Path 2.0 incorporates a set of activities- Photos, People, Places, Music, Thoughts and Sleep/Awake status- that users can post to their timeline and share with their network. By initially focusing on these social services, Path’s mobile functionality either super-sets (in the case of Places and Thoughts) or competes with (for Photos and Music) some of the most popular mobile apps available:

• Photos: The basis for the original Path app, Photos, which incorporates image-filters as well, competes with many other photo-sharing apps including the wildly successful Instagram.
• Places: Popularized by location-based social networks, Path also offers check-in services inside its app and allows the location data to be posted to a user’s Foursquare account.
• Music: Giving users the ability to insert song clips into their Path timeline competes directly with the relatively new but popular SoundTracking app.
• Thoughts: Like any social network, commenting is a core functionality which Path supports and allows to be shared to both a user’s Facebook and Twitter accounts.

By leveraging design, for which the company has received rave reviews, Path has created a differentiated mobile user experience that consolidates these services into a single app. While competition between content creators and aggregators for audience attention is a relatively new phenomenon in mobile, it has played out over several cycles on the wired web already. Yahoo became a very popular web 1.0 destination by providing an online directory through which the initial content creators on the web could be found. Over time Yahoo evolved from being just an aggregator to a creator of content as well- launching successful finance and sports content verticals in the process. As the web matured, traditional media (magazines, newspapers and television networks) began bringing its offline content online, shifting consumer attention back towards these properties. Then came Google who re-aggregated the content experience for audiences by providing a better way to discover exactly what people were looking for through its search engine. Google has also tried leveraging its audience by acquiring (i.e. YouTube) or launching (i.e. Gmail) content and services that keep these consumers engaged with Google’s properties. When web 2.0 came along the balance of attention started to shift to socially oriented sites like MySpace and Photobucket where the users became the content creators. As last week’s S-1 filing reminds us, Facebook won the battle for social networking supremacy as they created a platform that not only aggregates individual content creation but enables professional content to be curated in the same experience as well. In the process Facebook took the aggregation idea one step further than in previous cycles by allowing other companies (such as Zynga) to build applications directly on the platform, thus ensuring users continued to engage with Facebook.

The ushering in of the mobile app economy by Apple has led to the development of hundreds of thousands of task-specific apps- from games and content apps to personal utilities and social networking services. Relatively few of these though have been built to aggregate individual app experiences. Path is attempting to do this, and take it a step further at the same time, by creating its own set of services (Photos, Music, Sleep/Awake status) alongside super-setting such well-established apps as Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and now Nike+ through the use of APIs. A consistent, mobile-only experience throughout Path’s app allows users to still participate in these underlying networks but aggregates the engagement within its own app, which if successful, would allow Path to eventually drop their connection to these underlying social networks.

How valuable consumers find the aggregated experience versus using activity-specific apps will determine Path’s success ultimately. And while design may very well continue to win over users from competing web and mobile services, Path will need to grow beyond the Valley’s A-List of users and connect with the average American already using Facebook if it’s going to win the first wave of mobile app aggregation. If not, which companies stand to benefit in this cycle?

The Nielsen Company is the de facto provider of the ratings system used to determine how the 60 billion in television advertising dollars are allocated amongst broadcast and cable network line-ups. The company relies on the behavior of 50,000 Americans across its sample of 25,000 households to extrapolate ratings for the nearly 115 million households with television sets in the U.S.  The resulting ‘share’ of audience Nielsen attributes to each TV episode on a nightly basis ultimately effects which series get renewed or cancelled (for a great primer on how Nielsen’s TV ratings system works, check out this ESPN-style animated video on the topic from local Washington, DC creative agency JESS3).

Though with the number of households with television sets dropping for the first time in 20 years, on-demand video platforms taking viewing time away from traditional television and multi-tasking across multiple screens a growing reality, traditional means of measurement are failing to capture this evolving consumer behavior. While Nielsen is working on ways to aggregate this distributed viewing audience through its ‘extended screen’ initiative, the company isn’t measuring the actual activity on the social web occurring around the episodes being watched. This represents an opportunity for services that provide a platform for social engagement as well as companies that aggregate TV show-related conversations from across the internet to address this information gap. While both Facebook and Twitter have their own media-related initiatives that allow fans to interact with one another as well as with the shows and their stars, neither network focuses on quantifying this engagement on an industry-wide basis.

Services like BuddyTV, GetGlue, Miso and Tunerfish, on the other hand, have been built in a manner that can address this need. Having ridden the check-in wave popularized by location-based service Foursquare, these event-based social networks (EBSNs) capture when consumers are tuning in to watch television and aggregating the activity being generated around each show within their respective apps and websites. GetGlue, the largest of these services, already has more users checking-in to the most popular shows on its platform than the size of Nielsen’s entire sample audience, making it statistically valuable to the ratings conversation.

