The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘monthly-uniques’

Larry Cheng, Managing Partner at Volition Capital recently put together a list of the top VC blogs according to traffic. On that list, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is the top VC blogger, followed by Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures and Paul Graham of Y Combinator. But which VC firm Websites attract the most attention?  Today, Cheng released another list.  This time, he ranked technology VC firms by traffic to their websites during the fourth quarter of 2009 (as measured by Compete).

Topping the list is First Round Capital, with 31,632 average monthly uniques. Sequoia Capital, which sports a very spare look on its site with only a searchbox and four faint links underneath (“U.S.,” “Very Early,” “Early,” and “Growth”), has the second-most popular site with 22,441 average monthly uniques.  Rounding out third place is Bessemer Venture Partners with 14,825 average monthly uniques. In order to make the list, the firm’s website had to have monthly unique data from Compete for October, November, and December 2009. Volition Capital averaged the traffic and ranked 150 VC firm sites. Of course, the traffic stats are just one benchmark of popularity, but Cheng did say he will be updating the list quarterly.

These are tiny numbers as far as most Websites go, but these are not consumer-oriented sites. The people who go to the sites are prospective startup founders, partners, and people looking for information on VC portfolio companies. Still, it’s interesting to see that First Round took the top spot; perhaps because its VCs are heavy bloggers. In fact, there seems to be a correlation between blogging and traffic to the related VC website VC and seed firms with investors who blog heavily, such as Founders Fund, Founder Collective, Foundry Group, Union Square, and Spark, all have top 25 websites.

Here’s the list of the top ten:

Venture Capital Firm Directory (Avg. Monthly Uniques – Q409)

1. First Round Capital (31,632)
2. Sequoia Capital (22,441)
3. Bessemer Venture Partners (14,825)
4. Highland Capital Partners (12,704)
5. Garage Technology Ventures (12,375)
6. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (11,823)
7. New Enterprise Associates (11,762)
8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (10,924)
9. Polaris Venture Partners (10,217)
10. Benchmark Capital (10,162)

French game developer Gameloft, listed on Euronext Paris, this afternoon shared its 2009 financial results with the world. The video game publisher achieved consolidated sales of €122.0 million – roughly $170 million – for 2009, up 11% compared to 2008.

The company also specified ‘iPhone revenue’, which presumably means its income from distribution of its games on both the iPhone and iPod Touch: in 2009, that number jumped 231% YOY to reach €17.6 million (approximately $25 million).

Gameloft withdrew from boxed games in January 2009, and says mobile games accounted for 94% of the company’s sales for the whole year. The remaining 6% are related to consoles game sales.

Full-year revenues from the mobile game segment grew by 12%, self-reportedly due to the success of the games the company distributes through Apple’s App Store. To demonstrate its growing importance for the company, you need only look at revenue figures for the fourth quarter of 2009: iPhone revenues for the company reached €7 million ($9.75 million), while initial expectations were €4.4 million.

Total Q4 2009 sales reached €31.8 million ($44.5 million), which means revenues from the App Store are currently about 22% of the company’s total revenue.

Last week, Gameloft CEO Michel Guillemot was quoted as saying that he regards the iPad as massive new opportunity for game developers, and to ’stay tuned’ for upcoming announcements on iPad-specific video games.

Gameloft was founded by the Guillemot brothers, founders and owners of video games leader Ubisoft, and has partnership agreements with carriers, handset manufacturers, specialized distributors in over 100 countries. The company employs some 3,500 developers around the world. For a comprehensive list of games developed by Gameloft, head on over to their Wikipedia profile.

We’re still at The Next Web Conference 2009 here in Amsterdam, and I just ran into Matt Mullenweg from Automattic / WordPress and immediately cornered him, put him against a brick wall outside and got him to answer some questions about the company and WordPress.

The takeaways:

- BuddyPress, which is supposed to transform an installation of WordPress MU into some sort of a white-label social networking platform, is going to be launched ‘relatively shortly’. Mullenweg calls it “Facebook-in-a-box”.

- The latest version of WordPress (version 2.7.1) is seeing about 27,000 downloads a day (the built-in auto updater helps a lot, apparently).

- WordPress.com saw 175,000+ new blog posts from a little under 200,000 bloggers in the last 24 hours (translated to about 44.5 million words) alone. A quick look at the site’s comScore stats pegs monthly uniques to have reached 24.4 million U.S. visitors last month, compared to 48.3 million for Blogger and 13.3 million for Six Apart services. For reference, Facebook’s March traffic was at 61.2 million unique visitors.

- Real-time status updating is not threatening regular blogging, according to Mullenweg. When asked if Twitter is sucking the life out of blogging, he responded that blogging is not slowing down and that the service is actually quite complimentary with WordPress.

- Automattic acquired 3 companies last year (IntenseDebate, PollDaddy and BuddyPress) and is definitely considering doing more of that. Mullenweg says “it’s fun” but that he’s not planning on making any announcements shortly because he’s still waiting for the prices to go down.

Here’s the full interview:

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One of our favorite parlor games here at TechCrunch is trying to guess when exactly Facebook will pass MySpace to become the No. 1 social network in the U.S. by unique visitors. Worldwide, Facebook took that crown long ago (in April, 2008). But in the U.S., MySpace has been more difficult to displace.

At the end of last year, according to comScore, the gap in unique U.S. visitors was just over 20 million in MySpace’s favor. At that time, we projected then-current growth rates for both services and calculated that Facebook would pass MySpace no later than January, 2010. It looks like that estimate might be way too conservative. Today, Facebook has narrowed that gap to 9.1 million unique U.S. visitors, and is now on track to pass MySpace in the U.S. within the next three months.

