Search results for Yahoo

Traffic hacks: Growing your user base at someone else’s expense

Jul 15th

Posted by George Favvas in Customer acquisition

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Most startup entrepreneurs are obsessed – rightly so – with figuring out the magic formula to get their product to go viral. But few are able to launch a product which goes viral completely on its own. Very often, successful products early on have gotten a boost by latching onto another company with more users, money or both. Here are some examples:

Hitching a ride

  • Despite still not being a monetization success, Youtube has been very successful at optimizing for retention and virality. But when Youtube first launched, their founders had to literally beg people to post videos. Is was not until Youtube enabled embedding and users started posting their Youtube videos on Myspace that the service really took off.
  • Location-based games Foursquare and Gowalla are seeing viral growth due in large part to very tight integration with their users’ Facebook and Twitter streams.
  • Without a doubt the most successful company built entirely on top of another social network is Zynga, through their brilliant (but often annoying) deep integration of Farmville and other games with Facebook in a way which enabled them to grow faster than if they had to build their own social graph from scratch.
  • Before Google was what it is today, they powered search on Yahoo!
  • BillShrink scored a marketing coup last year by convincing T-Mobile to plug the site’s cell plan picker because T-Mobile objectively came out on top most of the time. What are the chances the startup would have otherwise afforded a national ad campaign featuring Catherine Zeta-Jones? (See the video at the top of this post.)

There’s nothing wrong with being a plug-in to someone else who can increase your distribution early on. But pinning everything on one partner is a recipe for certain death, which is why all the companies above used their opportunities as a springboard – they embraced, extended and then evolved.

Case in point: When Facebook limited Zynga’s ability to talk to their users directly, and wanted them to migrate to Facebook Credits as a payment platform, they promptly decided to create their own game network. (And it didn’t take long for rumors to circulate about Google investing $100 million into Zynga and planning the launch of Google Games.)

What are some of your favorite traffic hacks? Share them in the comments below.

Special thanks to Peter Pham for previewing and providing feedback on this post.

What Yahoo! Pipes teaches us about entrepreneurship

Feb 20th

Posted by George Favvas in Entrepreneurship

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Almost as interesting as the launch of Yahoo!’s Pipes service — which lets users create their own feeds by combining and processing multiple RSS feeds – is the way in which the project came about. A quick look at the Pipes site and it’s easy to miss the association with Yahoo! The site uses Yahoo! accounts for user management, and sports a tiny “this is Yahoo!” icon at the bottom of the home page, but otherwise does not fit the typical model of what a Yahoo! property looks like, what is does, nor how it integrates with its Yahoo! siblings.

The major web properties have a history of maintaining distinct brands for popular web properties. Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Youtube are prime examples. But these are all properties which were launched independantly and managed to build strong brand awareness before being acquired by their parent.

Pipes, on the other hand, is a Yahoo! baby from the start. It was incubated within Yahoo!’s new Brickhouse division, physically located away from the Yahoo! campus, where teams are given more freedom to think outside the box and experiment.

An article by BusinessWeek, points out how Yahoo! has acknowledged the risks that come with being big:

Yahoo’s brand is another challenge. People associate the company and its trademark yodel with one of the Web’s prime destinations for mail, news, entertainment, and search. But Yahoo’s status as an established, family-oriented, commercial brand can turn away some cutting-edge users.

The article goes on to state that Yahoo! plans to launch additional products off-brand.

Google is known for allowing their staff to spend 20% of their time on personal projects, but the projects that even see the light tend often languish on the Google Labs page.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, is demonstrating a real commitment to allowing innovation to not only take place internally, but also to launch. They are getting edgier and taking more risks. They’re getting traction with new uses of community and social networking concepts — witness the early popularity of Yahoo! Answers, launched as as Google pulled the plug on its equivalent. In short, they are being entrepreneurial. This is great news for Yahoo! and entrepreneurs everywhere who can take a page from their book. Where they go from here will be fun to watch.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing previews new goal-oriented optimization

Oct 25th

Posted by George Favvas in SEM

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Heather Paulson today reports, with screenshots, on a preview of Yahoo!’s new search marketing platform.

For the better part of the last five years, tools made available to search marketers have been focused around the concept of managing bids and budgets.

But marketers are more concerned with goal-oriented metrics: What is my customer acquisition cost? What’s my return on investment? And what’s the volume of customers I can acquire at a given commitment level?

Yahoo!’s search marketing functionality had been sorely lagging its competition’s – they have announced they will finally start factoring ad quality into as ranking in 2007. This puts them back in the game. Expect Google and MSN to follow suit with similar functionality sooner rather than later.