Marc Andreesen’s new thing, Ning, has opened its doors. I played around for a while and liked the concept — essentially a Php, CSS, XHTML playground for building social apps. "Hike Around the Bay Area" sort of things. I signed on for a developer’s account and will mess around with importing the open-source bike ride format off of this blog.
Day: October 4, 2005
Spark Capital launches
Paidcontent sheds some light on the launch of Spark Capital, the $260 million Cambridge VC firm that took an ad out in Monday’s NYT.
"Founders: Dennis Miller, who was executive VP responsible for production and original programming for TNT from 1990-95; Todd Dagres, who notably backed Akamai while a partner at Battery Ventures; and Santo Politi, former president of new media at Blockbuster, who was responsible for figuring out how to move the video-rental giant into digital-broadcasting and VOD services. Other partners include Paul J. Conway, former chief financial officer at Charles River Ventures, and Bijan Sabet, previously an entrepreneur-in-residence at Charles River. "
Smart team with strong heritage. CRV is one of the top tier Boston-area VCs.
Pass-Along Statistics
When I first got sucked into the world of publishing metrics in the mid-90s I was amused by the concept of "pass-along," that completely speculative measure of how many people read a dead-tree publication.
"IN AN EFFORT TO PROVIDE better usage data for advertisers, the Newspaper Association of America Monday launched a new initiative to show advertisers that newspapers’ reach exceeds the number of papers they sell. The semi-annual study, called the Newspaper Audience Database (NADbase), counts the average number of people who read the 100 largest newspapers in the country on a given weekday. Rather than providing circulation data–the usual currency by which newspaper advertising is bought and sold–the NAA study also incorporates "pass-along" data, which refers to the number of people projected to read each copy"
I remember asking the circ director at Forbes if that meant a copy of a mag moldering in the waiting room of a dentist was the most valuable in the world, he laughed, and said most of those magazines were complimentary gifts by the publisher to the doctor for just that reason.
Which gets me back to my ongoing rant about the lunacy of metrics in the dead-tree world versus the over-weening specificity of online. Agencies and clients seeking left-handed Latvians at 3 am feel empowered to demand and get quantitative insights into a site’s traffic logs, while the print world continues to depend on specious syndicated research, porous audience research, and flaky circ numbers that would make Enron’s balance sheet more dependable than the Table of Elements.
Here we sit, in the most measurable medium in the history of media, and people wonder why newspapers are going to hell. It comes down to metrics.
Online up 62% in UK – Passes Outdoors
Internet News Article | Reuters.co.uk Online ad spending in Britain surged 62 percent to more than 490 million pounds in the first half of 2005, the Internet Advertising Bureau said on Monday. According to a study carried out by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the IAB, online advertising has surpassed outdoor ads by market share, 5.8 percent to 5.1 percent, as more marketers have moved their advertising budgets online. Online ads surpassed radio by market share last year.