Rogelio Choy

Twitter - blogging for the masses

2009-03-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

For a long time I didn't understand why everyone was so enamored of Twitter. It seemed like an effective broadcasting tool, but my gut told me it would suffer the wrath of blogs - a ton of readers/followers with few, concentrated creators. While the blogging model can be monetized effectively through niche, contextual ads, Twitter writers or Twitter itself would have a hard time copying that model. 140 characters seems a huge limitation to line by line context, and as a result context based ads, especially if you're broadcasting random thoughts or daily activities.

Within a few minutes of using Twitter last month though, I 'got' it. Writing a blog to attract a readership is tough work. Readers expect content and blog writers have to produce it in volumes. Don't produce, readers abandon your feed. For the last year or so, I've literally had little to no time or interest in writing (which I love to do). A ton of my friends who blogged have tapered off as well for what I assume are similar reasons. Ultimately, blogging is such a great tool for broadcasting your expertise or opinions due to SEO. But the cost on personal time is material, so 99.9% of blog readers don't end up blogging at all or don't stick with it.

Twitter is effectively blogging for the masses. Most of the upside is still there. An effective tool for self-promotion, quick access via mobile or feeds, an inherent method for creating connection with thousands of readers. But by breaking down the format to 140 characters, everyone can do it simply and almost without thought. It's taking the basics of viral marketing (singular focus, super simple, no thought required) and applying it to something creative. This up-ends the creative/followers ratio from less than 1% on blogs to what I assume is some huge multiple of that (no clue what the writer vs follower % actually is on Twitter).

Given the huge number of writers that are suddenly enabled via tweets, you have to believe Twitter will be larger than Wordpress in short order (100M+ uniques a month), which makes it ridiculously valuable. Capturing user-created contextual data, even if piecemealed, is more valuable than user-read contextual data (i.e. blogs). The former is simply more representative of the individual than the latter, so long as there's enough content being written. Do this across 100M+ people and suddenly you have a massive network of interests, groups and engagement, all of which can be targeted for advertisers for a fee. Doesn't matter how this can be done, whether through behavioral targeting via cookies, search, company tweets, etc. Think of it as a cross of Google, Facebook and MySpace. Search delivers dynamic context (and monetization) on what you're looking for. Micro-blogging delivers dynamic context based on your publicly available status update. Both drive the same difference, an opportunity for a business or advertiser to generate a high CTR. Mix in self-expression and mass-market acceptance and you have a killer service. No doubt that's driving Facebook to open up its pages to the public or consider an acquisition.

Well, you can safely assume I'll be doing a lot more twittering than blogging for now, though at some point when stuff at RockYou calms down I'll come back to writing long-form - hard to do it well in 140 characters, feels like I'm writing haikus. Here's my latest tweet: "for any The Wire fans out there, wife and I settled that she's the Marlo and I'm the Stringer Bell of RockYou".

(I'm rochoy on Twitter btw).

Quick RockYou Update

2008-10-01T01:28:00.000-07:00

We have some ridiculous things going on at RockYou these days. Our owned/operated social applications on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Orkut, hi5, etc have crossed 50M unique visitors a month and over 1.2B monetized PVs (and I mean actual visitors not just 'viewers'). Our ad network for social media, representing over 400 publishers, has grown to 8B impressions and 90M global uniques a month.

A lot of folks continue to heavily discount social platforms' potential for developers and their overall monetization. Let me be blunt. There's a massive opportunity in this space, and RockYou continues to see material, growing business from agencies, advertisers and virtual goods alike. Social networking/engagement is the fastest growing and now primary activity on the web (and soon the phone). To not have some type of deep exposure in this space (whether as a developer or advertiser) is tantamount to missing the entire scope of Internet usage now and what's to come for the next 3-5 years. Are their risks? No doubt. But building on top of Facebook, MySpace, Orkut is no more or less risky than building a site dependent on SEO from Google. At least with the social platforms, you're given some notice of changes to come.

More to tell soon, but wanted to put out this video of our panel at MIXX in NYC last week. Brian Morrissey, editor of digital marketing at Adweek moderated. The other participants included Karsten Weide, Program Director, Digital Media & Entertainment, IDC, Danielle Knopf, VP of Social Media at Deep Focus, Terri Walter, VP of Emerging Media, Avenue A-Razorfish and myself. Never mind that I seem to have swallowed a lemon at the beginning of the video :)

Mixx 2.8 Conference - Ro Choy from Rock You on Vimeo.

