Posts from June 2009

Is Momblogging The New Radio?

Momblogging is one of the fastest growing categories in social media. Here is some data I got from a friend who just completed a study on momblogging:

  • Mom blogs are
    growing like wildfire.  Moms primarily blog as a “family
    journal”.  Just like every family has a physical home, there is a growing
    feeling that every family should have a “home page”. 
  • Mom blogs are
    incredibly social.  They love to link to each other, display each other’s
    “buttons”, and participate in and hold contests.
  • Mom blogs are very
    visually oriented.  They love big bright headers.  4 of the top 6 Mom
    blogs have a photography theme.
  • Mom blogs love to
    review and giveaway products.  If they find a great product, they want to
    help other moms by sharing this product with them.
  • The vast majority of
    mom blogs use Blogger because it is simple and free.  Among the top 50 mom
    blogs 50% use Blogger and 50% use WordPress. 
  • The top 50 Mom blogs
    generate about 30 M Pageviews / month.  The real strength of Mom blogs
    lies in the long tail.  There are hundreds of thousands of mom blogs that generate
    > 10k Pageviews / month.

If you want to see some momblogs, here are some popular ones:

My Charming Kids
dooce
c jane enjoy it
Bring The Rain
The Bloggess
The Pioneer Woman

But how does all of this have anything to do with radio? Well, radio used to be the way a new musician was introduced to the world. And in many cases, it still is. But the innovators in the music business have adopted online media as the new way to break artists and we have quite a few success stories to point to including The Jonas Brothers and the Arctic Monkeys.

The person who initially broke The Jonas Brothers on MySpace using viral videos is my friend Steve Greenberg who runs the innovative record label S-Curve Records. In the spirit of full disclosure, the Gotham Gal and I are small personal investors in S-Curve.

3507921019_525e2aa9f1 And now Steve has set his sights on the mom bloggers to introduce the world to Diane Birch, a wonderful singer songwriter who I think of as Carol King meets Norah Jones and Joss Stone. In fact, Diane’s first record, Bible Belt, which was released today, features the same production team as Joss’ initial record.

Here’s a track from Bible Belt called Fire Escape that is available for free at RCRDLBL:

Diane Birch – Fire Escape

This spring Steve was at the tech part of SXSW and met a bunch of mombloggers. He realized that Diane’s music was perfect for this community and so he called Diane and told her to get on a plane and fly down to Austin. They did a lunch for the mombloggers and Diane played her songs for them. It was love at first sight and sound.

And so as part of the launch of Bible Belt, Diane and S-Curve have teamed up with the mombloggers to get the word out about Diane and Bible Belt and also raise money for charity. They’ve created a series of  widgets that mombloggers can run on their blogs introducing their readers to Diane’s music and linking to Amazon and iTunes so people can purchase the record. And each momblogger will select one of several charities to get $1 per record sold. That’s most of S-Curve’s profit on the record which is priced at $6.99 for digital download. Here is the widget in case you want to run it on your blog.

I love so many things about this story. I love that Steve and S-Curve continue to look for novel ways to leverage social media to launch new artists. I love that they’ve connected so deeply with the momblogging community and are leveraging them to get the word out. I love that they’ve incorporated good and needy causes into the campaign. And I love that Diane’s music is going to get heard far and wide as a result.

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#Music#Weblogs

comScore Announces Media Metrix 360

I started working with the comScore team in 1999 when my prior firm, Flatiron Partners, provided first round capital to the founders. I served on the board for nine years and dropped off last summer with a lot of mixed emotions.

I've always been fascinated by the Internet measurement business and comScore is the recognized leader in that business. With agencies, marketers, wall street, and a host of other important constituencies, comScore is the "gold standard."

But I've also been very frustrated that comScore's panel centric approach (2mm Internet users worldwide) doesn't measure small early stage web services very well. It's only once a service gets a significant audience that a panel based approach can really work.

I've also spent countless hours explaining why panel-based numbers don't match server logs. Many people think server logs can't be wrong. But they can because one person can access a web service from their home computer, work computer, mobile phone, and friend's laptop in one single day and be counted as four unique visitors. Server side numbers are also impacted by cookie deletion, which is common among the most sophisticated (and most active) web users.

So the panel based approach has issues and so does the server based approach. The simplistic way I've always looked at it is panel undercounts and server-side overcounts. I've always advocated a "triangulation" approach to get to the right number.

So it's very big news that comScore has spent the past year building an entirely new approach to Internet audience measurement that combines its "gold standard" panel with server-side numbers reported by web services who install comScore's beacon. The comScore press release that explains how Media Metrix 360 works is here.

If you have a smallish web service but still need comScore numbers to sell advertising or raise capital or for some other reason, you can now put the comScore beacon on your pages and get reported right along with everyone else. This is also hugely important for "apps" that run on top of web platforms like Facebook. Our portfolio company Zynga, for example, has a huge number of montly unique visitors but the Internet audience measurement services have not been able to see most of them. If Zynga puts the comScore beacon on their pages, they would be reported alongside all of the web-based gaming services.

The other big innovation with Media Metrix 360 is the "universe" report which does the following:

A newly developed “universe
report” will provide visibility into the entire universe of Internet
usage, including access from mobile devices and computers outside of
home and work (i.e. Internet cafes, schools, libraries, and other non-private
locations). Usage from these locations accounts for a significant percentage
of total traffic, ranging from 10 percent to more than 50 percent, depending
on the market. The “universe report” will supplement the traditional
home and work universe measured by the existing Media Metrix service
with server side data to account for a site’s complete addressable
audience.

I think this is a very big deal, for comScore, its customers, and web services of all shapes and sizes that want to be counted correctly. I'm thrilled to see this happen.

#VC & Technology