TreeWorks Blog

We are talking about video and music: In my opinion the money does not stand in the 30 hits of the moment, nor on the tones of home-made stuff. Midtail is the name of the game. Content aggregation must especially be based on that. People don’t go on youtube to stare at bending teenagers, but to see professional content which is not to be found eveywhere: like video clips, documentaries and so on. But especially video clips, let’s be serious.

But what happens when Viacom asks the removal of over 10 000 of videos from YouYube? The big boys from media will finally realize they can still make the games if they know how to play the content card.

My vision about video: it’s more like placeshifting/timeshifting plus a wider variety of preexistent content (like old series, old music, old talk-shows). I do not fully believe in user-generated content when it comes to this side. Or maximum 25% will be user generated content consumption. If before it was composed 90% from mainstream hits and 10% from niche content, in the future it will be more like 40% mainstream hits, 30% old mainstream content, 20% niche content and 10% home-brewed content.

And a question: Will Google remove them or it will start the war with Viacom? Difficult. On other words this risks to be a new Napster, but with a lot lot more financial power? And if this is so, will the big ones from traditional media sign the pact?

A man on the street who was smoking right into my nose reminded me (I hate this habit of smoking on the street, BTW) that I have just noticed the first big banner in Romanian on Yahoo today.

It led to an anti-smoking website.

I was already enjoying this and wanted to see through whom is being sold. Actually it seems to be an European initiative, at the E.U. level.

Come to think about it, it makes a lot of sense on the Romanian market. I’ve made some quick calculations and I think Yahoo has almost 80% of the e-mail users market (persons, normally), Gmail about 5%, Hotmail somewhere near 2.5% and all the Romanian providers altogether about 10-12%. The error margin maximum 5 percents of the obtained numbers.

That means that Yahoo is the biggest player on the Romanian market. Guaranteed and surely! This counts from the number of opened and utilized accounts, but also the number of page views / daily users (because everybody opens their email, but not everybody enters classified websites, job sites, dating and other services that demand a log in).

But we all knew that already, didn’t we? The question is: will they use their power to take some other market areas? For instance, a HotJobs on Romania would be a redoubtable competition for BestJobs and Ejobs. Especially since at the time being, because of the penury of good people, the two do not send enough good candidates on the accounts of the employers (I know from my own experience and after having talked with other people and from the statistics on the website – how many apply for the job). So most of the companies would say let’s try these ones too. The move would make sense from the financial point of view if it is to trust the numbers given by Calin in the ZF, for example.

When it comes about dating, it is a little curious. Meaning that the market is into a continuous rotation, it is pretty hard to make money from this taking into consideration the presence of more impressions than inventory in .ro and all those being on websites with better demographics. Plus the average Romanian teenager who, I do not think has more than 50 euros to spend (it would be interesting to know how much, btw). But if, for instance there is a Yahoo-MySpace partnership (somewhere in the future; I know, MySpace is at Google, but for me Yahoo-NewsCorp-(Microsoft) seems a much more normal alliance) it would be interesting that the capitalization starts from here. The impression is that the dating/social networking is much more regional than it seems. Especially with the extend of its use. I think a website for Bucharest only might gather more active users than a global one with Bucharest listed in the search engine profile. And the proof is that Noi2.ro and Sentimente.ro have more profiles than hi5 or the Yahoo dating (on the .ro side, normally).

For the news, interesting also. Would I be Yahoo and I’d feel to enter the .ro, I would make a partnership with a player from the second league of newspapers (regarding the online tops). Like Ziua or Romania Libera.

For adverts there are pretty good sectoral players (imobiliare.ro on real estate, autovit.ro on auto, okazii.ro on general subjects) but I do not think one of them compares to craiglist.org for instance (BTW – craiglist.ro is taken by Ziare Com Srl). My opinion is that yahoo.ro could play pretty nice on this side.

What is the main condition in my opinion? The aggregation of jobs, news, dating, announces in the e-mail interface. This is not very complicated, in fact. I can even give a few solutions (So, the Yahoo gentlemen, if you are reading this, buzz me :)) )

Can Google have the same strategy? Nope! It probably lacks the critical mass, plus the Gmail users are more advanced. The Yahoo Mail-ers lend themselves much more to a one-stop shop approach. MSN? I don’t think so. Or only with bigger-bigger-bigger-bigger expenses. Since for Yahoo the costs would be reasonable, in my opinion. It would be a sustainable business from the first year.
Enough for now, I stop to work a little too.

