DISQUS

Found you through the Friendfeed room invite. I fell in love with BackType instantly. Hope you guys become the hub of conversation of the future!

Very exotic concept with the securitization of ad inventory =) I would guess the biggest barrier to securitization is the lack of fungibility between different ad units. There are simply too many "non-comparable" SKUs out there, unlike say...a futures market where corn is just corn. When every context and CPM rate has it's own SKU, how can you create enough liquidity?

RFM alone is only part of the picture, what you're really interested in solving for is the lift. 555's have no potential for further lift, while 155's need a reminder, 551's need to be upsold, and 515's need a sticky recurring relationship.

Nolan's Batman is characteristically "un-comic book"-like, where main characters actually die off instead of getting resurrected over and over again in order to continue the series. I'm content with that realism...

Powerful central statement, but to really prove it you have to show people leaving an incumbent to a different network and re-invest time in recreating their graph+content. However, I believe this flip in market share is the result of a gross-adds game, not a defections game.

The network effect holds only true for people you actually know or vague care about. joe schmoe in middle arkansas signing up for MySpace doesn't increase it's value for me. It could be that Facebook and Myspace are attracting totally independent social segments with little overlap and thus, it's really a matter of whoever has lower penetration in their segment getting greater adds.

One could also argue that MySpace is culturally more American, while Facebook is far more culture-neutral (and the facebook vs MySpace race in Asia could be utterly irrelevant since it appears they don't stand a chance against local players).

Finally, from a monetization point of view, greater concentration in 1 country is unequivocally a good thing. Inventory from different countries probably have zero chance of being bundled and sold together. Facebook has to find more advertisers for a more fragmented audience, while MySpace can enjoy more or less one-size-fits-all advertising deals with summer blockbusters =)

It seems like there is only room for one site for UGC. It may make sense: UGC is numerous and disorganized, and having more than one source can be overwhelming. In fact, I'd say people still conceptualize bodies of video content interns of "channels" or "networks". They're probably thinking "oh Soporanos is on HBO, Heroe's is on NBC, AnimalPlanet is on Discovery, and all the UGC stuff is on YouTube"

The key here is that people are dividing content by type, not the surrounding feature set or "usage model". That could be important guidance for how a video startup might try to differentiate itself.

I personally think the path forward for social-network ads is brand advertising, not DTC. It makes perfect sense: brand advertising emphasizes demographic data vs intent data, and operates at the large volumes that social networks can offer.

Yeah it's extremely hard to quantify the incremental contribution of promoters/generators. Does that mean you shouldn't put any effort/cost into pampering these "valued" guests, as a casino would? What is the content-site's equivalent of pampering?

(I have no idea, just wondering if there's anything we can borrow from traditional LTV/differentiating-offers that's applicable to those active promoters and content creators on your site)

1) Blackberry
2) Google Reader
3) Google Maps on Blackberry
4) Facebook
5) Friendfeed

Great post! I'd add that for online businesses, LTV is further complicated by a user's role as a net-promoter and a content creator. Otherwise, LTV should be easier than ever for online businesses vs offline--you have direct access to customer demographic and value data, and creating differentiated outreach is easy as pie.

Problem is, given the state of the web today, we're still struggling with finding value, period. Segmenting by non-existent LTV may be a moot point for many startups.

One more thought:

Adoption of utilities is slower because they generally require a bit of learning, or re-tooling one's existing habits.

I'm very surprised that the leading social networks have yet to be leveraged for discovery (besides iLike, which could still do more). Most of these services (Stumble/Del.icio.us, Yelp, last.fm) would rather build out their own social graphs than piggy-back on Facebook/Myspaces.

Part of me believes that truly useful apps (like those listed before) are confident in their ability to re-create a social graph and therefor, end up sitting largely outside of Facebook with only a "profile gadget" application to market themselves.

Your last point struck an important issue: Why on earth would Facebook/Myspace let Google aggregate/summarize their social data, and capture the first click? There seems to be a fundamental problem with ad-monetization where parties don't act in a way that maximizes usefulness to their users.