Posts tagged worth
16 Secret Google Analytics Advanced Segments Worth Their Weight in Gold
May 16th
We’ve tapped into some of the web’s finest web analytics professionals to share their tips for mining analytics gold. Here are 16 secret – until now – Google Analytics advanced segments that could make you insights rich, too.
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Why Pinterest Could Be Worth Far More Than $2.5 Billion
May 9th
Guest author Derek Brown is a technology executive and analyst who blogs at One Blind Squirrel.
Pinterest is a three-year-old start-up with what is rumored to be no revenue to date. Zero. In fact, by all accounts, it hasn’t even attempted to generate revenue yet. In three years! Hard to fathom in this day and age, isn’t it?
And, yet, some of the sharpest minds in the venture capital community are so confident in Pinterest’s team and business that they recently invested in the company at an eye-popping valuation of $2.5 billion. Yes, billion!
If you were involved in the Internet economy of the late-1990s, as was I, you may be rolling your eyes right about now and muttering to yourself about Pets.com, Kozmo, Webvan, theGlobe.com, govWorks, Boo.com, eToys and all the other so-called-companies that were, for one brief moment in time, valued as if they had discovered the cure to cancer, only to be out of business a few short quarters later. Ahh… the memories.
Assuming that Pinterest’s investors share many of the same recent memories (or, more aptly, nightmares), what could be so compelling about the company and opportunity that would justify their support of such a lofty valuation this time around?
Passion At Scale
In short, I believe it is the economics of passion at scale.
Pinterest, in its own words, is “a tool for collecting and organizing things you love).” (Italics mine.) By pinning images from around the Web to their own board(s) or browsing others’ pinboards for images (which can then be “liked” or “re-pinned” to their own board(s)), users are able to create, manage, share and discover highly personalized image collections that define their passions.
Vintage fashion. Wind surfing. Gourmet cooking. Disneyana. Digital photography. Wedding gowns. Home decor. Camping. Italian design. Rolex watches. Travel planning. Architecture. Mid-century furniture. Urban farming. Knitting. Cross-Fit… The list of people’s passions is literally endless; and, Pinterest helps its users collect, organize and maintain all of them. On their own (or, with the help of the broader community). In granular, image- and/or SKU-specific detail.
Self-identified passionistas on a product-by-product basis — are you kidding? I’m not sure a marketer or merchant could dream of more fertile ground among a set of unknown people, short of seeing a prospective customer standing directly in front of items on a shelf, with cash already in hand. And, I’m not even convinced that would be more compelling on a long-term basis.
What could possibly be better? How about having that level of insight into the interests and intents and aspirations of not hundreds of thousands, but tens of millions, of people per month! According to press reports, Pinterest is already doing just that, hosting roughly 30 million unique monthly visitors who are generating more than 2.5 billion page views, the majority of which are likely coming through little more than domestic word-of-mouth promotion.
Fast forward three years and I think it’s entirely reasonable to assume that Pinterest is successful at growing its user base and traffic flows by 5 times, fueled by existing users continuing to build out their identities, waves of more mainstream domestic users finally catching on and contributions from millions of new pinners (their word, not mine) in overseas markets. That’s a lot of passion under one roof!
Passion Pays
On the business side of the house, passion pays. Extremely well.
Advertising, alone, could generate several hundred million dollars of revenue per year. Let’s say, hypothetically, that Pinterest follows in the footsteps of virtually every sizable media company on the planet, by introducing advertisements of some sort across its pages in the next few years. With marketers across every vertical likely salivating at the prospect of reaching into the company’s massive, impassioned and finely segmentable audience, it seems more than plausible that advertising rates across the company’s site could be at least 50% higher (if not considerably more) than the current industry average. Accordingly, with 12.5 billion page views per month (three years from now) and a site-wide CPM of, say, $4, Pinterest would generate advertising revenue of roughly $50 million per month, or about $600 million per year.
And yet, despite this sum, Pinterests more intriguing revenue opportunity at Pinterest lay in its role as a direct facilitator of online commerce.
