brinking - nabeel hyatt

A meme begins: Compete announces the Attention 200 - Top Websites by time spent

I love watching a new idea take hold. Evhead, and some others have been recently chatting about how Ajax & Widgets has killed the relevance of the page view, and we need to start measuring the web by time spent instead -- what I've been calling Attention.

Boston-based Compete seems to agree as they have announced The Compete Attention 200.  I spoke with Andy Kazeniac at Compete and he said they compute this Attention metric by analyzing clickstream and timestamps, adding "those time numbers are then aggregated and given as a percentage of all time spent on the internet." Kudos to Compete for reacting quickly to a new trend.

What does this new data tell us about the Internet? Well, I categorized the top 50 to see what kinds of sites garner the most attention.

A couple things that seem to come out of this data:

• I expected old media (CNN.com, ESPN.com) to have a much bigger percentage of attention simply because of brand power. This suggests that we are further down the Web 2.0 curve than maybe we thought. People simply don't spend a lot of time with old media online.
• Commerce is the #1 category -- which just says we must be good consumerist Americans after all. Note that this includes everything from Amazon.com to BankofAmerica.com.
• Gaming is the #3 category, only beaten by Search/Info (Google, Wikipedia) and Commerce. Again, wow. While aggregators like Pogo and Wild Tangent dominate, it's good to see that even individual properties like GAIA and Runescape get in there.
• Video/Photos and in general exclusively broadband media is still pretty rare. YouTube is the only big player. I suspect this will change over time and we'll be seeing the likes of Heavy, JibJab, and Next New Networks peak in there in the coming months.

more about this data, and a few exceptions, after the jump...

A Second Life for MTV

It used to be the last word in youth culture. Now MTV is more about reality shows than rock stars. Can a virtual world of 3-D avatars help the network get its groove back? A couple interesting points from this Wired article on MTV:

• Virtual Laguna Beach launched in September and drew almost 300,000 sign-ups in its first 10 weeks.
• the hard-to-reach demographic of teenage girls makes up around 55 percent of members
• On average, users visit six times a month for 35 minutes a session. (The typical Web site devoted to a TV show receives just five six-minute visits per user per month.)
• Jeff Yapp, an MTV executive vice president who leads the Leapfrog unit, thinks that VLB has the potential to generate bigger bank per person than the TV show from which it sprang.

And apparently Sumner Redstone is now "fascinated" by virtual currency and virtual item sales, the model that has made such a huge impact on the South Korean MMO market and led to an MMO being turned into a TV show. Oh, how the the circle of entertainment spins.

read Wired 15.02: A Second Life for MTV

The first MMO to go Web 2.0

I haven't found a whole lot about Hardcore MMOGs worth talking about in a while. The fact that World of Warcraft pummeled out another kagillion quests for their expansion pack, and that it alone can account for Vivendi's sales rocketing, just didn't rise above the threshold of obviousness to be news.

But what the Lord of the Rings team is doing to embrace Web 2.0 is certainly worth discussion:

A Google Maps version of Middle-earth will be accessible to subscribers. Each character you create will get his or her own page on the game’s official website, and you’ll be able to blog it. Minigames on the website will affect your real progression in game. The site will also feature an online Wiki encyclopedia of info about the LOTR Online universe. All in all, it sounds like a very robust package of community tools.

This seems to be all the chatter around the blogosphere (here, here, here, here). And lets not forget this is also the first title to announce pre-order discounts, beta account rollover, and the Tivo-like lifetime subscriptions for $199.

For all the issues our local boys in Boston have had over the years, it's nice to see some real innovation coming out of Turbine. Kudos to the group for actually making an interesting game as well, I've been enjoying the beta so far.

One very surprising thing to note is that these Web 2.0 innovations did not come from the current crop of "casual MMO" folks. For the most part Habbo Hotel, Runescape, and even the recently launched Nicktropolis are still Web 1.0 endeavors -- largely monolithic, sealed off, AOL-style worlds. While Turbine will undoubtedly benefit from being an early MMO adopter of these tools, the real amazing integration will likely happen once this migrates to titles that are already being played in browsers.

The new way to rank the web

Looks like Jay Meattle over at Compete's blog has been watching his trackbacks. Just a couple days after using his data to make my case for how widgets and ajax will lead to a shake-up in web hierarchy to measuring by time, he posted a great follow-up piece.




This is absolutely the kind of graph that could be driving the industry in a couple years. Pogo gets three times the attention share of YouTube. WOW, even more than I thought. And let's not forget that Yahoo's #2 position is at least partly because of their very dominant position as the #1 casual games website (their #1 position in webmail doesn't hurt either).