Or, whatever, those 15 minutes of fame could as well last for a few days .

1. So, Wednesday evening, PROTV uploads on their website the material filmed by their cameraman in the Himalayas, showing the Chinese Army assassinating Tibetans.

2. On Saturday I take a glance on the website and I see that protv.ro doesn’t do too well in traffic. Robi (the coordinator of the online division of Mediafax’s televisions) tells me that this happens because that film is linked on onet.pl - the biggest Polish portal - and that creates a super-spike in traffic.

3. The guys from PRO’s IT team move fast and add capacity/servers. So do the site’s editors who add in a few hours an English version of the materials (here and here).

4. The website’s traffic goes way up (at a moment I saw that it had the biggest number of visitors in the last 24 hours, after Softpedia). And notice that most of the visitors came for the movie, so it was a big band consumption.

5. Today I see in GoogleNews a huge cluster (over 100 articles) about the cameraman who filmed the Tibetans’ executions. With apparitions in digg.com, boingboing.net, International Herald Tribune, News Corp, Guardian, CBS News etc.

And now my remarks:

1. Onet.pl is listed in Warsaw’s stock. With a capital of 1.2 billion zlotys and sells of 85 million zlotys in 2005. This means $400 millions and $29 millions. Onet.pl send in an interval smaller than 24 hours, yesterday, over 79 thousands units. With an article that appeared in one category of the news portal. The normal question is this: what traffic do they have?

I feel that it is at least 15-20 times over the one of Romanian portals, otherwise it is not explainable how they sent so many visitors.

2. Here’s an example of Press 2.0. I mean the way they link to blogs and other external sources.

3. It is important to have the hardware resources to deal with this kind of spike in traffic.

4. I am curious if CNN will cover the news. And the Western authorities. At the time being, they kind of need China’s vote regarding the North Korea and my feeling is they would not want to alienate the Chinese with this story. But to remain optimistic.

5. Compare the coverage in the traditional media with the one from digg.com. Which manages to generate a big quantity of comments and reactions.

6. I wonder how much this piece of news will go up. I mean, a few days have passed since an outside big channel covered it (Onet.pl) and after that a few hours until the international English publications/channels took it.

Later update (October 16): Mihai from PROTV offers here technical details. 2100 Gigabytes in 10 hours is something!

Or…that’s the idea beyond the Vista Industrial Design Toolkit – a set of suggestions that transforms the Wintel hardware into objects similar in terms of design with Apple products.

The big question is who will take the plunge to this direction? That would simplify hardware much more. I can’t see the people from Dell, IBM, HP biting the bait. On the other hand, if I was with Alex, Flamingo or UltraPro, I would launch a more luxurious line based on these specifications.

Regarding of what Emil was writing about Ray Ozzie, there is an interesting article from Financial Times:

Microsoft’s Ozzie declares end to PC era

So… soon Google will launch the PayPal’s competitor: GBuy.

Interesting is that this time, they have a precise date for future, and not just with only some few days before - 28th of June. This means that they wish as much publicity as possible for the launch, starting even from the day 0. But this thing looks quite normal if we look at the size of the pot: maybe even the long term domination in the on-line advertising area.

Yesterday I was reading about the great problem that per-click-advertising (and especially Google Words) has with the false clicks (and not just 2-3 clicks given by anybody, but high volumes made through the networks of zombie computers and other large scale operations).

http://www.fool.com/news/commentary/2006/commentary06060927.htm?ref=foolwatch

And, obviously, the solution is combining the context targeting with demographic targeting and with the user targeting. I mean, it is clear that one who bought a cruise in the past from a specific IP, it is very probable that it will also buy a perfume. While a completely virgin IP, from the acquisition point of view, it is not too attractive for the advertisers. And I’m wondering when will we see “select the IPs that have a minimum of 500 USD spent in the past 6 months”?

But even better then the IPs would be a system of accounts so that one could calculate someone’s acquisitions made from different computers and other gadgets. Especially because this goes according with Google mantra of moving the activity from the Microsoft dominated desktop to web servers (preferably theirs).

And, from this point of view, I’d say that the portfolios of auctions from Google Finance and the paying accounts from GBay will play a very important role. The journalists already understand it.

It is interesting how much data-mining Google will do with this information. Up until now, Google operated analysis predominantly over the contents. But the similar algorithms can work on users too. Big Brother?