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‘No Appointment Necessary’ Television

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Same_Bat-Time_Same_Bat-ChannelThe recent release of House of Cards by Netflix was as much-anticipated for its production value (starring Kevin Spacey and produced by David Fincher) as for its release strategy (all 13 episodes were made available to Netflix subscribers on the same day). While traditional media outlets have questioned Netflix’s decision to release the entire first season at once, which eliminates the water-cooler effect and anticipation build-up from episode-to-episode that traditional television show experiences have been built around, fans of the all-you-can-eat approach to serialized content can’t get enough of it. So it’s not surprising to hear that House of Cards has become Netflix’s most-watched program in terms of number of subscribers and total hours according to Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos.

But is binge-viewing the future of television then? Not exactly, though it is part of a broader trend in how content consumption habits are evolving thanks to technology. Just look at some recent stats from two new series on FOX’s network- The Following and The Americans. The Following debuted to an audience of 10.4 million viewers on FOX who watched the premiere either live or the same-day. That audience figure doubled in size though when DVR (which contributed 23% of the audience), encore showing (14%), streaming (7%) and video-on-demand (5%) viewing was also included. Much like The Following, FX’s The Americans also showed audience growth of 44% and 58% across its first and second episodes respectively when DVR viewing data for the 3 days following the original airing (the period that encompasses the original broadcast plus DVR viewing up to 3 days afterwards is relevant because it is used determine the cumulative ratings used by advertisers to determine the size of the audience that saw their ads) was counted.

The story being told by these stats is that the appointment-based model of watching TV popularized in the 1960s by the likes of the original Batman series (remember ‘Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel’?) is becoming a relic of the 20th century. But to what extent? That question will finally start to get answered this fall when Nielsen, the de facto standard in determining how the $60 billion television advertising market is allocated across television networks, will begin counting TV shows consumed via video game consoles and broadband connections in its show ratings (with an eye towards including iPad and tablet viewership in 2014).

By expanding the definition of what constitutes an addressable audience, Nielsen will be legitimizing viewers of shows that are already being quantified (as The Following data shows) but not valued from an advertiser perspective. This will give broadcasters the incentive to both expand the availability of their television content through additional channels (which both ABC and CBS seem to be set to do with the launch of new streaming mobile apps) as well as aggregate these cross-platform audiences to provide more reach and value to advertisers (as Disney’s networks are doing now).

Another potential benefit in this approach to TV content distribution and monetization will be the unification of pricing across digital screens (PC, tablet and smartphone) which have traditionally seen a wide discrepancy between PCs and their mobile counterparts (especially smartphones). While digital might not reach parity with television ad rates, the increase in revenues from parity within digital should convince broadcasters to make more content available online and with less delay from the original television airing day and time (depending on how all-encompassing Nielsen’s new ratings get).

The days when broadcasters knew what was best for audiences (which really meant what was best for their advertising clients) is coming to an end as consumers are exerting more control over the pace at which they consume content and the devices they use to watch it. This will have an interesting effect on event-based content and advertising as sports (especially football and playoffs or championship in any sports) audiences along with those watching voting-oriented reality TV (like American Idol and The Voice) and award shows (Golden Globe, Grammy’s and Oscars) will become even more valuable to time-sensitive advertisers (such as movie studios promoting a new weekend release) looking to reach large audiences in one fell swoop. Conversely, it will create opportunities for ad technology platforms, along the lines of BlackArrow and Freewheel, that can both deliver ads in different formats and dynamically synch the delivery across multiple platforms for advertisers looking to reach this newly identified ‘appointment-less’ audience.

Tune-in whenever you feel like it to see how it plays out.

Photo image source: Batman

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The Valuation Disconnect in Mobile

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Well before the media anointed mobile the Next Big Thing, venture capitalists saw its potential. Consumers have rewarded VCs for their foresight by how quickly they’ve adopted non-voice mobile services over these past couple of years. The result has been a number of high-profile liquidity events this year starting with mobile ad network Millennial Media’s IPO followed by Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for an eventual price of $736 million and record levels of gaming sector acquisitions led by mobile. With all this positive momentum it’s not surprising that VCs continue to allocate an increasing share of deals and dollars to mobile startups as the overall number of investments has reached its highest levels since the dot-com days.

In contrast to this optimism in the venture community, Wall Street is down right negative towards mobile. Google’s third quarter earnings announcement was met with a 8% drop in share price in part due to the increasing number of search queries being performed on mobile devices which is causing a deceleration in the company’s revenue growth. And while Facebook’s most recent quarterly earnings report resulted in the stock rising 20%, the company’s market capitalization is still only at 60% of its peak value from its first day of trading. This is in largely due to concerns over Facebook’s ability to monetize their growing mobile audience, which now consists of 600 million users, including 126 million of which use Facebook mobile exclusively.