Even though the demographic make-up of EBSN users is not representative of the overall U.S. population (which Nielsen does try to mirror in selecting its households), check-in services make up for this by highlighting the actual activity of the most desirable audience to advertisers (18 to 49 year-olds) and not just projections. For advertisers this represents a unique opportunity to target these consumers in a highly engaged environment by extending their TV advertising for particular shows to the equivalent social web channels and mobile devices. To bring the desired scale to this type of opportunity though, these social environments need to be aggregated somehow.

That’s where companies like Bluefin Labs, General Sentiment, Social Guide and Trendrr come into play by not only aggregating publicly available social commentary but filtering and normalizing this data from disparate sources (EBSNs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to identify the underlying sentiment of a broader range of web users. This provides a more complete view of the engagement associated with shows across the social web in real-time as well as beyond the initial airing time slot of each episode. The resulting findings might be just the data set necessary to become the de facto social television rating to rival Nielsen.

Even with Nielsen’s recent ratings calculation glitch, it’s unlikely that the company will be replaced as the ratings system for the television advertisers industry in the near future. But as audiences for traditional TV continue to disperse across more mediums and content experiences, the need to compliment the ratings discussion, and ultimately how advertising dollars are allocated, with additional data will only continue to increase. This creates an opportunity for actual engagement-related metrics to gain equal footing with passive stream and tune-in projections over time.

So how do we get there?

While results from a recent NM Incite (a Nielsen/McKinsey company) study confirms the correlation between social activity and TV ratings, the opportunity for social television start-ups is in identifying and explaining the variations in popularity between Nielsen’s most highly rated shows and those series being discussed online and how to benefit from it.

The combination of tune-in and conversation activity make EBSNs the most compelling data set for social television ratings. The challenge is that the company that popularized the check-in, Foursquare, only recently passed 10 million users worldwide itself, a far cry from Facebook’s 150 million users in the U.S. alone. For EBSNs to reach Facebook-like adoption, they need distribution and a more automated process for socializing around TV shows (beyond the manual download of apps and checking-in to services). While BuddyTV and Miso have partnered with AT&T’s television service offering U-verse, GetGlue and Miso have integrations underway with satellite television provider DirecTV that enables subscribers to check-in to shows through DirecTV’s remote control. Other companies, such as Dijit, are by-passing traditional TV service providers entirely and competing for consumers with their own universal remote that layers in check-in functionality.

What social analytic companies lacks in proprietary data, they make-up for in business model by already working with advertisers and media companies to help them understand the volume and sentiment of chatter occurring online about their brands and shows across the social web. Gaining access to data on an exclusive basis from EBSNs and other social communities would be a key differentiator in winning the battle for advertising and media clients- the same companies that subscribe to Nielsen’s television ratings data. With so many companies vying for client dollars and mind share, the social analytics provider that can get the right media outlets partnerships to adopt and distribute their version of social television ratings can become the industry standard through sheer perception and market momentum.

Based on these factors, Trendrr, which launched a TV industry-specific real-time dashboard before the start of the fall television season could be that company. Considering Trendrr’s breadth of data sources (Facebook, GetGlue, Miso and Twitter) and how well they’ve embedded themselves into the online media landscape (partnering with the likes of AdAge, Lost Remote and Mashable to distribute their data and findings), the company is best positioned to become the social television ratings provider of the future.

What are the most likely outcomes?

Absent Trendrr or another one of these start-ups gaining the necessary client or user clout to grow into the de facto social TV ratings provider, the most likely outcome for the companies with the most traction in this market is an acquisition.

If either Facebook or Twitter decided to focus on providing analytics as a value-add to their advertiser and media clients, they would make ideal acquirers of these types of companies. For Facebook, adding a media-oriented check-in service to their massive user base would fit nicely with Facebook’s recent overturns towards the television industry and turn the acquired ESBN into the immediate and undisputed winner in the social television data game. Twitter on the other hand would benefit from acquiring one of the leading social analytics companies, as it would fill a large analytics hole in their offering. Even though the company recently stated its intentions to stay out of the enterprise market, the opportunity might prove to be too lucrative to stay out.

Beyond Twitter, The Nielsen Company is a natural acquirer of a social analytics company since it compliments Nielsen’s existing ratings and research business. With the company having held an initial public offering at the beginning of this year, Nielsen also has the necessary capital to do this.

Beyond these entities, media companies and television platform could benefit from owning one of the EBSNs by leveraging these services to gain insight into user activity and drive additional tune-in for themselves or partners. Yahoo was the first to act on this, acquiring 12-week old IntoNow earlier this year and releasing an iPad app last week that integrates into Yahoo’s Connected TV framework. For GetGlue and Miso, who have raised capital from Time Warner and Google’s venture arm respectively, they already have likely acquirers in the fold. That being said, with the variety of relationships GetGlue (most recently with FX) and Miso (most recently with Showtime) have established with different broadcast and cable networks it’s not out of the question that one of these media partners tries to acquire either company to be their underlying social TV platform. The engagement data would be very valuable to any company negotiating with advertisers during the ‘upfront’ season as a way to justify advertising rates (beyond Nielsen’s rating data) for the next television season or provide brands with a new way to advertise to their intended audiences (for an additional cost or as a make-good).

