social gaming networks with platform ambitions such as Zynga and SGN. This should be fun to watch.

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Don’t mess with March Madness. CBS Sports is learning that lesson the hard way on Facebook, where a major backlash is happening over its NCAA basketball bracket application. Yes, this is the same application that was allowed to spam users’ friends with more invites than other Facebook apps. The app—which lets you pick which basketball teams you think will win March Madness, track your progress, and compare with friends—isn’t working properly. For instance, yesterday it didn’t know that Texas A&M won against BYU. We were alerted to this problem by Jake Pease, a student at the University of Florida, who wrote in an e-mail:

I just wanted to report on the issues I’ve seen with the CBSSports Facebook app that has users peeved on the forums. . . . As some of you may know, A&M won their game today against BYU. Alas, Facebook says otherwise, with A&M coming up in red.

On top of this, if you refresh your bracket a few times, you’ll see different calculations for your current score.

People commenting on the CBSSports app are saying some pretty harsh things about the app. I can’t blame them. This is supposed to be an application that awards $10,000. If they can’t get the math right enough to tell me my score, how can I know they’re picking the right person? Come on CBS, didn’t your coders actually test the program before you deployed it?

Fail.

This is a serious issue for college students and other sports fans following the tournament. There is a lot of beer money at stake, not to mention that chance at $10,000 CBS Sports is offering to anyone whose picks end up in the top 10 percent. But it is an even more serious issue for CBS Sports. It is failing in a very public way. This is the risk big brands take when they put an app on Facebook. It had better work or else the world will hear about it. Below are some more comments from irate Facebook members who add the application to their pages:

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In the age of social media—when everybody is busy creating personal broadcasts on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, blogs, Justin.tv, you name it—what happens to the notion of the broadcast? I am not talking about TV or radio, where traditional broadcasts still work the way they always have. I am talking about broadcasting an event or a message on the Web. Does the notion of broadcasting even make sense anymore in a narrowcasting world where anybody can read, watch or listen to any piece of information on their own schedule? And if it does make sense, how do you pull together the personal media of the Web into a coherent experience rather than produce something in a top-down fashion to be released upon a no-longer-passive audience?

These are the kinds of questions that Tola Oguntoyinbo wrestles with all the time. Tola is the CEO and co-founder of Sonecast, a bare-bones social media marketing startup in Chapel Hill, North Carolina that is credit-card funded. His sonecasts (social network broadcasts) pull social media from practically any source into a dedicated, branded site. The closest thing to it is perhaps a combination of Meebo Rooms and SplashCast (which just raised $4 million earlier this week). Sonecasts tend to work better around a live event, like this one for a DJ Spooky concert or this one for the Crunchies that he ginned up after the fact (see also screen shot below).

In the Crunchies sonecast, there is a floating frame on the page with little tabs that bring up clickable thumbnails of Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and blog posts from the event. There is also a live tab that would have shown the live video feed from Mogulus during the awards ceremony. Each photo, video, or blog headline you click on opens up a new window and lets you comment on each item. The DJ Spooky one broadcast live video from a concert at Duke University, which is now archived and still viewable. Other tabs include photos from Flickr and Facebook, DJ Spooky videos, music, and posts from MySpace, a podcast interview from the event, and a fully-featured music widget with complete streaming songs, music videos and links to posts about the artist on music blogs.

Please note that these are demo sites, they are a little slow to load, and probably cannot handle a ton of traffic. (The service is still in a closed alpha). But the approach taken with the user interface is instructive. It is both economical and all-inclusive at the same time. And while it is tapping into social media for marketing purposes, it is not trying to create a corporatized social network along the lines of Mzinga or Networked Insights.

“We’re really about leveraging existing content networks,” says Tola. He makes a distinction between “ego-centric” social networks and “object-centric” ones where the “objects” people organize around are photos, videos, and links. Ego-centric social networks, in contrast, like Facebook or MySpace, are organized around user profiles. They are about “people surfing versus content surfing,” he says.

The sonecasts can combine professionally-produced video or other broadcast material with relevant audience-produced material about the same event. Flickr photo streams, Twitters and YouTube videos can all easily be pulled into a sonecast. The idea is to create social activity around the events. Sonecasts can also be created around brands or products. For instance, a sonecast for the Pleo toy dinosaur (click on the middle dummied-up screen shot below) could include Flickr photos from enthusiasts, posts from the Pleo blog, or videos of the Pleo being hacked.

A Sonecast is a place to collect the lifestream of a product or a brand, if you will, just as people are beginning to gather their own lifestreams from across the Web into services like FriendFeed. Except there is also the broadcasting component—that initial, compelling content that will draw people to the Sonecast in the first place. That is the biggest challenge here: Getting people to the Sonecasts in the first place and making sure there is something there for them to do.

A good place to start would be syndicating its widgets across the Web to draw people back into the richer experience of each full site. (SplashCast, in contrast, only does widgets. Having both widgets and a destination page could be an advantage). It also needs to do a better job with showing who else is in a Sonecast and what they are doing there. But it does open your eyes to the possibilities of broadcasting in a totally different way.