The Typical Relationship

So why the disconnect in how these investors value mobile? It can be partially explained by how each type of investor evaluates investment opportunities to begin with. Venture capitalists, especially early stage ones, typically look to buy private, and thus illiquid, stock in pre-revenue companies with nascent, but potentially market-disruptive, ideas. As such, these investments may take up to 10 years to realize a return for their VCs, if at all. Contrast this with public market investors, such as hedge and mutual funds, which focus on the predictability of earnings and revenue growth relative to a company’s market value and reevaluate their investments in real-time based on news and quarterly earnings reports since liquidity is readily available in these stocks.

So when VCs invest in start-ups, especially consumer-oriented ones that are ad-supported, they are betting not only on a company’s potential to execute on their business plan but also on the formation of a rapidly growing market. Due to this, the focus is usually on customer acquisition and market share growth- not revenues. As a market begins to mature in size and opportunity, monetization solutions are developed, usually by other start-ups, allowing the entire market to benefit from the creation of new revenue streams. Companies that don’t get acquired and can show they have a path to profitability have the opportunity to go public and in the process become industry bellwethers, using their new capital infusion and stock shares as currency to further enhance their market position.

Why Mobile Had Been Different

In the case of mobile, a couple of things happened that has affected the usual relationship between the private and public markets. First, the consumer adoption of mobile has outpaced any other technology in the history of the U.S.- including radio, TV and the internet. As such the native monetization solutions that were developed alongside these other technologies have been slow to scale in mobile because (1) the ad formats currently being used are largely re-purposed ad technologies from the desktop internet, such as banner and rich media ads, which were easy to launch with in an effort to capture mobile revenue early on and (2) advertisers have been slower to allocate advertising budgets to mobile than previous technologies due to this speed of growth- funds that would be used to help spur innovation in ad experiences on mobile devices.

The economic realities of increasing supply of mobile ad inventory coupled with relatively low demand for quality ad experiences thus far has resulted in effective CPMs that are 1/5th the price of desktop internet advertising. This disparity in monetization capabilities between mobile and desktop is forcing public investors to reevaluate consumer tech investments where mobile is becoming impactful enough from a usage perspective to potentially affecting earnings. With Millennial Media, a pure-play mobile ad network, and Pandora Media, whose ad-supported internet radio audience is now 75% mobile, still not profitable as publicly-traded companies, investors will continue to discount the mobile businesses of public consumer technology companies for the foreseeable future.

Without having proven their business models to Wall Street yet, Millennial and Pandora can’t be considered mobile bellwethers, which is needed to preserve the private-to-public valuation relationship. Companies such as AdMob and Instagram might have achieved bellwether status if they hadn’t been acquired before realizing their potential as stand-alone public companies. As such it might be left to existing ad-supported consumer internet tech leaders who are able to make the audience and business transition into mobile to perpetuate the ecosystem. Facebook, which has faced scrutiny over its performance as a public company in part due to mobile, has the momentum in user growth and sheer audience size to accomplish this transformation if they can prove their various mobile ad products can profitably scale. Because of this you could argue that Facebook actually went public too early, instead of too late, if you look at it as a mobile-first company. Probably the best positioned public company though is Google which acquired what is now the most popular mobile operating system in Android, largest mobile ad network in AdMob and is seeing mobile growth in its core search business as well as across YouTube.

Mobile is Really Two Different Experiences

The second part of the answer to the valuation disconnect is in the definition of mobile. When research companies forecast trends and investors talk about opportunities they always speak about mobile as if it were one cohesive distribution channel when in fact it is composed of two distinct experiences- smartphones and tablets. Being able to differentiate between the two is critical because of the activities each device is best suited for based on the physical limitations of each display as well as their monetization opportunities.

Smartphones

While Apple might be credited with ushering in the consumer mobile era with the launch of the iPhone in 2007, it was the launch of the App Store the following year that enabled smartphones to properly leverage their mobility as the physical limitations of mobile phone screens (3 to 5 inches in length) required task-specific applications be built instead of all-encompassing web experiences. Because of this, the most successful app experiences, as Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler eloquently describes it, mimic a remote control in that they are easy to use and provide a specific utility to consumers. In turn, advertising on mobile phones need to abide by these same principles in order to be valuable.

Rare Crowd’s Eric Picard described the current mobile ad format problem in a recent article while also presenting a possible solution for smartphones that is interruptive without being intrusive- and can be delivered at scale. For app developers that have large enough user-bases though, creating native experiences, especially ones that can leverage location, will always result in better value for both the advertiser and consumer. Expanding on sponsored ad units that Facebook (via Sponsored Stories) and Twitter (via Promoted Tweets) have popularized in the social activity stream and more recently on mobile, location-based social exploration platform Foursquare launched Promoted Updates for local merchants this past summer and crowd-sourced traffic app Waze launched its own self-service advertising platform earlier this month that focuses on solving users’ location-based needs.

