Friendfeed on the road to monetization
Translation: Roman Yuriev, toodoo is a social network of website users, especially for Habrahabr
Recently, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor (Bret Taylor) talked about the first months of the existence of an aggregation service. He explained what the site team is trying to achieve, developing the service, and also what to expect from FriendFeed while the network plans its monetization and increases the user base. Investor Jeff Clavier from Soft Tech VC, developer from Pownce Leah Culver and French entrepreneur Loic le Mer (Loic) participated in this panel discussion conducted by Kara Swisher, which represents the All Things Digital conference. Le Meur) from Seesmic.
I visited this discussion and took notes directly in my notebook, i.e. all the quotes were saved in the best way.
')
In the presentation, Bret said that FriendFeed now has 43 different services and stores information about more than 100 million users on the Internet. The service was originally designed to provide content search and its consumption in social media through the exchange of data from friends and people of the same circle.
Before an audience at Stanford University's School of Business at Stanford, Bret, using Apple's Keynote program, described the site’s response to stories about the growth of his traffic on Tech Crunch and the New York Times. The activity of users as a result of publications decreased, and it took the team four months to restore it. During this period, the site staff used different strategies: excitement, scientific approach, and even experienced a decline in business activity. At the same time, the team openly discussed their possible wrong steps based on the success stories of Google products. However, some time later in 2008, traffic began to be generated again with increasing force. The most active period was from March to June, during which the joy of the FriendFeed employees turned into a panic. This happened when they planned to differentiate their product and guarantee the speed and reliability of the site in terms of its unprecedented demand.
When the opportunity arose using FriendFeed to highlight your favorite sites or comment on the preferences of friends, they began to talk about the service. It turned from a simple aggregator into a portal that was visited by many. However, Bret noted that the team did not foresee such a success. Employees have not worked too hard to develop these features.
Taylor said the following: “The discussions that took place on our site were the only determinant of its growth. It was interesting to observe this process, and in retrospect it seems that his role was obvious. But he was one of the most underdeveloped services on our site. ”
Also, FriendFeed was praised for its high-performance feature “Hide”, thanks to which you can block individual publications, images or services. However, users continued to ask for improved message filtering and improved search for interesting (or uninteresting) information for them. But so far the team is still catching up. Bret added: “As a result, for about a year of our existence, we paid less attention to the relevance of information, and more to filtering tools. We are working on relevance now. This is reflected in the different ways visitors use the Feedreader program. Many see it as a mailbox, and some want to be shown everything that might interest them right now. ”
Swisher asked a question that excites many. “Are there as many sites on the Internet today as there were calendar sites in the era of Web 1.0?” She noted that there might be only three of them by the end of the Web 2.0 period. And one with horizontal search, like Google, will get the lion’s share of the market.
Bret replied that livestreaming (information about what friends are doing on the Internet) is a new category of service. For many, it is perfectly normal to have a problem finding content. With the advent of aggregation like RSS or social networks, in his opinion, even the smallest difference between services matters. On the Internet, natural fragmentation has long existed, which allows niche sites to succeed. However, Taylor warned about resources that add too many features and because of this, they miss their main function. He said: “Each application grows until it turns into an email. Each site develops until it becomes a social network. ”
Every week someone says that it would be nice to sell FriendFeed. And the buyer's name is obvious: Google. It was in the search engine team that FriendFeed employees previously worked. But Taylor himself and Paul Buchayt (Paul Buchheit), the creator of Gmail, note the following. The plan is not to sell the company. Even if the path to success is not so easy.
Bret thinks so. “We are not interested in selling. We wanted to create our own culture, a self-sufficient company. We have different concepts for the development of a large-scale company. We plan to turn it into a service that has weight. ”
According to Bret, $ 5 million of the initial investment received in the spring was given in light of the economic downturn. Thanks to financing, the company was able to work productively for quite a long time before the funds run out. The team hoped to find a good way to generate profit through advertising that would not bother users. In response to questions from Kara, Swisher Taylor said: "There is a huge range of effective ways to advertise." These are advertisements with a large number of clicks on a banner (like Google AdWords), and less targeted ones (like AdSense), whose performance indicators are low. Their views are generated by random clicks. In his opinion, FriendFeed was somewhere in the middle, but, hopefully, on the way to the right choice. (In this case, if the links were embedded in the service supported by advertisers, they would be located directly among the information about users, and not on the sides of the pages of the site.)
