Mike Blumenthal alerted me to Hitwise data, confirming comScore data and indicating that Google Maps had passed MapQuest in monthly uniques:
Source: Hitwise/Blumenthals
Mike makes the point that the arrows may reflect the time when Google started its broader no-modifier local rollout.
An interesting question is: what might MapQuest do to regain the lead?
Tim Cohn sent me a link to a story that asserts (based on Compete data) that Twitter has passed the NY Times in terms of monthly uniques:
Assuming it’s accurate, what are we to make of this:
Who should “worry” about Twitter?
Google now allows Street View in Maps to be expanded into a full screen mode. On a large monitor it’s pretty spectacular:
Great for the armchair tourist as well as the real tourist (or real estate searcher).
Yelp for a long time has allowed businesses to contact reviewers behind the scenes via the site. But it has not allowed them to comment publicly the way, say, that hotels can on Trip Advisor or SMBs are able to on other local sites. The concern, as CEO Jeremy Stoppelman indicated to me early on, was that this capability would result in a kind of he said/she said exchange in public and not be very beneficial to the content and the community.
Indeed, some of the exchanges that I’ve seen on Trip Advisor can look petty. But Yelp is apparently now going to allow businesses to make comments about reviews in public, on the site. The move is about addressing the needs of business owners and bringing a bit more balance to the approach that Yelp has taken. Assuming the process can be managed successfully it’s a good move and business owners will be happy about it.
There are some guidelines around what businesses can and cannot say publicly. Apparently Yelp wants owners to be restrained about their responses but it will probably take a little time for the rules and the right tone to be established. The potential temptation for many SMB owners will be to engage character assassination: “that couple was crazy; she wouldn’t get off the cell phone,” etc. Witness this article on rude behavior in restaurants from the SF Chronicle:
It’s the recent spate of weird antics – pole dancing in a crowded dining room, sex in the bathroom and raucous feuding – that has restaurant workers scratching their heads.
“It’s not everyone,” says Frank Klein, owner of San Francisco’s Fish and Farm and a national restaurant consultant. “But over the past couple of years there seems to be this sense of entitlement. There are people who are so rude. And it’s not just me. I’ve talked to consultants across the country who have noticed that diners have become more disrespectful and aggressive. It’s a shame, because it puts a damper on other diners’ good times.”
Some chalk it up to a generation raised on Facebook, Twitter and reality television, where narcissism and bad behavior is not only accepted, it’s encouraged.
There is a “spoiled brat” quality to some of the comments and reviews on Yelp and some SMBs might see the new Yelp policy as a chance to “get even.” In the NPR/KQED Forum segment on Yelp and defamation that I was a guest on, some SMB callers got very specific and expressed palpable anger about what a “nut case” this customer was or how “crazy” that one was. But Yelp certainly doesn’t want that; the site wants evenhanded and rational explanations that will help clarify critical reviewers’ comments. In addition, presumably, Yelp will also allow SMBs to publicly appreciate positive reviews.
Again, on balance, I think this is a positive step. Businesses are hungry to have a “voice” on Yelp and I believe they’ll be generally grateful for the opportunity.
There are lots of pieces today on newspapers in the wake of Eric Schmidt’s address to the NAA and the AP’s (partly irrational) anti-piracy rampage.
Here’s a roundup with some comments:
From CNet: Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera calls out the NYTimes and WSJ on being “news aggregators.” The Times owns Blogrunner, which is clearly a Techmeme-like news aggregator. It shows links to third-party content on its site. And Dow Jones’ AllThingsD is reportedly excerpting healthy chunks of blogs without permission.
At the NY Times, Miguel Helft discusses whether Yahoo is a “better friend” to newspapers than Google. The answer is: yes. He also cites a very long and thoughtful post from analyst Ken Doctor about moving from “fair use” to “fair share” at Google News. The essence of the argument is that Google is getting more value from newspaper content — especially now that it has ads on Google News — than it’s returning in the form of links to the various news sites it aggregates.
Doctor suggests a rev share with the newspapers and an algorithm to determine what that rev share should be. He’s got a great idea — and a fair one. I would add as a suggestion that 60% to 80% of the revenue generated by clicks on Google News should go to the included publications and, in turn, paid to individual publishers based on CTRs to their sites. The sites that are most visited get the biggest chunk of the money generated by News.