Tablets

Like smartphones, Apple can also be credited with jump-starting the tablet market a mere 3 years ago. The company was prescient in introducing the iPad as a tool for consuming media as users have made watching TV shows, playing games and reading the primary uses for the device. This makes sense when you consider the screen size of tablets (ranging from 7 to 10 inches) allows consumers to replicate the offline experience of reading a magazine or watching television in a more convenient and personal format than traditional computers allow for. Because of this, advertising on mobile tablets can be interruptive like traditional media and less concerned with other vectors such as location since most people are using their tablets at home and as a second screen complement to watching television. That means online video and rich media interstitials, which are higher-valued ad units than traditional banner ads, will work with minimal refactoring compared to smartphone ad experiences. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity for companies to innovate around the ad experience as start-ups like Kiip are proving by rewarding user engagement and retention within mobile apps with real world rewards.

When It’s All Said and Done

With tablets expected to outsell PCs by next year, focusing efforts on this part of the mobile market might be the most prudent move for consumer tech companies with mobile audiences since the advertising experience most closely resembles the desktop internet from both a format and value perspective. The smartphone advertising market will take longer to scale simply because of the utility-oriented nature of the user experience.

As these advertising solutions sort themselves out though, so should the discrepancy between public and private market investor valuations around ad-supported business models. As start-ups fill these gaps in the consumer mobile space with monetization solutions that prove to be effective, so to will public investors get comfortable with the long-term value mobile users have to offer, which, at the end of the day, will benefit everyone involved in growing the value of the mobile industry.

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The 6 Letters Holding Back TV Everywhere

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TV Everywhere- the ability to watch any televised program at any time on any device- isn’t a matter of ‘if’ anymore but rather a question of ‘when’ once you consider the evolving viewing habits of US consumers and the changing dynamics of the pay television business. The ‘when’ for TV Everywhere becoming a mainstream consumer experience though will largely be determined by the letters F, G, L, N, P and R. Let me explain.

GRP: The metric used to allocate more than $60 billion in television advertising spend each year is known as Gross Ratings Points (GRPs). This figure estimates the size of the audience reached for a particular commercial during each television program over the life of the ad campaign. Unfortunately traditional online metrics like unique visitors, clicks and video starts don’t capture online audiences in a manner that can be translated into a GRP equivalent so broadcasters haven’t been able to take the credit they deserve, in the form of greater ad dollars, for delivering audiences to advertisers through their own websites and mobile apps or those provided by aggregators like Hulu. The thinking goes that if broadcasters could get compensated appropriately for aggregating consumers for advertisers, regardless of the screen through which the content is being watched, more television programming would be made available outside of the traditional TV model in hopes of capturing the broadest audience possible for ratings and advertising purposes.

The first major attempt at addressing the disparity between television and online audience measurement was introduced last week by Nielsen. Dubbed Nielsen Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings, the multi-screen ad measurement service leverages Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) with their established proprietary National People Meter TV panel to provide unduplicated and incremental GRP measurement. Nielsen’s OCR has gained momentum in recent weeks having been adopted by 15 online ad platforms as well as by the CW Network to guarantee online audiences to advertisers for the recently started television season.

Regardless of whether it’s Nielsen, comScore’s vGRP, or something else, bridging the audience measurement gap across viewing screens is an important step in bringing the discrepancy between digital ‘dimes’ and analog ‘dollars’ in advertising. This effort shouldn’t siphon money away from traditional television but instead reallocate ad spending in media to reflect the actual time being spent with media across different mediums, which will benefit the internet and mobile. The result will be an increase in advertising dollars for video across all platforms and the availability of more content to support this additional spend, which can most easily be made available to consumers via TV Everywhere.

NFL: Major League Baseball (MLB) has it. The NBA has it. Even the NHL, when they decide to get back to playing, will have it. The NFL? Not so much. What I’m talking about it the ability to watch any game live, in HD quality video across any number of connected devices. The NFL only offers its subscribers the ability to buy access to replays of games only after they have been televised.

With only 1/5th the number of regular season games versus both the NBA and NHL and 1/10th that of MLB, it is much easier for the NFL to package the sale of television rights at a national level for all of their games than it is for these other professional leagues (which rely on regional sports networks and local television stations to broadcast the majority of the regular season). Football’s reining popularity combined with the scarcity of game content versus alternative sports options has enabled the NFL to command $7 billion per year in total broadcast licensing fees from CBS, DirecTV, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Verizon Wireless to broadcast each and every NFL game (in comparison MLB generates about $1.5 billion in national broadcast revenues from a combination of ESPN, Fox and Turner). In the following chart you can see exactly why the NFL commands such a premium:

As you can see, the NFL is the only television program that can concurrently deliver an audience of tens of millions to broadcasters who in turn sell this reach to advertisers for more than $4 million for a 30 second sport during the Super Bowl.