Google Chrome is... fast :)

2008-09-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've had my critiques of Google in the past (one funnily enough got me into enough trouble at eBay to land me my current job at RockYou). So I guess I have to thank Google twice. The one real reason I thought Google kicked all the search engines in the rear when it first launched was speed. No one matched how outright fast Google performed on searches. Google Chrome is the browser equivalent. Page uploads are 2-3x faster than Firefox/IE. This includes rich-media laden pages and sites which normally are very slow to load on my PC. It takes that type of difference to change my inertia in using Firefox/IE. I'm assuming the same will happen for a lot of folk...

PS - Chrome seems to work REALLY well with Gmail, Google Calender, Google Docs and Google Analytics. Given we use all four at RockYou as business tools, it's a given that we end up using Chrome organizationally as well.

eBay - Look beyond the .com

2008-08-20T15:47:00.000-07:00

With the time/life commitment required of startup life at RockYou, I haven't posted much of anything in 6 months. Guilty. I find that a lot of things I think about or ideas shared from partners, friends and competitors can actually be put to use at the company. I'm left either not feeling comfortable openly sharing things via the blog or not having time to do it.

That said, recent articles and blog posts on eBay (this one actually insightful from Techcrunch)
sound increasingly like memorials or obits. Now that the vast majority of my friends have left eBay (including my wife), I finally have some leeway to add an opinion.

eBay faces two major issues today. 1) Lack of product leadership at the executive level and 2) an almost over-zealous opinion that eBay's problems can be fixed on the eBay site alone. The second issue is obviously a direct result of the first. I actually have great regard for many of the leaders both past and present at eBay. The company hires very smart folks on both the business and product end. But when company-wide strategic decisions continue to focus on things like site pricing, eBay seller feedback and improved buyer experience on eBay.com, it's clear that eBay's top executives are anchored on the wrong assumptions. The primary reason buyers are bleeding off eBay is not due to trust and safety issues, lack of marketing or anything directly site related. Are those things problematic, sure. But take a look at eBay on Alexa or Quantcast. The decline of unique traffic/PVs is accelerating. Now if this was only on eBay, maybe the problems would be site-centric and could be handled on eBay.com alone. But Amazon, Buy.com, Shopping.com and the vast majority of eCommerce sites have a similar decline in activity over time, which spells out the broader problem.

The fortunate/unfortunate truth is that the radical shift in Internet usage, especially with teens and young adults, will continue to erode traffic at former leading mass-market Commerce or content sites like eBay. Simply put, the Internet is becoming WAY social and web-service oriented. If an online site or service is not heavily invested in both, the future is dire. Three years ago, MySpace was the only social-platform among the top 10 visited sites globally. Now, six of the top 10 sites are social in nature (Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, hi5, Wikipedia, Orkut). Additionally, the disaggregation of the web is now a reality (think Iphone, Opera Mobile, Social Platforms, Integrated Activity Feeds, RSS, micro-blogs). Web services are driving this extreme segmentation of user's online experience. In either case, I don't see any material reaction from eBay to the shift.

Companies like Amazon are trying at least to understand that shift, leading the way with cloud computing and hosted bandwidth. There's seems to be no corresponding response from eBay. The company actually has some great platform centric web services, namely Paypal and Skype. But these very services are eroding the need for online commerce and communication to be anchored onto a single site. Paypal has massively increased trust across all eCommerce sites, making SMB marketing through Google the most cost effective and direct route for generating online transactions. Skype has had HUGE adoption (i'm probably one of the few folks who actually still think the acquisition was a smart one) and represents one of if not THE largest P2P network on the web. P2P as near-costless distribution model for media and digital goods is a massive asset. But if I can communicate openly and freely with my customers and embed trust on my commerce site via Paypal, the need for eBay as a central service (i.e. eBay.com the site) is increasingly limited.

