Rudelle Blogging

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.

The exponential growth of mashups should lead to a sharp increase of destination sites. As a result, tens of new exciting Web sites will mushroom daily in the coming years.
However, despite this major trend, let’s bear in mind that there is another wave pushing in an opposite direction.
The idea behind this new wave is as follows: to get their favourite contents, why surfers should be obliged to browse around dozens of different web sites? Wouldn't it be more efficient to get all this content directly pushed in one central place?
This is how was born the idea of personal aggregator. At the beginning, it was just about getting all your RSS feeds on a single page. But this new ecosystem quickly became much more sophisticated. Now, you can easily and freely aggregate thousands of contents from all different sources ranging from weather forecast, email notification, auction tracking, stocks alerts…
The current battle is about who will control this personal aggregator: either a central supplier (as Google and Yahoo! or even Netvibes as a challenger) or either it will be directly integrated in the web browser (Microsoft and Firefox strategy).
In this new world, the challenge for content providers changes radically. It is mo more a question of how to attract surfers on the most beautiful site of the world. Now it’s about making its content accessible on each personal aggregator. As space on this personal aggregator is inevitably limited, the battle for space between content providers will be fierce. Each inch gained on competition will be a victory!
2007 will be an exciting and key year in the field. Comparing mahsups and personal aggregator, we should see which force proves to be the more dynamic.