Timing

The current agreements the NFL has in place with these 6 broadcast, cable, satellite and mobile providers run through the 2021 season so it could take another decade before the most popular content on television make a full foray across viewing screens (through the licensing of full content rights, including digital). NBC’s simultaneous live broadcast of last year’s Super Bowl on TV and the internet was a starting point, but without an economic model that can simultaneously grow revenues for the League while providing fans with additional access to content, the NFL has no reason to upset the current revenue apple-cart. When the time comes, expect GRP to play an important role in enabling this.

The issues surrounding TV Everywhere aren’t limited to just these two issues of audience measurement and content accessibility, but most other items, like user and device authentication, can be solved with improvements in technology. It’s the negotiations that will take place between content owners, distributors and advertisers that will eventually determine what user experience audiences are left with, which might not necessarily in the best interest of the consumer. If these three parties can find common ground with evolving consumer consumption needs though, not only will TV Everywhere become a reality, but the groundwork will be in place for the next evolution in television: unbundled, on-demand and IP-based program delivery.

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Not All Users Are Created Equal (For Ad-Supported Consumer Businesses)

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Facebook’s first earnings announcement as a publicly-traded company last week was not well-received by investors, as the company’s stock hit new all-time lows after only being able to meet analysts’ already lowered financial expectations.

Most of the discrepancies between Facebook’s growth trajectory and stock performance can be summed up in these two slides from the company’s earnings release:

While directionally these charts look good, going up and to the right, a closer look reveals a growing problem in the relationship between Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). The MAUs chart shows quarter-over-quarter user growth in each of Facebook’s four geographic regions over the past two years. The largest of these regions, Rest of the World, is growing the fastest though (at 9% over last quarter) while US & Canada, which is the smallest region in terms of MAUs, is growing the slowest (at 2%) which is an issue since Facebook is able to monetize US & Canada users over seven times better than Rest of World users on average according to the ARPU chart. Optimizing per user monetization is further exacerbated when you consider that growth is increasingly coming from mobile-only users where advertising is still in its infancy.

Facebook’s ability to attract and monetize a large U.S. audience is what has enabled the company to go public. Whether Facebook becomes a successful publicly-traded company will rest largely on how quickly it’s able to reduce the ad monetization gap between U.S. users and every other region of the world. Until then, the financial markets will continue to recalibrate Facebook’s valuation (downward) to reflect the realities of the company’s current revenue capabilities.

This situation isn’t unique to just Facebook though. For example Twitter, the second largest social network out there, recently passed the 500 million account mark according to analyst group Semiocast, which also saw the proportion of U.S. user accounts decline relative to the rest of the world since the beginning of the year and identified Jakarta, Indonesia as the most active tweeting city- statistics that have a similar looking trend to what Facebook has experienced, growing but mostly in less mature advertising markets. As any free consumer tech services starts to grow quickly, they too will eventually face this same situation.

If you’re fortunate enough to be involved with such a consumer product that is gaining millions of users, focus on growth in countries where advertising is a mature industry so mobile will also be monetized more quickly (places like the U.S., Japan, Germany, and U.K.) and also accessible (so not China). If growth takes off in less-mature ad markets, but sizeably populated countries such as India or Indonesia, find a local advertising partner with strong ties to large conglomerates and marketers in the region before committing resources.

So when Josh Elman, venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, blogs about getting meaning from growth numbers provided by startups, we should probably add users by region to the discussion for ad-supported consumer start-ups in order to better understand the real opportunity and value being created for investors.

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Disrupting Retail Commerce and Real Estate

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At last month’s TechCrunch Disrupt the best interview of the multi-day conference was that of Chi-Hua Chien, partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers (if you haven’t seen it yet, I urge you to put aside twenty minutes to watch it here- it’s that good). In the interview Chi-Hua discussed Kleiner’s investment thesis in the context of technology’s ability to democratize industries. Previously technology had been leveraged to disrupt information (through the internet and search), distribution (through social media) and computing (through PCs and mobile devices). Now he says we’re in an era where commerce is being democratized. Through the “unwinding of that aggregation of commerce” companies such as Home Depot, Safeway and Walmart, which have succeeded historically by aggregating consumer demand through credibility and inventory, now have to compete with new demand aggregators coming from smartphone apps. The effects of this are already being felt by the retail electronics industry as Best Buy recently announced it was in the process of shrinking its physical footprint due to a drop in same-store sales which some are attributing to internet retailers benefitting from ’showrooming’. This disruption isn’t just be limited to physical commerce though, as retail financial services are also undergoing their own transformation thanks to more activities (such as depositing checks) being performed via mobile devices, which is reducing the number of transactions taking place inside bank branches across the U.S.

As a result retail real estate is becoming less important as a marketing and demand generation vehicle. So what will become of big box stores and strip malls?