One possible solution is to bridge the transactional eBay model to an ads-based business. Unlock the massive amount of transactional data eBay has across its 260M online users and port that off-site to publishers that are looking for higher eCPMs and advertisers wanting more distribution channels based on effective product-based behavioral targeting. Another option is to extend major, high value eBay functions (eBay's feedback, commerce/transaction engine, auction platform, product finding) as web services, which would widely propagate the eBay brand across the web as the eCommerce tool of choice, and make it extremely easy for users of those services to post product into the site or eBay network. I imagine there's a boatload of developers currently building to the iPhone, Facebook, MySpace and the numerous Opensocial platforms that are launching, that would be psyched to engage those APIs to build transaction, commerce-oriented applications, on the very sites eBay has little to no brand presence. If eBay is going to aggressively pursue a true web service focus, it needs product leadership willing to make a material investment in the space (i'm talking a 40-50 person web service team).

What's key is for eBay to accept and embrace the changes that occurring today - widespread usage of social platforms, disaggregation of content and services, increasing trust across all web sites vs focus on a few 'trusted' sites - and build a corporate strategy that at the very least makes material long bets in this new/volatile environment (ala Amazon Web Services).

Now back to work...

P.S. - I'd been waiting to post this for a bit and lo and behold, eBay announced the hiring of a new SVP of Platform, Mark Carges. Let's hope Mark believes in life outside the 'site'.

Bubble 2.0?

2007-11-11T17:21:00.001-08:00

A couple of things. First, here's a simple reason why we aren't going to see Bubble 2.0. U.S. Internet advertising is expected to double to $42 billion over the next four years. I'm seeing a lot of activity and interest from major agencies and advertisers on RockYou's ad platform on Facebook, completely outside of Facebook's own material initiatives with advertisers. Obviously a complete downturn in the economy can derail everything, but outside of that fairly remote possibility, there's a lot of strength beneath the business models of next-gen online destinations.

Sites like LinkedIn, Kayak and Sidestep are generating $30-$50MM in annual revenues with eCPMs in the triple digits. Wordpress.com has over 80MM unique visitors (check quantcast) with all of 18 employees, monetizing hundreds of millions of PVs through Federated Media. Not even going to mention RockYou or Slide :) I find references to Bubble 2.0 completely ignorant of the shifts in both internet usage and marketing $. Enough said.

Buffaloes, Lions and Crocs

2007-06-05T17:40:00.000-07:00

Pretty remarkable video with a happy ending.

Lala has brass...

2007-06-05T00:34:00.000-07:00

Wow. Lala, a company my classmate and friend Billy Alvarado helped start, is taking a huge, impressive gamble. $140MM committed to at least one major label, Warner Music Group, to stream (I assume) their entire catalog at 1 cent a play. At RockYou, we've been pushing the envelope with legal music streams, partnering with SnoCap, Nettwerk, PumpAudio and Fliptrack to maximize our music selection and test if music-based revenue could be material. Lala took it 1000x steps further. Congrats to Billy, Carole and the Lala team. They've taken a massive bet to test whether the free stream to paying download model works or not. Will be really interesting to watch. One standing concern is free services like Audio on Facebook, which offer completely free streams, and whether Lala can draw users away from these semi-legal/illegal streaming services much like iTunes did vs the original Napster. Really hoping Lala makes it big...

Facebook Widgets

2007-06-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

This is a happy time here at RockYou. We have the top 3 fastest growing and 3 of the top 5 largest apps on Facebook's new f8 platform, with an aggregate 1.3MM embeds for Horoscopes, Slideshows and the new X-me application - just 7 days after going live. A ton of great things to say about the f8 platform which I'll reserve for later. Obviously, lots of cool, new apps may ultimately displace us, but it still rocks if only for a couple of days :)

Joost rocketh

2007-05-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

Got my invite to Joost (I meant Hulu ;)) this afternoon and I can only say that this will (make that still can) be a massive supernova success. Think completely accessible, free and remote VOD. With the integration of standard ads (pre-roll) to premium content from the likes of MTV and Comedy Central, there's little to no reason why content providers wouldn't openly participate (least none that I can think of). There are hiccups in the service - video play can get a bit staccato, you need to scroll through a lot of content - but the beta is really impressive. The ability to stream full shows via P2P, combined with an attractive, stupid simple interface will make this super viral once officially launched.

