@ Thursday, Apr. 16, 2009 – 21:29:50
Zoopla has been busy in recent weeks - and not 'just' with valuing 26m homes...
Launched property for sale and to rent listings
New company property blog
1000+ followers on Twitter
Cool new property widgets which you should definitely take advantage of if you run your own property or local site or blog.
@ Wednesday, Sep. 10, 2008 – 18:52:08
One thing that continues to fascinate me on the web are the number of sites out there that are able to earn a very nice income for a one-man-band (or woman, but most of them seem to be guys) by re-publishing existing free or cheap data sources, driving traffic through SEO, and making money through ads - principally Google AdSense, which if optimised and prominent can earn around a $5 CPM.
House prices is an area I look at a lot and there are at least 5 of these sites out there in the UK, buying the sold house prices England and Wales Land Registry data for a small fee, publishing to get traffic through SEO, then sending out the odd email newsletter to boost traffic to their AdSense pages. However, in this case it looks like UK House Prices site Zoopla is set to take much of their property price search business away by adding value to the data, through their property valuation algorithm, free house price estimates and other richer content.
Another related SEO property data catalogue you find everywhere is that for estate agents. There are around 15,000 estate agents in the UK, and so everyone from email4property to Zoopla to Rightmove to TouchLocal can generate agent SEO traffic - and even sell advertising or leads - by publishing a list of their contact details.
Other sectors where I see a lot of these AdSense entrepreneurs doing a great trade are business listings sites and directories, health sites like free calorie counters, and sports sites. Then there are those who take some initial database and add user-generated content and reviews - anything from classifieds to parenting to the thousands of niche forums out there.
It seems what you need is a free or near-free database source with real search traffic and lots of SEO-friendly information. I wonder what other databases there are out there worth re-publishing.
I also wonder what sectors out there are doing "dumb" re-publishing like in house prices, where there is room for another Zoopla-style play that adds value.
@ Sunday, Jan. 29, 2006 – 08:49:27
I wrote a long post about Rightmove's IPO back in August. It now looks like with the crazy bubble in UK classifieds it may fetch as much as £400M in a spring offering. That will make struggling owners like Countrywide very happy - in fact their stake in Rightmove could be as much as 20% of their current market cap.
This bubble has seen the UK media companies, scared witless of online eating their lunch, buying up the likes of findaproperty and primelocation for some very generous valuations over the last 18 months. But at £400M (at least 50x 2006 earnings), Rightmove is probably too steep for them.
Rightmove is a clear number one - as Alexa shows - but how much of this is due to expensive TV campaigns and its closed relationship with its estate agent owners?
It will be great - if they do make it to IPO without a scared media baron diving in - to have another UK internet stock. Although not a very sexy one.
PS 2 years on - check out Zoopla for House prices and UK property value estimates
@ Sunday, Jan. 29, 2006 – 08:31:45
Google Pack looks like a very useful software bundle. It also looks like one step nearer a complete desktop solution, which if I was Bill Gates would make me very fidgety indeed. Adobe, RealNetworks, Norton, Lavasoft - also a list of the few viable software companies Microsoft never gobbled up, sidling up to Google.
This, along with the My Google stealth programme, forcing me to merge my different Google accounts and tenaciously remembering my postcode / zipcode, smells like another step in the Google Gets Evil plan. Google hasn't been so good at integrating all its different cool products and ideas, or at giving each user a single view of all their Google options. That's changing, fast. Google is packing.
@ Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006 – 18:51:46
Brandchannel.com just released their most influential brands of 2005. No surprise: Google top (GGE 
). Apple second. But Skype third is more surprising and pretty cool if you own stock in eBay like me ;-) Clearly this was voted for by cool, slightly-but-not-too tekky media and advertising folk. But it's still thought-provoking.
You can see the full rankings here
Interesting how branding ain't that global; that BBC is a big brand (government owned after all); Nokia still top in Europe despite a shaky year; Firefox is top ten; and craigslist and Wholefoods (used to be my local in Evanston) continuing to make waves in the US. Bono is also a global brand apparently, sounds like a brand of dog food to me 
@ Sunday, Jan. 22, 2006 – 18:28:35
Great post by Adam Mills in The Web Review listing 2005 Acquisitions by Google, eBay, Yahoo, IAC, AOL, NewsCorp etc in the web 2.0 space, including Urchin, Flickr, Blo.gs, Gumtree etc
Urchin looks like a real bargain for Google at $30M, they have decimated the competition and really added to their webmaster suite of services by making it free and calling it Google Analytics! Smart move, although demand has overwhelmed them I think and it could be another step in the GGE campaign (Google Gets Evil).
Other transactions worth looking at in 2005 from a UK perspective include old line media company purchases of classifieds sites like smartnewhomes, primelocation, findaproperty in real estate and also in jobs. These guys are one step behind though.
Anyone got any interesting info on the "undisclosed" transaction amounts?
@ Sunday, Jan. 08, 2006 – 12:32:51
Just a big ad for Yahoo or an interesting independent assessment of the best of UK web 2.0 in 2005? If this is the best innovation our Venture Capital, blogging and entrepreneurial community can deliver, it may be time to quit now!
I found out this week that Gumtree had been nominated for best Community site in these awards. My first task then is to ask you to please vote for Gumtree as the People's Choice.
Plug over. Now some observations on the state of the UK web from the other Community nominations:
Can Do Exchange - freecycle meets keen.com. "Service" exchanges and marketplaces have been tried for the last 10 years, everyone thinks they're a great idea and yet they never work big time. Not much traction for this one yet either.