Stay tuned. This market will only get more interesting.

The result? Contests, giveaways and promotions of all types are requiring ‘Liking’ the company as part of the entry process. So what began as an opportunity for brands and fans to find and connect with one another in a social setting has turned into a competition between entities to see who can compile the most Likes in a 24-hour period. So thank you Frito-Lay, you’ve helped turn social into a transaction.

The socialization of the web was the most important development to come out of the web 2.0 era. The advent of blogging platforms and social networks allowed the internet to evolve from a read-only medium to a read/write experience for consumers who quickly became comfortable with blogging, posting and tweeting about every topic imaginable in the process. Inevitably some of these conversations turned to discussing experiences with, and opinions about, products and services, which corporations were not prepared to deal with, since advertising had traditionally been broadcast through a channel that didn’t allow for real-time user feedback.

To justify the time and money being allocated to understanding and managing this social activity, corporate departments, along with their agencies and social media consultants tasked with this job, have turned to quantitative measures such as number of friends, followers, Likes and subscribers as a way to validate their respective effectiveness in addressing the social web. As a consequence, advertising across social environments has quickly become a $2 billion business according to local media advisory firm BIA/Kelsey, which also forecasts that social media-related spending will grow to $8.3 billion in the U.S. by 2015.

The problem with this approach, as Steve Rubel, SVP of Digital at public relations firm Edelman, pointed out at The Next Web Conference earlier this year, is that social isn’t an industry, it’s a behavior. So instead addressing consumers at a personal level, web users are being treated as a metric by advertisers looking to fill their social media quotas. The difficulty for most companies in trying to adopt a customer service-oriented approach to social is that they don’t know how to quantify the return on investment for this type of activity (if you are interested in understanding the right approach to communicating with consumers on the social web I’d suggest reading The Thank You Economy, the most recent book from author, video blogger and wine enthusiast Gary Vaynerchuck, or watch him speak, as I recently had a chance to, about the ROI of his mother).

Worse yet, from an advertising perspective, these user metrics can be easily inflated, as there are plenty of companies that can acquire social connections in bulk for brands to show high Like counts. With the amount of time being spent by consumers in their Facebook News Feed, the ability to re-message these fans and the viral potential of content distribution through the social graph the Like has started replacing email as the most desirable means of communicating with potential consumers. Combined with low open rates, spam filters and unsubscribing options in email, the Like also become more valuable to marketers, leading to pricing of up to $1 per Like from social ad networks.

Buying Likes is the wrong means to building relationships with consumers though, as it is akin to offering kids on the playground gum to be your friend- it makes you feel good about yourself at that particular moment but doesn’t actually change the dynamic of the relationship. Certain users will use the Like button because they generally appreciate the brand, while others will use it in order to receive discounts and promotions, so paying for these types of fans doesn’t make sense, and in the long-term, could end up damaging the relationship between brands and consumers on Facebook.

Many consumers migrated from their initial ISP email accounts because of email spam resulting from signing-up for free services or giveaways, rendering these accounts unusable. By cluttering users’ News Feeds companies risks annoying consumers in the same manner and potentially causing users to leave Facebook over time for newer, less spammy social networks.

So where are the investment opportunities in social?

While Likes are a form of social currency, the business models being built around driving social connections are highly questionable. That’s because the continued growth and success of companies providing social cost per action pricing is predicated on finding the next great social action to arbitrage before advertisers lose interest in paying for Likes because of the lack of quantifiable return on investment.

Salesforce’s acquisition of Radian6 for $340 million earlier this year, to tackle social CRM, does highlight the value of being able to decipher the conversations occurring across the social web. Beyond just monitoring consumer chatter, start-ups need to help brands understand the sentiment of these conversations (both positive and negative), the change in velocity of the discussion associated with the sentiment and the influencers behind these topics. Only then can start-ups provide real value by automating some of the activity around information gathering and distribution across social platforms.

A couple of companies with recent announcements are trying to address this need for clients on the advertising and distribution side of the market as well. Taykey, which just came out of stealth mode with its $9 million Series B announcement, provides advertisers with ways to reach audiences across the social web in real-time by identifying users who are displaying an active interest around a product, service or topic at any given time. SocialFlow, which recently hired an online industry-veteran as President after raising $7 million in April, focuses on solutions for publishers and media companies who want to increase engagement with their audiences by putting new content in front of consumers at the appropriate time.

The automation being provided by these types of companies is intended to deliver better value to consumers and not de-humanize the social experience on the web (which is a risk for Taykey since they do provide cost per action Likes as part of their offering). Since the Like is here to stay, my only hope is that advertisers and consumers both engage with the button at the right time, and for the right reason- like in this ad.

