meinVZ noch nützlich, aber facebook wird wertvoller

Es wird schon länger darüber diskutiert, wie der Wettbewerb zwischen facebook.com und meinVZ.net in Deutschland ausgehen wird. Anfangs sah es aus, als ob meinVZ.net seinen führenden Platz in Deutschland halten konnte – trotz zahlreicher Rechtstreitigkeiten zwischen den beiden. Mittlerweile hat allerdings facebook.com in Deutschland die Nase vor, wenn man den Umfragen glauben darf.

Gestern habe ich ein wenig überlegt, ob der Trend dahin geht, dass am Ende die Nutzer sich nur auf ein soziales Netzwerk fokussieren, statt viele verschiedene Web 2.0-Dienste zu nutzen, und was das für die jeweiligen Anbieter bedeuten könnte. Da drei Personen aus meinen Bekanntenkreis neulich meinVZ.net und myspace.com verlassen haben, um den Schwerpunkt ihrer internetbasierten, sozialen Aktivitäten bei facebook.com zu legen, werde ich heute kurz schauen, wie es eigentlich in meinen Bekanntenkreis mit der Nutzung von meinVZ.net (95 Freunde) vs. facebook.com (185 Freunde) aussieht. Mal schauen, ob es auch für mich an der Zeit ist, meinVZ.net Tschüss zu sagen.

Mindestens 48 meiner meinVZ.net Freunde haben auch bei facebook.com einen Account. Wenn ich also nun meinen meinVZ.net Account deaktivieren würde, würde ich den Anschluss zu 47 bzw. 49% meiner Bekannten verlieren – ist wohl noch zu früh, um meinVZ.net ganz aufzugeben. Interessanterweise haben aber von meinen 95 Freunden bei meinVZ.net nur 28 Personen also 29% in den letzten 30 Tagen etwas auf der Plattform aktiv unternommen, d.h. beispielsweise persönliche Daten geändert/ergänzt, Bilder hochgeladen oder Buschfunk genutzt. Von diesen 28 aktiven Freunden sind jedoch 18 bzw. 64% auch bei facebook.com und schon sieht die Welt ein wenig anders aus – reicht das aber als Indiz aus, dass alle anderen nur Karteileichen bei meinVZ.net sind?

Das Fazit wäre damit aus heutiger Sicht, dass aktive meinVZ.net in der Mehrzahl auch bei facebook.com vertreten sind, es aber noch zu früh wäre, sich gänzlich von meinVZ.net zu verabschieden, da doch noch fast die Hälfte des Bekanntenkreises an meinVZ.net hängt und den Weg zu facebook.com noch nicht gefunden hat :o)

Virtueller Suizid in sozialen Netzwerken als Befreiung und Geschäftschance zugleich

Heute gibt es eine Vielzahl an Web 2.0-Diensten und vor allem an so genannten Social Networks, so dass man als Nutzer die Qual der Wahl hat, wo man alles dabei sein soll. Da ich beruflich mit diesem Umfeld zu tun habe, bin ich natürlich in vielen sozialen Netzwerken registriert; angefangen bei meinVZ.net und nasza-klasa.pl, über facebook.com und myspace.com, außerdem bei mobile-monday.de und mixxt.de, bis hin zu xing.com und linkedin.com sowie selbstverständlich bei vielen mobile sozialen Netzwerken wie peperonity.com, itsmy.com, mocospace.com und mygamma.com. Wenn man sich die Funktionalität so mancher Web 2.0-Anwendungen anschaut, dann könnte man auch eBay.de, amazon.de, youtube.com und flickr.com als soziale Netzwerke dazuzählen.

