Tag Archives: Google

Internet Industry, Mobile

Think Through Your Competitor’s Response Before Acting

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Google Maps Image

Whenever one is evaluating an action to improve or maintain their business’ competitive situation, thinking through the competitor’s likely response is a critical element.  I frequently see companies taking actions and not thinking about competitors response.  A classic move to increase competitiveness is to cut prices.  It’s a huge mistake however to evaluate your offering with lowered prices against your competitors offering with their existing prices.  There will be a new equilibrium once competitors respond to your action.  There maybe several rounds as some initially follow suit, and some wait and see and take action later.  But assuming there will be no response and predicting the outcome using that assumption is foolhardy.

A recent example is Google Maps on iOS.  According to many published reports, Google refused to offer Apple turn-by-turn directions in the Google powered iOS mapping application that was bundled with iOS 5 and before.  Google’s refusal was so they could keep turn-by-turn directions as an Android only feature.  In hindsight, this plan was a strategic blunder as Google  lost a 23 million iOS users as a result. Even in foresight, this was predictably a blunder since it failed to consider Apple’s likely response.  Was it really even possible that Apple would just accept this deficiency in their most profitable product line, the iPhone?  It wasn’t necessarily predictable that Apple would create their own mapping app as there were many companies they could have chosen another partner instead.  But what was predictable was that Apple was going to quit using Google as their mapping provider costing Google many million map users.  Even though Apple’s switch to providing mapping was rocky to a say the least, Google still suffered. And, Google’s response to Apple moving to their own mapping system? To introduce that same turn-by-turn direction feature they originally refused to provide on iOS.  Google had no choice but do so once Apple introduced their feature as losing the entire iOS user base greatly decreases the value of their local content.

It’s entirely possible there were other factors that lead to Apple’s decisions to no longer rely on Google maps which make it difficult to judge how big a blunder this was on Google’s part.  Apple may just not have been comfortable relying on a competitor.  But what is clear is that Google was never going to succeed in gaining any competitive advantage over Apple in the smartphone war by withholding any mapping features as Apple had alternatives for getting these features. The moral of the story is think through the likely response from your competitors when taking any action to boost your competitiveness.  If someone else is proposing a plan, ask them what the competitor’s likely response will be.  If you get a blank look, you know that they haven’t thought it through and their touted benefits are likely fantasy.

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Internet Industry

Thoughts on Facebook’s rumored entry to email

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Image courtesy of husin.sani

I’m a bit surprised that Facebook is (rumored to be) entering the email market.   Partially my surprise is that consumer email feels like a mature market and I expect Facebook to be concentrating on areas where more innovation and value creation is possible.   The rest of my surprise is why Facebook book wants to enter a space that’s not a great business for any of the incumbents.  EMail is essential to Yahoo and AOL for the recirculation opportunities it provides to better monetizing channels but in and of itself, email does not move the needle for anyone today.

Here’s my take on the pros and cons for Facebook entering the email market:

The Downside

1) Free consumer email is a tough business

Being an email provider is expensive because you have store to an ever growing amount of old emails essentially forever even though they are rarely, if ever, viewed.   Being rarely viewed means it’s impossible to monetize those petabytes of messages eating up storage space in the data center.   In the old days before GMail changed consumer expectations forever, storage space for free accounts was sharply limited and additional space meant highly profitable premium revenue.

Compounding the problem, email page views monetize poorly compared to other types of content.  Partially this is because the incumbent providers (Yahoo, AOL, Windows Live) with exception of GMail do not target using email content.  My suspicion is even targeting off of email content does not help that much anyway.  Advertising is valuable either when the purchase intent is high (where search is king) or there’s value in brand affiliation (full page New York Times ad).   Email has neither of these characteristics and is likely getting worse on purchase intent.  No one emails anymore to ask which camera, laptop, cell phone they should buy since it’s easier and hipper to ask in a Facebook status.

2) EMail does not fit well into the walled garden model of Facebook

Facebook messaging today is an unpolluted stream where messages are almost certain to have been sent by person.  There’s no outside spam.  EMail is the exact opposite both due to its history and the expectations around it.    EMail started off with no way to verify sender identity and thus invites spam and scams.  There have been some technical fixes (DKIM, SPF) but at the end of the day you really do not know who is sent a message.   It’s also expected to be ubiquitous and completely interoperable thus removing the option of excluding bad actors from the system.