• 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.

With the Android-based Motorola Bionic delayed until the second half of the year and rumors of the iPhone 5 shipping anywhere between September and the next year, the immediate decision seems to come down to whether I should get the 4G LTE network-enabled HTC Thunderbolt or iPhone 4. But is this the real question I should be asking myself?

The speed of Android’s rise to prominence in the U.S. smartphone market has been nothing short of amazing, growing from a 9% market share in February 2010 to 33% in February 2011, vaulting Android’s operating system from 4^th to 1^st place in the process according to comScore. Over that same period of time Apple’s U.S. smartphone market share has stayed flat at 25%. This had led to people like venture capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures to suggest that developers should build for the Android operating system first.

What Fred’s analysis, this market share data and my question fail to address though is the broader market dynamics of mobile. The battle everyone is focusing on is Android versus iOS smartphones- and why not? With 70% of the U.S. still using feature phones, according to the same comScore data, the market opportunity for smartphones remains massive. Even so, the war between Apple and Google is actually taking place at a much broader level, as decisions made by consumers like myself and developers alike will decide who the eventual market leader will be for the entire mobile operating system (OS) market- not just smartphones.

While Android might be winning the smartphone market share battle, it’s at the mobile OS level that iOS holds the advantage over Android. Google’s primary market for distributing its mobile OS is the smartphone via HTC, Motorola, Samsung and other handset manufacturers. Apple on the other hand distributes iOS across three markets through its own devices- handheld entertainment devices (via the iPod Touch), smartphones (iPhone) and tablets (iPad). Because of this Apple’s outlook is much broader in scope- to get its other iOS devices into the hands of the 80% of the market (70% of the feature phone users in the U.S. plus the 1/3^rd of the smartphone market not on Android or Apple smartphone) not using an Android or iOS smartphone. By getting consumers to purchase an iPad or iPod Touch, Apple can create a barrier to entry for Google through high switching costs.

With every app install, especially paid ones and those that can be used across device types, consumers increase their switching costs for leaving Apple’s ecosystem. So when the time comes for iPad and iPod owners to upgrade their mobile phones, the iPhone is the natural choice since these users are already familiar with Apple’s App Store and iOS user experience. With the iPod’s market share pegged at 70% of the digital music market last year according to NPD and iPad’s at 85% of the tablet market in 2010 according to ABI Research, Apple has a huge advantage over Google in getting consumers onto its mobile OS platform through these types of devices. As iPod sales begin to decline though, the growth in iPad sales will be the key complimentary product in Apple’s effort to gain market share in the smartphone market.

According to a different study released by comScore earlier this week, there is evidence to corroborate iOS’ network effect for Apple in the U.S. iOS’ reach is 59% greater than that of Android when you combine iPad, iPhone and iPod users. This translates into approximately 38 million iOS users overall in the U.S. versus nearly 24 million Android users. More importantly though, in looking at iPad sales specifically, BlackBerry users account for the second highest percentage of iPad owners, behind iPhone customers, followed closely by Samsung and LG. This represents a great opportunity for Apple to convert these users into iPhone customers once their contracts are up or they ready to switch to an advanced smartphone. Update: comScore just released a similar study for the European market showing Apple’s reach being 116% greater than Android in France, Germany, Italy Spain and the UK- albeit on a smaller user base (29 million consumers) than in the U.S. As it relates to iPad adoption, Nokia users closely follow iPhone users in iPad ownership, providing Apple with a huge opportunity to take market share from the largest mobile handset manufacturer in the world.

So how can Android better compete with iOS at the mobile OS level?

• First, Google needs to nail down agreements with the music industry’s four main record labels in order to launch its cloud-based music competitor to iTunes. This will allow manufacturers to create devices that can finally compete with the iPod and eliminate the biggest feature advantage of the iOS platform.

• Second, Android tablets need to be synched with the smartphone’s OS platform. The Motorola XOOM, which launched with much fanfare towards the end of February as the first real competitive threat to the iPad (after winning Best of Show at CES in January), seems to have come up short. Sales of the tablet have been estimated at 100,000 devices in its first 5 weeks on the market compared to the iPad which sold 300,000 devices its very first day and nearly 5 million devices in the just announced second quarter. By running a newer and completely different version of Android than its smartphone siblings (Honeycomb 3.0 versus Android 2.0 thru 2.3.3) the device hasn’t been able to leverage apps from the smartphone Android Marketplace. According to Apple’s COO Tim Cook a fragmented ecosystem where Android tablets have less than 100 apps to choose from while iPad customers have 65,000. Without a cohesive OS platform across device types, Android will lack the switching costs afforded to Apple’s OS ecosystem.