Based on comScore’s latest March data, 61.2 million individuals visited Facebook in the U.S. during the month, compared to 70.2 million for MySpace. Facebook grew by 3.8 million visitors in the month, up 6.7 percent. Meanwhile, MySpace is losing visitors. In March, it attracted 160,000 fewer U.S. visitors than in February, and a whopping 5.8 million less than in January, when it had 76 million U.S. visitors. MySpace is also languishing internationally (based on February numbers).

If MySpace stays flat or loses more momentum, Facebook should have no trouble catching up to it in the U.S by summer.

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Kosmix, the universal search engine that dynamically generates guides to search queries using dozens of different content sources, is quickly gaining momentum. According to today’s latest comScore numbers, the site has jumped up to 3.2 million monthly uniques in March - a 419% growth since February.

Kosmix is meant to serve as a search engine for when you want to get a quick overview of any topic (In some ways, its approach is similar to Mahalo’s). But unlike Mahalo, all ‘guides’ are built using search algorithms rather than human editors. Data is pulled from a variety of sources, including YouTube, Wikipedia, and news sites to generate each guide. This makes the engine very flexible, as it can attempt to build a page for any search query, but it has also can lead to some quirks - occasionally you’ll find items in a Kosmix page that seem out of place, which human editing would presumably avoid.

But for the most part it works well, and it’s growing quickly. The site began testing its universal search in a private alpha last summer but only began promoting it to the public in December, when it also announced it had closed a $20 million funding round led by Time Warner (the company has raised $55 million since 2005). And while its technology is primarily geared towards search, it is also flexible: last month it launched a personalized newspaper called Meehive, which uses the Kosmix engine.

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The generation gap all too often expresses itself as a technology gap. A survey of white collar workers (most of them in the legal profession) commissioned by NexisLexis offers a glimpse at changing attitudes towards technology between Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and Gen Yers. (Full survey embedded below). One thing Baby Boomers apparently really hate is when the rest of us are not paying attention during meetings and instead checking our e-mail or Twitter accounts on our mobile phones and laptops. A full 69 percent of Baby Boomers surveyed agree that “PDAs and mobile phones contribute to the decline of proper workplace etiquette,” while only 47 percent of Gen Y workers see what is the big deal. (By the way, who says “PDA” anymore? I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that it must have been a Baby Boomer who put together the survey).

Pretty much everybody knows that using a laptop or Blackberry during meetings is downright rude. Even 57 percent of Gen Y respondents think that it is “impolite” (compared to 67 percent of Baby Boomers). But the Gen Y workers surveyed can deal with it better. Only 49 percent find such behavior “distracting,” while 68 percent of Baby Boomers did. And so it goes, younger workers also tend to find such multi-tasking during meetings more productive (Gen Y: 35% versus Boomers: 20%) and efficient (Gen Y: 35%; Boomers: 17%). While Gen Xers find them to be the most unavoidable (29% versus 21% for Gen Y and 17% for Boomers).

Perhaps that is because we rely more on e-mail than Gen Y workers The average Boomer gets the most e-mails per day (69), followed by Gen X (63), and then Gen Y (40). Those number seem awfully low to me. I get more than 69 e-mails an hour (Granted, I am weird).

My advice to anyone who finds Blackberry or laptop use during meetings rude or distracting: have fewer meetings or get to the point faster. Invariably, the conversations people are having on their laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries are increasingly more interesting than the ones that are going on in the room.

Tech Gap Survey - Get more Information Technology

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The integration of shopping and social networking features is not a new phenomenon. eBay launched eBay Neighborhoods a few years ago, Hearst acquired social shopping service Kaboodle, and there’s Jellyfish, which was bought by Microsoft. Retailers themselves have half-heartedly embraced social networking as a marketing tool, adding branded Facebook pages, creating profiles on social networks and posting ads.

Interactive online retail marketing agency Fluid Inc. hopes to take this one step further for retailers. Its “Fluid Social” technology allows for retailers to offer a chat feature on their Websites that integrates shoppers’ Facebook Friends and Groups in order to enhance their online shopping experience.

Here’s how it works. If you see an item you like while browsing a retail site, you can request feedback about a product from your friends by pushing information about the product (such as images from clothing, links to products, and movie clips) to your Facebook status update. Under the product image, you are given the option of clicking on a ‘Share on Facebook’ button and are prompted to add the given retailer’s Facebook application. Once added, you can rate the item and ask for feedback via a link back to the product that is published directly into your status update feed.

Your friends’ comments or ratings on the status update can be seen directly on the product’s page on the retailer’s site and are updated in real-time. The app also lets you invite specific Facebook friends to rate the product without publishing to your status update. Of course, throughout the shopping process, you must be logged into Facebook. Fluid’s technology also allows for real-time chat separate from Facebook. This feature lets you send an email to a friend inviting them to join you in a chat about a product. Once the invitee joins, you can openly chat with them via Facebook Chat on the product page of the site.

This implementation is promising for several reasons. For retailers, these peer-to-peer interactions allows for shoppers to never leave their site to get feedback from friends. For shoppers, it lets them see ratings and comments on specific products from friends whose opinions they value and trust. And the real-time chat let’s you get this information instantaneously. Currently, Fluid has enlisted Vans, Lucky Brand Jeans and Warner Entertainment to incorporate Fluid Social.

Collaborative shopping isn’t new—plenty of retail sites offer live chats with store reps, but the ability to do it directly with your friends and Facebook contacts adds a new twist. With the current drought in consumer retail spending, retailers may be looking for other ways to engage consumers. Fluid says it plans to integrate Twitter into its technology in the near future by allowing users to tweet directly from the retail site as well. Heaven help us.

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