Monday, March 9, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
2009 Online Trends from Jefferies Internet Conference
By Rory Maher - Fri 27 Feb 2009 07:29 AM PST
God knows, there's no shortage of pessimism about the economy and the state of U.S. business these days. But put 70 CEOs in a room together and you're bound to hear something positive. Here, according to the cluster of CEOs that attended the Jefferies Internet Conference this week, are some of the big opportunities for online companies in 2009. (They were distilled from a report on the conference by Jefferies internet analyst Yousseff Squali.)
—More subscription models in 2009 and 2010. As ad dollars dry up in 2009 and perhaps into 2010, digital companies will be forced to find other ways of making money, and some indicated they were already actively pursuing subscription models that generate additional and more stable revenue streams. Netflix said it is likely to roll out a new service that charges customers for online streaming from its catalog, while Shutterfly said it would probably charge customers who use the most storage on its personal-publishing service.
—Consolidation is necessary and likely in online video. The consensus was that there are too many online video companies with high-cost business models chasing too few ad dollars. The result? Some industry shrinkage.
—Display isn't going away even though things look awful now. Most executives believed that when the economy recovers, online marketing campaigns will evolve from narrow buys that focus on either search or display to more integrated campaigns across both types of ads. That would give display a lift, though it is unlikely to ever return to its heady growth rates of recent years.
—Profit margins will improve. The weak economy has caused even the most optimistic CEO to scrutinize the costs of running his/her business—and most at the conference said that was the silver lining of the recession. Comscore (NSDQ: SCOR), Bankrate (NSDQ: RATE), and Valueclick all expected profit margins to improve over the next couple years.
Keep in mind that these conferences tend to be forums for companies to promote themselves, so it's not surprising that much of the focus was on what will go right for online businesses and not as much on what is now going wrong.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
New Rules of a New Age
• Customers are now in charge. They can be heard around the globe and have an impact on huge institutions in an instant.
• People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you—or against you.
• The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches.
• “Markets are conversations,” decreed The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of the internet age, in 2000. That means the key skill in any organization today is no longer marketing but conversing.
• We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profit.
• Enabling customers to collaborate with you—in creating, distributing, marketing, and supporting products—is what creates a premium in today’s market.
• The most successful enterprises today are networks—which extract as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible—and the platforms on which those networks are built.
• Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
2009 Widget Industry Predictions
1. consolidation of powerful and useful widgets thanks to Flex, JavaFX and Silverlight
2. Lines get fully blurred from the desktop to the browser because of Os Layering, Widget-App Engines and SSB clients.
3. Consolidation of Widget-apps in mobiles thanks to mobile RIA platforms. that are exactly the same ones dominating the desktop
4. Widgetization in pretty much all online service
5. Live FX Framework Widgets now out and showing a new game for Widgets and Widget-apps
6. Google and Yahoo caving in and finally giving direct support for Windows Vista Sidebar
7. Widgets get into a Socialization Frenzy
8. Widgets get into a Federated Identity Connector Frenzy
9. Widgets turn heavy into branding and entertainment. a blur of Widget Utilities and Widget Advertising starts to happen. a small backlash to follow thanks to that and the ties of widgets with Identity and Sociality
10. Widgets hit big money as engagement, branding and code portability gain the spotlight
