Continuations

Twitter is banning political ads. This is Jack sticking it to Mark while the latter is on the ropes in a one-two punch including a jab against Libra. This mast feel like sweet revenge for the many ways Facebook has messed with Twitter over the years including snatching Instagram. But is it the right thing to do? Not running paid political adds is a self-imposed behavioral remedy, the way traditional antitrust regulators would impose on monopolies. A behavioral remedy requires or forbids some ...

Earlier this week Rebecca posted the latest evolution of the USV thesis. It includes the words “trusted brands” which led some people to ask how an early stage company could already be that. I provided the answer in a tweet in which I wrote that “trusted brands” — have incentives that are aligned with your customers/endusers so you can build trust over the longtermI want to explain that further today and put it in the larger context of Internet business models. During the Dotcom Bubble, there...

The rollout of iOS 9 and along with it adblocking plugins for mobile Safari has re-ignited the debate over the ethics of removing ads from pages. Marco Arment who released the paid Peace adblocker previously wrote a piece laying out his views arguing that publishers have crossed a line with ads and trackers that are too intrusive and disruptive. In response there are now pieces bemoaning the end of independent publishers and the web altogether. And inevitably micropayments are proposed as an ...

I will be participating in an ad:tech panel this afternoon with the title “Digital Economy 2010: A Robust Recovery or Another Year of Trench Warfare?" I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what that means, but in a prep call with moderator Mark Mahaney we came up with some fun questions. The one that is most interesting is whether we may be facing a long-term decline in the percentage of GDP that is spent on advertising. I am pretty sure that I saw a statistic to the effect that adverti...

A while back, I wrote that display advertising is too complicated. Today Google announced their entry into the display ad exchange business. Both in their announcement and in this conversation with Neal Mohan from Google, the idea of bringing simplicity to the market is cited as a major driving force. Google also describes the system as if it were the first display ad exchange ever. Of course the reality is a bit different, with Yahoo/Right Media and others having offered exchange capabilitie...

Yesterday morning, I participated in another meeting sponsored by the Mayor’s office and the NYC EDC to talk about the economic future of New York City. Up for discussion this time: the media industry. There is a lot of concern about employment in “old media” disappearing more rapidly than jobs will be created in “new media” (I have put these terms in quotes since I don’t really like them but they make ok placeholders for the basic idea). The morning was organized in breakout groups. The grou...

Dalton Caldwell kicked up a fair bit of discussion with his post on paid-for services including a defense of free by my partner Fred. Here is a slightly different take on the issue at hand when looking at “media” style services (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc). Let’s start off by looking at advertising. At its core it is the routing of attention. You are looking at a newspaper, magazine, TV show, web site, web service (giving your attention to it) and one or more ads are trying to capture you...

In 2011 I gave a talk at conference that The Media Kitchen had organized about the impact of mobile on marketing. While everyone else presenting was talking about how to make mobile ads work, I was openly critical of advertising on mobile platforms altogether arguing that ads were (a) mostly annoying given the small screen size and (b) likely to be replaced by direct commerce. I just tried to find my slides from that talk but unfortunately came up empty. I was reminded of the talk when I read...

Occasionally I take time out from talking to startups to meet with folks from big brands. What keeps surprising me is that many of these brands don’t seem to understand the power of direct. By direct I mean any communication that is direct between the brand and existing or potential customers without requiring the use of a “medium” to carry the message. Instead, many brands treat the Internet as if it were just another medium that is similar to previous ones. The logic seems to be mostly arou...

Today our portfolio company Clickable has released version 2.0 of their Pro Product. There are many great features in it, including support for emerging Google ad formats, keyword filtering & bulk edits, and enhancements to the Act Engine. What I am most excited about though is that Clickable’s conversion tracking is now out of Beta and generally available:Clickable Conversion Tracking is a powerful, independent, performance analytics tool that works across the three major search engines with...