Chi-Hua, during his interview, and start-up founder/angel investor Chris Dixon on his blog recently,  both alluded to the answer- companies that can create differentiated and superior customer experiences and not just compete on price will be the ones that succeed in this new retail environment. Starbucks was the first modern-day brand to successfully build a business around creating an experience for mainstream consumers (even resulting in a book being written about The Starbucks Experience). Then there’s Apple, the best example of how to build a successful retail presence. In the 11 years since the first Apple Store was launched, the company has opened up over 360 retail outlets worldwide and has become the most profitable retailer in America in the process while competing with electronic retailers such as Best Buy.

New opportunities to disrupt commerce will open up as a result of this excess capacity in real estate and Amazon might just be one of the biggest benefactors of this. As the company continues to grow its Amazon Prime subscriber base and potentially extend its Kindle line of devices this will increase Amazon’s need to grow beyond its current 34 warehouses in an effort to get the most popular inventory closer to its customers for faster delivery (for Prime subscribers), in-location pick-up (for consumer convenience) and product testing (for newly launched Kindle devices). An even more likely scenario will be an increase in temporary retail store experiences (also known as ‘pop-up shops’) where brands can leverage physical presences for short periods of time in order to support the launch or promote new products or services, which Samsung is looking to do in order to better compete with Apple for example.

The most exciting opportunity that could further transformation the physical retail experience is the democratization of manufacturing through technology. This next wave of disruption will come courtesy of 3D printing, which aims to digitize manufacturing and enable individual production quantities of many objects at massive scale. Currently 3D printers from the likes of MakerBot and Shapeways are used primarily used by hobbyists to create single-compound objects (usually plastic or metal). From this you can imagine a point in time in the future where more complex objects (made of multiple compounds, colors, etc.) are offered by developers through specialized retail store-fronts where consumers can submit orders for pre-fabricated products or design their own specifications to be printed out and picked-up. Each 3D retailer could specialize by type of product (ie plastic toys such as action figures or Legos) or production capabilities (ie motors for remote control vehicles) depending on their capabilities and demand.

The beauty in all this is that there will always be a need for retail real estate and technology will play a part in its evolution.

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Twitter’s Evolving Broadcast Network

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Last week signaled a big step in the evolution of Twitter as a broadcast medium. Starting with the announcement of a weekly email digest that summarizes the most relevant tweets from within each individual’s network, Twitter moved from being just a carrier of tweets to a curator of them as well. Combine this with the partnership announcements made at the end of the week, Twitter is starting to look less like a consumer technology platform and more like a traditional media platform. But what else does Twitter need to do to complete this evolution?

Slowing Down the Stream to Grow Faster

One of the primary challenges that Twitter needs to overcome to make this transition will be to develop a broader-based audience. Six years into its existence Twitter has reached 140 million users. But compare with Facebook which hit 500 million active users in the same time frame and Instagram, which will most likely pass 140 million downloads by the end of this year if they continue on their current growth trajectory- a mere 2 years into its own existence. So why hasn’t Twitter, which has similar brand recognition as Facebook and exceeds that of Instagram experienced similar growth? It boils down to simplicity and relevance. Facebook started out by focusing on photo-sharing and communication on the web while Instagram took photo-sharing to a new level in mobile. Both services were built in a manner that makes it easy for users to find and consume individual posts by highlighting the most relevant content in their feed based on their social graph’s interactions with it. Twitter on the other hand has always been about real-time distribution with little framework around how to use it, making it intimidating and not intuitive for newer, mainstream users. If Twitter hopes to reach 2 billion users it will need to focus less on what has made it popular to date (the real-time nature of the platform) and more on how the rest of the world consumes content (at their leisure). The new weekly digest feature, combined with the launch of the Discovery tab on Twitter’s apps at the beginning of the month should go far in simplifying the on-boarding process for new users by making the entire content experience more digestible.

The Reality of Real-Time Monetization

At the same time, Twitter needs to solve how best to monetize the real-time web experience beyond Promoted Tweets. For all the interest and excitement around real-time feeds, except for a few situations, no one has yet to prove there is a business model that can be built around it. Finance is the only traditional industry that operates in real-time to begin with, so companies like Stocktwits are in the enviable position of having already built their business around capturing the stream of stock market commentary on Twitter and providing additional analytics and services around that information that professional investors are actually willing to pay for.

The one area where Twitter seems to have identified opportunity around monetizing real-time communication is live events such as sports and award shows. The most popular events on Twitter, in terms of concurrent volume of tweets, have been sports-related, the Champions League soccer semi-final followed by the Super Bowl from this year, which had the highest tweets per second volume of any topic ever discussed on Twitter. The partnership announcement between Twitter and ESPN last week to create interactive programming around major sporting events is the first attempt to monetize this highly engaged audience on Twitter through advertising. Combined with the announcement the following day with NASCAR to curate tweets from a variety of sources around specific race events, you can see how Twitter could build a real-time business around curating the second-screen media experience.

