The Facebook FriendFeed Fail

Remember back in August when Facebook bought FriendFeed for approximately $50 million to go to war with Twitter? The terms of the deal were actually $15 million in cash and the other $32.5 million is in stock (based on a Facebook valuation of $6.5 billion at the time). With Facebook’s IPO coming closer, it’s likely the stock position of the FriendFeed founders will be worth more than $35 million.

Traffic has plummeted on on FriendFeed since the acqusition. Over the past month there have been several days with less than 5,000 US visits. (shown here on quantcast,click on day).

With 12 employees at Friendfeed, this amounts to around 400-500 unique US visits per employee per day. As any blogger knows if you post 5 posts per day on relevant or trending topics you will exceed this number easily.

Now, just picture that $50 million dollars. Ouch!

Google Goggles Search App for Android

Google impresses me with their vision for “Goggles”, the new search app for Android Mobile Phone users.

Instead of typing words for your search, “Goggles” allows you to take a picture using you cell phone, then it returns relevant search results.

Google can also provide information for nearby businesses and restaurants based on what it sees in the picture you take.

In the future, Google Goggles may allow you to take a mobile picture of a spider, then immediately return the name and information about the spider. This could be very cool to use with plants, animals, cars, etc.

The Google engineer in this video says that eventually it could even give you advice on which chess move to make, or other strategic advice!

Does Domain Registration Length Affect Search Rankings?

Domain registration length does seem to be a small factor when Google is trying to make up it’s mind where to rank your site in search results.

I’ve spent time reading snips of blogs, watching YouTube videos, and the only thing I can really determine is your might as well register the domain for 5 years and use a public registration. When you register a domain for a single year you generally renew the thing anyway.

It makes sense to me that Google might trust a domain a small bit more if it’s on a 5 year registration. Typically spammers will register a domain and burn it out (get blocked by blacklists, etc) within a few months, of course they use 1 year registrations…maybe not for long.

Contact me or drop a comment below if you have some hard facts on this, or can point me in a clearer direction.

Cyber Monday Sales Up Nearly 14%

Cyber Monday 2009 is a giant success! The results are in, Coremetrics is reporting a 13.7% increase in year over year sales for online retails during Cyber Monday. The average dollar amount spent per online purchase rose to just over $180, up from roughly $130 last year. The number of items purchased per order was up 30%.

Overall, Cyber Monday sales exceeded Black Friday sales by 24.1%

Cyber Monday is the first Monday following Thanksgiving when online retailers roll out their holiday specials and many one time offers. Cyber Monday follows the traditional “Black Friday” marketed by brick and mortar retailers 3 days earlier.

Google Trends On Black Friday

Online retailers are likely getting a huge surge of traffic today as many consumers are avoiding the congestion of the mall by shopping online.

Here are the top Trends on Google at 1:52PM CST:

Top Google Trends

* black friday online deals
* cyber monday 2009
* leftover turkey recipes
* iron bowl 2009 game time
* turkey soup
* ugg boots black friday
* josh mcdaniels f bomb
* zhu zhu pets toys r us
* retailmenot
* jos a bank
* blackfridaydeals 2009 online
* joseph a bank
* yowza
* turkey trot results 2009
* amazon coupons

In other news, FB Ad reviewers have apparently taken the day off or are heavily sedated from turkey leftovers.

Affiliate Networks: Optimized Rotators Fail

Banner optimizers on affiliate networks feel more like a meat grinder than optimized rotation. If you’re like me, you’ve checked out all these “optimized” banner rotators at Clickbooth and other networks. You’ve probably also seen that these “optimized” rotators are the worst performing adverts you’ve placed since those affiliate banners for fire places in 1995 (if you remember these, you are a ninja).

Most ad networks rely on your assigned Affiliate Manager to optimize the ads in said rotation and this is where the ball gets dropped. We’ll never know if the technology is any good because it’s bombarded with unproductive offers that no one would run on their site if they had the choice (feel like turning your computer in a TV tuner, lolz).

If you do not run volume and have a great relationship with your Affiliate Manager you are already dead in the water on optimized rotation.

Clickbooth has a small advantage because they allow webmasters to choose which offers are in rotation (if your AM ever gets back to you, some are good there, some you will never hear from for years, hope you got a good one), but their interface is not very intuitive. Most campaigns you select take a few days for approval, then a few days to see if it works or not for whatever GEO you’re showing it in, then the process keeps repeating and weeks go by before you nail down the right offer, and then it goes stale in 5 days.

Anyone with a wordpress plugin that rotates and geo target ads can generally outperform these rotators by 100 to 1 margin. There is a huge void right now someone could fill with an intelligent adserver. Unfortunately, none exist that I can find.

If you’re using optimized rotation and it’s working well for you please contact me 812.480.8889

Facebook Going Public, IPO Coming Soon

Zuckerberg creates new class of stock in preparation for selling to institutions and the public.

Insiders have been talking about the possibly of an IPO for months, but today the dual stock class decision is a clear indication that your chance to own some powerless B class shares is coming soon ;-)

I think I’ll try to backup the truck on FB stock when I can. Even after the institutional investors load up early and machine gun shares as the sheep, I think there will be enough juice left to make some serious gains before the 2.0 meltdown is initiated.

Twitter Traffic Plunges

Twitter’s traffic has dropped by about 25% in 90 days, reversing course on it’s giant exponential ramp up during spring and early summer.

Perhaps once people got intrigued by simple social networking, they moved on to interfaces that allowed more than 2 sentences.

Here is the image that must be keeping the twitter exec’s and $100 million investors really nervous:

Just over the past month traffic has declined an estimated 15%. Twitter did an enormous amount to help bring new people into social networking, but I think their hay day is coming to and end (and I’m sure plenty of people will be cheering as the old fail whale begins years of decline).

Facebook and Mafia Wars Face Lawsuit

Facebook and Mafia Wars creator Zynga ready for court as a class action lawsuit was filed today over “offer-based” ads that automatically rebilled users each month.

The “offers” consisted ads that asked users to complete surveys in return for prizes, but neglected to tell these users they were also being signed up to paid subscription services at the same time. This $5 million class action suit is the first of what is expected to be many rounds of court battles over Facebook’s ad practices.

It won’t be long until the lawsuits work their way down the chain to your favorite affiliate network.

Recent activity at Zynga and Facebook: Mafia War’s Zynga put out a statement last week announcing they had raised an additional $15.1mil of financing and have over 3 million people per day playing their games online. Facebooks traffic has nearly doubled over the past 6 months.

Bebo Traffic Drops 50% in 6 Months

Bebo, the once popular social network geared around member updates and media uploads, continues it’s death spiral towards nothingness as traffic drops another 50% over the past 6 months.

The Bebo Traffic graph from Quantcast would only be good if you could sled down it. Here is the data:

Bebo has been a mecca for spammers, bullies, and copyright abusers over the past year. Although the company is taking steps to address the abuse issues (such as instant panic button to report content violations), they are about a year too late.

The super fascinations with social media early on that propelled some of these earlier networks to the moon also sucked in plenty of internet slime and marketeers hoping to take advantage of said users. Bebo left the door open too long and is paying for it.

So far, networks that are able to scale their abuse departments and detection capabilities are sucking in all the traffic the lesser quality networks have given up.

Want to see an inverse of the Bebo Graph above? Check out Facebook:

Comparing the two graphs above make it clear that user experience wins wars in Social Media. Will most of these 2nd tier networks (such as Bebo, Hi5, etc) simply dry up and disappear while Facebook doubles up on traffic again over the next year? I’d put my money on it, but we’ll have to wait and see.