For developers, the 189 million cumulative iOS devices sold through the end of March 2011 represents a huge market opportunity. Add in ease of monetization and payment mechanisms in addition to a formal app discovery process that is still lacking in Android’s marketplace, you can see why companies like Color and Instagram chose to launch in the iOS App Store first and why there continues to be more apps available for iOS than Android even though Apple has a more stringent app vetting process.

As for myself, the decision was easy once I took a step back and looked at the broader mobile OS ecosystem options. Even though I already owned an iPod Touch, I’ve decided to go with iOS primarily because I was planning on picking up a new iPad in the first place. So by default, the iPhone it is for me. With three different types of devices being tied to iOS when it’s all said and done I will be Apple’s ideal customer. The only question I have left? Do I wait for the white iPhone.

This is essentially the game Apple is playing in the tablet market right now. The company, which launched the industry with the unveiling of the iPad last April, has yet to see a truly competitive offering after selling 15 million iPad units in 2010. The only notable rival last year was Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. This Android-based tablet, which launched in November at a slightly lower price point than the iPad but at the expense of comparable features (smaller touchscreen display and less internal memory though it does include front and rear-facing cameras), has not met sales expectations.

The Motorola Xoom, which gets released today, is expected to be the first viable alternative to the iPad after winning Best of Show at CES in January. This device comes equipped with Android’s tablet-specific Honeycomb operating system and hardware specs to match current versions of the iPad, with the addition of memory expansion capabilities and front and rear-facing cameras, but accomplishes this at the expense of price (higher compared to iPads) and app offering (a handful versus the iPad’s 60,000).

In both of these instances, a trade-off between product and price had to be made by the manufacturer. To compete on price, Samsung had to sacrifice on product (i.e. screen size and memory). To compete on product, Motorola had to give on price (i.e. be more expensive). Throw in research that shows the iPad has 90% awareness among consumers, and you can see why tablet manufacturers must beat Apple on both product and price to beat the iPad.

Heads Apple wins, tails tablet manufacturers lose.

While Apple competitors might be able to match, or even exceed the design and hardware capabilities of the iPad at some point in the future, doing so at a lower price point would be challenging. Apple understands their strategic price advantage and is continuously looking to expand on it.

Case in point- based on iSuppli’s research, the single most expensive component in the iPad’s manufacturing process is the touchscreen display. So it’s no surprise that Apple revealed on its most recent earnings call that it has made long-term financial commitments of $3.9 billion dollars with three suppliers believed to be display providers. If correct, this means Apple would control 60% of the global touch panel capacity according to Taiwanese industry website DigitTimes. Controlling this amount of supply would have two major effects on the tablet market as (1) it would lock in favorable pricing and predictable supply for Apple going forward in manufacturing future versions of the iPad and (2) create supply constraints and pricing pressure on tablet manufacturers.

Once again, heads Apple wins, tails tablet manufacturers lose.

The concept of vertical integration is nothing new to Apple which acquired Intrinsity last year, a semiconductor chip design firm responsible for developing the iPad’s original A4 processor, in an effort to bring the skills and development costs in-house. This became another component cost advantage over the Motorola Xoom which leverages NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 for its processor.

With Apple’s event next week expected to showcase the next iteration of the iPad, which should once again place the product’s feature set ahead of its competitors, the question to Android, Tablet OS and WebOS tablet makers is: want to flip again?

Photo credit: Algie Moncrief/Flickr

With advertising a major theme at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona could this latest Tremor news set off the next round of capabilities expansion and provider consolidation amongst ad networks?

With online video projected to grow 55% annually through 2014, making it the fastest growing online ad format worldwide, it’s easy to see why there’s interest from both traditional display and pure play video ad networks in acquiring online video market share. Looking at recent industry trends and projections, mobile video might be poised to follow this same type of growth trajectory, creating a similar opportunity for ad networks looking to provide cross-platform digital ad solutions to agencies and advertisers.

• Devices: Worldwide smartphone shipments passed PCs in total volume for the first time in the 4^th quarter of last year while tablet shipments, led by Apple’s iPad, are expected to reach nearly 56 million this year and 172 million by 2014.
• Network Traffic: In Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast, updated this month, the company predicted that, by 2015, two-thirds of all global mobile data traffic would be video.
• Advertising: Mobile ad spending is projected to exceed $18 billion worldwide by 2015, representing over 15% of digital advertising’s spend. While in the U.S. video is expected to continue growing faster than any other mobile segment through 2014.

Together, these data points confirm that the PC-based era of the web has been officially replaced by the mobile web, which consumers are already taking advantage of through the proliferation of mobile device types. According to The Nielsen Company, Americans, led by teens and young adults, watch an average of 3 ½ hours of video a month on their mobile devices. To understand just how quickly video consumption habits are evolving look at YouTube’s announcement last month that it has reached 200 million video views per day on mobile devices- an increase of 300% over the beginning of 2010.

