Disqus - Friends of jameshicks

Re: 24 hours to go!!!!!!!

Andrew Chen — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:35:51 -0000

Hi all!

Check this out! The football fans affect on the results of their football teams http://www.voodoo4football.com
It turns out, that one who has more fans - he will win? Or those one - who has a lot of money? Let's get join them!

Re: Company Stages – Revisted

Andrew Chen — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:07:24 -0000

Would love to hear your ideas around how this process changes if it's bootstrapped versus venture-backed. Maybe worthy of a third post on the topic?

Re: Yahoo Buys Contest Site Bix, But Why?

Andrew Chen — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:36:03 -0000

I have a pretty good sense of why they did the acquisition, for a number of reasons. Basically one hot area in brand advertising (where Yahoo makes a ton of money, and Google does not) is the idea of "brand integration" - i.e., having microsites and feautres within the portal where people participate in sponsored advertising.

So it's very clear to me that Bix is a great platform for Yahoo to run contests with their community, and leverage their advertising relationships to create more brand ad inventory for their network. That way, they can give users something fun while making it very easy to monetize. Think of contests like, "Sing a song about your car" and other ad-friendly concepts.

Re: I’m Really Tired of Alexa

Andrew Chen — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 02:07:50 -0000

At Revenue Science (which is an online ad company), we use Alexa but take the numbers with a grain of salt. You really have to compare it against comScore and Nielsen to see how off things can be.

Anyway, here's some more detail on the issue:
http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2006/11/are_you_misusin.html

The summary is that:
- Alexa doesn't give concrete metrics like pageviews or uniques, just "rank"
- Alexa has a biased sample (which can be too small)
- Alexa gives false certainty

Check out the article above for more details.

Re: PhotoBucket Back on MySpace (I Want To Know The Backstory)

Andrew Chen — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:34:29 -0000

Hi guys,
Here's an analysis on what might become a stable situation in the widget world, where widgets are the new ad network:

http://andrewchen.typepad.c...

Re: How to fool VCs into thinking you have traction, Part 4

Andrew Chen — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 03:40:00 -0000

I'd encourage you to read the rest of the series, particularly the intro :)

In fact, I work at a VC and the different techniques I'm laying out are in fact things that people should watch for.

The fake accounts thing is not far off from what people do in dating sites and social networks which set up really attractive members to woo people to sign up. I think any smart investor should know how to dig into the company enough to understand what's going on.

Re: Best new blogger I have found recently

Andrew Chen — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 04:39:52 -0000

Thanks for the link! ;-) I put up my best stuff on the leftside bar... enjoy

Re: Big exits for New York consumer internet startups?

Andrew Chen — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:31:33 -0000

Hmmm I know of Quigo, but it's not consumer internet - Quigo's an ad network. (By that count, Tacoda/Quigo/DCLK/etc are all winners..)

I'm just looking for straight consumer internet.

Re: Follow Up to Andrew Chen’s Good Post on Facebook Developers – It’s Mostly about Being Famous

Andrew Chen — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 13:27:51 -0000

Great post! I agree with the idea that SF tech people are all about attention whoring ;-) and that the best ones receive value in return! haha.

Re: Where are all the video startups? Maybe Content=King, online and offline

Andrew Chen — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:34:56 -0000

It actually looks like it's not the sum - I think people just end up watching a bunch of different videos from sites on this list and off this list, and it aggregates into 80+. From the article: "Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 82 videos per viewer in April. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (83.7 million), where they watched an average of 50 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (52 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (37.3 million) and Microsoft Sites (29.9 million)."

Re: Hello world! (from Disqus)

Andrew Chen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:10:57 -0000

sigh, already a problem... i had to convert my typepad to "advanced templates" and it removed all my typepad widgets I had lovingly installed. Sad.

Re: Hello world! (from Disqus)

Andrew Chen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:20:44 -0000

at least i got my subscriber counter and lijit search back up... will have to work on the other stuff tomorrow. Typepad = POS.

