The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘after-the-close’

Trusera, a health 2.0 community where users can share their stories about how they’ve dealt with health conditions, is officially closing its doors on May 27, according to a blog post on the site. We originally reported on Trusera’s possible shutdown in March, when the startup was nearly out of money.

Founded by former Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, Trusera launched almost a year ago. Trusera sought to bring users together who were suffering from similar health conditions. The site also took other personal information into account when connecting people, including a user’s hobbies, location, and age. Trusera would then match people up according to all of these factors and allowed users to receive email updates whenever a new match submitted a story or tip, which meant that users didn’t have to worry about constantly searching the site for new information.

In the blog post, Trusera’s site manager wrote that the startup had run out of funds and could not sustain operations. Although the site was innovative and had steadily attracted a growing and dedicated set of users over the past year, it was still a small community. The health 2.0 space is a competitive landscape to survive in—there are a number of websites, including Medpedia and PatientsLikeMe, devoted to online forums for people to share their health-related stories.

After the close, Trusera will keep a landing page with information about the site and its mission but will disable all other functionality. Trusera says that the content of site will be secured so that it can be preserved in the event that the startup is able to raise additional funds in the future.

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YouTube, a site that was once notorious for pirated content and user-generated videos that were practically useless to brands, has made great strides in the last few years as it looks to appeal to its growing number of advertisers and content partners. Today the site is adding a new feature that makes the platform even more useful, adding Google’s powerful (and very popular) Analytics reporting to YouTube brand channels, adding some credence to YouTube’s claim that it’s the “world’s largest focus group”.

Before now brands (and general users) could keep tabs on how their videos were performing using YouTube Insight, which has some basic demographic information, tracks a video’s popularity around the world, and shows how your video is being rated by other users. But when it comes to more powerful tracking that’s useful to major websites and brands, it falls short. YouTube says that the addition of Google Analytics will allow them to track far more, with “reporting on their channel as if it were their own site”. From the new YouTube Biz Blog:

While all uploaders can still use YouTube Insight to learn detailed information about their video views and user engagement, now advertisers and partners with brand channels can get even more information about their audience. Brand channel owners can track metrics such as how long visitors stay, repeat visits, bounce rate, and page views per visitor. For those who want to tailor their videos to a specific audience, Google Analytics also provides data about where viewers are located geographically, and what languages they speak.

At this point it looks like the new feature will be limited to major brands and partners, and it’s not clear if it will be released to a more general audience. Most people probably wouldn’t care about such specific analytics, but I’m sure quite a few major YouTube users who aren’t necessarily large brands would be interested.

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The future of the weekly city paper is the daily blog. Hints of this future can already be seen at Village Voice Media, which owns and operates 15 of the top weeklies in the country, including the Village Voice, SF Weekly, and LA Weekly. Bill Jensen, the director of new media who oversees all the Village Voice Media sites tells me that 40 percent of pageviews comes from the blogs on the sites, up from 20 percent a year ago. Some of the more popular ones include columnist Michael Musto’s blog, Nikki Finke’s Deadline Holywood Daily, and Topless Robot.

Of course, the sites feature music listings, restaurant reviews, and articles from the print editions as well, but the blogs are driving an increasing portion of the traffic. The online and print newsrooms are combined and everyone is expected to post on the Web. Long gone are the days when a music reviewer could attend a rock show and turn in his copy three days later. “I don’t care how drunk you are,” says Jensen, “you post by 9 AM.”

The weeklies are essentially guides to local nightlife, and nearly all of the advertising is from local businesses (restaurants, bars, concert venues, clubs, local shops). In fact, 90 percent of the online ads across the network are local. Jensen wants to parlay this strength in local advertising, along with the company’s army of nearly 300 ad sales people across its 15 markets, into a local ad network of sorts for blogs which cover similar topics (food, music, gossip). He’s already signed up New York city real-estate blog Curbed, foodie blog the Eater, and music site Wolfgang’s Vault to sell some of their ad inventory. And he is looking to sign up more.

Village Voice Media is getting $7 to $12 CPMs for local ads and $14 CPMs for geo-targeted ads. How much of that participating blogs will get, Jensen wouldn’t say. But not only can Village Voice sell inventory on a blog that writes only about Phoenix restaurants, but it can also show ads from Phoenix advertisers only to Phoenix readers on blogs with a national appeal, such as Topless Robot, which is a more general-interest tech blog.

According to Jensen, Village Voice Media is on track to bring in $20 million in online revenues this year, nearly double from 2008. Although this represents only a little more than 10 percent of the company’s total revenues, it is growing fast. Local ad revenue alone grew 140 percent last year. Content pageviews across the network are on track to top 500 million this year, versus 318 million last year. (Or, an average of 42 million pageviews a month). Total pageviews for the year are on track to hit 4 billion, with the vast majority of that coming from Backpage, its network of online classifieds that is trying to not be crushed by Craigslist. (Backpage is a fraction the size of Craigslist, but it is actually doing okay).

Village Voice is also partnering with local social recommendation site LikeMe, which uses Facebook Connect and asks you to take a survey of local restaurants and hotspost that you like to offer up recommendations of what other people who like the same places also like.

Local online advertising is a nut everyone from Google to Yahoo to the national newspapers are trying to crack. The Village Voice, however, has the feet on the ground in its local markets to sell ads directly to businesses who are still not online. How far it can extend a local-ad network beyond its own sites and topically-related blogs is unclear, but these days in the newspaper industry any extra source of revenues that is not tied to print is something to nurture.

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