With two kids in the house, the wife and I use Comcast on Demand a ton in the house (Dora the Explorer on demand is a parent's best friend). With a few more premium shows (Thomas the Tank!, Bob the Builder, you know the good stuff), Joost will be a constant in my home/laptop, and I get the feeling in millions of others as well. And no, I'm not getting paid for this post :)

P.S. - Hulu essentially upended Joost on content and ease of use (browser access). So just replace all the Joost comments above with Hulu and I can retain a little dignity :)

MySpace acquires Photobucket

2007-05-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

Techcrunch confirmed the rumor that MySpace acquired Photobucket for $250M in cash. We're obviously big fans of MySpace and have a good relationship with their team. Acquiring Photobucket provides them with the single largest photo hosting company in the world. Much like the acquisition of MySpace for $580M by News Corp years past (what's the minimum one of the top visited sites in the world would be valued at? $10B?), I think Photobucket's true value will surface over the next several years. 40MM registered users and 17MM unique visitors a month may not have translated to significant revenue today ($6MM in 2006 and a projected $30MM in 2007). But as the widget economy continues to develop, monetizing user photo content will become a significant revenue driver in the near future, especially if that photo content is tagged (better yet auto-tagged Danny ;)). If there's one thing ALL internet users have a ton of is photos (much more so than video content). What better way to know an online user than by their photo content? Interesting things happening here that I don't think many really understand.

eBay To Go

2007-04-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

Some quick thoughts. eBay launched their 'to go' widget recently. My initial reaction is positive. It's good to see eBay give this a go and give some more remote functions to the web service (you can search completely on the widget itself). There's no buying via the widget, but I guess I can't expect everything to come all at once. Some suggestions however.

First, the widget is like a mini-eBay, which isn't necessarily the right approach depending on the demographic target. If eBay was hoping for viral growth with young users, they need to put some serious work into making it more engaging to viewers. Not sure why they don't show the 'hot' styles in apparel or something that would engage young women (who drive viral widget adoption on social networks). Also, the format and design of the widget needs to be tailored for a specific user demo.

All in all though, it's great to see eBay push the boundaries a little. Let's hope there's a lot more to come.

Ping Pong!

2007-04-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

This is one of the funnier sport movie trailers you'll ever see :)

Growth and Free Services

2007-03-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

Not sure what's been keeping me bottled up on blogging these days. Writers block? Maybe startup life is more hectic than I'd assumed. Either way, finally read something which got me fired up again. One of our seed investors, Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, has a perspective on 'free' business models. According to Josh, getting users to pay for ANY service, even if charging a penny, is the biggest obstacle to material revenue generation.

At RockYou, we've had some some informal statements on TechCrunch related to our funding. Some of the commentary related to RockYou funding focuses on doubts related to the 'free' business model. How can RockYou (or any Web 2.0 consumer facing site) make money? While I generally agree with Josh in his post above, ultimately premium services should never be the singular focus of a 'free' business model. Having worked at eBay where online services to the buyer are completely free, the vast majority of revenue is not generated from premium services but rather from access to the consumer. Whether it's charging for leads, a transaction fee % or CPC/CPM, what makes or breaks online consumer sites is 1) the overall size of the userbase 2) how attractive that consumer demographic is to an advertiser and 3) how effectively said site is able to charge for that access (unrelated to simple onsite advertising via ad networks).

A great case example is Linkedin. Would anyone have predicted that Linkedin, a business social network at its essence, would be able to generate $100MM in revenues for 2007? A friend of mine that works in online recruiting mentioned that Linkedin has 35,000 recruiters signed up for Linkedin services, looking to access their 8MM+ user base. In this case, Linked in 1) has a big but not massive user base, 2) maintains a highly attractive demographic for recruiters and 3) was able to extract sizable but equitable rents from recruiters. Looks like the 'free' business model in this case is a damn good one.

So why invest in RockYou? At RockYou we have 1) a fairly massive & growing user base (8.5MM registered and 14MM unique visitors a month), 2) a very attractive demographic (teen/young adult) and 3) *wink* a plan to charge for access to that user base. Obviously our ultimate success will be based on how good that plan is and how well we execute on it. But with #1 and #2 continuing to grow, the team and our investors are feeling fairly good about the future of our little company.

One more thought - notice that premium services aren't a focus. I expect that premium services will play a material part of our revenue growth in the future, but I'm happy to being completely free to users into perpetuity if I can anchor userbase size and demographics for potential advertisers.

JetBlue

2007-02-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the dearth of posts. Been travelling and dealing with hairy partner issues (figurative not literal :P). One of my trips this past week was to NYC to visit one of our recently signed partners. I'd forgotten how freakishly cold the city can be. Had just gotten on the JetBlue plane to fly back to Oakland, when David Barger, JetBlue's president, jumped on the flight with a very humbling apology. Here he is with his orange flight vest...

