Posts tagged “Strategy”

Feb 26 2010

We do not fear any competitor.

— Reggie Fils-Aime

Nintendo: No Fear of Competitors - Digits - WSJ

Cocky but focused. Nintendo plays their own game.

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Feb 17 2010

Silly business jargon but with three practical points:

  1. Start with business outcomes.
  2. Direct the evolution of business capabilities.
  3. Provide design implementation models oriented around business change.
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Feb 8 2010

It’s not just about great songs. In the best-case scenario, it’s a full multimedia package.

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Kinda like the opposite of a fad.

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Nov 16 2009

Amusing:

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Oct 29 2009

Ben Huh is LOL. Ben Huh is Business.

1. That I Can Has Cheezburger? purchase price was probably lower than the $2 million Time and others (ahem) reported. Huh is unflappably mum on what he spent, but he’s too good a business man to have ponied up that much—even as fast as the profitable site was growing. Plus, regulatory filings show his angel round he raised to buy that blog and build a company around it was just $2.25 million. When I asked why he’d spend almost the entire amount on one acquisition, he didn’t so much nod, answer or agree as make a face that said “Yes, thank you for not assuming I’m a total idiot.” But, yeah, he won’t comment.
2. Huh has really studied what makes humor catch and made an interesting observation: Male sites and female sites grow distinctly differently. Men tend to share by gut instinct, so male oriented sites grow faster but can churn users quickly too. Women are more trust-oriented, says Huh. That means they share links and sites less frequently, but with more credibility. So the sites grow slower but maintain their audiences better.
It’s an interesting observation given how much of the early breakout Web 2.0 were so male dominated, and Huh should know seeing the traffic patterns of Hawtness (slightly NSFW) andLovelyListing. (Guess which one is for men?)
For the record I Can Has Cheezburger? is about 50%-50% male-female, but nearly 100% geeks-who-love-cats, both of which have aided huge and sustained growth. As Huh explains it, dog people go to parks, cat people sit inside on computers.
3. Just how good that traffic is. The Pet Holdings Network boasts 12 million uniques a month and does 1 billion page views every four months. Those numbers are astounding for a 26-person, user generated content company built largely on frivolity.
We all know about Cheezburger, which surpassed 1 billion page views last month. But FAIL blog went from zero to 10 million page views-per-month in just 90 days, and the recently launchedThereIFixedIt.com  has matched that pace.
That said, Huh doesn’t hugely care how fast a blog grows, as long as it grows. What gets one of his sites shut down is a huge spike and then a fall.
His newest site, NotVeryTalented.com launches on Friday.
4. Revenues. Huh has done a great job making money in tough industries. While a lot of blogs are sputtering, his have 30% margins, posting CPMs anywhere between 15 cents and $8. The least profitable is clearly Hawtness, which Huh doesn’t even try to sell ads on, given the dodgy inventory. “It just hooks in readers,” he says.
Here’s the shocker: The company also makes 30% margins from book publishing deals, and advances and royalties make up nearly a third of the company’s revenues, which are in the “single digit millions.” More shocking: Huh can’t seem to get a publisher to sign him to a multi-book deal. This despite the fact that the first LOLcats book spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Really, New York publishing houses?
Huh plans on releasing six books next year and – SPOILER ALERT- the third LOLCats book will be all about kittens.
5. Huh has a social network too. Even if you knew all of the above, this one must surprise you because it recently surprised Huh. Pet Holdings has long offered a log-in and profile for contributors who regularly post images and passively given them the ability to friend each other. The result? A niche social network with 1.3 million users. Huh hasn’t quite decided what to do with this revelation, but he’s thinking about it. As comparatively well as he’s done with blog ads and book sales, to really scale the company, he’d like a sexier revenue stream that can grow fast without massively growing content.

TechCrunch

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Oct 25 2009

I think before you have ROI you have to really understand how social media is driving your business. If you’re a traditional sales funnel type of company—if you’re selling something online—you could say, “I know how many sales I got out of that social media app.” We are not a funnel company, but we still need to measure the value of what we do. I can’t measure it in actual incremental sales because I’m not selling something online. It’s much safer to say we are focusing on measuring the business value of different types of digital marketing.

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Oct 15 2009

I can’t wait to see this.

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Sep 18 2009

The best analysis I’ve seen so far about the coming pay wall.

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Jun 10 2009

A new anti-premature ejaculation pill, if the FDA ever approves it, is a Johnson & Johnson drug with a marketing plan: 

The key words were the last two, “self esteem.” Could this pill really be positioned as a cure for low self esteem? Yup. That’s because Priligy (or dapoxetine) was originally developed as an antidepressant. The sex-extending properties of the drug initially manifested themselves as a side effect.
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