Als Nutzer wird man irgendwann ganz schön gestresst, wenn man alle diese Web 2.0-Dienste nutzen will und manchmal sogar muss. Nicht nur die fortlaufende Pflege der eigenen Daten und Inhalte erfordert viel Zeit, um den Eindruck zu vermitteln, dass man noch virtuell lebt, sondern auch das Verfolgen aller Neuigkeiten aus dem Bekanntenkreis bedraf ständiger Wachsamkeit, so dass man bloß nichts verpasst. Mittlerweile bekommt man aber auch wirklich jede virtuelle Aktivität der Bekannten mit; A ist jetzt Single, B hat neue Fotos hochgeladen, C hat den Status von A kommentiert, D hat B mit einer Videobotschaft geantwortet, E hat C zu einem Online-Spiel eingeladen, F ist gelangweilt von D, G sucht ein Zuhause für sein Schaf, H ist schlauer als I, dafür ist aber I beliebter als H, und so weiter.

In letzter Zeit sehe ich aber einige Leute aus dem Bekanntenkreis, die sich anscheinend bewusst von manchen sozialen Netzwerken verabschieden. Zu lesen sind dann Neuigkeiten wie “Matylda just deleted her myspace and studivz account, what an eventful saturday evening” und “Susann just canceled her myspace account! Finally! hehe” oder der Profilname wird umbenannte in „der Matthäus ist bei Facebook aktiv”. Dieses Verhalten verwundert mich jedoch nicht, da ich bei mir im Laufe der Zeit auch eine gewisse Schwerpunktsetzung in der Nutzung bestimmter Web 2.0-Dienst sehe. Abgesehen davon verändert sich bei jedem von uns schließlich auch der Bekanntenkreis mit der Zeit, man wechselt den Job, zieht in eine andere Stadt oder sucht sich ein neues Hobby – alles mit sozialen Netzwerken im realen Leben verbunden, sich mit der Zeit, nicht zuletzt in Folge dessen, ebenfalls verändern. Unabhängig davon ob real oder virtuell, ist jede Veränderung mit Unsicherheiten, aber auch mit Chancen verbunden; wenn ich nun mich von meinVZ.net abmelde, könnte ich einige (virtuelle) Bekanntschaften verlieren, dafür aber mehr Zeit finden, um andere (virtuelle) Bekanntschaften z.B. bei facebook.com zu intensivieren. Mein Respekt an Matylda, Susann und Matthäus, die den Mut für solch einen Schritt fanden – zum Glück sind wir aber noch über facebook.com befreundet :o)

Aus der Sicht der sozialen Netzwerke stellt sich natürlich die Frage, wie man mit solchem Nutzerverhalten umgehen soll, da diese von den zahlreichen Daten und Inhalten der Nutzer immer profitieren. Auch wenn die Nutzer nicht mehr aktiv sind, kann es aber eine Bereicherung für andere Nutzer sein, wenn beispielweise interessante (und zeitlose) Inhalte eingepflegt wurden und diese mit der Deaktivierung der Accounts nicht gelöscht werden. Natürlich klingt es für ein wirtschaftlich agierendes Unternehmen ein wenig beunruhigend, wenn man davon sprechen sollte, dass man Millionen von Karteileichen hat, aber eigentlich müsste dies meines Erachtens sich auf Dauer positiv auswirken – nicht nur die Qualität, sondern auch die Quantität an Daten ist in Web-Geschäft Gold wert. Der Tot an sich ist zwar keine schöne Sache, über die man zumindest in unserem kulturellen Umfeld nicht gerne spricht, aber auch in diesem Bereich hat sich eine “sichere” und “lohnende” Branche entwickelt. Ähnliche Tendenzen sind auch schon seit Jahren mit den virtuellen Friedhöfen im Web zu beobachten, also würde es mich nicht wundern, wenn wir bald auch in den etablierten sozialen Netzwerken virtuelle Friedhöfe sehen werden.

