Ricky Yean's List: Reading List

• Widgetbox is now serving close to 60m uniques per month, up from 49,000 uniques two years ago. Importantly, Facebook is well less than one percent of our traffic. Why?

   

  Widgetbox is premised on the fragmentation of the web and a belief a healthy network is one comprised of hundreds of thousands of nodes and not 4-5 large walled garden nodes. Yes, there are millions of users in the gardens, however, the balance of power is not favorable and the garden owner’s interests are often not aligned with your own.  Our network comprises not only tens of millions of users, but importantly it is comprised of over 1.1m different domains.  The diversification inherent in our network ameliorates the concerns CNET mentions. Channel masters - Wal-Mart, Dell, Microsoft - make life hard for product companies. App vendors need to be careful not to end up like Levi’s - commoditized by Wal-Mart, enjoying huge volume, but losing value and appeal in the process.  
• On the web, will access to users concentrate like retail sales or will the very different economics of digital allow for mililions of front-doors to users and an even balance between providers of syndicated content and services and their “distributors.”  We are clearly betting on the latter.
• media buyers and brands continue to wrestle with very real issues regarding how to buy distributed media consumption - lack of ad standards, lack of analytics, fears of unknown domains and brand risk, etc. My last post noted that the top 10 sites on the web account for 28% of web page view and yet 76% of ad spend. In my experience, the article is right on in detailing how media buyers are in the early stages of understanding how to buy, how to build creative, and how to measure social media advertising.

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