Beyond these examples, all the other information being tweeted (except for natural or social emergencies like earthquakes and riots which cannot be monetized anytime) doesn’t require real-time distribution to be effective. The killing of Osama Bin Laden? The passing of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch? Great information to have, but isn’t any more critical or particularly more valuable when provided in real-time nor can it really be monetized appropriately. So by slowing down the stream experience, Twitter might actually be able to increase their monetization options beyond their current offering.

Continuing to Evolve Through Acquisition

Twitter’s broadening platform capabilities have benefited greatly from  acquisitions. The weekly digest looks like it is leveraging Twitter’s acquisitions of both Summify (a provider of daily summaries of the most relevant news from social networks) at the beginning of the year and RestEngine (a personalized email marketing service) earlier this month. For Twitter to continue down this path as a media broadcast network, additional acquisitions will be likely. While the biggest headlines Twitter has made on the acquisition front recently have been for the latest photo-sharing app it didn’t buy, the company should look at Pocket (formerly Read it Later) on the consumer side that allows users to save content for consumption at a later time- a sort of DVR for the real-time tweet stream- as an example of potential add-on services for its platform. On the business side, enhancing its analytics offering to compliment the tools and services it already provides to media publishers and advertisers should be Twitter’s primary focus.

From Content Carrier, to Curator, to Creator?

Ultimately, the type of broadcast network Twitter decides to evolve into will depend on whether or not the company gets into content creation. A recent job posting by Twitter aimed at journalists seems to indicate just that and may expand on the previously announced ESPN and NASCAR relationships. Luckily the evolution from carrier to curator to eventually a creator of content isn’t without precedent. Comcast was a carried content over its broadband networks until it decided to buy NBC a couple years back (after an unsuccessful attempt to acquire The Walt Disney Company years ago) to get into the curation and creation businesses. And as Matthew Ingram from GigaOM pointed out, YouTube has undergone the same progression with the announcement last fall of a $100 million fund via Google to invest in online content creators.

With each new step Twitter takes in its evolution as a broadcast network, the company exposes itself to greater business risks, but also greater financial rewards, by owning and further streamlining the process of getting content in front of consumers. Finding the intersection that optimizes the content consumption experience for users with Twitter’s own platform strengths and capabilities should be the main focus for the company going forward. If Twitter can find that optimal mix, it can become the internet’s answer to traditional media broadcasting.

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Rise of the Middle Class (Ad Inventory)

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In the past month or so I’ve had the chance to attend several online advertising industry events where a recurring topic of conversation has been how can publishers better monetize their remnant ad impressions. While technologies like real-time bidding (RTB) have made accessing and transacting this type of inventory easier for buyers, the corresponding growth in the use of RTB has not translated into increased revenues for online publishers. There is hope though.

By applying the same underlying technologies that power RTB, a new class of ad inventory has emerged that exists between traditional direct-sold (tier 1) and remnant (tier 2) inventory that is being referred to, conveniently enough, as tier 1.5 inventory that might be able to bring together the best of both inventory worlds. In a traditional RTB environment, ad inventory from one publisher to the next becomes indiscernible outside of pricing, removing the contextual relevance of each ad impression in the process. Even if you incorporate audience data for targeting specific web visitors, without knowing the context or even website that will be surrounding the ad prior to bidding on the impression, campaign performance, and thus publisher CPMs, will remain poor. It will be the ability to automate the entire process of targeting the right user on the appropriate website alongside relevant content that will improve the fortunes for all parties involved.

That’s where private exchanges come into play. They bring the efficiencies of RTB into an environment where advertisers know the context of where their ads will be delivered and publishers can set parameters as to which advertisers can have access to their audience and at what prices. Entities like quadrantONE for local news in the U.S. and the just announced pact between three of Canada’s largest broadcast companies are taking this one step further by pooling impression inventory from multiple online publishers across the same content types to provide a larger audience pool for advertisers to target in hopes of garnering larger portions of ad budgets. Layered on top of this, semantic technologies from the likes of Crystal Semantics, Peer39 and Proximic, can be leveraged as part of the set-up and bidding process within private exchanges to better organize content into categories in an effort to complete the contextual picture for the available ad inventory.

Instead of relying on advertisers coming into their web environments, others like the New York Times are looking at new ways to expose their content for monetization by leveraging social media. The company recently announced the release of Ricochet from their R&D Ventures group, which allows advertisers to wrap their ads around relevant articles from any Times Co. publication that these brands can then distribute across social media channels to interested fans and followers.

All of these opportunities don’t mean that publishers can get away with just enabling technologies for ad buyers at the transaction level in hopes of improving their indirect revenues though. In addition to building audiences through more engaging content, there are a number of services being brought to market by start-ups at the user interaction level that can help drive a better web experience, which can translate into more ad revenues. Companies like Visual Revenue are helping online publishers determine what content to highlight on their homepages through predictive analytics, while Sailthru’s Concierge provides content recommendations to keep users engaged once they are on the site. Finally, Yieldbot is attempting to tie all this activity together into the appropriate context for advertisers to target users on an impression or even session basis to create an on-going advertising experience.