Swisher teased participants in the discussion, calling FriendFeed a company that could not provide investors with adequate profit information. Bret noted that the key factor in launching a website in a Web 2.0 environment is precisely the measurability and the ability to evaluate its performance. “Monetization does not make sense when the service has only a couple of thousand users. This is too early, and the behavior of early followers is not typical of the main audience of the network. ” Bret recalled the early success of the Overture search engine and the Google AdWords contextual advertising service. Thanks to them, a measurable advertising market has been developed. However, he admitted that the team still has little idea how the ads on FriendFeed will work. “We want to experiment in order not to lose money before we need to invest. We need a balanced business. ”
Bret clearly hinted at the site’s plans to improve the relevance of the information and help users find the right data in the general stream. The site recently published the heading "The best publications of the day", thanks to which users will be able to use the "wisdom of the crowd." Moreover, this feature can be improved. Obviously, the placement on the site advertising is not far off, but it will not happen this minute. After all, the company continues to gain weight in terms of users, and only then will it start to take care of generating revenues. Taylor also noted a search engine that only lists data related to the user's friends. However, this service can also be improved, since skipping the result in FriendFeed can have more serious consequences than if the user does not notice the result of Google search. He also spoke about focusing attention on the qualitative performance of one function. That is, it is quite possible that those wishing to get the opportunity to correspond with FriendFeed with friends may not get what they want.
The only thing that FriendFeed employees will never do is obedience to the wishes of early users - technology fanatics, who sometimes can be very demanding. Although Seesmic CEO Loic le Mer (Loic LeMeur) believes that “technology fans will force FriendFeed to fulfill their demands,” Cara still disagrees with him. She says that this group of users is not big enough to make a start from her. According to her, this is just a group of 14 white guys with excess weight.
Recently, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor (Bret Taylor) talked about the first months of the existence of an aggregation service. He explained what the site team is trying to achieve, developing the service, and also what to expect from FriendFeed while the network plans its monetization and increases the user base. Investor Jeff Clavier from Soft Tech VC, developer from Pownce Leah Culver and French entrepreneur Loic le Mer (Loic) participated in this panel discussion conducted by Kara Swisher, which represents the All Things Digital conference. Le Meur) from Seesmic.I visited this discussion and took notes directly in my notebook, i.e. all the quotes were saved in the best way.
')
In the presentation, Bret said that FriendFeed now has 43 different services and stores information about more than 100 million users on the Internet. The service was originally designed to provide content search and its consumption in social media through the exchange of data from friends and people of the same circle.
Crazy growth after a slow start
Before an audience at Stanford University's School of Business at Stanford, Bret, using Apple's Keynote program, described the site’s response to stories about the growth of his traffic on Tech Crunch and the New York Times. The activity of users as a result of publications decreased, and it took the team four months to restore it. During this period, the site staff used different strategies: excitement, scientific approach, and even experienced a decline in business activity. At the same time, the team openly discussed their possible wrong steps based on the success stories of Google products. However, some time later in 2008, traffic began to be generated again with increasing force. The most active period was from March to June, during which the joy of the FriendFeed employees turned into a panic. This happened when they planned to differentiate their product and guarantee the speed and reliability of the site in terms of its unprecedented demand.
Errors and oversights in the development of services
When the opportunity arose using FriendFeed to highlight your favorite sites or comment on the preferences of friends, they began to talk about the service. It turned from a simple aggregator into a portal that was visited by many. However, Bret noted that the team did not foresee such a success. Employees have not worked too hard to develop these features.
