DISQUS

Would converting a Venture Fund into a ETF help?...in the same note is it possible to run a hedge fund as a ETF?, this way even small investors can participate and no issues with lockdown period or redemption!

BTB, I am not a expert and dont understand the regulations, so this maybe a stupid idea!

I agree the govt should get stock from the companies that sell bad loans...But i have doubts about the "salary cut" plan - if the payout is just 1 Million whats the incentive for any CEO to remain with the company?.

Maybe "Salary Cut" would work with a increase in stock payout so that the incentive of the CEO is aligned with that of the shareholders.

Fred, here do you think the immediate growth will come from??. (Apart from future potentials like Android or Video monetization which may take years!)

1, Not from gaining search market share - It has only 10-20 points to gain in the US market, most oversees market is tapped out (90% share in most markets). Also the total search market pie is not growing fast.

2, Not much left to squeeze from eCPM optimization - Remember most of the growth in the last 2 years came from this sort of revenue optimization (via adword quality score) than organic traffic growth. IMO, there is not much left to extract in this area

The only area left for immediate growth is display ads - but unlike adwords this is a low margin business (like adsense) so it has little effect in the net cash flow.

Poker is good but the ARPU's of house games like blackjack are much more. But Poker has a wide appeal so i guess its makes up in volume.

>> Borrowers now have cheaper sources of credit

I think the fact is the opposite - the subprime saga tightened the creteria for lending ...But i am not sure why borrowers are not flocking to the site.

>> I'd like to see how the wsj calculates that

Basically uncapping the social security tax contributes to majority of the tax increase. Anyway here is the article from WSJ - http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB12...

>> if rates get north of 50%.

With Obama's income tax hike and plan to eliminate the cap for social security tax , the combined marginal income tax rate comes to more than 62% according to Wall street journal. How do you think this will be a incentive to a hard working small business owner??

The reason your tax rate is less than your brother's or bufett's tax rate is less than his secretary is because of the unfair large difference between income and capital gain tax rates. The solution to this is not to rasie the tax as Obama suggest but to make both capgain and income tax the same flat rate and making it progressive by deducting the first $75k.

jayweintraub.com is good place to learn about the incentive marketing space.

Gratis started this space but in the last 3-4 years this space has grown much much bigger. At one point more than half of ValueClick's revenue came from incentivized leads. Obviously the quaility is crap but the leads are prized accordingly.

Fred, the current US tax system affect upper middle class professionals like doctors and small business people with earned income and thus pay income tax (35%) than the billionaires and super rich people like you who makes more in capital gains (15%) than ordinary income. This situation will be further worsened by Obama's coming income tax and SS tax hikes (marginal rate's will be more than 60% according to WSJ)

In my opinion we must have a Same flat tax rate (like 20%) for individual income tax, corporate income tax and long term capital gain. We can make it progressive by deducting the first 75k and indexing it for inflation so that most families pay no tax.

I dont think Obama is going to raise taxes to reduce deficit but its to bring wealth equality. He is a socialist and he will be more concerned with slicing the pie fairly than in growing it.

I was amazed when the so called web 2.0 pundits questioned the moneymaking potential of StartPage services (when they first appeared)...

I mean, the business potential is soo obvious even for some web outsider, dont you think??.

>> the problem with local is mainly that the CPL to actually acquire a plumber in Tacoma, WA is often more than the revenue you'd ever get from it.

Lead gen companies like ServiceMagic would not agree with that point!

>> smartest things to do is to keep a low-profile, gather millions of customers, and go from there

absolutely true, if you look back you will see usually the most hyped companies in techcrunch (like flock or edgeio) never made it big. Compare those companies with the ones no one cared in the begining (ex: youtube).

>> you need a bunch of external money like venture capital

Isn’t that what happened in the late 90's, VC’s were the only outside money entering the internet ecosystem and when it stopped the bubble bursted!

Andrew, Is there a particluar analytics solution you recommend or there is nothing in the market & inhouse development is the only way to go??

Burtonator, i am sick of your cut/copy comments (in many blogs). You really dont know anything about this thing called "network effect", dont you??

1.5 million uniques/month website is worth 100 million dollars?...you guys have to be kidding me!. Even some myspace resource websites run by teens (ex:whateverlife.com) have more traffic than that!

The best way for a high volume sticky website to monetize upstream traffic is with a Google search box...A well placed branded search box can make atleast 20% of your traffic exit thro it. Doing the math, with a typical $50 Search CPM and assuming a 20% search box usage that comes to $10 CPM in incremental revenue.

I guess most of myspace or even hi5 or Tagged.com's revenue is thro the search box rather than with the display ads in their own sites!