Media companies and marketers are looking at ways to quantify this audience in aggregate in an effort to bring advertising economics to parity across all “three screens” (television, web and mobile). This represents a big opportunity for ad networks willing to put forth the technical and execution effort to target mobile audiences fragmented by app-type (mobile web versus native apps), device (smartphones versus tablets), operating system (Android, BlackBerry, iOS, etc.) and ad unit interactivity (passive versus touch-screen).

Because ad guidelines and standards for the mobile web are still maturing in comparison to display and online video, ad networks interested in entering the mobile video space would benefit from acquiring video delivery expertise and an embedded distribution network. Any M&A activity would involve one of these three types of acquisition strategies:

1. Buy capabilities and market share: This tact was used by Specific Media to enter the online video market by acquiring a top 10 video ad provider and instantly gaining reach. If leading online video advertising networks BrightRoll and YuMe, which launched their respective mobile advertising solutions last fall, don’t see adoption of their offerings, they might be forced to take this route in order to match Tremor Media’s cross-platform scale in video. From the display advertising perspective, only Microsoft and Yahoo as well as the largest ad networks will be able to afford this type of acquisition due to lofty valuations in mobile and video.
2. Buy capabilities, leverage market share in current business: Undertone took this route by leveraging its own scale on the display advertising side with its video technology purchase to become a top 10 online video ad provider of its own within a couple of months of the acquisition. This is the most capital efficient way for any ad networks to enter the mobile video business, though acting quickly will be the key to successfully executing this strategy due to the limited number of acquisition options and venture capital being invested in the segment.
3. Extend capabilities and market share: As for Tremor Media, already a leader in the online video advertising space, its deal allowed the company to add product expertise (video overlay ads) while growing its reach and video ad volume. Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad network which raised $27.5 million earlier this year, and has raised $65 million overall, is the best positioned mobile ad network to take advantage of this strategy due to its profitability, exit options and capital on hand.

While Google bought its way into a dominate position in the U.S. mobile advertising market (including interactive video ad capabilities) with its purchase of AdMob last year, the growth of YouTube’s mobile website has allowed Google to become a cross-platform provider of mobile video monetization solutions. Apple on the other hand used its acquisition of AdMob competitor Quattro Wireless to build the iAd Network solely for its own mobile operating system (iOS). With two of the largest ad networks having been acquired by the two leading mobile operating platforms what merger opportunities still exist in mobile video advertising?

• JumpTap: The company added video to its suite of mobile ad formats last year in an effort to broaden its appeal to clients. JumpTap, which delivers ads across all major smartphone platforms (Android, BlackBerry and iOS) as well as the iPad, is considered the largest independent mobile ad network in the U.S. after Millennial Media. As such, the company will most likely have to wait and see what happens with Millennial (which will either go public or get acquired) before drawing interest from the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo and potentially Research in Motion (maker of BlackBerry) who have all been rumored acquirers of a mobile ad network and the only companies large enough to digest JumpTap’s $69 million in capital raised.
• Mogreet: The company provides mobile video advertising solutions through SMS and MMS mobile messaging services, allowing Mogreet to address the feature phone audience as well. Considering the limitation of their offering, especially when you consider the growth of the smartphone and tablet markets, and the $7 million invested in the company thus far, an acquisition of this company would be a stretch for a U.S.-based ad network but maybe not for a network in a large developing market such as Brazil, India, Indonesia or Russia where feature phones dominate the market.
• Rhythm NewMedia: From a pure play mobile video ad network perspective, Rhythm NewMedia has built the most envious, cross-platform network out there of the remaining independent players. The company, which recently raised $10 million, only works with premium brand advertisers and publishers across Android and iOS mobile platforms covering both smartphones and iPads. Having raised $37 million in total funding makes Rhythm a pricey acquisition for anyone not named Microsoft or Yahoo at this point though.
• Vdopia: While the company is an online video ad network with extensive operations and market share in India, it also operates iVdopia, a mobile video ad network. Its mobile offering covers both Android and iOS platforms (including iPads) as well as mobile websites. Claiming it has reached profitability, and with only $4 million raised, Vdopia would be a prudent acquisition for an online global ad network.

Beyond these mobile video ad companies there are several other start-ups that focus on providing rich media advertising solutions for smartphones, tablets and the mobile web that could provide the framework for a video offering for ad networks interested in getting into mobile video. Greystripe which focuses on rich media banner ads primarily for the iPhone, while supporting Android  and Java feature phones as well, has raised the most venture capital of the group ($18 million), followed by Medialets ($10 million) and Crisp Media (at least $5 million). Greystripe’s strength is in its ability to transcode Flash ads into HTML5 in order to support Apple’s Flash-restriction on iOS devices. Both Crisp Media and Medialets, neither of which are an ad network but instead earn revenue from serving rich media ads to mobile devices, do provide video ad solutions for both smartphones and tablets. The biggest challenge facing these companies will be potentially pricing themselves out of the M&A market if they continue to raise capital. Based on this, Crisp Media might be an ideal technology pick-up for an ad network with a strong client-base and distribution network.