Londonist - part of Gothamist, a "worldwide" network of city blog sites, trying to become the blogger version of the Metro I guess. Interesting global-local twist, but I didn't find it sticky.
Flickr - hardly fair for Yahoo to nominate their own global photo-sharing community web2.0 tagging phenomenon as the UK's best community site. It is damned good though.
Treasure My Text - The next killer storage application? A huge base to expand into mobile services? Or the world's most rambling collection of horribly misspelt haikus?
The other categories - entertainment, celebrity, tv and travel etc don't pique my interest so much. They're OK for an idle Friday afternoon I suppose but hardly original. Just a couple of favourites that buck the trend:
Future Me - Utility to send yourself/others email in the future. Maybe to make your boss think you're working when on holiday?
Live Plasma - Mind maps of music, movies and stuff you like, so you can find more like it. Integrate this with MySpace or similar music communities and you are getting into truly coooooolll-land.
Come on UK bloggers, VCs and webtrepreneurs - I wanna see us leading the US next year, not presenting this miserable cluster of half-innovation.
@ Friday, Sep. 09, 2005 – 08:13:59
Lots of rumours about and a rich price tag for a company with $70M in revenue. Most people don't get it, hence a dip in eBay's stock. Why?
This would be a fascinating development in the context of my last post on Google Talk and pay per call.
It could bring eBay into even more direct competition with Google and Yahoo as a forum for small business advertisers too. A lot of people are talking about customer service benefits for eBay - there's also a huge P2P network,a micropayments play and a pay per call ad network play. eBay is in the business of attracting massive consumer audiences, enabling transactions and charging businesses for access to them - so is Skype, PayPal, shopping.com and incidentally so is Google. eBay didn't buy Google 5 years ago when it could have; perhaps they will not repeat the mistake.
@ Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005 – 13:22:03
The net has gone crazy this week with hype about Google Talk, Google's newly announced and released Instant Messenging / Voice over IP product. But some big implications have not been picked up widely: open IM networks and pay-per-call voice advertising.
Yes, Google wants to compete with the hype that is Skype. Yes, it is making a direct competitive play with MSN, Yahoo and AOL's millions of installed instant messenging customers. And in both segments, it's coming from behind. Yes, it can sell ads on Google talk. But this is all "me too".
Voice over IP is the future. In fact, it's pretty much here now. The problem is, there's not much cash in these consumer-to-consumer calls: worldwide prices are falling anyway, and while the pure-plays can beat British Telecom on cost structure, at the end of the day it's a commodity product. Although it would be kind of cool / scary to be able to Google search your phone calls ;-)
The first really interesting implication for me is around open networks - Google is using XMPP, an open source, XML-based protocol which could in theory open up the various instant messenging networks to each other, something that Yahoo/MSN/AOL have resisted. Whether it will succeed in getting these opened remains to be seen.
The second is around advertising and in particular pay-per-call. The reason that Google and Overture exist as businesses is performance-based, pay-per click online advertising. I pay you to deliver a customer to my site. But still 90% of businesses would pay more for a phone call than a click. As an estate agent, car dealer or plumber, do I really care about clicks? Calls are much more valuable, and I'll pay more for them. Although it's early days and the business models are still evolving, start-ups like Ingenio and eStara are proving this. Try a search for "mortgage california" on AOLsearch and look at the Ernest Loans ad that comes up from Ingenio to see what I mean.
Google or Skype's voice network and millions of voice users, could be a huge strategic asset in pay-per-call for the next wave of online advertising, integrating web and voice.
Yahoo has announced that it has just started trialling eStara's pay-per-call solution on Yahoo cars UK and soon on Kelkoo too. This one slipped by with little notice, but is almost as significant in showing how the next leap in advertising's getting closer.
Is Google becoming evil? Maybe. Are they scatterbraining into lots of random industry areas without any strategic sense? In this case, probably not.
@ Sunday, Aug. 21, 2005 – 12:08:38
The net, peer to peer technologies like Napster and BitTorrent, social networking, blogging, podcasting, eBay, classifieds, zopa. They don't just destroy old industries and ways of doing things from a commercial perspective, they break down the controlled, centralised 1950s ways of thinking. This culture has been dominated in the last 50 years by (in most western countries) a national media lacking in diversity, an apathetic and materialistic middle class and governments often more beholden to corporations and political donors than voters.
But the net starts to break this down. Witness the rumblings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or US elections. Witness the breadth of "news media" replacement perspectives on the London bombings reported in blogs and through passers-by taking pictures on their mobile phones.
In this vein, I was struck how some of what Noam Chomsky had to say on propaganda and the limits of freedom of expression in the west could apply to the (past, present and) future of the net, while reading some of his old essays on the plane while on vacation. This stuff was written in 1970, much of it in response to the Cold War, but is just as true today:
"We have, perhaps, reached a point in history when it is possible to think seriously about a society in which freely constituted social bonds replace the fetters of autocratic institutions ...
Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. It is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of a competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense.
An autocratic state is no acceptable substitute; nor can the militarized state capitalism evolving in the United States or the bureaucratized, centralized welfare state be accepted as the goal of human existence ...
Modern science and technology can relieve people of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it."
Language and Freedom, 1970
You have to remember that I was in rainy Iceland, denied pretty much all access to the net and therefore forced to read a real book for a change: very productive! Maybe this should happen more often.
A philosophical grounding for web 2.0? Viva the revolution (or is it the evolution)!
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