We have been using Lookery.com, the service Scott Rafer founded after he sold MyBlogLog to Yahoo, for almost two months now to get a little more data about you and we like what we see!
According to Lookery more than 37% of our readers are female and the majority of our visitors are between 18 and 24 years old/young.
Should this influence our blogging? Of course! It is important to know who you are writing for. So what should we change? How do you write for 18-24 women? What are 35-44 year old men interested in?
Another question: is Lookery right? Is the collected data correct? Lets find out!
Silicon Valley has been painfully instructive in the last month. It’s now clear that many bloggers are no better than the MSM in terms of “If it bleeds, it leads.” As a community, web startups need leadership, focus, and goals. To hear that message from one of the big names in venture capital, apparently one needs to fly to New York. Instead, the Valley is delivering grimy voyeurism from ‘A-list bloggers’ or transient opportunism from VCs seeking to negotiate better inside deals with their portfolio companies over the next six months.
We are certainly in a Buyers’ Market for startup equity right now, but it will end predictably. It will end so predictably that I’m going to the crazy thing and make a specific prediction in writing. To wit,
Without additional, catastrophic interference, early-stage startups will start to enjoy a Sellers’ Market with angel investors and VCs by the middle of Q4 2009. In other words, the combination of the natural maturation and consolidation of Web2 and the current banking crisis will only cause a one-year “winter.”
I’m clearly guessing — but not without basis.
Calling the Top
Starting in late 2004, I was running around telling people to be out of the markets and in cash by March 2008. My specific reasoning was “about six months before the Republican National Convention,” which was at least as wrong as it was right. I simply figured that the GOP would stop at nothing to stay in office [√], and the Republicans usually persecute bit-driven businesses like IT and Entertainment in favor of atom-driven businesses like Autos, Telecom services, and Petrochemical.
My more general reasoning was that IT boom-and-bust cycles have been between 8 to 11 years long since the early 1960s. March 2008 was exactly 8 years from the top of the last IT cycle, i.e. the DotCom boom. However, this cycle was marginally the shortest ever, and I called the Web2 Top w_a_y too close for my own comfort.
I don’t believe in exact market timing and was hoping my March 2008 deadline was a bit before the Top, but it was actually after. GOOG and NASDAQ both hit their highs around November 1, 2007, and the Bebo-AOL deal was announced on March 13, 2008. That deal felt late and overpriced at the time, and it probably still will with the passage of time.
Calling the Bottom
Nobody seems to remember it well, but the dotcom community was clearly climbing out of its Bust in Q3 2001, less than 18 months after the DotCom Top. Wi-Fi and blogging, the harbingers of Web2, were well into their early adopter phase. That quarter, Oren Michels and I launched WiFinder on stage at Demo. We got off to a great start PR-wise too, largely by pitching Glenn Fleischman and the bloggers who already owned the public discourse on Wi-Fi.
Of course, WiFinder launched September 5, 2001, six days before the world-beyond-tech shut down for a while. Even that extension into “nuclear winter” as people call it, was eighteen months or less. Friendster launched March 2002 and the first bulge of Web2 startups had been founded by spring 2003 and had little trouble finding angel investment. O’Reilly coined the term “Web2″ in Spring 2004 to describe what he saw as an existent, emerging sector.
Large shocks extend the tech down cycle, but not for very long. 9/11 extended the post-dotcom Buyers’ Market by eighteen months. I’m betting the banking-shock extension is twelve. The Top was almost exactly a year ago, and Sellers’ Market start to re-emerge around this time next year.
Separating the Cycles
Any number of credible people will make the above statements, but then they come to very different conclusions. In these panicky times, many experts are unnecessarily and unreasonably conflating unlike economic cycles. When you make that error, it looks like web startups will take as long to recover as global banking. That’s not the way it works.
IT startups don’t run on credit, and they don’t correlate directly the GDP. IT startup recovery leads GDP recovery significantly. We don’t behave like big tech companies such as GOOG, YHOO, ORCL, MSFT, etc. who need to care a lot about the state of the overall economy. Their revenue is driven by big corporate spending. Ours normally isn’t. That’s one of the reasons the big guys are late to the pick up the latest technologies. Two guys in a garage with a new way to share music, or even startups at Twitter’s scale, don’t care at all. Facebook and Automattic, where I have a few shares, are in an interesting middle-state from this point of view. If they manage the transition a tenth as well as Google did during the Dotcom Bust, they will be huge wins.
The Buyers’ Market for startup equity is never more than a quarter of the overall cycle, and it’s normally more like a sixth. Early-stage investors won’t wait for the economy or housing or banking to recover. A bunch of rich people are frantic right now because their personal portfolios are getting hit. However, pretty soon they’ll remember that those portfolios only exist because they paid a startup to give away web-based email, sold AKAM at $300/share or some other highly speculative IT-investing activity.
At that moment, they’ll move back from fear to greed and start competing with each other to speculate — on us.
Last Friday, Amsterdam was the scene of Holland’s first international blog conference BLOG08. Pete Cashmore (Mashable), Loren Feldman (1938media.com), Hugh MacLeod (Gapingvoid), and Scott Rafer (Lookery) all crossed the ocean to tell the European crowd how they could turn their blog in a successful one. Two of them, namely Cashmore and Rafer, focused on monetizing blogs.