Two big shocks were the inclusion of Neopets and the exclusion of Runescape. While everyone in the "advanced casual" crowd talks a lot more about Habbo Hotel, GAIA and Club Penguin - it looks like Neopets is still attracting the most attention. This, despite the fact that Neopets is now seven years old. For me, this does some damage to the argument by naysayers of Myspace that claim their demographic audience is too transitory.

As for Runescape, I am curious if the playing time in Runescape is not being properly computed because it is Java and launches in a separate browser window. If so, that could hurt any startup who uses Java in this fashion (which is really not many folks I can think of except some games like Runescape and Puzzle Pirates).

As it is, the only "startups" left on this list are Facebook, Craigslist, and adultfriendfinder. Maybe Facebook turning down that $1b offer wasn't such a bad idea after all.

(thx Andrew @ Gong Show)
Technorati Tags: youtube, pogo, attention, popularity, startups, measuring, games

How to solve social network Invite Fatigue

This week in social networking: Brad Feld invited me to Me.dium, Bijan got me sucked into MyBlogLog, and I joined Heyletsgo because my friend Evan just joined as CEO. And that's not even getting into the handful of services that I "kind of" use: Twitter, Upcoming.org, Last.fm, and the various MMOs I play (Second Life, Puzzle Pirates, Eve Online, WoW).

The problem is that there is a new one every week (see the minger.net image for 19 of them), and at this point I simply refuse to invite friends to a social network service.

I suspect this invite-fatigue affects many people, which means that new social networks cannot rely on inviting friends as the primary way to grow.

What is required is friend discovery, not friend annoyance. Social networking needs to adopt ways to help me find out which of my friends are already using the service. LinkedIn is the only site that I know of that offers this, allowing you to upload your address book and then telling you who is already a member. It is no surprise to me that LinkedIn is my most active social networking tool.

Of the above tools, MyBlogLog is probably the closest to being useful out of the box because you somewhat self-discover your friends while browsing ("hey, I didn't know David used this tool -- I'll add him as a contact"). But it still falls well short of making it simple.

What we really need at this point is a social networking contact manager. I upload my contact list to the service, and then I tell it which social networks I use. It does the match and helps me auto-add the folks I know to the social networks I use. Call it AlreadyHere.

Technorati Tags: social networking, web 2.0, meta, friend finder

The rise of the ??? gamer

Runescape, Puzzle Pirates, and others are taking advantage of a trend of gamers that are not casual (there is nothing casual about the commitment of an MMO after all) but are not hardcore either (free to play, like to play via the web). So what are these gamers called?

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a report on Runescape. For those familiar with Runescape, the article is a pretty basic rundown: knights and dragons world, terrible graphics, gameplay that is anything but casual, but it's in a browser and is free to play so people love it. It has more users than World of Warcraft, and the rumors are that Insight Venture Partners has spoken with some potential acquirers at valuations in the range of 9x revenues, over $500m.

But Runescape and their incredibly dedicated twelve year olds are only part of the story. Back in Korea, The Land of the Video Geek (as the NY Times called it) there games like Fantasy Westward Journey and  Legend of Mir II that also beat out WOW with variations on the same formula. Come back stateside again and you are starting to see a global trend -- RuneScape is consistantly one of the top searched-for games on Yahoo, and MMOs dominate the charts at CNET's Download.com. Fully half of the top ten downloads are MMOs, and seven of the top ten are online games.

 

Every single one of these games is free to play, and the best of them have mastered a few other more subtle elements as well. But the key trait seems to be aiming at an audience that we don't even have a name for. I spoke with a guy from Parks Associates at AGC recently and he likes to split things even finer, and perhaps he has a point. But for the gamer who:

• requires free to play
• spends an average of $8-18 a month on virtual goods per game
  
• values the social aspects of the game highly (this is not Solitaire)
• spends long hours of gaming, with sometimes complex, deep gameplay

What do we call them?

If you had read this blog you'd be a millionaire

Tomi T Ahonen over at the Communities Dominate Brands blog has claimed, with no shortage of self-appreciation, that he was right all along and social networking and communities are not only the next big thing in mobile -- they are the biggest thing today!