Passions, as we all know, cost money — lots of it, over extended periods of time; and, it is money that we are, on some level, actually excited to spend. So, whether it’s a weekend warrior who pins a Burton snowboard, or a hobbyist portrait photographer pinning a Zeiss lens, or a budding interior decorator who pins the perfect accent table on Fab, Pinterest has the potential to become an economic kingmaker when these enthusiasts transition into consumers looking to purchase the goods/services that bring their passions to life.
Projecting Pinterest’s Numbers
To appreciate the financial implications of Pinterest’s role in the transaction cycle, think of the service as a massive affiliate that gets paid for delivering customers to online merchants. If just ~3% of its 150 million+ users (three years from now) decide to indulge in their passions by clicking from a “want-to-have” product image on one of their own Pinterest boards to a relevant online merchant, the company could claim a direct role in driving 4.5 million transactions per month. Assuming an average transaction size of $200 (remember, people are buying their passions, not everyday staples), Pinterest’s users would account for ~$900 million worth of monthly purchases. Were the company to receive a 7% affiliate “take”/lead fee/commission on these sales, it would generate transactional revenue of about $60 million per month, or $720 million per year.
As if annual revenue of $1.3 billion (from just two sources) weren’t enough, the company’s margin profile has the potential to be the envy of most. Based on my 15+ years of experience evaluating a wide variety of online marketplace business models, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pinterest were able to sustain gross margins of 90% or more and adjusted EBITDA margins comfortably in excess of 25% (even while continuing to invest heavily in future growth). At these levels, the company would generate adjusted EBITDA of approximately $325 million per year.
Worth It? Or Not?
So… were Pinterest’s investors ultimately wise to value the company at $2.5 billion? No comment.
Will the company generate any annual revenue, let alone $1.3 billion, and adjusted EBITDA of $325 million in a few short years? I don’t know.
Will Pinterest eventually be worth $5 million or $50 billion? I can’t wait to find out.
Those purposeful vagaries aside, though, I clearly see the underpinnings of a company with tremendous potential and, if I squint just enough, a business that could be the driver of billions of dollars of passion-fueled online commerce each year — and that’s a position that few companies ever even have the chance to dream about.
View full post on ReadWrite
A Data-Centric Approach To Identifying 404 Pages Worth Saving
Apr 2nd
A critical part of doing a site or link audit is checking to see how many 404 (page not found) pages there are in a site. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an audit that lists the total number of 404 pages and advises developers to find appropriate pages to redirect these [...]
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Cisco Says Its “Internet of Everything” Is Worth $14.4 Trillion. Really?
Mar 13th
Networking giant Cisco predicted Wednesday that as we move into a “fundamentally mobile and video” world, the “Internet of Everything” — which combines the so-called Internet of Things with the Internet used by people and their mobile devices — will create $14.4 trillion in value and boost overall corporate profits by 21%. All by 2022.
Those are some pretty big numbers, shared by Cisco executives at a press event in San Jose on Wednesday. But while the vision makes sense, quantifying the changes to be wrought by growth of the Internet of Everything seems, well, fairly abitrary. To say the least.
What Goes Into $14.4 Trillion?
Rob Lloyd, Cisco President, Sales and Development, broke down the $14.4 trillion figure this way:
- $2.5 trillion in better asset utilization
- $2.5 trillion in employee productivity
- $2.7 in supply chain logistics
- $3.7 trillion in better customer experience.
- $3 trillion in enabling new innovations.
Those may seem easier to grasp, but when you’re talking in trillions over decade-long time frames, it’s very hard to put much credence in calculations like these.
Perhaps we can start by seeing which industries benefit first and most dramatically. According to Lloyd, the top candidates include manufacturing, the public sector, energy and utlities, healthcare, finance/insurance, transportation and wholesale/distribution.
The Internet of Everything combines several trends, including the growth of connected devices, the increasing use of video, cloud computing, Big Data and the increasing importance of mobile apps compared to traditional computing applications.
