Marissa Mayer's Billions

Even when Steve Jobs was sitting on 50 billion dollars he did not give any of that back to shareholders. Why would Marissa Mayer part ways with seven billion dollars?

$7 billion would come in very handy to help Marissa Mayer reinvent Yahoo

Marissa Mayer, who looks to be clearing the decks in preparation for significant changes to Yahoo strategy .... looks for acquisitions .... Judiciously spent, $7 billion might be the ticket to help the once-proud Internet giant regain some of its former glory

I say buy Flipboard. Buy the Pinterest competitor.

With this seven billion Mayer should be able to grow Yahoo's market value by 20 billion over three years. But if she spends more than a billion on acquisitions I'd get suspicious.

Put money in house into search, email and Flickr.

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SEO Takes Care Of Itself

Darren Rowse, the top blogger in the world perhaps, has a Google Plus post on SEO.

While I once did spend more time on SEO (particularly on structuring my site right, getting keyword density up, interlinking my posts lots and quite a bit of researching keywords) I've increasingly found more value in working on other areas of my business and have found that the result in doing so has been that SEO has to some extend looked after itself....... more search traffic to my blogs .. direct traffic, traffic from social, referral traffic .. Understanding the needs, problems and challenges of readers (and potential readers) is key. ..... you're writing on topics people are searching for, it means that when they find your content they are content with it and are more likely to share it (link to it) - all of which helps to increase search rankings/traffic. .... I work hard and getting inside the heads of my readers by surveying them, running polls, running focus groups, asking questions and giving them space to share what they are doing, learning and struggling with. All of these gives me a fantastic picture of how I can serve them better. ...... the creation of content that is both relevant and useful. This is a daily process of writing, commissioning our writers with assignments and editing their work. ..... ensuring high quality of work but also keeping the quantity up .... More articles mean more doorways into the site. ..... Community - giving readers ways and spaces to engage with you and one another brings a blog alive. .... a reader who feels a sense of belonging is much more likely to be sharing links to your blog than one who never interacts .... I spend a lot of time monitoring our site 'outposts' (Facebook, Twitter etc), creating community centred content (discussions, homework/challenges), focusing our team upon our forum area and investing into customer service (I have a dedicated team on this). .... the dPS Email strategy. .... That blog was well optimized for Google and naturally ranked well. The result was 90% of our traffic was Google traffic. All was good until the day came when Google changed its algorithm and the blog all but disappeared from Google. ...... for the next 6 weeks 90% of my traffic (and income) disappeared. It came back almost as quickly as it disappeared 6 weeks later but the experience taught me an important lesson - to work on other traffic strategies. ..... the graphic with the regular spikes and troughs pattern. The troughs are weekends and the spikes.... are newsletter days. .... Our newsletters drive massive traffic to the site. .... While I wouldn't want to loose the search traffic - the site is now at a point where we wouldn't need it to survive because we can now drive our own traffic each week. .... We now have 100,000 Facebook likes on dPS and it too is sending more and more traffic than previously. The same's true for Twitter and even sites like Pinterest. ..... diversifying our focus on multiple forms of traffic (particularly those we have complete control over like email) gives us a much much much stronger foundation than if we only focused our time and energy upon SEO

In short.

(1) Actively seek to understand your reader's needs.
(2) Write quality and quantity.
(3) Build community at the blog. Hello Disqus.
(4) Email/newsletter can be powerful. Facebook and Twitter are useful.

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Ben Silbermann Of Pinterest

Video Like Photos Are, Text Used To Be

We have seen an entire generation of photo based tech startups. Facebook might be the biggest among them, Instagram reigns in the mobile domain. Pinterest might be the newest entrant.

Before that things were more text based. Yahoo chat room were text based, and a lot of social activity happened there. AOL's instant messenger was also text based.

I think we are about to see a new generation of companies for whom video will be the starting point. This is primarily a function of larger bandwidths available in the mainstream, but it is more than that.

The Blogosphere Blooms

Image via WikipediaFacebook is like the McDonald's chain. The blogosphere is like the endless number of Chinese restaurants. Collectively the blogosphere is bigger. And that's the way it should be. I am an avid blogger. I am a glad, avid blogger.

Nielsen Wire: Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Blog Readers

.... consumer interest in blogs keeps growing ..... over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only five years earlier in 2006. ...... 6.7 million people publish blogs on blogging websites, and another 12 million write blogs using their social networks. ...... 7 out of 10 bloggers have gone to college .... Women make up the majority of bloggers ..... Bloggers are active across social media: they’re twice as likely to post/comment on consumer-generated video sites like YouTube, and nearly three times more likely to post in Message Boards/Forums within the last month ...... Three out of the top 10 social networking sites in the U.S. – Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr – are for consumer-generated blogs. Blogger is the largest of these sites with more than 46 million unique U.S. visitors during October 2011, making it second only to Facebook in the social networking category, and Tumblr was the fastest-growing social networking or blog site on the top 10, more than doubling its audience since last year from home and work computers to 14 million unique visitors. Overall, these three blogging websites combined for 80 million unique visitors, reaching more than 1 in 4 active online users in the U.S. during October 2011. ..... 92 percent of Pinterest’s audience also visited Mass Merchandiser sites during the same month.

Robert Scoble Favorited My Tweet

Robert Scoble on the red couch (Photo credit: niallkennedy)

Robert Scoble Now Following Me On FoodSpotting
Robert Scoble Retweeted Me
PlanCast Failed For Not Catering To Its Power Users

Robert Scoble favorited my tweet. That is news in my world. I am surprised I am on the guy's radar. I am an admirer of Robert Scoble. I don't know anyone else who does social media quite like Scoble. Kudos.

Pinterest Competes With Twitter, Instagram With FourSquare

Pinterest Competes With Twitter, Instagram With FourSquare

Image via WikipediaLies, Damn Lies And Statistics: Instagram hits 25 million users – you heard it here first

I am talking in terms of my web diagram. I think Pinterest has the potential to surpass Twitter just like Instagram has surpassed FourSquare.

Pinterest feels mainstream like Twitter never did. Twitter has always felt a little nerdy. A very smart friend once asked me what the hashtag was. The idea of checking in can be a barrier. But sharing photos? Photos with twists and tinges? That old adge about a picture being worth a thousand words. And the whole thing about social. Fred Wilson once derisively referred to Facebook as "a photo sharing network." Another way to look at it is that was a compliment.

At universal gigabit speeds there might be video versions of Pinterest and Instagram. But something tells me photo has staying power. A photo can be consumed in a split second. But short videos can play. And there are so many details to a video. There is room. There will be room.

I Am On Pinterest Now

And this is my first Board. And I am loving the embed feature.

Source: classy-in-the-city.tumblr.com via Paramendra on Pinterest

Source: yayeveryday.com via Paramendra on Pinterest

Source: flickr.com via Paramendra on Pinterest

Ben Horowitz And Dave McClure

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBen Horowitz: Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years?

I was just reading this blog post by Ben Horowitz - great blog, by the way - and could not help thinking this guy sounds a lot like Dave McClure, only at a much larger scale. Dave McClure wants to help build your accounting department.

Investment firms aspire to be incubators. It is not like, here's the money, and now go build. The money is good, heck, it is the primary thing. But then there's the advice, the network.

I mean, look at this, this looks like a FoxConn report. As in, we cooked 30 tons of rice today and 12 tons of pork.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2659065551/ via CrunchBaseIn 2011, we hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at our office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.

We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio.

We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies.

We’ve had nearly 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies.