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Posts Tagged ‘ticketmaster’

Menlo Park, CA-based Mayfield Fund, founded over 40 years ago, has officially announced the expansion of its team with two noteworthy Entrepreneurs-in-Residence (EIRs): Sean Moriarty and Rajeev Chawla.

Moriarty is the former CEO and President of Ticketmaster who recently joined Eventbrite as a director. He also served on the boards of iLike (acquired by MySpace last year) and Points.com.

Prior to Ticketmaster, Sean was part of the technology team at Citysearch, where his roles included Executive Vice President of Technology and Vice President of Internet Systems.

Rajeev Chawla founded and is the former President & CEO of NeoPath Networks, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in March 2007.

Mayfield Fund’s portfolio includes companies like Rubicon Project, BigDeal, Gigya, and Jaxtr. The firm has over $2.8 billion under management.

Now that the dust is settling on the newly launched Google Music (if you don’t yet have it in your normal Google search results, you can use it here) that integrates LaLa and iLike/MySpace streaming music, all I can think of is this: What were Facebook and Ticketmaster thinking when they passed up the opportunity to acquire iLike?

MySpace is the big lottery winner here. They bought iLike for $20 million in August. What they got: a talented (literally) team that is starting to fill the executive ranks at MySpace, the biggest music application on Facebook, and, it turns out, a deal with Google that is now sending massive traffic flow directly to MySpace Music.

Our understanding from sources is that MySpace made an offer to iLike without knowing about the Google deal. Supposedly, since iLike was under NDA, all they knew was that iLike had a big partnership opportunity with a partner, nothing more. In hindsight the iLike deal looks smart even without Google. Add that deal in and it looks absolutely brilliant. I’m no fan of MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, but I’ll give the man credit here.

Giving Facebook The Benefit Of The Doubt

Facebook decided not to aggresively pursue iLike. They seem to have firmly moved away from any desire to deal with content directly, so this looks less like a mistake and more like a strategic decision.

But one thing is clear. Facebook utterly failed to execute on their music strategy from last year, even while trying to work via a partner application to avoid direct contact with content. Meanwhile, Google stepped in and quickly brought streaming music directly to users, without paying anything at all for it.

iLike CEO and now MySpace exec Ali Partovi, speaking at the launch event last night, didn’t hold any punches against Facebook. He gave huge credit to Google for pulling off a win-win-win-win (labels, google, users, MySpace/LaLa) in the difficult online music space. And he noted that “others have tried or are still trying and have failed miserably.” He was quite clearly referring to Facebook.

The truth is that we don’t know if Facebook flailed on a huge opportunity to get into the Google search stream, or if they just decided they don’t want the hassle of dealing with music directly. We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. And they certainly had no idea of the Google deal back when they were trying to buy iLike anyway.

Ticketmaster Flubs It

None of Facebook’s excuses (didn’t know about the Google deal, strategically not what they want, etc.) apply to Ticketmaster. The company was a big shareholder in iLike, had a board seat, and certainly new every detail of the Google deal. They could easily have acquired iLike, probably for not much more cash than the $13.3 million they already had invested. But instead they let the company go to MySpace, knowing full well that they were enabling a huge potential competitor.

If Ticketmaster had acquired iLike all that Google music search traffic would be under their control. Click throughs to the iLike site could be monetized through event ticket sales. It would probably be a matter of months, not years, before they got their investment back in additional ticket sales.

And what’s worse is that MySpace now controls all that traffic. MySpace actually has a much more complete worldwide database of concert events than even Ticketmaster has, and they already flow through a lot of traffic to ticket sales at Ticketmaster and competitors. Now that database is combined with iLike’s impressive concert discovery and alert product. When you plug Google search traffic into all of that, it’s got to be scary for Ticketmaster:

“MySpace has the world’s largest database of live events, and iLike has already built some of the world’s best concert-discovery features available online,” Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music, wrote in a blog post. “We’re delighted to have implemented the first structured integration of concert data into Google search, and this is only the beginning of our efforts to innovate in the live event space.”

