Rudelle Blogging

Google impressive financial quarterly results seem to confirm the tremendous power of its model. Furthermore, despite his increasing domination on the Internet, Google manages to still be perceived as a cool user friendly start-up, as opposed to Microsoft often depicted as the Big Evil.
However on a closer look, Google situation is somewhat fragile. First of all, 99% of its revenues come from advertising, and above all from AdWord. On the other hand, AdSense is facing a more challenging situation in terms of returns. Outside the comfortable cocoon of its search engine, Google indeed has some serious difficulties to generate actual efficient ads returns. AdSense semantic engine is regularly pointed out to show poor outputs, resulting in disappointing click through and transformation rates.
Furthermore, so far, all attempts of Google to diversify were failures. This includes in particular video, email, cartography, storage or shopping guide. In these areas, Google has not been capable to grab a significant market share compared to its main competitors. For video, the failure of Google Video has even forced them to acquire YouTube. This acquisition has also made Google to discover the charming world of copyright infringements.
Eventually, the power of Google is due mainly to its amazing market share in search. Its domination in this area is particularly strong in Europe. The question is therefore: can anyone ever challenge Google search domination?
Google’s power is due to the fact that the search industry has not evolved in the last seven years. No one has indeed succeeded to come out with any disruptive technology. Still, disappointing experience of search engines shows that some serious improvement should be expected sometime down the road. We all experience ourselves that any search results are not exploitable.
The day a brilliant start-up will invent a revolutionary approach, the position of Google will soon become uncomfortable. Either Google will manage to copy very quickly the new algorithm of the intruder, or the shake-up will soon proved very serious. Indeed, nothing is less sticky that a search engine. Barriers to change are pretty low. In two clicks, you can loose a user you had for years. Irony is that it's precisely this way Google started his irresistible growth in the early days, passing by incumbents like Yahoo! who were incapable to react.

Even if everyone agrees that spam is a plague, not everyone does have the same sensitivity on the subject. According to Wikipedia, spam is “the abuse of electronic messaging to send unsolicited bulk messages, which are generally undesired”.
The concept of “unsolicited” is not as obvious as it appears. With the strictest interpretation, any message which is not a response to a preceding message is by definition unsolicited. It is absurd. If my email is visible on this blog, it means that I agree to receive some “unsolicited” messages. Nevertheless that does not mean any message is welcome.
To clarify this, regulation authorities usually distinguish if the message is addressed to a consumer or a professional.
In the case of a consumer, it is usually necessary to collect his preliminary agreement at least with an opt-out function. There is nevertheless a big exception: if someone buys a product from a website, the e-merchant is authorised to flood this mailbox as much as he wants.
In the case of a professional (what I am), regulation authorities usually consider that it is not necessary to obtain the agreement of the recipient if and only if the content of the message is in connection with the activities of the recipient of the message. It’s obviously much more acceptable to receive an unsolicited message in connection with my activities that something completely out of range.
It remains that focusing too much on the way emails are collected misses the main point. To truly distinguish between spam and not spam, what really important is the content of the message sent and even more important the frequency of the emails. This is where the “undesired” becomes much more important than the “unsolicited”.
I am much more tolerant with the small start-up which sends me an one time unsolicited teaser on its new product, than with some big e-retailer which feels he can spam me with his bulk junk emails every week (sometime even every day!) just because one time I bought one product from his web site.
This is similar for viagra and credit offers. What is painful above all, it’s not to receive one spam per year, but 50 per day.
In short, an unsolicited email is still desirable if and only if:
- The content is neither dishonest nor offensive, is mainly informative and not hard selling.
- The product or service to which it refers is original, new and in connection with the activities of the recipient.
- In the recipient responds, his mail is treated quickly and in a personalized way
- Without answer from the recipient, no more other email is sent on the same subject.
Finally as a sender, there is a very simple way to know if you are spamming. If your response rate is lower than 5%, it’s likely that what you propose is not in adequacy with your target.
Below 1% of return, you are completely out of focus and it is time to consider another approach. For example, why don’t you try personalized e-mailing which is much more efficient? Of course, this requires personalization (and usually sophisticate) tools, but there are a couple of vendors in the market that can offer you that.

Following the take-over of YouTube by Google last fall, we have seen many comments on the return of the Internet bubble. This 1.6 billion dollar deal for a company with virtually no revenues was illustration that irrational thinking was infecting us again.
Well, 6 months later, it does not look at such a bad deal for Google. On the contrary, the fast growing on-line advertising market shows that it should not be such an issue for Google to monetize this extra inventory.
On-line advertising growth is very much connected to the growth of Internet itself, especially of broadband access. And this broadband access is accelerating in all major countries. As a result, e-commerce is also growing at a nice 30% rate per year with no sign to cool down.
This strong and steady e-commerce growth is financing portals, media and community sites with profitable advertising budgets. This makes the whole picture much healthier than in 1999 & 2000. This is why there is not much to worry about a bubble bust as so far, there is no bubble at all, just plain fast growing market.
Remember all those crazy IPOs in 99. Anything similar today? Not really. Not only companies are getting profitable much quicker, but investors are also much more selective. It looks like for the first time they show some memories of the past to keep the market at a reasonable and healthy level. Not bad at all. ;-)

All along 2006, we have seen Web 2.0 hungry VCs racing to invest in web community startups. They were all trying to replicate YouTube supposed easy cash out. Anything with some Ajax, mashups, open API or User Generated Content would be called Web 2.0 and was supposed to be very hot.
In beginning of 2007, it looks like Web 2.0 is no more a phrase to put forward to attract VCs attention. They have eaten too much of this buzz word and get afraid to get stuck with some lagers who have missed the wave.
However, it’s not because a catchy phrase is no more fashionable that the underlying concepts are dead. Open APIs, mahsups and UGC remain a major key of Internet’s future. Many innovative and powerful business models are still to emerge in this field. Some of them have the potential to overtake the traditional way to do e-commerce and media.
But as for the first Internet bubble, only savvy investors who are smart enough to invest against the crowd will make tremendous leverage in a couple of years on these emerging players.

My company Criteo has launched AutoRoll, a widget for blogs.

What is all about?
AutoRoll is a blog widget that displays links to blogs with a strong affinity with your blog. We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on each blog that has installed AutoRoll. This information is fed to the Criteo recommendation engine which computes blog affinities in real-time. The more often a reader visits and browse a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with this blog.

In terms of benefits for blog owners, first of all, you will provide your readers with a very entertaining blog roll, as it is based on other readers with similar reading habits.
Moreover, another huge benefit for you ton install AutoRoll is to get highly qualified incoming traffic for your blog. Indeed, as other similar blogs display your blog on their AutoRoll, they will feed you with new readers with a strong affinity with your blog.
Last but not least, you will also get a complete private reporting module with valuable statistics on impressions and click through rates from and to your own blog.

To be part of this Beta, just sign up here
It takes 2 minutes to install and it's real fun to use.