Disqus - Latest Comments for Chris Zaharias

Re: Kleiner’s John Doerr saves Keplers, despite Amazon

Chris Zaharias — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 03:39:45 -0000

My Keplers browse to buy ratio for magazines is 4,800:1 - guess I'll need to change that going forward.

Re: Stanford, center of Silicon Valley’s innovation, expands

Chris Zaharias — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 10:06:16 -0000

Wow, I can't believe the Excite@home buildings are finally leased. I had gotten so use to seeing the sunlight shine through those building unimpeded by human activity; when we lived over that area I taught my boys to ride their bikes in those huge abandoned parking lots.

Claria is across the street, so does this mean we'll soon have popups on PAMF's website?

Re: Zappos.com — Hsieh’s answer to Sand Hill Slave

Chris Zaharias — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 10:21:57 -0000

Running an online retail business requires strong execution on a number of fronts (marketing, technology, analytics, etc) and far too few firms get an 'A' grade, but IMO Zappos is one of them. You can fault them for the name of their VC Firm (unless you're French in which case you'll like it) but public firms like BlueNile, RedEnvelope and others would do well to emulate Zappos' day-to-day execution.

Re: Stanford student wants to let you browse with your eyeballs

Chris Zaharias — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 21:00:02 -0000

This will be great in case evolution ever gets rid of our hands and fingers. . .

Re: Gore wants “carbon freeze,” may get backing from Kleiner?

Chris Zaharias — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 18:20:26 -0000

I propose a "hot air" freeze, into which all of Gore's politically-motivated, half-baked, high school climate science projects should go.

Re: The Google API kerfuffle, and what it means for startups

Chris Zaharias — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 11:33:58 -0000

I'm glad Google's charging for AdWords API access; that'll keep VC's from pumping even more dumb money into the search mgmt space than is there already. You're right, though, in that Google is hurting their advertisers. They would rather advertisers trust G's broad matching than let the advertiser do the targeting themselves via Exact Match.

Re: Etelos offers CRM for Google

Chris Zaharias — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 04:35:33 -0000

I wonder what this page looks like when you do a search? Seems to me the whole idea gets shot to hell once you actually start using it.

Re: FatKat to use quant investing to help you pick stocks

Chris Zaharias — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 20:16:27 -0000

There's also a very interesting firm [which I work for] called Efficient Frontier that's been applying quant math to how best to value and optimize paid keywords on search engines.

The future of everything from airplane ticket pricing, to advertising optimization, to equity trading is... algorithms.

Re: FatKat to use quant investing to help you pick stocks

Chris Zaharias — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:23:11 -0000

A couple reasons, Rockwell. First, our advertiser clients share their conversion data with us and might be nervous about us competing with them on keywords. We would never use their data for anything other than optimizing their own ppc campaigns, but some of them would be nervous nonetheless.

Second, we continue to have more business available to sign than we can handle, so we have to pick and choose where we allocate our resources. In that context, growing advertiser spend with good, long-term relationships is job #1 and is what'll lead to the best valuation for us long-term. Doing arbitrage would make us $$, but the enterprise value to a potential acquirer of those arbitrage efforts probably wouldn't be as high as of that manpower were applied to getting another $100M in spend under management.

Re: Update: AKQA buys search marketing company Searchrev (likely > than $10M)

Chris Zaharias — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 14:08:56 -0000

VentureWire, I think you might have misinterpreted the WSJ article and taken SearchRev's 2007 projected revenues (

Re: AOL Only Adwords - Marketplace & Revenue Impact

Chris Zaharias — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 19:56:32 -0000

Good post Vinny, and I'm very much in agreement with your description of the situation. In terms of whether it's (1), (2) or (3), I have to say it'll be some of each. One point of distinction, though - my understanding is that this is *not* something Google is pushing but is rather being led by AOL who wants to (and has the rights to) sell their traffic directly for its higher ROI value and, frankly, because they have the rights to in their 2005 agreement with Google.

Another point of distinction - as far as I understand, AOL does not have the rights to sell their traffic directly to anything other than a list of 2000 top advertisers as determined by an independent 3rd party.

Google CPC's will not be impacted much, if at all, in the short term, advertiser adoption (even among those 2000) will happen over a period of 3-9 months because of work loads, lack of ROI understanding, and AOL's newness to search ad sales - and IMO because of the AOL/Google deal structure not making it easy to launch a la Site Targeting or Content bidding.

Markets want to be efficient, and this is AOL being sick of seeing their CPC's diluted by G's lower-quality [and IMO non-search] search distribution partners. Good advertisers who adopt AOL directly will be able to profitably spend more overall in search, Google will see a little bit less spend overall, and perhaps most importantly, many of those 2000 advertisers will opt out of G's search network once AOL's in place - at least until/unless G allows Search Network-specific bidding.

Re: Why is Facebook worth $10bn?