We frankly can’t see any reason at all for Ticketmaster to let iLike go to a potential competitor, particularly with this Google deal locked up. Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff certainly knew what was happening. So why did he make such a huge misstep? Possibly because he’s in the middle of a divestiture of topline assets as part of a merger with Live Nation. Azoff is rumored to be looking for a huge personal payout as part of that deal, and may even be spinning himself off along with assets.

In other words, maybe Azoff couldn’t care less about the future of Ticketmaster.

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This is a guest post by Nabeel Hyatt, Founder and CEO of Conduit Labs, which is the creator of Loudcrowd and other social games that help you experience music with your friends. His personal blog can be found at nabeelhyatt.com and he can be followed on Twitter @nabeel.

Yesterday, Facebook announced they are going to drastically alter the way applications can message users once again, likely throwing a wrench into every app developers’ growth rate. Hints of the coming turmoil appeared last week when Facebook changed the way feeds work. This caused enough worry that apparently Mark Pincus, Founder/CEO of Zynga, canceled his appearance at Harvard Business School so he could sit with his team and figure out what the impact would be to the viral rates of their massive hits such as Farmville and Cafe World. That’s not surprising, since getting posts in the feed is critical to continued growth, but the myopic focus on the “viral rate” by some in the industry has created an over-dependence on perhaps the wrong number.

(As an aside, those who complain about Facebook being an unreliable channel to build a business off of should try dealing with a retailer such as Best Buy. They will be happy to take a 50% cut of your revenue and then one week decide to eliminate your entire section of products and ship them back to you. Oh, and they’ll bill you for the shipping.)

In all the talks about virality the general focus is on the new, clever, and sometimes underhanded ways to increase your viral rate. What gets lost is the core message that, as Siqi Chen of Serious Business puts it, viral messaging tactics are just a force multiplier on the inherent viralness of your product. Or, in simpler terms, how good your product is in the eyes of your users actually is the most important thing. Viral messaging is just a way of greasing the skids on that user’s intent. It is an important later step, but not the root.

And how do we measure that intent? It turns out that in Facebook at least, the level of retention is the best public number to predict likelihood of a hit.

Real retention numbers for other people’s products are notoriously hard to come by, but in Facebook there is good 30 day retention data called the DAU/MAU Ratio – which can also be called Stickiness. This is the ratio of Daily Active Users to Monthly Active Users. For example, a DAU/MAU ratio of 50% would mean that the average user of your app is using it 15 out of 30 days that month.

It turns out this simple metric is enough to predict, with a high level of probability, the success of a product. For example, look at the correlation between the following set of Facebook games.

Here we have games that fit a broad set of criteria, in terms of brand association, demographic appeal, play style, and time since launch. See how the second column and the fourth column are almost perfectly in order? Despite this broad cross-section of games it appears there is a very direct correlation between stickiness and success. Let’s take a deeper view of the data.

For those who aren’t stat geeks, this is called the coefficient of determination (R2) and predicts whether two correlated data sets accurately predict future success. If everything lined up perfectly on the linear regression line above you would have an R2 value of 1, and then we could say there is a perfect correlation between Stickiness (x axis) and the Size of the app (y axis). Using these social games we have a rather astonishing “fit” of 0.77.

Stepping back, this data is quite remarkable actually, since you would expect Stickiness to go down as you get huge. It would stand to reason that your 20 millionth user, who might be experiencing their first Facebook game, is going to be harder to retain than your 1,000th. The fact that this is not happening yet, that no one has found the edge of users where suddenly retention metrics collapse, says something very powerful indeed about the potential size of the social gaming market.

But it isn’t the market size implications that are the big takeaway, the relationship between Stickiness and success is. This of course will also cause a messaging arms race around retention, and the prevalence of Free Gifts is a good example of that already happening. But just as with the viral rate it’s important to remember those are all simply tactics to enhance a products inherent retention. The clear inference is that building something users love to come back to is the best predictor of success.