Kate Kaye at ClickZ also writes about Google, Yahoo and newspapers — and about newspapers starting to sell search/Local SEM. The latter has been going on here and there for some time but will pick up steam. As I said in my conversation with her yesterday, the key will be to educate and differentiate these products. They’re all sounding the same and when five different companies, including two YP publishers and an independent channel (e.g., Reach, Yodle) are selling them too, it all gets very confusing and noisy.
Another idea: newspapers join forces to allow multiple online subscriptions from a single entry point. In other words, if some or all of them start to reintroduce subscription pricing, why not manage all that from a centralized portal/aggregation location. Allow me to pay one price to access multiple publications or have tiered pricing according to the number of online sites I want to subscribe to. Because that would require lots of coordination, it’s unlikely to happen.
Even thought I’m fatigued by it, I’m glad all this public discussion is happening. Something will emerge on the other side that will hopefully be sustainable and help support journalism, online or offline. Journalists and editors serve democracy and help support a healthy political system. They have to be able to make a living, buy homes, send their kids to college, etc. That’s what this is ultimately about: sustaining journalists and journalism — regardless of the platform or delivery mechanism.
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Related (from the WSJ): True/Slant launches in an effort to create a new journalism-centric site with a slightly different model.
From MediaPost: Video Surges On Newspaper Sites and USA Today Bows Online Auto Community. The latter is about Gannett creating an auto community (looks a lot like AOL’s blog sites). Gannett has been one of the most interesting of the traditional newspaper publishers and has experimented with many different kinds of sites and content destinations. The company also owns PointRoll and ShopLocal.
Allan Mutter discusses what happened behind the scenes at the NAA event in private discussions among publishers:
The under-the-radar discussions include a sit-down among several CEOs – held quite separately from the convention under the guidance of a lawyer to ensure the talks don’t stray into inappropriate territory – that would be similar to a confab where many of the same leaders discussed the industry’s challenges in January, 2007. Despite the deterioration of the newspaper business in the intervening time, no similar session has been held since then.
According to a press release I received this morning:
The processes Angie’s List relies on to provide reliable, fair and accurate consumer ratings on local companies have been certified by BPA Worldwide, an international, independent auditing firm.
Angie’s List, the nation’s leading provider of consumer ratings, was last reviewed by BPA in 2007, earning high marks for fairness. The current audit covered the company’s activities through February 23, 2009.
“In our opinion, the Angieslist.com service follows a consistent, documented set of techniques and processes to present fairly, in all material respects, the ratings and input of the site’s members,” BPA said in its letter apprising Angie’s List of its findings.
“Our audit included examination of member feedback for service providers that advertise with Angie’s List and service providers that do not advertise with Angie’s List. We found no variation in processing member feedback for all service providers,” the auditor said.
AngiesList reports 750K members. That’s a fraction of the 25+ million users on Yelp or Citysearch. But AngieList doesn’t have to sell ads to SMBs (there is some advetising in the printed magazine). Fees vary by market but in my area they’re $6.95 per month. Assuming members pay an average of $5 per month, that would mean roughly $45M in annual revenues. It’s likely lower than that because of discounts and other factors. But that’s still very healthy revenue.
Angie also writes a blog. What about Twitter? 
Reviews have become increasingly important, both in terms of consumer reliance upon them for decision support but also as Google starts to factor in this information as part of its organic local ranking algorithm.
Facebook announced that it officially has 200 million users globally. According to comScore MySpace still has more users in the US (though Compete data disagree):
What does it mean for MySpace, which just announced MySpace Local, in partnership with Citysearch. Will both thrive or will FB dominate — one network to rule them all? And if both FB and MySpace manage to thrive, what about other networks? How will they do? Will they need to be organized around demographic groups or specific types of content to be viable?
Of course there’s now a “social layer” in almost all content or commerce sites online today.
FB is still missing out on the local opportunity in my view. Indeed, I articulated a local strategy in a lunch some time ago with Net Jacobsson, who has since apparently left the company.
At MySpace, former Yahoo! exec. Warren Kay is leading the advertising push into Local.