In society, a growing middle class is beneficial to the overall health of the economy. The same can be said for online advertising where the rise of middle class ad inventory will benefit the entire online ad ecosystem. This doesn’t mean that tier 1.5 inventory will be a panacea for all remnant inventory nor will it replace direct sales relationships. Instead it will offer buyers and sellers more choice around how inventory is bought at scale thanks to the ad standards developed over the years by the IAB. There will always be a need for full service ad sales teams that can create a native advertising experience that guarantees audiences for those advertisers willing to pay for better access and services. It’s those companies that figure out the right experience for their site and users and can optimize revenues across these 3 tiers of ad inventory that will be able to gain the advantage in a still nascent ad market.

Photo image source: Time Inc.

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How To Convert Underpants Into Profits

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Yesterday I was invited by Fortify Ventures to speak to some of the start-ups at their accelerator The Fort where I am a mentor. Since I am the Chief Revenue Officer of my company they thought I could cover the topic of revenue models. The title for my presentation (embedded below) comes from the classic South Park episode ‘Gnomes‘ where gnomes that are stealing underpants from one of the boys try and explain their business model of turning these underpants into profits (to no avail). Swap ‘users’ for ‘underpants’ and you have the dilemma that most start-ups not named Instagram face in converting a user base into a profitable business.

Let me know what you think and how I can improve the presentation for future use.

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How Mobile and Real-Time are Helping Maximize Revenues and Utilization

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Yesterday an interesting set of announcements hit the tech world that highlighted some of the early successes start-ups are seeing in helping businesses maximize revenue opportunities and service utilization.

  • Overnight, Uber, a provider of high-quality, on-demand car service officially announced the availability of is service in a second city- New York.
  • Then Gigwalk, which turns iPhone users into an instance mobile workforce announced that it had exited its beta period and raised $1.7 million in seed money in the process from an all-star list of early-stage investors.
  • Finally TaskRabbit, which offers a marketplace for people to outsource their errands announced its own $5 million Series A funding round to help expand its service beyond Boston and San Francisco.

Each of these companies is attempting to apply the same concept behind peer-to-peer computing projects, such as the search for alien life forms, in utilizing available bandwidth. But instead of leveraging unused computing power, these start-ups are leveraging excess capacity in service-oriented businesses. For any type of service business, time not allocated or used to generate revenues are opportunities that are lost forever, just like when an airplane takes off with empty seats on it. In the case of Uber, the company is trying to alleviate this problem by matching professionally licensed drivers who have idle time while at work with new, short-term, fare opportunities. Meanwhile Gigwalk is pairing people with availability in a specific location with large corporations that need specific, once again short-term, tasks completed in that area. In the case of TaskRabbit, it’s allowing consumers who have free time on their hands to run errands on behalf of other consumers who don’t.

The opportunity to provide a service and generate revenues in a given period of time isn’t limited to these types of jobs though as other capacity-based service industries are benefiting from real-time yield maximization as well. Daily deal service LivingSocial has already tested its Instant Deals in D.C. offering lunch at participating restaurants for $1.00, while industry leader Groupon is developing a similar service called Groupon Now that enables restaurants, spas, and other retailers to drive business to their establishments through the use of real-time incentives. This makes perfect sense when these service businesses are not operating at full capacity. Taking the same concept of driving utilization through discounts, Hotel Tonight has launched a mobile app for booking same-day hotel rooms in a number of cities across the U.S.

The underlying enabler of all of these start-up services is the smartphone. Without the ability for consumers and service providers to communicate in real-time based on one or both parties’ location and availability, the opportunity to match the two entities wouldn’t exist. This would leave service providers without a way to generate additional revenues or complete certain projects in real-time and consumers without a way to benefit financially- either through service discounts or by generating additional income for themselves. The economic potential for retail and capacity-based services will only grow as smartphones and tablets become more ubiquitous and enable new business opportunities and economics to be created around simple, short-term, service-oriented tasks.

I’m excited to see what other service industries (airlines, data collection in the real world, movie theaters, tourist attractions, etc.) will benefit from start-ups that can help bridge the gap between existing sales opportunities and maximizing a service providers revenue potential by creating what are essentially real-time exchanges for specific services. For established service industries, there will always be a market for start-ups that can bring new revenue opportunities to the table. For entities willing to pay consumers to perform services on their behalf, the key will be to make the task short and easy to complete to attract the widest applicant pool for these jobs.