I'd read about JetBlue's issues last week and frankly didn't even consider that it would effect my trip. If I'd been a passenger left stranded on the tarmac for 10 hours, I'd probably be considering harsher things to say. But without that luggage, it was great to see the president of a company take full and complete accountability for issues that, in my opinion, seemed fairly out of his control.

That type of direct corporate engagement with me as a customer (6 hours of SportsCenter helped as well) did a ton to increase my loyalty to the JetBlue brand. A rapid rabid response to catastrophic events from the very top of their organization showed JetBlue's true colors. Kudos.

(ex)eBay Bloggers Unite

2007-02-13T11:14:00.000-08:00

Now that Jason (now at Tellme) has finally tired of maintaining BestofeBayBlogs (kudos for the effort), former highflying eBay VP of Corporate Strategy turned filmmaker, Shripriya Mahesh, has put together an eBay Blogs wiki. Such luminaries like myself, Greg Isaacs, Shri and Adam Nash are on this exclusive list ;).

That said, there's quite a lot of 'uninformed' opinion regarding eBay and its properties out there. While most on this list are now ex-eBayers, I'm hoping a few hardy souls at eBay (like Adam Nash) will push on the rich tradition of eBay blogging and continue defending the kingdom. eBay has a lot of things going for it... hopefully blogs can continue to be a good venue for expressing them.

eBay & Distributed Commerce

2007-02-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Looks like eBay is finally waking up to pushing distributed commerce forward. Apparently eBay is in talks with MySpace to provide an easy way for users to post things for sale (assuming the inverse would apply as well). Hopefully the good folks at my corporate alma mater can get past the notion that 'everything needs to come back to eBay.com'. If eBay really enabled a fully functional eCommerce widget/web service, where a seller can post and a buyer can purchase products all within a profile page (e.g. w/o leaving MySpace), they'd have something huge on their hands. If it's the typical affiliate application with a signpost leading back to eBay, well... it'll be something less than huge.

There's a real opportunity on the widget side for enabling a completely remote & distributable eCommerce experience. Cafepress, Qoop and Zazzle are leading the way here, as they begin introducing web services enabling individual users & sites like Rockyou and Photobucket to buy and sell photo and design-focused products. eBay is the natural winner in this space IF they make registration, trust and purchase completely remote from eBay.com the site. To date the company has pushed back on offering that through their web services due to concerns around fraud (which admittedly is a significant hurdle). But a deal with MySpace could be a fantastic motivator for making this happen and ultimately heralding a true entrance by eBay into the Web 2.0 world...

RockYou on Businessweek

2007-01-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

Businessweek just came out with a report on the MySpace Ecosystem, and RockYou got several mentions in the article. RockYou, Snapvine, Photobucket and Slide got cited as leaders in the space, with specific reference to our partnership with Bebo.

Anastasia (the author of the article), not sure that I agree that widgets are "parasitic in nature". Parasites don't give back to their hosts. Widgets increase user engagement and functionality for a social networking site. The more breadth of widgets, the more a user can do on MySpace for example. That aside, a nice primer article for those who haven't a clue what the heck a 'widget' is.

Mashable & Bloglines

2007-01-25T14:55:00.000-08:00

Having used Bloglines as my RSS Reader for the past year, I've noticed the sheer amount of info I skim/read through has increased at least 10-fold. Content for another post, but increasing the ability to consume that much more information has made Bloglines an incredibly useful tool for both entertainment and professional development. I went from looking at 5 news/content sources a day, to over 70, and with that, my understanding of the Web 2.0/consumer Internet space has increased multiples as well.

Some of the daily rags I read include the now universally subscribed Gigaom and TechCrunch. That aside, one blog I highly recommend that hasn't gotten that level of acclaim yet is Mashable. If you have any interest in the social networking and widget space, Mashable does a great job digesting the daily grind. They have great coverage of new startups and events related to the Web 2.0 space. Kudos to the Mashable team for delivering the goods.

eBay Q4 2006

2007-01-24T17:40:00.000-08:00

Congrats to my friends and former peers at eBay for a fantastic quarter. Across all of eBay's business units - Marketplaces, Paypal & Skype - there were outstanding performances. As mentioned previously on this blog, I remain a big believer in eBay's mission and team. Heck, my wife just joined my old group, eBay Motors, to head up sales. I'd be hard pressed to recommend eBay for her if I didn't still believe... Hopefully all the anti-eBay pundits and naysayers can fall silent for at least a day or two.