Open directory Brownbook has introduced a video offering in the UK. Here are the details:
You can now get 30 second, 1 minute, 2 minute and 3 minute ads from as little as £12 a week, all professionally filmed, edited and produced, PLUS we distribute your video ad on Friday Ad, Brownbook, and over FIFTY other online video and media websites driving you up the search engine results.
At current exchange rates £12 a week is roughly $18 or just under $1000 on an annualized basis. The video creation is obviously of value but the distribution is equally important. Partner Friday-Ad is one of the leading traditional and online classifieds publishers in the UK.
Here’s an example ad:
The lack of polish, in a way, of the SMBs in the advert (as one would say in the UK) is part of the appeal here.
Google’s Eric Schmidt gave a keynote speech at the NAA conference in San Diego yesterday. Miguel Helft covers it for the NY Times:
His speech was followed by polite questions from industry executives that only briefly touched upon a perennially sore point: whether the use of headlines and snippets of newspaper stories on Google News is “fair use” under copyright law or a misappropriation of newspaper content . . .
In a meeting with reporters afterward, Mr. Schmidt said Google was unlikely to license newspaper content, as it has done with The A.P., even if that content was behind a pay wall.
“In a scenario where a newspaper had a subscription product, what would Google do?” he asked. “It’s highly unlikely that we would buy a subscription and give the content away free. We might be able to help the distribution of that content, but the user would have to pay.”
I listened to the speech and summarized the Q&A session at SEL.
Though the audience was generally polite, many publishers are angry at Google and think it has contributed to the decline of the business, on par with Craigslist. But this is in a way a fiction and Google is a scapegoat or stand-in for the entire Internet.
One questioner asked Schmidt to assess newspaper digital strategies and tell the audience what he would do if he were the CEO of an American newspaper company. Here’s what Schmidt said (paraphrasing):
I was very impressed by how quickly all the newspapers I talked with in the 90s embraced the Web. They quickly repurposed existing print stories on the Web and created reporter blogs. The criticism if I can offer one is that there wasn’t an act after that. And the act after that is a much harder question. How do you keep engagement; how do you keep from being disintermediated into just a set of stories with your brand on them, which has happened to some newspapers.
If I were involved with the digital part of the newspaper, I would first and foremost try to understand what my reader wants. It’s obvious to me that the majority of the circulation should be online rather than printed. There should be 10 times more readers online because there are no distribution costs.
So the question becomes, how do we get to 10 times more readers online and what do they want to see? My own bias is a technology one; I think the sites are slow. They’re actually slower than reading the paper. And that can be addressed.
He did speak generally about increased personalization on newspaper sites and becoming more user-centric. However he didn’t really offer any concrete suggestions to his audience.
Here’s what I said in my SEL post by way of concluding comments about the Schmidt speech and the Google-newspaper relationship in general:
Schmidt was generally open and charming but didn’t offer the newspapers any real, concrete solutions. Being more user-centric is good advice but general. The audience was polite and didn’t really challenge him. I’m sure there was a lot of unexpressed frustration in the room. Google is seen, as much by some as Craigslist, as a villain and destroyer of newspapers.
The truth is much more complex. Newspapers have seen some of their business commoditized by news aggregators, of which Google is merely one. They have also failed to create the user experiences and products that might make them more successful online. Yet they are relatively successful online and among the top sites in their respective markets in many instances. However they suffer from the same tension faced by all traditional media: revenues reside in the traditional product but audiences are increasingly online.
There are no easy solutions but setting Google up as a scapegoat, as newspapers have often done with Craigslist, obscures things that they have control over and actions they can take in adapting to a dynamic media marketplace. With their complaining, newspapers strike me a little like Albert Books in the movie Broadcast News. Even though he was smarter, he “lost the girl” (Holly Hunter) to the more attractive but dimmer character played by William Hurt — and spent much of the movie feeling sorry for himself.
It doesn’t do newspaper publishers good to point fingers or see themselves as victims. They now need to move forward in constructive ways.
That’s probably what the AP thinks it’s doing, I’m sure.
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Related: (via MediaPost [reg req'd]) Would cross-media ownership save newspapers?
On a hopeful note, McClatchy says it will generate $200 million (or 15% of revenues) from online this year, at higher margins than print.