With wonderfully self reflective quotes like, "if you were reading our blog a year ago and just copied some of the ideas...you'd be a millionaire today" they proudly proclaim that mobile social networking is worth $3.45 billion dollars, this year. For some comparison of this size:

All of iTunes revenues last year were about 400 million dollars. TV-interactivity (voting for Big Brother, Survivor Island, Pop Idol etc) were worth 900 million dollars. Internet gaming revenues, were worth 1.9 billion dollars. All internet adult site revenues were worth 2.5 billion dollars in 2005. Two years ago - when we were researching our book, the total value of mobile digital community services was well below 200 million dollars. Today in 2006, the total value of mobile digital community services is $3.45 billion dollars.

If your spidey-sense tells you this is bull, it is. At least, it is all about how you define "mobile social network." To justify this size is not fake, Tomi uses examples like the MMO-ish virtual world Cyworld (which 90% of Korean teenagers use, fully 30% of the Korean population, and just launched in the US). The more appropriate example is SMS traffic.

After looking at the report, I would characterize the $3.45B as "all mobile data revenue" not "mobile social network." Does sending an SMS to a friend count as a "mobile social network" -- I guess you could say that it does, but of course then why not count voice minutes?

That doesn't mean that creating social networks on mobile isn't worth doing, it is a growing business for sure. But the hurdles to adoption are real. Social networks on the web are built around browsing, expressing creativity, and competitively creating more connections.

With mobile social networks, none of those can be the core value proposition because each goes against the mobile experience (you hate browsing, it's hard to express creativity with the exception of the cameraphone, and creating competitive connections are undermined by how intrusive SMS is). Instead they will need to built around availability, finding events, and doubtless a few things we haven't thought of yet.

In the meantime, spare the hype.

Communities Dominate Brands: Told You So: Social Networking on mobile EXPLODING, worth 3.45 B dollars in 2006

 

Technorati Tags: mobile, social networking, mobile social networking, market size, cyworld

Five lessons from Friendster - how not to do it

For all the entrepreneurs who say they have the next MySpace. "The counter to that is, ‘Tell me why you aren’t going to be the next Friendster," "It’s become the iconic case of failure."

How bad is Friendster now? It has gone from pioneer and media darling to being the 14th ranked social networking site. Even Yahoo's frankenstoner of a blogging service, Yahoo 360, gets more traffic. Friendster was offered $30m by Google prior to taking any VC money and turned it down. If that had been paid in stock, it would be worth over a billion now. The NY Times did a retrospective on lessons learned:

1 - First isn't always best. Friendster pioneered the most recent wave of social networking startups (post six degrees, etc). Great to be first, hard to watch everyone else learn from your mistakes.
2 - Too many chiefs. A ton of VCs and luminaries came in very early who did not actually use the product or fit in the demographic, muddying the waters.
3 - Run before you walk. Geographic expansion and growth of users became paramount, at the expense of a well-performing site (Friendster was notoriously slow). Without a well performing base product, the idea of adding features that made it worth adding friends could never be tended to.
4 - Social is public. Friendster had a closed profile system, while MySpace allowed you to see any profile you wanted.
5 - If your eye is on the competition, it's off the ball. Once MySpace hit, the discussion became about them and Yahoo, not about how to create a better service.

link: Wallflower at the Web Party - New York Times 

Technorati Tags: startups, social networking, friendster, myspace, anti-advice, business

The fuzzy line between social and games

Raise you own child, one text message at a time. Today Chia Chin Lee pointed me to a company blurring the lines between what is a game, a virtual world, a social network, and yet another silly example of how quick we are to anthropomorphize everything.

Media Republic is a Dutch company that has launched a Tomagatchi-like "grow your own child" where the point is to find a co-player and together raise a child over the course of a few weeks. The twist is that your interactions take place all using IM and text messaging.

Some are skeptical...

This is a demanding virtual baby that text messages you throughout the
day when it needs something, such as a diaper change. The only things
that could be more fun would be surgery without anesthesia, or actual
childbirth.

As someone with both a baby, and an aptitude for text messaging, I can firmly say I am entirely uninterested in this product. The idea of a messenger bot going from "gaga" to "I hate you dad" does not count as satisfying gameplay.

But the idea of interaction over the media that you already use is kind of interesting, as is the requirement that you find a partner to raise the child together. They've announced a Dorittos sponsorship and a virtual H&M store where you can purchase clothing for your Eccky, so someone is paying attention. But with the prescribed life of the child being only a week - are people really getting enough satisfaction to keep coming back?

Read: MSN's Virtual parenting poised for growth spurt - Products - MSN Tech & Gadgets

Technorati Tags: im, sms, games, eccky, msn, virtual worlds, anthrapamorphic