Re: Google AdSense FAIL

Andrew Chen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:23:58 -0000

Makes me think there should be an entire website dedicated to funny website-to-ad matches. Sounds like a good project for the Icanhazcheezburger guys ;-)

Re: Google AdSense FAIL

Andrew Chen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:24:13 -0000

do you have a screenshot?? ;-)

Re: omg I'm just a startup, I can't do those fancy analytics!

Andrew Chen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:25:03 -0000

albert, nice website plug ;-)

Re: Hello world! (from Disqus)

Andrew Chen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:27:38 -0000

yeah, the integration is not that great. I keep seeing scrollbars for all the IFRAMEs, for example. And the SEO stuff is definitely a concern, given that Google is my #2 referrer. We'll see how it goes ;-) Please feel free to share your experience as well, once you're a bit further along.

Re: AdAge article on agency perspectives of online versus traditional advertising

Andrew Chen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:47:55 -0000

These guys do stuff like buy the front page of Yahoo, etc. These are where the real budgets come from - who else has the ability to spend hundreds of thousands of bucks online?

Obviously the datapoint for Unilever, as a consumer packaged goods company, is going to be really different than folks in auto, etc. But the case remains the same (and you can see this in other data) that online remains a small part of F500 companies' budget, with some more enthusiastically embracing it compared to others

Re: omg I'm just a startup, I can't do those fancy analytics!

Andrew Chen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:27:58 -0000

great points, and good idea for how to step into analytics... I think you can generally go through a couple steps, from most lazy:

1) keep a row in a flat file log (or DB) which you use grep and wc to count, or select queries in the latter case
2) write a script file that runs a multi-query report and spits it out into a flat file
3) same as #2, but hook it up into a web page
4) then the final option is to check it into your codebase and integrate it with the live site, so the queries can be pulled in real time
5) after that, then you set up a slave DB and run it on a separate machine so that your queries don't overload the main server
....
100) run hadoop/cassandra/etc and write all your queries in mapreduce format ;-)

Re: omg I'm just a startup, I can't do those fancy analytics!

Andrew Chen — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:12:08 -0000

I want to add that Rajat's advice is great, particularly for ecommerce. Anyone looking at stats would be well-served to read the above comment and apply it to their particular industry. Obviously some social media metrics would be different, but I agree with the general premise.

Re: 50+ essays on viral marketing, social network monetization, product design and more

Andrew Chen — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 04:10:03 -0000

thanks! And it was good to see you at S2S. Until next time... -A

Re: Quick link - NYT article on a "wow" product

Andrew Chen — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:19:07 -0000

ah, that is awesome. Thanks for the pointer! I just subscribed to my neighborhood.

Re: Poll results for user acquisition: Viral, SEO, word-of-mouth, or other?

Andrew Chen — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:28:26 -0000

got it. Plus I think B2B's are different... you can focus on serving thousands of customers, and it's not as important to figure out how to scale into millions of people!

Re: Poll results for user acquisition: Viral, SEO, word-of-mouth, or other?

Andrew Chen — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:29:49 -0000

nice to meet you Andrew! I think I figured that most of the folks reading my blog are B2C folks, whereas all the B2B people are off reading something with fewer pictures of lolcats and myspace celebs floating around ;-) But perhaps I'm assuming incorrectly

Re: Poll results for user acquisition: Viral, SEO, word-of-mouth, or other?

Andrew Chen — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:21:12 -0000

i don't know if you can rank the effectiveness of these techniques against each other - too much apples to oranges. I tend to go for scaleable techniques that don't cost any money. In general, only viral, widgets and SEO fall into this camp (which explains why they have all gotten so much attention). I'm pretty anti-blog, PR, techcrunch, etc. as a sole strategy for gaining traction.

Re: Poll results for user acquisition: Viral, SEO, word-of-mouth, or other?

Andrew Chen — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:26:02 -0000

i like that distinction, and agree that some efforts are more time intensive.

In fact, I'd also add that they take time from specific types of employees - viral and SEO are typically more engineering centric whereas PR/blog outreach can be facilitated by nontechincal types