The Associated Press announced an aggressive new policy whereby it is going to try and get more money for newspaper content online or take legal action against “copyright violators” and those that won’t pay. From the AP’s own press release:
The Associated Press Board of Directors today announced it would launch an industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation online.
AP Chairman Dean Singleton said the news cooperative would work with portals and other partners who properly license content – and would pursue legal and legislative actions against those who don‘t.
“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,“ Singleton said at the AP annual meeting, in San Diego.
The quote at the end is vaguely reminiscent of the rogue US general in the 1964 Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove who will no longer allow the “commies” to “pollute our precious bolidly fluids.”
The rest of this post is at SEL.
I’m late in blogging this today but Google officially acknowledged, after about a week of discussions on blogs, that it was showing local listings for queries without geographic modifiers:
But we’ve noticed that much of the time users make simpler searches, like [restaurants] or [dentist].
We like to make search as easy as we can, so we’ve just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don’t type in a location. When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you.
As much of the commentary and discussion on this blog indicated, some version of this has been tested in the past but the scale and commitment to this rollout is new and unprecedented. And as previously indicated it makes ranking in that 10 pack even more important than it was before — because it will show up even more frequently.
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Matt McGee has more and a short Google Q&A.
. . . Of Twitter and Internet culture more generally:
Ahmed Farooq sent me this link to a Ted presentation (video) arguing that better design can save print newspapers. It’s very compelling and persuasive and an approach I’d never considered or heard discussed:
Circulation grew post redesigns, seeming to validate the approach. In one sense this is what Apple does: focus on the UX and make it visually compelling.
The presenter, Jacek Utko, drew his inspiration from Cirque du Soleil believe it or not. He goes on to argue that design was just a part of “improving the product completely.” But design was a starting point for that process.
Watch the presentation-video and tell me what you think?
Last December I had lunch with Brad Inman in Berkeley. Brad is the founder of HomeGain and Inman News and TurnHere, among other things. He’s very smart and unlike many successful entrepreneurs not at all pompous or full of himself. As we were talking about a range of things he told me that he’d written a kind of multi-media novel and articulated his vision of where he thought book publishing was headed. I was immediately impressed by his versatility. Indeed, the novel is in a way is a proof of concept of the medium he is imagining.
The folks at TurnHere had filmed scenes for the book that would be incorporated into the text and could be played like video clips associated with a news story. Inman said that with the rise of eBooks and handheld electronic readers that this was one way forward for publishers. He also argued that it was inevitable that books would become multi-media experiences. In a way it’s not unlike audio books, just slightly more expensive to produce. (There are lots of interesting questions raised by this vision: pricing, production, advertising, etc.).
Today’s NY Times profiles the new startup that Inman has created around his vision: Vook. (Video + book = Vook.) Community is also in there as a part of the experience. TurnHere is a partner with Simon & Shuster on book videos TV. It’s not that much of a leap from there to where Inman is headed.
I spoke to Inman several years ago when he had just gone public with TurnHere after laying the groundwork and creating the filmmaker infrastructure in secret for a couple of years. I was immediately impressed and saw the potential of what he was doing. I put him on a conference panel in the Spring of 2006, when I was still at Kelsey. It was a breakout session, opposite a discussion of sales channels. I moderated the session and we had the smaller number of attendees. A year or so later, video was the hottest topic at this conference.
It’s clear that Inman has been well ahead of the curve more than once. With Vook, that’s probably true once again.
It’s Sunday morning and I’m up reading Techmeme and the New York Times and other news online. As I’m reading the Times via its great “Article Skimmer,” I hear the vroom of the newspaper delivery van outside and the thwack of the rolled-up NY Times as it hits the gate in the front of our house. There’s a 75% chance it will go straight to the recycling bin in all likelihood.
This was not what I intended of course.
I restarted my subscription to the Times a few months ago because I wanted to do my part to help the print newspaper industry. I also had a vision of sitting with my 9 year old and going through the paper together, initiating her into the venerable ritual of reading the Sunday paper. But that largely hasn’t happened.
Typically, by the time the physical newspaper has arrived I’ve selectively read the articles I want to read and efficiently skimmed everything else. Sunday paper done in 30 minutes — max. That experience, while not a leisurely aesthetic stroll through the paper has changed my behavior probably for good. (I’m also spending a lot of time reading news on my iPod Touch, subtracting that from my Internet news time.)