Hier sind noch zwei Blogpost zum Thema “Virtual Suicide”:

• Is Virtual Suicide Quickly Dying or Slowly Coming to Life
• Facebook Takes Another Step Against Virtual Suicide

English Version coming soon…

Virtual Suicide in Social Networks as relief for users and business opportunity for service provider

Infinitely trapped in the net with web 2.0

What happens with all of your social media profiles after you have left the real world? Today I heard by accident through a mutual contact that one of my over 700 business contacts at xing.com is already dead since almost two years now I didn’t check this information directly at his family and I don’t want to publish untruths, but my deepest sympathies for the passing of Peter Trauth. I met him back in 2006 at the Learntec and I was a little bit surprised that he didn’t respond to my invitations to the Mobile Learning Day 2009, but now I understand. His company 5mo Group AG seems to be deleted and also his domain 5mo.ch and his email don’t work anymore, but his xing-profile is still online.

This incidence makes somehow thought-provoking. What will happen with my content in internet after I have passed away? Will my friends and contents even notice that I am gone? Or will some social media services continue to use my data for business proposes? I mean they can still use my identity to automatically poke other users and send them birthday greetings from my and in this way use my content draw on other people to their services. I suppose even as a nominal member I am still valuable for the social media services; no investor will check if I am alive, but will be happy about one more user in the database. So many questions to answer and the time is running out. It feels a little uncomfortable to use services like mywonderfullife.com and to “plan your funeral, your way”. I think I will keep this blog as my virtual gravesite, but how to hand on all of my social networking profiles to my bequests?

Many Aspects to consider by Optimizing Inventory

Some days ago I wrote about Whom should Mobile Social Networks partner with in Mobile Advertising and today I would like to share some experience from the perspective of a publisher with three mobile advertisement optimizer; smaato.com, admarvel.com and nexage.com. Beside smooth technical integration the evaluation of relevant operating figures like e.g. revenue, eCPM or fill rate is for me important. For my daily work I wish – in the best case – to get the figures real time. Maybe I am spoiled by the extensive admob back office and I understand that the optimizer need to collect and reprocess the figures from all their partners, but it still see some improvement of their back offices, so I can better get through with my personal every-day tasks. For example I am missing a more detailed effective cost per mille (eCPM) analysis. In one back office I get the eCPM for the top 10 countries, in the second one I find the eCPM for each advertisement network and the third one doesn’t provide any eCPM calculation. And sometimes there is also some fine tuning to be done, like putting all the figures for the same country together and not to separate them into e.g. Congo, The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zaire :o)
 
Not every optimizer has a daily (one has a weekly) and a country specific (one has only the top10 countries) breakdown of the figures, so a detailed analysis e.g. of the daily click through rate (CTR) in a certain country is not possible. And I must say that there are also big differences in the speed when jumping from one statistic to another between the three different back offices. Sometimes I am also not sure if the figures are completed, because some data are included bit by bit after some days and the optimizers don’t get all information from all their networks. This doesn’t come as a big surprise, because in the best case they have connected you as publisher to 20+ different advertisement sources. But this all makes it more difficult for a publisher to compare the three services in terms of economic performance, but also to compare them to other alternatives, like a direct integration of an advertisement network.

Another good thing for a publisher using an optimizer is the allocations of ad sources to increase the overall fill rate. The experience shows that there are big differences in the three testes systems; for one particular country we had a range from 33,6% over 89,1% to 99,0% fill rate. I know that it’s only one of several performance indicators, but still the test shows, that you should consider various aspects in your decision making. For my personal conclusion I must say, that the cooperation with all of those advertisement optimizers is a valuable experience for me and for a better understanding of our business, but there is still much home work to be done for those new players in the mobile industry. In the last months I heard many different thoughts about the future of the mobile advertisement optimizers and I am really curious about future development.

The Mobile Advertising Ecosystem

There are several business models for Mobile Social Networks (MSN). Asking users to pay for either community membership or for premium content like virtual goods are two examples. Lately, a few players have been experimenting with different premium models. Nevertheless, it seems to me that our market segment still favours the advertising-based business model.