With the display inventory component of mobile advertising already being automated through demand side platforms like DataXu and real-time bidding exchanges like Mobclix, mobile video might be the last digital ad segment where ad networks can extract additional margin out of the industry through ad effectiveness and audience scale. Perfecting the online and app video experience will be important beyond just mobile as internet television, the next great digital ad opportunity, will leverage these advertising frameworks for its own platform monetization. As agencies begin to provide digital services at global scale to their advertising clients, ad networks that can deliver audiences across devices and digital formats, at scale, will garner the lion’s share of ad campaign dollars coming from these agencies going forward. To accomplish this ad network’s need to boldly go where most networks haven’t gone before.

Photo credit: fdecomite/Flickr

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 2^nd 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

Make A Few Enemies (If You Want 500 Million Friends)

The launch of Places was a direct shot at Foursquare by Facebook. To return the favor Foursquare should go after Facebook’s core audience of college students (something I suggested to Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley in a conversation last year). Beyond revenge, this actually makes a lot of sense if you remember that Facebook’s success was built on its ability to capture the college crowd before opening up to other audiences.

Considering that (1) with 165 million Facebook users in the U.S. alone there is bound to be some backlash by young adults against parental “friending” as well as overall loss of interest in the platform and (2) Foursquare’s raison d’etre is to help people find new things to do in cities, Foursquare can offer college users a unique experience. Students who already use Facebook now have the chance to create a new, curated social graph based on people they want to interact with socially- and one that doesn’t include their parents. By leveraging Foursquare’s discovery element, which the company has started rolling out across several campuses with the launch of Foursquare for Universities, students can develop relationships based on sharing new experiences.

The result is the creation of a real social network- one that occurs in the real world and not just online or through social games. Facebook is accurate in not calling itself a social network as it operates more like an ambient network- one that allows people to communicate and interact with their accumulated social graph from afar. Because Foursquare’s purpose is to enable face-to-face social interaction it has the opportunity to become the place where your real friends are- i.e. people who you’d actually want to grab a drink or hang out with if you knew they were nearby. This statement can’t honestly be made by anyone trying to socialize beyond Dunbar’s number on Facebook. Time will tell if Facebook’s just announced Groups rectifies this situation or is too cumbersome for average users to implement. If not, they can resort to playing dirty by enforcing their newly granted LBSN patents.

Show Me The Money (Or At Least a Discount)

Not to be lost in the social aspect of Foursquare’s service is the underlying business opportunity. While Mayor-ships and virtual badges have been the drivers of Foursquare’s early successes, to a maniacal level in some instances, I agree with early stage investor Dave McClure, though not in such eloquent terms, that game mechanics will only take LBSN’s so far and that tangible financial rewards are how these networks can turn into more mainstream services.

That’s not to say that Foursquare should abandon its game mechanics. In fact the social activity driven through these features of Foursquare’s service should be leveraged by local businesses because these mechanics can create the right type of incentive structure. Local merchants are eager to tap into in-discretionary spending habits (especially those of college kids), but in a cost efficient manner that creates loyalty beyond just the initial lead generation. In the same breadth, consumers are interested in deals at local establishments- especially promotions they can opt-in to. That’s where leveraging Foursquare’s Swarm Badge to drive group participation makes sense.

The concept around Swarm Parties, in which businesses offer discounts to customers once a minimum number of users have checked-in on Foursquare in a given time period, has proven to be effective in increasing sales for local businesses in both the U.S. and overseas. This hasn’t been lost on the likes of recently launched GroupTabs which is looking to provide group discounts for local merchants by combining the check-in features of Foursquare with the deal incentives of Groupon. While Groupn itself has shown how effective it can be in driving one-time sales for local businesses it does also have its drawbacks. Foursquare can help businesses foster the long-term loyalty with consumers that is missing from Groupon-type offerings by helping merchants create incentives that can exist beyond virtual badges. This could include leveraging relationships merchants already have with consumers through loyalty cards, which CardStar is already doing by integrating Foursquare into its service, or creating new reward structures based on check-in frequency.

Find Other Ways to Help Users Grab Life… (And Experience New Places)

Beyond group incentives, Foursquare needs to find other ways to be useful to users and businesses in discovering one another. The recently launched “Add to My Foursquare” button is a great way to transfer an individual’s web-based interest in a venue, by adding it to their Foursquare To-Do list, into an actual visit to the physical store when they check-in nearby that business. Beyond web surfing, Foursquare’s recommendation engine, which is still being tested, could offer search engine-like opportunities for users to find, and merchants to pay to promote, businesses based on matching users’ check-in activity with potential interests. Combined these capabilities can not only enable better discovery and thus socialization opportunities for current users but also act as a starting point for new users who don’t have a check-in history but want to benefit from the wisdom of the local crowd.