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Facebook’s Effect on Consumer Internet IPOs

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Regardless of whether or not you believe in the long-term viability of Demand Media’s content creation platform (more widely referred to as a “low-cost content farm”), one thing is certain: there is a healthy demand for consumer internet stocks. Having priced its offering above the expected range of $14 to $16 per share last week, Demand Media (trading under the ticker symbol DMD on the New York Stock Exchange) ended up 33% on its first day of trading, valuing the company at $1.5 billion- the highest market capitalization for an internet company since Google’s IPO in 2004. Neither the company’s questionable account practices around how it amortizes its content costs, nor Google’s announcement that it would take stronger action against low quality content sites and content farms (which could also include the ability for consumers to blacklist these domains) appearing in search results seemed to dampen investors’ appetite for the stock (according to Demand Media’s S-1 filing, Google made up 28% of the company’s revenues in the first 3 months of 2010).

So why does this matter?

Investing beyond Facebook

Interest in stock of consumer internet companies needs to exist beyond just Facebook for the overall health of the capital markets. Facebook, which recently confirmed that it had raised $1.5 billion in an oversubscribed round led by Goldman Sachs that included $1 billion from non-U.S. clients, will most likely not file for an IPO until the end of April 2012 when it has to begin disclosing its financials to the public due to the company exceeding the 500 shareholder threshold this year. Investors are left with the decision to either wait for Facebook’s offering or participate in the overall growth of the consumer internet sector by buying into other companies” IPOs. Even if Demand Media is a beneficiary of pent-up demand for Facebook stock, the fact that investors are buying up shares in the open market is a positive sign, especially for the likes of LinkedIn (which filed its registration statement the day after Demand Media went public) and Skype (which has already filed its paperwork and is expected to go public in the 2nd half of this year) which have healthier overall financial profiles than Demand Media.

Market opportunity validation

The phrase “a feature not a product,” which has been attributed to friend and venture capitalist Chris Fralic of First Round Capital as it relates to investing in start-ups, is a concept than can be extended to evaluating potential IPO candidates as well. Over time, the public markets are the most effective way to determine whether an entity is “a product line not a company”. The consumer internet, like other sectors, needs public companies to validate whether or not capital being deployed by venture investors in a particular sector is warranted or not. The validation comes by way of each company’s financial performance and associated market capitalization as well as that of the entire sector- public data points that do not exist in tandem in private companies (even though secondary markets do exists for shares of private company stock, in companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga, there is no accompanying financial disclosure requirements as with public companies).

It’s this market validation that keeps venture capitalist investing in start-ups that compete with Google in search for example, even though the company holds an ever-increasing grip on the U.S. search market. AdWords, Google’s  search advertising product, represented the majority of the nearly $20 billion in revenues the company earned from its own websites in 2010.  The validation of search advertising’s market size by Google enables companies such as Blekko to raise $24 million in funding even though their goal of reaching third place in the search business sounds modest, though worth billions of dollars in revenues.

Acquisitions, which are a much more common type of liquidity event for start-ups, don’t provide the same type of market proof because they are completed for a variety of reasons, some of which are not purely economic or accretive to the acquiring company (i.e. acquiring companies for the talent, for access to a particular customer or as a defensive measure against a competitor).

Business theory versus reality

Whether Demand Media deserves to be worth more than the New York Times makes for entertaining debate (especially after it was revealed that the New York Times almost bought into Demand Media over three years ago), but it misses the point. What Demand Media’s public offering is really about is whether or not the theory behind the internet being a more efficient, scalable way to do business is a reality for the content creation business. If Demand Media can prove skeptics wrong and build a sustainable, profitable business as an online media company, it will open up opportunities for other pure-play online media companies such as The Huffington Post to go public and keep venture capitalists investing in the sector.

With Facebook’s revenues on track to exceed $1.5 billion and net income to reach nearly $500 million in 2010 investors are correct to anoint the company the darling of this consumer internet class as Facebook’s financials and growth story far exceeds anyone else’s in the industry (Groupon doesn’t factor into this conversation because it is an e-commerce company). In the process Facebook has also validated the business opportunity around social networking, which LinkedIn will benefit from in its upcoming IPO. For Skype, which provides a different type of social communication utility, their public offering will put one of the most often  used business models existing on the internet today to the test, the “freemium” model, along with trying to fulfill on the business promise of paying for communication over the internet (which Vonage never really was able to accomplish). The success or failure of Skype’s business model of charging consumers for only premium services and giving away the rest for free to users will have a major effect on start-up funding across the entire consumer internet sector going forward.

With the countdown to Facebook’s inevitable IPO having already started, the company  has indirectly provided other private consumer internet companies with a chance to leverage the demand and go public themselves (granted  they meet some of the traditional financial metrics of approximately $100 million in revenues and profitable). This is a short-term opportunity though as companies that are able to complete their IPOs in the months before Facebook goes public or starts disclosing its financials should do so to benefit from the investor appetite for consumer internet stocks but do it far enough in advance to not be drawn into direct comparison to Facebook’s financial success. In addition to the aforementioned companies, several start-ups that have benefited directly from the success of Facebook’s platform over the past several years, namely Buddy Media and Zynga, could benefit further from the Facebook effect by going public in 2011.  The clock is ticking.

Photo credit: David Kirkpatrick/The Facebook Effect