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A Yahoo update, Bing in depth, and Reddit’s escape velocity

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Yahoo Update

As has been reported at length, Yahoo’s board fired the company’s CEO, who fired back with an infamous email and a furious interview with Fortune. Yahoo’s board is now rumored to be considering spinoffs, divestitures, or a buyout, especially with the encouragement of their 5.1% owner, the activist hedge fund Third Point.

As a Yahoo employee, I can’t comment on any of this, of course, except to note that it’s been an interesting first week.

Google Author Markup as a Spam Vector

Michael Gray has a good overview of how Google Author markup could be used for spamming. Or, less cynically, how it could be used for traditional SEO. Author markup seems to function like domain trust, except without the domain part: it’s an exclusive attribute that’s meant to signal that the owner of that identity is willing to bet its reputation on whatever piece of content it’s attached to.

Bing’s Algorithm in Depth

This interview with Bing’s Duane Forrester is worth reading and re-reading. The most surprising part: Bing’s indexing is actually more elegant than Google’s. Bing doesn’t bother to keep pages or domains in their index if they see that user’s don’t care. At the same time, they’re more willing to give new content a chance.

This won’t necessarily last. Bing can do this kind of thing because it’s the underdog; Google is—and should be—much more reluctant to risk the perceived quality of their rankings, even if it means they gather data more slowly. Since Bing’s brand name is less valuable, and since they’re already at a data-gathering disadvantage to Google, this works out fine for them.

Google Buys Zagat

Google has purchased proto-Yelp restaurant review aggregator Zagat. This contradicts our earlier notion that they had aggregated reviews to bootstrap their way into having enough Google-owned reviews that they could offer just those. Perhaps Google has decided that their reviews aren’t performing well enough. Or perhaps this was a longer-term plan; this deal could have been gestating since before Google stopped scraping other sites’ reviews.

Picking Apart Target’s New Site

AuthorityLabs brutally analyzes the new Target.com. Most of these criticisms are fair (and some are the kind of things that can be trivially fixed: removing out-of-stock items from search results is trivial, for example). But one thing they get wrong is the argument for displaying ads on e-commerce sites. Amazon—the user interface A/B testing built—does this, because it generally pays off. Users who want to buy don’t click on the ads; users who click on the ads weren’t going to buy. On the other hand, people browsing Amazon.com are certainly more likely than the rest of the web population to a) have a credit card, and b) be somewhat inclined to use it right at that moment. So the ads pay off pretty well.

Putting ads on e-commerce pages is so blatantly ridiculous that there are only two reasons to do it: either it tests better than the alternative, or it’s safe to copy someone who already tested it.

Facebook Launches Direct Music Sales

Facebook is now selling tracks directly through artist pages, for the standard 30% cut. As with other Facebook products, this is pretty self-serve; Facebook is letting artists pick their own pricing and run their own sales strategy. It will be tough for them to overcome Apple’s walled-garden approach: iTunes is clearly a better-designed music-selling service, for the moment, and they can easily copy and ubiquitize any innovations that Facebook artists discover.

It will be interesting to see what happens when an independent artist gets popular mostly through Facebook, and then declines for whatever reason to get on iTunes.

Reddit Partially Spins Off

Link-sharing site reddit.com has been incorporated as a subsidiary of Conde Nast, five years after being acquired. Reddit is still a fascinating site and an advertising connundrum; more so than other audiences, Reddit’s readers want to be specifically pandered to. That makes it a durable community, but makes it very hard to scalably advertise to. If reddit is just one more media buy, it’s going to be a flop. Reddit’s next CEO won’t just need to know how to sell ads; they’ll need to find someone who knows how to sell people on truly weird one-off ads.

General Assembly Raises a Round

Startup workspace / hackspace / learning space General Assembly has raised a round in order to expand to new locations and potentially roll out some products. This is yet another successful “meta-startup.” In GA’s case, they’re a pretty pure market company: their value-add consists mostly of bringing together smart, ambitious people who will do the value-adding for one another. It’s coincidental that GA also gets revenue from education; the best analogy is that they’re disaggregating elite universities. They’re selling the surroundings and the network; the classes are (even more) optional.

TechCrunch Update

CrunchFund has made its first investment. And Fortune argues that the end of TechCrunch would be a good thing. It’s fair to say that the end of TechCrunch would be good for some people, but the institution is valuable to everyone: Arrington is as influential as someone in his position can get, so there are some stories that simply would not break without him. He may have gotten there much more cynically than, say, the excellent Kara Swisher, but he’s still performing a valuable service. But no one wants to be the first to say that they’re willing to kiss the ring as long as it means we get a Pope.

Full Disclosure

I work for Yahoo, and am a shareholder. So I have an incentive to make them look good, but I also have an incentive to see them run well. In addition, I’ve taught classes at General Assembly, and will likely continue to do so.


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