Taylor said the following: “The discussions that took place on our site were the only determinant of its growth. It was interesting to observe this process, and in retrospect it seems that his role was obvious. But he was one of the most underdeveloped services on our site. ”
Also, FriendFeed was praised for its high-performance feature “Hide”, thanks to which you can block individual publications, images or services. However, users continued to ask for improved message filtering and improved search for interesting (or uninteresting) information for them. But so far the team is still catching up. Bret added: “As a result, for about a year of our existence, we paid less attention to the relevance of information, and more to filtering tools. We are working on relevance now. This is reflected in the different ways visitors use the Feedreader program. Many see it as a mailbox, and some want to be shown everything that might interest them right now. ”
Fighting rivals on all sides
Swisher asked a question that excites many. “Are there as many sites on the Internet today as there were calendar sites in the era of Web 1.0?” She noted that there might be only three of them by the end of the Web 2.0 period. And one with horizontal search, like Google, will get the lion’s share of the market.
Bret replied that livestreaming (information about what friends are doing on the Internet) is a new category of service. For many, it is perfectly normal to have a problem finding content. With the advent of aggregation like RSS or social networks, in his opinion, even the smallest difference between services matters. On the Internet, natural fragmentation has long existed, which allows niche sites to succeed. However, Taylor warned about resources that add too many features and because of this, they miss their main function. He said: “Each application grows until it turns into an email. Each site develops until it becomes a social network. ”
About independence
Every week someone says that it would be nice to sell FriendFeed. And the buyer's name is obvious: Google. It was in the search engine team that FriendFeed employees previously worked. But Taylor himself and Paul Buchayt (Paul Buchheit), the creator of Gmail, note the following. The plan is not to sell the company. Even if the path to success is not so easy.
Bret thinks so. “We are not interested in selling. We wanted to create our own culture, a self-sufficient company. We have different concepts for the development of a large-scale company. We plan to turn it into a service that has weight. ”
Finding a balanced business model
According to Bret, $ 5 million of the initial investment received in the spring was given in light of the economic downturn. Thanks to financing, the company was able to work productively for quite a long time before the funds run out. The team hoped to find a good way to generate profit through advertising that would not bother users. In response to questions from Kara, Swisher Taylor said: "There is a huge range of effective ways to advertise." These are advertisements with a large number of clicks on a banner (like Google AdWords), and less targeted ones (like AdSense), whose performance indicators are low. Their views are generated by random clicks. In his opinion, FriendFeed was somewhere in the middle, but, hopefully, on the way to the right choice. (In this case, if the links were embedded in the service supported by advertisers, they would be located directly among the information about users, and not on the sides of the pages of the site.)
Swisher teased participants in the discussion, calling FriendFeed a company that could not provide investors with adequate profit information. Bret noted that the key factor in launching a website in a Web 2.0 environment is precisely the measurability and the ability to evaluate its performance. “Monetization does not make sense when the service has only a couple of thousand users. This is too early, and the behavior of early followers is not typical of the main audience of the network. ” Bret recalled the early success of the Overture search engine and the Google AdWords contextual advertising service. Thanks to them, a measurable advertising market has been developed. However, he admitted that the team still has little idea how the ads on FriendFeed will work. “We want to experiment in order not to lose money before we need to invest. We need a balanced business. ”
What's next?
Bret clearly hinted at the site’s plans to improve the relevance of the information and help users find the right data in the general stream. The site recently published the heading "The best publications of the day", thanks to which users will be able to use the "wisdom of the crowd." Moreover, this feature can be improved. Obviously, the placement on the site advertising is not far off, but it will not happen this minute. After all, the company continues to gain weight in terms of users, and only then will it start to take care of generating revenues. Taylor also noted a search engine that only lists data related to the user's friends. However, this service can also be improved, since skipping the result in FriendFeed can have more serious consequences than if the user does not notice the result of Google search. He also spoke about focusing attention on the qualitative performance of one function. That is, it is quite possible that those wishing to get the opportunity to correspond with FriendFeed with friends may not get what they want.
The only thing that FriendFeed employees will never do is obedience to the wishes of early users - technology fanatics, who sometimes can be very demanding. Although Seesmic CEO Loic le Mer (Loic LeMeur) believes that “technology fans will force FriendFeed to fulfill their demands,” Cara still disagrees with him. She says that this group of users is not big enough to make a start from her. According to her, this is just a group of 14 white guys with excess weight.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/40596/
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