When thinking about whom to choose as a partner I drew the diagram you see above to visualise which partners and options MSN currently have. In my view mobile social networks now have four different groups of potential advertising partners. In more detail, if you consider the various possible combinations for cooperations between partners, the money we look at can go through 7 different ways through the value chain) as the diagram illustrates. These four groups of partners are:

• Mobile Content / Service Provider
  A direct cooperation with mobile content and service provider can bring higher rates of the effective cost per mille (eCPM) for the social network’s inventory. On the other hand the cooperation requires a a higher sales effort from the MSN. To reach a 100% fill rate (defined here as ads shown by content partner/inventory offered by MSN) your inventory a MSN needs many business partners to gain enough advertising deals. It also takes a high technical integration effort and a lot time to manage the relationships with these partners. One well-known mobile content provider is e.g. Fox Mobile Group (Jamba/Jamster).
   
• Mobile Advertising Agency
  Mobile advertising agencies often work for several big brands and manage cross media advertising campaigns for them. Typically agencies wish to target a very specific audience for a very large MSN inventory volume within a certain period of time. For a MSN these specific types of demands are often difficult to serve properly. Two of such mobile advertising agencies are pi2006.es and glispa.de.
   
• Mobile Advertising Networks
  Mobile advertising networks pool different kinds of mobile players. They have elaborated ways how they can fulfill the specific needs of advertisers and help publishers to convert their inventory into revenues. From the point of view of a MSN their specific disadvantage is that MSN can not directly choose who advertises on on their site. Indirectly they can choose to put to put specific advertisers on “blacklists”. Examples of two such marketplaces are admob.com and adinfuse.com.
   
• Mobile Advertising Optimisers
  Mobile advertising optimisers offer a very tempting comprehensive monetization solution for MSNs. However, they represent a new branch of business in the mobile industry. If one is to believe them MSN can easily manage all their business cooperations and maximize the monetization of their inventory. On the other hand they represent a new part of the value chain which wants a bite from the revenue pie. Nexage.com and smaato.de are among those new players.

It should be mentioned that there is a even more complexity in the value chain. For example some mobile social networks like buzzcity.com offer their own mobile advertising networks. And you also can’t preclude that the mobile advertising optimisers integrate each other. So how does one choose as a mobile social network the right part of this value chain to work with? We don’t really know yet who in the value chain will survive in the long term because the mobile advertising business is still young. We know mobile advertising networks since 2006 (admob.com started in 2006) and mobile advertising optimisers since last year (smaato.de started with SOMA in 2008). Google introduced Adsense for mobile search just the other day. I am sure that we will also see another big movement in the industry when the first mobile ads appear on Facebook Mobile and MySpace Mobile‘s efforts increase in this regard. Facebook has got no ads yet, but just imagine the additional amount of mobile advertising inventory from ‘20 Million Users Now Accessing Facebook Through Mobile Platforms‘.

To me as MSN one must broadly consider of a trade-off between money (content providers, agencies) vs security (optimizers). The best business option for a mobile social network depends much on which strategy in general they pursue. If you go for the big money, you go directly to the content / service providers or/and advertising agency and accept the high business efforts and the risk depending on few big customers. If you aim for more secureness and less work, but at the worst also less money for your inventory, than you go for the mobile advertising marketplaces and optimizers.
 
But at the end, how to chose the right business partners for the corresponding cooperation? For an informed decision you need some criteria; I can think of a set of 14 criteria to bear in mind when selecting one. Firstly we can have a look on basic facts about the potential business friends like company age, references, team and investors. Some operating figures like the market coverage, achieved average fill rate and achieved average eCPM are also of interest. Than we should consider the business aspects like revenue share, contract duration, contractual specials and payment target / reliability. And of course don’t forget the technical issues like integration efforts, performance / scalability and support quality. But at the end it’s all about individual experience with specific business partners, because mostly you have to deal with young players in our turbulent industrial sector.
 