Lloyd did lay out numbers to support the importance of the trends. But though these are also all giant numbers, connecting them to the $14.4 trillion figure still requires a leap of faith.
In terms of connected devices, he said, we’ve gone from 200 million in 2000 to 10 billion devices today, to a predicted 50 billion by 2020. On the mobile side, Lloyd said, 20 billion mobile apps were downloaded last year alone. By 2017, he added, two-thirds of mobile traffic will be video.
New Levels Of Complexity To Support New Uses
That complexity will make today’s issues “look very, very minor,” and pose historic challenges to manage, Lloyd said. That statement, at least, is easy to grasp. “We’ve been warming up for this for the last five years.” The company already has a number of projects in the works demonstrating key elements of the trend, including installing smart meters and pole-top routers for BC Hydro in Canada, and a single auto plant with 50,000 IP devices.
Cisco’s Sean Curtis demo’d live data from San Carlos, Calif., showing a heat map for mobile connections using “dwell time” metrics to track how efficiently pedestrian traffic was moving through the suburb’s commuter train station. Curtis said similar information mashups have been applied to San Carlos’ farmers market, offering insights into how many shoppers showed up, how long they stayed and which stalls they visited — information that would be of great use to both retailers and city planners.
The next step, Curtis said, is to link that kind of data with store data as well as parking and traffic information to help shoppers optimize their experience. The idea is that eventually shoppers could see the best route to the least crowded store with the best prices on the items they were looking for.
As apps like that come online, the Internet of Everything should indeed spur growth. Maybe even trillions of dollars worth of growth. Exactly how much and when, though, seems a Big Data question of the highest order.
Rising Expectations, Bigger Security Issues
The rise of the Internet of Everything is already changing corporate expectations, Lloyd said, not to mention who pays for technology advances. “The Internet of Everything will be driven by business funding, not just IT funding,” Lloyd said.
What about security for all this connected information? Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, said “the data will be collected whether we want it to be or not. How will it be used? That is the security question.”
Photos by Fredric Paul
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Promoted Tweets: Is a Picture Worth 350% More Clicks?
Feb 21st
A recent photo in a tweet vs. no photo in a tweet experiment revealed that a linked photo results in 120 percent increase in engagement and 350 percent increase in clicks. Maximize the photos in your Twitter campaigns with these five tips.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Eric Schmidt to Sell Google Stock Worth $2.5 Billion
Feb 11th
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Google said that Schmidt would be selling 3.2 million shares of Google stock – more than 40 percent of the 7.6 million shares of Class A and Class B stock controlled by Schmidt.
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Real estate SEO competition is tough, is it worth the effort? – AGBeat
Jan 28th
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Real estate SEO competition is tough, is it worth the effort?
AGBeat by Stephanie Sims in Business Marketing – January 28, 2013. Real estate SEO has long been a competitive game filled with million dollar players all the way down to a lone agent selling five homes a year, so is it a game that can be won? Is it worth the … |
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Is Groupon Worth It?
Oct 18th
Groupon’s daily deals are an enticing way to potentially bring crushing amounts of business to your doorstep, but you really have to be careful what you do. A few small mistakes can doom your Groupon campaign. Done badly, daily deals will aggravate you, your customers, and your employees, and even cost you money. That being [...]
The post Is Groupon Worth It? appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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Why Clean Source Tagging Is Worth Your Time
Sep 28th
Messy, incomprehensible analytics make my stomach churn. Just knowing that I’m going to spend the next several hours cleaning up sloppy data puts the kibosh on my day. The problem with Google Analytics, or any analytics package for that matter, is that even if my site is properly tagged and I’ve…
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SEO: Content Worth Commenting On – Internet Marketing News
Oct 16th
Posted by Webmaster in Uncategorized
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Internet Marketing News
Internet Marketing News
Reader comments are doubly useful for SEO because they help to pad out pages with extra content that is generated free of charge and will most likely be unique and – at the very least – related in some way to the topics covered in the article or post …
User Generate Content Does Not Mean Spam
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