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The deadline to apply to participate in the FCC’s upcoming auction of wireless 700 MHz spectrum passed on Monday. And we still don’t know exactly who the bidders will be. But we have a pretty good idea. Google is in. So is AT&T, Frontline Wireless, and Craig McCaw’s Clearwire. Comcast and Time Warner are out. But Cox Communications is in. Verizon Wireless isn’t saying either way, but everyone expects it to bid. Sprint Nextel is sitting this one out, as is Microsoft. And T-Mobile isn’t expected to play a big role. At least initially, there seems to be two major camps. Google and Frontline on one side, looking for an opening in the entrenched wireless industry. And AT&T and Verizon on the other, trying to keep the technology pirates from climbing aboard their ships. And Craig McCaw as always, is the wild card. As for other possible bidders, you can never count out Qualcomm, or the handset manufacturers like Nokia or Sony Ericsoon, who might like to bypass the carriers for once. Smaller wireless companies like Alltel or Leap Wireless could bid on a regional basis. I would not be surprised if at some point Google and Frontline combine forces. Any auction strategists or game theorists out there have any advice for how they can improve their chances of winning? Please enlighten us in comments. (Photo by Steve Jurvetson) Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

AdBrite might have just secured an additional $23 million in funding, but at midnight tonight its business prospects may look decidedly dimmer. Competing ad network Etology is cutting deals with some of AdBrite’s biggest customers to take over their ads.

A big chunk of the ads that AdBrite serves are for porn sites on behalf of the AVN Media Network. These AVN Ads make up 31 percent of AdBrite’s total daily impressions (259 million out of 824 million total, according to the respective Websites). Yes, porn is the lifeblood of many of these online ad networks—don’t act so surprised.

Since December, 2004 AdBrite has been supplying the technology, billing, and payment platform for AVN Ads. Now that deal is going to Etology, who will manage the site from now on and relaunch it with a new look. Before that happens, AdBrite is trying to redirect all of its members to its own new adult advertising sub-brand, BlackLabelAds. If you go to the AVN Ads Website, you will see a big pop-up trying to switch advertisers and publishers with existing accounts over to BlackLabelAds. Yet, according to Etology, it has already secured the loyalty of 1,268 (and counting) of the biggest porn sites on AVN Ads, including YouPorn, PornTube, and RedTube. (Out of 6,614 total). Those 1,268 sites account for 108 million daily impressions (or 42 percent of AVN Ads’ total, and 13 percent of AdBrite’s total). The other 151 million impressions are still up for grabs. Etology is trying to lure them with a 75 percent share of revenues, versus the 70 percent they got from AdBrite.

I caught up with AdBrite co-founder Philip Kaplan on the phone to get his take. He notes that all the current 6,614 sites that run AVN Ads have AdBrite code on them, and that is going to stay there unless they take it off. “If you were an AVN Ads user before, you are automatically a BlackLabelAds user.” But he is really not too worried about losing the porn business because it is not where he sees the future:

Adult is an interesting thing. It is a lot of pageviews, it is not a lot of revenues. Most of the major players support it, but as the Internet advertising business is growing and more mainstream advertising is coming from TV and print, it is becoming less and less significant.

In the meantime, he is happy to fight it out with Etology for the porn advertising business, but it is not where he is planning on spending the bulk of the new money he just raised.

Here is what the new AVN Ads Website will look like:

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This morning, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures discloses to the world his failure rate as a venture capitalist of 17 years (20 percent over 32 investments, which is enviable in VC circles). He’s also had 11 deals (40 percent) with 5X+ returns, so it more than balances out.

Wilson is more at ease talking to the world (through his blog) than most VCs. But all venture capitalists should have to disclose their personal failure rates. After all, measuring performance should go both ways between VCs and entrepreneurs, not to mention venture investors. Sometimes, you can learn a lot more from failure than from success. Wilson shares what he’s learned from his failures. Either a business turns out to be a dumb idea, he says, or, more likely:

It was a decent idea but directionally incorrect, it was hugely overfunded, the burn rate was taken to levels way beyond reason, and it became impossible to adapt the business in a financially viable manner.

. . . Of the 26 companies that I consider realized or effectively realized in my personal track record, 17 of them made complete transformations or partial transformations of their businesses between the time we invested and the time we sold. That means there a 2/3 chance you’ll have to significantly reinvent your business between the time you take a venture capital investment and when you exit your business.

So it’s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed.

Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.

We’ve all heard variations of that be-nimble-or-die philosophy, but it bears repeating.

What have you learned from your business failures? Comments, as always, are open.

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It is now official. Google has confirmed earlier reports that it will bid in the upcoming wireless spectrum auctions. Already, it is toying with other prospective bidders, waiting until next Monday, the last possible day, to file its application with the FCC.

In mid-December, the FCC will release its list of eligible bidders. The auction itself begins on January 24, and could continue through March. Google exec Chris Sacca also notes that because of anti-collusion rules, Google will not be saying anything else about the auction until it is over.

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