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iLike, the popular music discovery site with a huge presence on social networks, is launching a set of new syndication services for musicians. Beginning tonight, iLike now offers extensive integration with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, allowing artists to distribute content to each of their online presences from a single control panel. In addition to these, the company is also launching a new self-serve platform for building customized iPhone applications for artists, allowing them to establish themselves on the App Store with a minimum amount of effort and resources.

While most readers probably associate iLike with music playlists and streaming, the service is also home to 300,000 artists who use its services to help manage and distrbute their content. Before today’s annoucement, the service offered more limited syndication options, allowing them send data through the iLike Facebook application, its iGoogle widget, and an iTunes plugin. But the new options go much further.

One of the most significant changes is the release of a new ‘Music’ tab for an artist’s Facebook pages, which will allow them to incorporate their music, videos, and concert information (previously artists would have to rely on the iLike Facebook application). The service has also expanded its support for Twitter, allowing artists to import their Tweets from elsewhere and distribute them to their social network profiles, or to syndicate them directly from the iLike dashboard.

Other additions abound: artists can now sync their videos between YouTube and iLike, so they won’t have to post them in multiple places. They can create their own ‘dot-com’ websites, which they can manage from the iLike dashboard. They can syndicate their content directly to their Ticketmaster profile pages. And iLike’s concert app and event pages on MySpace have also gotten a boost, allowing fans to purchase tickets directly without having to go elsewhere and including more social features (like being able to see who else is going to a certain concert).

Finally, in what is easily the biggest departure for the company, iLike is also rolling out a platform that will allow artists to create their own iPhone applications, which can include dynamically updated photos, music, blog posts, and other content (you can see a demo of the app below). iLike is charging artists a one-time fee of $99, and will also participate in a rev-share deal for those that want to charge for their applications (the current plan is for a 50/50 split). Artists that give their application away for free will only have to pay the initial fee. The iPhone is quickly becoming a very popular and powerful way to connect with fans, and there’s no doubt even smaller bands are eager to appear in the App Store. But iLike won’t be alone in trying to tackle this market - other companies like Mobile Roadie and Kyte are offering similar platforms for building custom iPhone apps.

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Twitter is officially getting dumbed down.

For the second time in less than two months, Twitter has changed its @reply system, this time by removing an option that has existed for many months in an effort to appease confused newcomers.

The basic premise behind the @reply system is that it allows you to create a semi-public conversation with another Twitter user. To prevent you from having to listen in to conversations you might not care about, the default setting has long been to only show these @replies if you were following both people in the conversation. And that’s the choice most people stuck with.

But there was an option to receive all @reply messages from any users you were following. This led to an increase in noise, but it also exposed you to new Twitter users and conversations that you might have otherwise missed out on. I’ve had it turned on for over a year. But apparently that option has confused too many people, so Twitter is killing it.

From the Twitter blog:

We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow—it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.

Confused? That’s understandable and exactly why we made the update.

Gee, thanks Twitter. I didn’t realize that an option I manually activated was undesirable. Any other things I shouldn’t like that you’d like to make me aware of?

If there was anything undesirable about the old system, it was that Twitter did a poor job of explaining it, not that the functionality itself was unwanted. And given that the option was not the default and was buried under a settings menu, why would it matter anyway? If too many people are getting confused, why not simply make it more hidden (perhaps under an ‘advanced’ tab)?

In the months since Twitter has grown in mainstream appeal, and especially since it made its debut on Oprah, some of Twitter’s early adopters have expressed fear over a change in the service. With a growing number of celebrities and media presences (not to mention spammers), they worry that the service will lose its tight-knit feel. Before tonight I never paid much attention to this train of thought - after all, on Twitter, I can just follow the people I care about and ignore those I don’t. But it’s clear that Twitter is concerned with appealing to a more mainstream audience, and if that takes making a very simple service even more simple, then by golly, that’s what they’re going to do.

Update 1: Many Twitter users are up in arms about the change, voicing their complaints under the channel #fixreplies, which is currently the top trending term on Twitter.

Update 2: Twitter CEO Evan Williams just tweeted about the change: “Reading people’s thoughts on the replies issue. We’re considering alternatives. Thanks for your feedback.”

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