Foursquare’s ultimate success, in addition to keeping the service up-and-running, will depend on its ability to create tangible benefits for its current users, before they start losing interest, while simplifying the value proposition for mainstream Facebook users to understand and start using Foursquare. If not, companies like Google Ventures-backed SCVNGR, which now has 500,000 users of its own, has the pieces in place to compete with Foursquare through its own brand relationships, university outreach program and group-buying functionality, are waiting in the wings to take on Facebook Places.

Ball’s in your court Foursquare. I’m rooting for you.

Photo credits: Dunny/WeeklyShot, The Social Network/Columbia Pictures, Jerry Maguire/TriStar Pictures and DodgeBall/20th Century Fox Film

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Last week Clearspring Technologies [disclosure: I used to work there] publicly announced its new direction as an audience buying platform, leveraging the widespread distribution of its AddThis social sharing tool (which I include at the end of each of my blog posts) to aggregate intent-oriented data from keyword searches performed by web users (AddThis accomplishes this by capturing search query information contained in the referring URL string when a visitor lands on a web page where the tool is embedded). Search re-targeting has become a big driver in the growth of data-augmented display ad campaigns this year as advertisers look to find consumers that exhibit particular characteristics across the web versus targeting visitors to a particular website based on traditional geographic and demographic parameters. The incorporation of data into online advertising has been greatly aided by the creation of self-service platforms that allow advertisers and their agencies to define their audiences and buy access to these users, as well as the accompanying ad inventory, in the process.

These platforms are able to bring efficiencies to the demand side of the of the equation by automating components of the online display advertising ecosystem, something that wouldn’t have been possible without the standardization of display advertising units (which the IAB has achieved by defining such things as ad unit pixel dimensions, file weight and animation length). Without this type of inventory standardization neither the evolution of ad networks, ad exchanges and now demand side platforms (DSPs) would have never occurred, nor the ability to leverage data sources like Clearspring when buying online ad impressions.

This type of evolution hasn’t only been limited to the online display market though.  The IAB began the process of standardizing video advertising in online video players two years ago, creating guidelines that enabled online video ad networks to emerge. These specifications have matured enough to enable the likes of Adap.tv and BrightRoll, who coincidentally enough is a major video ad network itself, to launch video ad exchanges in an effort to bring efficiencies to the scale already available through these video ad networks. On the heels of launching BrightRoll Exchange (BRX) last week, BrightRoll announced this week that it will be leveraging search data from Magnetic to allow video advertisers to re-target audiences across the BrightRoll Video Network as well as BRX in the same manner they do with display advertising today.

As you can see the online video advertising market is following a very similar path as online display advertising has in its maturation- leveraging ad unit standardization to bring scale to the industry, which in turn has led to platforms being launched in order to bring efficiencies into the marketplace and incorporate data to enable audience targeting at scale- albeit in a much more condensed time line. Where online video advertising trails display advertising in delivery effectiveness is in the nascent state of its exchange marketplaces and integrations with DSPs and data sources, which should both evolve rapidly over the course of the next 12 months.

Based on this pattern, mobile applications should be the next advertising segment to follow this evolution as mobile ad networks focusing on the Android and iPhone platforms have proliferated. The biggest thing holding back the mobile application advertising industry from further efficiencies is ad unit standardization as the IAB is not yet willing to go down that path, only providing best practices as of yet.

This automation and scale being brought into buying online advertising inventory has started coming at the expense of ad sales people. Case in point, in June the Fox Audience Network disclosed that it would be laying off 5% of its staff, all from direct online ad sales, as a result of the success the company was seeing from the self-service display advertising part of its ad network business. So is there a future for ad sales people in online advertising or will they be a casualty of efficiency like blue-collar line workers of the industrial age?

To survive and thrive, ad sales people need to re-orient their thinking from selling impressions to creating experiences for brands and advertisers that focus on two core concepts: integration and social. Integrated campaigns enable advertisers to achieve higher engagement and mind share than through individual ad placements. In traditional display advertising this can be accomplished by implementing branded skins into websites or sponsoring sections of content. In video this might mean product placement in episodes or storylines and for mobile it might involve sponsoring the give-away of previously paid apps or premium features. The key is subtly associating the advertiser with the site and content so as to create a positive connection versus an annoying one elicited by standard display and pre-roll video ads.

In terms of social, I’ve previously written about the lack of innovation in online advertising since its advent 15 years ago and that the focus should be on creating socially-oriented ads (since social networking is what most web users are spending their time doing online these days). Developing ways for users to interact with and provide feedback on ads in real-time as well as leveraging a web property’s user base to collaborate in the creation of campaigns, which I’ve also written about, creates engagement because the users who participate have a vested interest in the outcome- just ask the Old Spice Guy.

Regardless of finding the right experiences to drive success for advertisers, ad sales people need to evolve ahead of these online advertising ecosystems or they will end up like Willy Loman.

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