Chicken-and-Egg Disruption: Misunderstanding YouTube, Uber, and AirBNB
AirBNB offers ubiquitous illegal rentals, says New York’s Attorney General. Uber gets shut down or hobbled in new markets around the world. Viacom’s legal department could have wiped out YouTube for ripping off their content.
At one level, you have to ask why somebody would build a business that’s either always illegal or probably going to be used illegally. If you want to be really contrarian, you could try asking that but not rhetorically. Read the rest of this entry »
You Say “Viral Content” Like It’s a Good Thing
Here’s a fun new game to play with the news: log on to Facebook. Find a story somebody has posted with an absolutely shocking headline. Next, try to guess what important fact the writer omitted to turn the story from something boring into a newsworthy event.
Try it!
- BREAKING: Politician says incredibly upsetting thing [as a self-deprecating joke].
- Student expelled for incredibly petty reason [after lots of other disciplinary infractions culminating in one that was, technically, grounds for expulsion].
- Pope says anything. [Catholic doctrine is well to the left of the average Catholic on pretty much all economic issues, and well to the left of its public perception on social issues].
- Lawmaker Claims… [When I read “Lawmaker,” I read it as “This headline writer would have said ‘Congressman’ if that were true, but it isn’t.”]
- Look at this gross thing some Internet nerd said [in an obviously self-deprecating way].
But it gets worse. The big growth area in online media isn’t incremental reporting. It’s incremental repackaging. Three TV channels plus a local paper can pitch the same story to four segments. Buzzfeed alone manufactures new segments constantly. And of course the point of writing something Only People Who Dislike Children Will Understand is that one person who dislikes kids will share it with their kid-disliking friends. The share doesn’t mean “this is interesting.” The share means “you are one of us.” And if that’s the case, what does disagreeing mean?
It’s a weird self-created Cordyceps: we all express group affinity by saying things that make our ingroup dumber. Nobody needs to be particularly cynical; we all just need to be in a hurry. You’re going to share something if it strikes an emotional chord. And you can watch the evolution in nearly real-time by reading about a story in fairly sober publications, and then on click machines like Business Insider. (An excellent example of how the most emotionally impactful word moved from “not” in a study to “maybe” in an early headline to “Study Says” on the blogs.)
I have three cures, two of which are expensive and one of which you can’t affect, but which is the best option because it’s inevitable.
- Buy a Bloomberg. Bloomberg, the product, not just something produced by Bloomberg, the company (if it’s not a terminal, it’s an ad for the terminal). How do you know the Bloomberg Terminal and Bloomberg TV are in the opposite business? A Bloomberg TV story goes something like this “A stock market stalwart’s latest announcement shocks investors–more after the break.” The Bloomberg headline is more like “IBM misses revenue estimates by 4%, rescinds 2015 guidance; stock drops 7%.” That’s pretty much word-for-word the best way to inform someone of what happened.
- Subscribe to The Economist or something: The Economist has a feedback loop, just like any viral content producer. Their feedback loop takes a little bit longer, because it goes like this: They write something; a large number of smart and important people read it to know what all the smart and important people think; and then they all act as if it’s true. This keeps The Economist mild, but also makes them a good leading indicator that’s not too tied to the outrage cycle.
- Wait for Facebook, Twitter, etc. to crack down further. A virus needs a host. It’s hard to strictly draw a line between the host as your attention, or the host as the share of your attention that Facebook controls. But either way, Facebook has an incentive to construct a memetic immune system for you, so you don’t spend all of your time repeating things your friends say. Not that they’re public-spirited—it’s just easier to sell big brand advertisements against bland but fun content, rather than engaging and enraging stuff.
The first option is a big monetary investment. The second is a big time investment. But the third is inevitable. Facebook already explicitly demoted clickbait headlines earlier this year. But they’re not done with Upworthy yet. And Upworthy is definitely a threat to Facebook’s iron grip on the average Internet user’s idle attention. Their business model is, basically, “Notice how everyone under 30 constantly mocks people for sending sappy email forwards? Clearly sappy stories are a universal human need. Let’s trick cool kids into like them.” And it worked! Until the host’s immune system kicked in.
It’s natural to slip into biological metaphors: the term “viral” is apt because it’s a small and self-copying chunk of information. But it’s also apt because a virus can only thrive given raw material from a host, and the host has a strong incentive to stop it. If the best metaphor for a business model is something that kills people, maybe that’s not the model to bet your business on.