In contrast, Facebook can kick anyone out of their network.  The Stuff White People Like article on Facebook is humor but its underlying point resonates with me.  The nice, safe neighborhood feel of Facebook is a key part of its success.  Most people over 30 were never going take to the generally messiness of My Space.  Opening up your Facebook account to email, is almost like inviting the world to come by and litter on your front lawn.  And there’s no way to “de-friend” someone sending you email.  None of this is to say email is not an essential method of communication in the modern world.  I just don’t see adding email fits with the positioning that’s made Facebook so successful.

The Upside

Facebook does have several things going for it in the email market:

1) Capability to run large scale operations at low cost

Facebook has the operational know how to run a email operation at lower cost than most of the incumbents other Google.  A cost advantage is always a huge competitive advantage in a low margin market.  It’s harder to leverage though in email since pricing to the consumer is already zero.   The price of an email account is really the amount of ads and Google has been able to effectively exploit their low costs through less intrusive advertising.

2) Good targeting data

Facebook already knows so much about their users they do not need to use email for targeting.  How valuable this makes email to them is a function of how much excess ad inventory they already have.  If Facebook ad inventory is already selling out at least for certain segments, adding email will be valuable simply by boosting ad inventory.  If they are already swimming in inventory which is going for fire sale prices, there’s not a lot of money to be made.

3) Keep younger users away from Google and Yahoo

Although the kids of today do not have much use email, they will get older and need to start interacting with the grown-up world which still largely runs on email.  At that point, they will need an email address.  Providing them though Facebook keeps those users from deepening or even creating their relationship with Google or Yahoo which may benefit Facebook in the long run.   However, that benefit is mitigated by the Google and Yahoo’s failure to be at all competitive in the social space.

4) Social Graph

Facebook’s biggest advantage in any area they enter into is their owership of all that social graph information.  Maybe they have found a clever way to leverage it with email.  I’m a bit skeptical because of the inherent identity problems with email.

I’m curious to see what Facebook has come up or if the rumors are even in the right ballpark.  However, I doubt I’ll be creating myself a Facebook email address.  GMail serves my needs really well today.

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Internet Industry

Content Economics

A few months back there were a series of analyst reports and subsequent blog posts about how much money YouTube was losing for Google.  What struck me about this coverage was that many people seemed surprised that YouTube would be hemorrhaging money since they had a lot of users.  Since then I’ve realized much of the industry does not think about the economics of serving content.   The smaller content is in terms of the bytes the better off the provider is.  Large content like video consumes tons of bandwidth and storage both which cost real money.  User content like YouTube uploads is even worse since there is a lot of it store and much of it is rarely if ever used.  Even photo storage and serving is a significant expense.

To offset these costs, heavy content needs superior monetization and since consumers rarely pay for content on internet regardless of what the old media types want to believe, this means advertising.  Video has the advantage that video ads have much higher CPMs than standard display.  However, any user generated content suffers from the problem of much lower CPMs than editorially produced content since the brand advertisers are wary of associating their brand with such unpolished and potentially offensive content.

Profitability data on individual properties is hard to come by since most properties are part of the big providers like Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN but if it were available, I’m confident that the ratio of revenue per view to bytes served per view would be a strong predictor of profitability. As an approximation, ad CPM / bytes served per view would work and ad CPMs are easier to estimate from the outside since the CPMs of most ad types does not have that much variance across similar properties.

At the other end of spectrum of the content, Facebook recently announced they are cash flow positive.  Most of Facebook’s content is the news feed which is very small in terms of bytes.  Facebook does have the challenge of keeping track and assembling small pieces of content which has its own expenses but from what I’ve read, Facebook engineers have been able to make that process reasonably efficient.  Facebook also had to invent a new type of advertising to get to positive cash flow.  Traditional display advertising has never been high CPM on user generated content.

I haven’t done enough analysis to know whether YouTube can be profitable on its current model.  Google has advantages of both scale and scope.  From their other businesses, Google knows how to run massive data centers cheaply.  Being a huge purchaser of bandwidth and infrastructure hardware surely gives access to rock bottom prices.  If Google does mange to make YouTube profitable, these other advantages will protect them against new entrants.  My guess is that without a new advertising model that raises their revenue per view, YouTube can not over come the costs of serving video for free.

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