For peperonity.com we have found our strategy and good business partners. Understandably I can’t tell you the details, but I am open for discussion about the mobile advertising ecosystem from the perspective of MSN or a publisher in general. Our mobile industry is just vibrant and full of surprises :o)

(Note: This is my contribution for the ‘FACTS OF THE WEEK NO 1′ at www.mobile-facts.com)

Insights on Mobile Social Networking

When we at Peperoni started to build our first solution for the mobile web back in 2000, I saw the business potential of mobile data technologies, but I must admit that today I am pleasantly surprised and very glad about the technological and economic progress in our mobile industry. And in particular the three last years were extremely vibrant for us with our core product portfolio around tools for user generated content with social media components. In the early days we had maybe 10 combatants worldwide, but today our ecosystem gained quite a high complexity with a good deal of new and old technologies and players from all kind of industrial sectors that we never thought would be playing the mobile game with us. But at the end it’s just another confirmation that we chose the right spot for our business activity :o)

In our industry today almost everybody is talking about Mobile 2.0 with Mobile User Generated Content and Mobile Social Networking, but I wonder if in the next years we still will speak about the ‘Mobile Web’ and ‘Mobile Social Networks’. Indeed ‘mobile’ is something special with other/more possibilities than a Personal Computer, but the basic technologies and services have already been there (in the PC World) long before even Peperoni existed. The many impressions and experiences I was lucky to collect in the last years dispose me to start writing about our spot in the mobile industry from the perspective of an entrepreneur. I want to contribute to the ongoing discussion with sharing some practical insights and I will try to address all relevant players along our relevant value chain. For the beginning I will refer to the Mobile Advertisement Business, because today it’s one of the most impotent commercial basis for many start-up in the mobile industry and there is a brand new element in the value chain – the Mobile Advertisement Optimizer. Stay tuned for more post about Mobile Social Networks …

Olivia Hilton on mobile chat in interview with inbabble.com

Hey! Today I saw an interesting interview on inbabble.com with Olivia Hilton (Jumbuck) on mobile chat and I just couldn’t resist to smile on this text passage:  

A fast thinker, Olivia Hilton isn’t afraid to make honest statements about her mobile dating competition, such as Mobiflirt (“Mobiflirt is a game”) and peperonity (“…the content is not validated – lots of naked women, gambling, etc.”)

Honest statements? For me it’s more like mocking – maybe because of fear of good competition :o)

Dear Olivia, it would be a pleasure for me to meet you and have a chance to explain to you that we are not really a mobile dating service. But I’m flattered to be competition in your eyes!

One of my personal interests and tasks at Peperoni is to track the development of our industry sector (Mobile UGC / Mobile Social Networks). Furthermore people (mostly investment bankers :o) ask me often how big and valuable our community is – but honestly, it’s not easy to answer this question satisfiable.

In our and other communities you have “creators” and “viewers”. We also have some ”new visitors”, “repeat visitors”, “heavy users”, “sleepers” and of course some “bouncers”. (There is a small survey about the typical Web 2.0 users from Forrester Research on ECIN – for German speakers.) In between that we also have our “unique visitors” and “registered members”, which I think could be the most informative key figures in this category.

Beside the already existing challenges on the net, it also seems not to be so easy to count the “unique visitors” on the mobile internet. So how to manage a proper measurement based on IP addresses, if e.g. the mobile network operator (MNO) use dynamic IP technology and their customers share the same IP addresses? Some MNO give you the information about MSISDN or a customer-ID, but in the off-deck world only very few of them are such generous. Furthermore you can use cookies, but many of the cell phones and MNO don’t support this technology. The bottom line is that you have to have some king of extrapolation on your figures, but like my old professor on statistics Prof. Dr. Walter Krämer used to say: don’t believe statistics that you didn’t make/fake :o)

You can also count the “registered members” which seems to be obvious, but in some cases it doesn’t span the whole community. For example you don’t have to register to join peperonity.com. Many of our “members” appreciate the anonymity, by still have the access to a broad range of functions in the community. Here some figures that I found (or not found) on the net today:

• tagtag.com has 269,960 sites
  you can count the sites in the tagtag.com catalog
  but there is no figure about the number of members and you can’t deduce it, because a member can have more than one site in a member account.
   