Now I'm the last person to able to predict where eBay goes from here. Could eBay do a better job becoming more distributed across the Internet via widgets and remote web services? Yes. Could the company leverage Skype as more than just desktop VOIP given they own the largest P2P network in the world? Absolutely. Is Google Checkout a real threat to Paypal? No comment ;) Lol. (Why no comment? Check out my single reference on Valleywag.)

P.S. Frankly, I have to thank Valleywag to some degree. Without them, I probably wouldn't have gotten back in touch with Jeremy Liew (one of RockYou's early investors/believers) and ultimately joined RockYou as a result.

P.S.S. I wonder how many times anyone's ever thanked Valleywag?

Viral Marketing and Growth (again)

2007-01-22T11:59:00.000-08:00

Was having a conversation about viral marketing with a friend from another startup. He had a valid question regarding how long to test the viralness of a particular widget. It's an interesting thought because I think the answer has changed radically over the past year. When RockYou launched our MySpace slideshow with 6 posts on MySpace help forums, we saw viral growth (subsequent user growth day over day) immediately. But it took several months before this growth actually become material to the business (i.e. millions of users).

Things have changed a lot since then. I'd hazard that the time period for vetting viral growth has become a LOT shorter. With widgets and the process to share preferred content now well known, this process seems to be taking several weeks rather than months. Take a look at Testriffic. Last July they introduced a quiz service for social network users which didn't immediately take off. Then early October they launched Who Knows Me Best, a widget that allows friends to take a short quiz about a user and displays their scores dynamically on the user's profile. If you check the uptick of their traffic on Alexa or Compete, in three weeks the widget (and their site) went massively viral. The same could be said for Zingfu. Again, check their Compete stats. Within a month, their service clearly showed viral growth.

So net net. For anyone looking to launch widgets and generate viral growth for a site, if widget embeds and traffic doesn't accelerate within a 3-6 weeks at most, it's time to start tinkering with the app. My thoughts on what to tinker with are posted below.

Yahoo Ads

2007-01-17T13:59:00.000-08:00

Let me first off say that I'm a big fan of Yahoo. I use their email services, finance, news, sports, etc all the time. That said, Valleywag picked this one up and its too funny not to reverberate. Below is an ad Yahoo Hong Kong is using to recruit new employees.

Pointing a pistol to your own head is probably not what Yahoo wanted to convey to potential hires...

LightSpeed Venture Partners blog

2007-01-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

Quick note. My fellow Stanford Business School grad, former AOL exec & Netscape GM, and now Rockyou investor and Lightspeed partner, Jeremy Liew has started up a blog along with his fellow partners at http://lsvp.wordpress.com/. They've got some great posts on Internet trends and guiding principles for entrepreneurs. Something to consider for your RSS readers...

Friendster Widgets and Slide

2007-01-05T00:16:00.000-08:00

Want to announce Rockyou's integration to Friendster! Just go to "Edit Profile", "Customize" and check the Widgets section at the bottom of the page. We've fully automated the photo upload process and posting of widgets for Friendster members across our entire widget portfolio. We've had a great experience working with the Friendster team. There seems to be a ton of activity there and their site is increasingly well organized, cleanly structured and really simple to set up an attractive profile. Go sign up and check it out!

Also, a quick hello to the Slide team. (I saw your IP on my blog's logs :D). Send me an email at ro@rockyou.com and let's go get drinks. No reason we can't compete over a beer.

Viral Marketing and Growth

2007-01-03T09:56:00.000-08:00

Alright. I've been working with RockYou for 3 months now (part-time and fulltime). Over the past month I've gotten half a dozen calls from startups looking to understand how to 'get' viral in their business models and emulate RockYou's growth on social networks, blogs, etc. Rather than repeat myself continually, I thought I'd put some of my initial thoughts down on why RockYou has been successful growing virally (this December we saw 13MM unique visitors to the RockYou site while spending $0 in marketing).

The way I see it, there are three basic drivers for viral growth within the social networking space.