Nobody wants money?
When the Mashable founder asked the crowd about monetizing, something noteworthy occurred. Anne Helmond reports:
When asked, hardly anyone in the room actually wants to monetize its blog. Pete is kind of surprised, especially if he asks the same question in the US where everyone raises their hands.
Language barriers
At first, I wasn’t really surprised. After all, most BLOG08 attendees report for a rather small group compared to bloggers who write in English. A Dutch blogger for example, only has an audience of 17 million people. Americans have a crowd of at least 300 million readers at their disposal.
What did struck me as odd was the reluctant attitude of most visitors towards money. Like it’s some kind of crime.
More revenue means more time for blogging
I’ve been blogging for a year before I made some money out of it. And ever since I started doing that, my blogging skills improved. More revenue means more time for blogging. I was able to quit my sorry day job and spend more time on reporting about tech.
A precondition on making some money with blogging is writing in English. Simply because you can reach a larger crowd. That’s not something I came up with. No, one of Holland’s most remarkable journalists, Nico Haasbroek, once told me that.
Write your articles in English, German, or French, so you can sell them to any magazine or newspaper.
Content producers should not be involved with advertising
Sure, my English isn’t perfect yet. But thanks to the euros earned, I can soon start following some English lessons. While I’m doing that, I keep another rather important lesson in mind. As read in Michael A. Banks’ Blogging Heroes, stated by Ken Fisher from Ars Technica:
Content producers should not be involved with advertising, to avoid even the appearance of advertised-influenced content.
So, work your ass off, create great content, and find an advertising partner like Federated Media as soon as you can make money out of your blog.
Maybe you’re still in doubt whether you should come to BLOG08. Or you might need to convince your boss or fiancée? The five reasons will make it easier for you.
2. Super vloggers Gabe Mac (Mobuzz) and Loren Feldman will spice up the place with live shows.
3. With all this financial crisis sensationalism buzzing around, you NEED a break. Get out of that office, get inspired, have fun, meet new people, and do business.
4. It will be a conference unlike any other conference, with a lot of surprising stuff. Trust me, it will be an experience that sticks.
5. This is the chance to meet cool bloggers (Pete Cashmore, Hugh MacLeod and a lot more), serial entrepreneurs (Scott Rafer, our own Boris), crazy vloggers (see point 2), inspiring attendees, journalists and speakers. All in an intimate but kick ass setting.
Bonus: Because you rock!
Tickets are 195 euros, grab one now. I look forward welcoming you in Amsterdam next week.
P.S. Really, the one reason I can think of when it’s OK not to go would be when you had those Morgan Stanley stocks and are now chilling on the Cayman Islands while reading this post on your Kindle.
Kevin Rose is officiously one of the most famous Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. He has co-founded Revision3, Pownce, and of course his most popular company Digg. Somebody with such an entrepreneurial spirit certainly has something to tell, so we asked Scott Rafer – who also managed successful start-ups such as MyBlogLog – to interview Kevin on stage.
So the first question that comes to everybody’s mind is: how can you handle three start-ups at the same time? Rose: “It’s a matter of getting the right management in place”. For example, Kevin appointed Leah Culver as the lead developer of Pownce. She runs the show from day to day, while Kevin makes the strategic decisions.
Digg however, takes a lot of time. Kevin: “Digg is like my full-time job, the one I work on for 60 hours a week”. Moreover, the Digg-founder told that the company is large enough now – 55 employees – for things to happen on their own. He used to panic when the servers crashed, now he has a team to take care of a crisis like that.
Scott also asked Kevin some questions about the future of Digg. Kevin: “We have to fix the Upcoming section because it’s broken. Nobody can follow the 50,000 new stories users submit per day”. So how will Rose and his team do this? Well, they’re gonna follow the 3.0 trend by letting in the experts.
Kevin: “When you digg a story that already has 3,000 diggs, you have no idea who those other 2999 people are. What else are they digging?” So Digg will make connections and introduce you to other stories that might interest you. Some of them might not even be popular yet. They’ll make those connections by, amongst other things, following the so-called pressure users: the users that have an eye for good content. Based on their digg-behavior, the team can make better recommendations.
So ‘Digg suggests’ is an upcoming feature. If you can’t wait for that service to arrive, you might want to try the DiggSuggest web-app.
Last week I had a video interview with Scott Rafer from Lookery.com. Unfortunately iChat screwed me again and this time recorded only 30 seconds of video for a 13 minute interview. Instead of having you stare at a black screen the rest of the time I filled it up with photos (zooming in and out) of Scott I found at Flickr. My advice: just listen to the interview. Scott is an inspiring and funny guy and he talks about a few interesting subjects such as why they decided to stop using OpenAds, how well Lookery is doing and even hints at how much they sold MyBlogLog for.
Written on 12th July 2007
0 COMMENTS Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
Scott Rafer, moderator of The Next Web conference just started a new company. After WiFinder, Feedster, MyBlogLog, and Mashery he teamed up with Compete.com founder David Cancel for a new ride with an ad-network for Facebook apps called Lookery.
Written on 31st October 2008
10 COMMENTS 
Written on 27th October 2008
Written on 27th October 2008
Written on 12th July 2007
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