Chris Zaharias — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 11:39:08 -0000

Vinny, I love you but you're way off on this one IMO. You say 1/3 of G's revs come from AdSense, so 1/3 of G's valuation is attributable to it, but you miss one HUGE thing here: Google has 70-80% TAC (traffic acquisition costs) on AdSense, and zero TAC on the rest of their business. So multiply the % of total revs AdSense brings to Google by 20-30% (post-TAC revs) to get to a more realistic valuation model for the contextual advertising sector.

If Google's 50% of the market is worth $12.5B and not the $50B you state, Facebook's worth a whole lot less.

Also (and I appeal to your love of data on this one), don't we all know in our heart of hearts that Facebook - and most contextual traffic for that matter - doesn't convert and is only temporarily over-valued?

I see a wave of advertisers getting smart thanks to Omniture, Google Analytics, Coremetrics et al, and the horror in their eyes as they realize how little contextual marketing has done for them.

That

Re: AOL Only Adwords - Marketplace & Revenue Impact

Chris Zaharias — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:35:39 -0000

Linda,

I don't think it ever will be. AOL's deal with Google gives it the right to sell to 1000-2000 top advertisers (as defined by a 3rd party I believe), and no one else. So either you're on the list or you're not.

Re: Happy New Year

Chris Zaharias — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:28:19 -0000

What, no comments from VL on today's rumors of Yahoo or MSFT buying EBay? ? ?

Re: LaJollaLight.com | New lawsuit filed to block seal dispersal in La Jolla

Chris Zaharias — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:38:57 -0000

Guess what, the seal's will find another place to chill out, so wildlife freaks, please chill out yourselves and r-e-c-o-g-n-i-z-e that the Children's Pool was built for... [human] children.

My name is Chris Zaharias and I publicly challenge to a debate anyone who thinks the seals should be given priority over humans.

Re: Did Google turn down the revenue knob?

Chris Zaharias — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:48:25 -0000

Robert,

The Google employee is either wrong or meant something other than the standard definition of 'short-term'.

We manage 3-4% of Google's total revenues on behalf of our clients, and their reducing ads had an immediate positive effect. Other changes to minimum bids also have improved revs, but from our data-driven POV, less ads = more $$ immediately as well as longer-term.

Re: Google Just Keeps Getting Richer — New Change to AdWords Announced

Chris Zaharias — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:00:02 -0000

There's a total disconnect in Google's messaging on this change. They say that in addition to giving advertisers more control over how to get their ads in top position, it will *also* improve quality of ads in top spots by making the pool of ads that can *attain* top position larger. But if increasing that pool just comes down to people raising max CPCs, then how does that improve quality? Realistically, it'll probably be quality neutral or even negative, at least until advertiser natural selection kicks in.

Anyone care to venture what % of clicks go to the top ad position on Google?

Re: Online Ad Rates Accelerate the Advertising Death Spiral

Chris Zaharias — Fri, 12 May 2006 11:37:01 -0000

The reason firms like Dunkin' Donuts and McDonalds are doing promotional stuff like you mentioned is that no one is searching for 'cheeseburgers' or 'donuts' online. That's less an indictment of targeted online marketing and moreso an affirmation of the fragmentation of media consumption (which is bad for brand marketers).

My own opinion is that the economy *is* going to get really, really bad soon & for 5-15 years, and that a large general downturn in the economy will hurt the advertising industry. Within that, though, online marketing will fare much better because it's more measure and still under-utilized relative to traditional media. Also, keep in mind that advertisers will improve their conversion rates & that will allow them to continue to spend more on online advertising; likewise consumers will get their online purchase behaviors worked out so that they convert more often themselves.

Re: Search marketing code of conduct

Chris Zaharias — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:59:03 -0000

Great post, and I hope to hear much more on European SEM from your blog in the future. There aren't enough European SEM blogs.

Re: First Rule of Winning Business: Turn Up

Chris Zaharias — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:08:49 -0000

Classic!

Re: Dave Morgan, AOL's EVP-Global Advertising Strategy, Leaving For Startup World Again

Chris Zaharias — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:52:19 -0000

Interesting info, John Harris, but looking at MDVX's stock price, it definitely doesn't appear that the market is betting on Modavox winning that lawsuit (which in any event will take 12-48 months to settle).

Also, Platform A appears to be much more than just Tacoda. It also includes:

Advertising.com (display network)
Quigo (contextual ad network)
Buy.at (UK-based affiliate network)
AdTech (ad server to compete with Atlas and DART)
Third Screen Media (large mobile ad network)
UserPlane (website chat/community platform)
Lightningcast (streaming audio & video advertising)

Re: Industry Moves: Can Former Yahoo Exec Dave Karnstedt Fix Efficient Frontier?

Chris Zaharias — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:38:36 -0000

jenkins, I'd beg to differ. Karnstedt has been managing SEM salesteams since his days at AltaVista, and knows a ton about search. Neither Siminoff nor Beriker had that industry knowledge, so this is a very good thing for EF, and to get someone of his caliber in that position says a lot about EF's fundamental strength and future prospects.