1) Engagement of BOTH the user AND viewer. I can't emphasize this point enough. Too many startups, even now, focus entirely on the user of their product. While delivering significant value to users is hugely important, it does very little to help drive viral growth. Generally people are not going to become evangelists of a product. They have no time to do it even if they truly like your service/application. What you're left with is the infamous 1% rule... and with only 1% of your users (assuming you have a great product) waxing poetic on forums and through word-of-mouth, it's gonna take a hell of a long time to go viral.

Your product needs to truly engage both users AND viewers. It's the engagement with the viewer of a widget on a social networking profile that will drive viral growth. If the viewer sees something they really like, you don't need the 'user' or profile owner to evangelize on your behalf. The viewer will simply click through and get the product for him or herself. For RockYou this meant making our widgets and slideshows really stand out through transitions, themes and music. Increasingly we're doing this by making widgets more interactive as well (ala Corkboard). By making user's photos and text 'pop' on a page, not only have we captured the viewer's interest (presenting user content that they will look at regardless), we've presented the viewer with something appealing to consider for their own content. Another example are MySpace Layouts (ala Freeweblayouts). Attractive, well-designed layouts generated a lot of value to both the user, allowing them to increase self-expression online, and great appeal to the viewer. The viewer is induced to click through to the layout provider site, generating viral growth.

If your product/service has great value to users but your widget has no self-evident appeal or engagement to the viewers of that widget, simply put, there's very limited viral upside.

2) Viral products are NOVEL products. In the slideshow space, I hazard, the opportunity for viral growth by a new player is nearly non-existant. Rockyou, Slide, MySpace and Picturetrail account for over 90% of the slideshow market. Once top players capture viral growth, it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, since sequential growth will continue to drive increasing market share until the user population for said product is tapped. Once that's happened new players are only stealing share through incremental improvements, not generating viral growth. Think about factor #1 above as well. If a viewer sees a new product they've already seen multiple if not numerous times, the inclination for that viewer to click through and get that product is significantly reduced. Clickthrough rates are key to viral growth, and having a me-too product competing with products that already burned through the viral spiral will elicit low clickthrough. Think video players on MySpace. Do you think there's any viral growth left in the video space? I don't.

That said, if you can create a product that take elements of current offerings and make it truly new and appealing to viewers, viral growth is once again enabled. Two great examples of this are www.zingfu.com and www.viraltags.com. Both have taken the well-played out concept of photo-sharing (Photobucket won that viral race) and made completely new applications for them. These applications, photos and faces within photos applied to templates to maximize a laugh, are both extremely viral. In the case of Zingfu, within 6 months they've driven an estimated 2MM users per month to their site. Novelty combined with something truly appealing to the viewer is a powerful combination.

3) Finally, almost all of the value of your product/service offering has to be FREE. If you're not providing the vast majority of value of your products for free, simply put, you won't have any viral growth. Think Google and Yahoo. Both offer users a ton of value without cost (search, mail, fantasy sports, news, etc). They charge for access to their huge base of users via advertising and also generate revenue from users via premium services. But without a truly compelling and free reason to go to Yahoo and Google, they'd have no traffic. This era of Web 2.0 is based on this concept. Offer free products to consumers to generate massive user bases which are then monetized via ads and premium content. Yahoo, Google and eBay proved that this model can be hugely successful. But you need the massive user base first.

Well there you have it. Obviously there's more stuff which I'm keeping under my hat. Would love to hear more thoughts regarding viral marketing and growth if you have them...

No thanks for the tip

2006-12-28T23:05:00.000-08:00

One of the founders of Firefox has taken issue with how Google Tips work, pre-empting natural search results (blog post here). Take a look at the result for "Wordpress blog" below:

Fairly certain the Wordpress team wouldn't be too excited to see an ad for Blogger better placed than their top natural search result and #1 paid-search link. More amazing still is that comments on Slashdot about this issue aren't all completely behind Google.

What makes Tips faintly nefarious is that they're not algorithmically derived (like the rest of Google results, both natural and paid). It's a fairly blatant marketing decision to drive traffic to contextually relevant Google products. Normally this would be a non-issue, since any company staffed with at least one marketer would attempt to do the same.

But Google's famous "do no evil" stance, and the trust users place in Google that the site will represent the most relevant results for specific keywords, aren't aligned with Tips. Simply put, if a Google product is actually not as relevant or popular as measured by its own algorithm, it shouldn't have top billing over those results (Wordpress blog as a keyword is a great example since the only relevant result should be Wordpress or results related to Wordpress).