Save The Euro: Bring Back the Franc (A Modest Proposal)
The problem with Europe is that everyone there has one and a half monetary systems. You can have one, two, or fifty, but you can’t go halfway.
Every country has the “one” monetary system that constitutes explicit use of the Euro and implicit use of Germany and France as collateral. But each country also has about half of another monetary system: the implicit one they develop when investors analyze their debts with a Euro dissolution in mind. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to end with a split: why not create a system where the Euro works by the Euro’s rules, and everyone brings back their home currencies to finance their financial misdeads? Read the rest of this entry »
09.6.11I’m Joining Yahoo!
I’m pleased to announce that I’m joining Yahoo as SEO Lead.
At Digital DD, we puzzled through the strategies behind some of the biggest SEO companies out there. But Yahoo is an order of magnitude bigger. They have over a hundred million monthly uniques; if I improve things by 1%, I’ve affected the lives of a million people. It’s hard to get that elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »
05.6.11Digital Due Diligence
I’m pleased to announce that I’m now working full-time as co-founder and CEO of Digital Due Diligence, an advisory firm focused on helping investors evaluate online assets.
(Note: A previous version of this post had a rather significant typo. I’m now working at Digital Due Diligence. Not “I’m not” working there.)
What Stock Option Pricing Models Tell You about Courting Controversy
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity” was surely coined by an otherwise bad publicist. Of course there’s such a thing as bad publicity, if you’re already famous.
If you’re not famous, there’s a tradeoff: at some point, it’s better to piss off most of your audience and impress a few people, rather than having no audience at all.
The Black-Scholes model provides a helpful way to look at this. The Black-Scholes formula allows you to price a stock option knowing only a few data points—the current price of the stock, the strike price and maturity of the option, the risk-free interest rate, and the stock’s volatility. Read the rest of this entry »
02.16.11A Clever Adwords Hack: How to Get Your Advertorial on MarketWatch.com
Good PR is priceless. But if you’re willing to skirt some ethical boundaries, you can get it for a couple hundred dollars, plus $1.89 per click. Read the rest of this entry »
02.15.11How to Short the Higher Education Bubble
You know the return on investing in college is low and declining. You know there are better alternatives to college. You know that “college for all” harms students—Harvard says so!
Some day, the education bubble will burst. How can you trade this?
02.14.11LinkedIn’s IPO Filing: Analyzing the S-1
Note to readers: my new startup research boutique, Digital Due Diligence, performs in-depth research on dozens of companies, public and private, including LinkedIn and its key competitors. Visit our equity research page for more information.
Last month, LinkedIn filed a prospectus with the SEC. It’s a great case study: LinkedIn is one of the largest social networks, and it may be the most mature of the major social networking businesses. Like Facebook, LinkedIn has turned a profit; unlike Facebook, LinkedIn’s profit is dependent on several known business models.
The filing itself was a better read than most. Among other risks, it cited the possibility that:
[O]ur initial public offering could create disparities of wealth among our employees, which could adversely impact relations among employees and our culture in general.
I guess that’s what you get when your Chairman is an avowed “free-market socialist.”
The hurdle LinkedIn’s IPO faces is that the easy comparisons are completely wrong. LinkedIn shouldn’t be valued like a job board: for a variety of reasons, it’s a much more defensible model; LinkedIn is likely to stomp all over the traditional job boards (not so much traditional recruiters). But it’s not a “social network” that can be valued like Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn’s business model is already in place, and its potential is a matter of execution, not innovation. Read the rest of this entry »
02.7.11Blogs are Here To Stay—Are Bloggers an Aberration?
It’s hard to say when the “blogger” phenomenon peaked. In the runup to the 2004 election, the media meta-narrative centered around “the blogger”—a possibly psuedonymous individual whose commentary was upending the traditional news cycle.
In the next few years, something strange happened: blogs became ubiquitous. But “the blogger” lost influence; the personalities that originally defined blogging never became as influential as most people expected.
I suspect that three forces sapped the blogging trend of most of its strength:
•Social media sites replaced low-traffic blogs.
•The right economic unit for high-traffic blogs is the blog network or the content farm, not the blogger.
•The only use for a blog qua blog is as an extended résumé or biz-dev pitch. Read the rest of this entry »
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