Just as I often think to myself “I’ll go to the gym this afternoon,” I know that if I don’t go in the morning it won’t happen. The same thing applies here. My behavior is all but fixed now and, despite my best intentions, it’s very unlikely that I will ever go back to a devoted session with the physical newspaper. I pick up papers left on public transportation or in the airport and glance at them. I also look at headines through newspaper bins or boxes on the street.
I’m as interested in news as ever — and I’m as interested in seeing the newspaper industry survive as I ever was — but in terms of my behavior and where I’m likely to get news, I’ve crossed the Rubicon with print newspapers.
Yelp is upgrading its iPhone application to incorporate a number of new features including mobile reviews and feeds (per TechCrunch). The video demo is better than a description of the new features:
Yelp originally resisted the idea of allowing users to write reviews from the mobile app because they felt it would compromise the quality of reviews. But now Yelp has recognized that it must add this feature, which Citysearch has added to its iPhone app. GoodRec also allows mobile reviews. Both companies have said they’re getting large volumes of reviews from mobile users.
In addition the various feeds explained in the video are interesting: nearby (what’s happening near me), Yelp friend feeds (reviews and comments from those I’m connected to) and the “me feed” (reviews I have generated and any related community responses).
Mobile becomes an increasingly important entry point for users seeking location-based recommendations and information, as well as a key source of content for PC-based services such as Yelp or Citysearch.
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Update: TechCrunch is calling for Yelp to integrate Facebook Connect so that all my reviews are broadcast through the news feed. Yelp has been a Facebook partner and was one of the original participants in the ill-fated Beacon initiative. Citysearch recently integrated Facebook Connect and benefited greatly from the increased social utility and reach that it provides. Yelp was/is already more social than Citysearch and so there isn’t the same urgency or incentive there — but I suspect it will happen.
The story of local London residents physically blocking a Google Street View camera vehicle in their neighborhood is fascinating and presents an escalating public relations challenge for Google. First, from the BBC’s report (which also features a video interview of the man who initiated this protest):
Angry residents in Milton Keynes blocked the driver of a Google Street View car when he started taking photographs of their homes.
Police were called to Broughton after residents staged the protest, accusing Google of invading their privacy and “facilitating crime”.
Councillor John Bint told the BBC the camera mounted on a car was intrusive and people should have been consulted.
This sort of anger to a perceived violation of privacy is not new for Street View, but what is new is the active resistance. This story will get lots of play in the UK and perhaps more broadly in Europe and will embolden critics. We may see more such confrontations with Street View cars.
Regardless of whether the law is with Google, which it is, the company must quickly address residents’ privacy concerns beyond what it is already doing. That could include town by town meetings or outreach on television, etc. If Google fails to do some form of preemptive education and outreach it will find there are more such stories in the press that contribute to the “Google as big brother” meme.
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Update: I received an email from someone who told me informally that his perception is that Google is widely disdained by Europeans despite its dominant market share or perhaps because of it. He added that the Street View controversy is merely the latest development in a privacy row (to use the British term) that has been brewing for a long time around the government’s use of surveillance cameras in lots of public places.
Web 2.0 yesterday (mood was restrained, if not somber); CTIA today. I’ll be flying to fabulous Las Vegas this morning and then leaving late tonight. I’ve got a pretty packed schedule so I don’t know how many of the items I want to get to here I’ll actually be able to get to.
Paul Levine, now running the Internet side of things at Current TV, was previously GM of Yahoo! Local when it was the leader in the segment. Here’s what he said in a comment last night about the seemingly new practice of Google showing local results in the absence of geomodified queries:
This practice has been around for a long while. At Yahoo we were (and they still do) integrating local listings against maybe 1000? non-location-modified queries (doctor, lawyer, dentist) by inferring location from a user’s reg info or IP and appending it to the query in the background. Originally in 2004 or 2005 I think. Map+3 v Google’s map+10, but same basic idea. Query without explicit location triggers local results. G did it too.
G may have increased their coverage/recall on this, but the feature itself has been in place for many years . . .
I had never seen this before so I’m surprised G & Y have been doing this for a long time. In addition, I’ve never heard anyone from either company say this publicly at any of the events I’ve attended or spoken at.
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