• itsmy.com has 2,104,214 sites
  you can see the figures on the itsmy.com homepage
  I suppose they have the same number of members, because you can only have one “nickpage” in a member account.
   
• mocospace.com has 104,914 members
  you can count the profiles in the mocospace directory
  I assume that they have the same number of sites, because you can only have one “profile” in a member account.
   
• peperonity.com has 394,586 members
  you can see the figures on the peperonity.com homepage
  and they have definitely more sites, because you can have more than one site in a member account.
   
• mobango.com has 1,500,164 members
  you can see the figures on the mobango.com homepage
  and I assume that they have the same number of sites, because you can only have one “profile” in a member account.
   
• mygamma.com has 44,213 sites
  you can count the sites in the mygamma.com catalog
  but on the other side they have “only” 20,044 members on the Gamma Life Ladder.
   
• pitch.tv has ??? sites/members
  I couldn’t find a way to count anything here :o(

The conclusion is that nobody knows if these figures are true, if they reflect the total of uniqe members, if they include nominal members/sites and if they can verify the “quality” of an community. So for me such manifestation is just a simple marketing instrument - we also use it :o) – and not really a significant benchmark. Another interesting question would be, how big the overlap on members all communities have together. I know some “heavy users” having several accounts in different mobile communities. I myself have three accounts on peperonity.com and one on each of the above communities. Some days ago we had a chat with Fred from AirG.com about our industry sector and it’s quite difficult to measure the size and growth of our market in terms of end user. Maybe some of my visitors have a hint for me on some studies on this …

Another way would be to count “page impressions” which seems to be easier. But even here a clear definition of a page impressions is needed, because sometime you risk to get total figures included page impression on error pages and other technical notes :o) And those figures only a provider can tell you. There are some statistic tools on the net like alexa.com, but in my point of view you should take these tools with a pinch of salt, even if you receive a first impression on the differences between services. For example you can compare peperonity.com with other services, but according to my current knowledge alexa.com only count the PC web traffic of people with an alexa-plugin. And for instance alexa.com says that most of our users come from Indonesia – I can’t confirm that. So it’s an interesting tool, but not the whole story.

And I love such figures like “ad views so far” [greetings to admob.com] or “total downloads so far” [greetings to itsmy.com]. I must ask my team mates how many millions of billions of trillions of page views we have served so far, but I promise not to get megalomaniac :o)

The phenomenon ‘CopyCats‘ isn’t new for us, because they have been constant companions for us since the beginning of our mobile business back in 2000. For example there was a company called IMOCOS International Mobile Content Service AG in Osnabrück providing a wap search engine and later on a similar mobile user generated community services as we did, but now they are completely gone from the market. Other companies sold their mobile community business in the course of time like wap3 Technologies GmbH in Cologne did in 2006 to Jumbuck Entertainment Ltd (press news).

A hard competition is all around in the different fields of online business and CopyCats are just natural in the market development; if I am correct informed then e.g.

• friendster.com started in January 2004, half an year later than myspace.com did in June 2003
• youtube.com was launched in February 2005 and then portals like myvideo.de (since April 2006), clipfish.de and videotube.de appeared
• facebook.com started in February 2004 and we had StudiVZ.net since November 2005

Update: Interesting article at TechCrunch.com: Web 2.0 in Germany: Copy/Paste Innovation or more? 

But also our mobile business friends from e.g. admob.com are confronted with CopyCats, e.g. with Decktrade.com - ”a global mobile advertising marketplace that delivers mobile campaigns to advertisers and a business model to mobile publishers” – powered by Millennial Media. The funny thing is that sometimes in the rush new companies make just avoidable mistakes like Millennial Media did, if you believe the story “Are the mobile advertising upstarts out of control?” of VentureBeat about Decktrade.com.

Right now my favorite CopyCat is definitely gofresh.de with their product itsmy.com. Even if peperonity.com has around three times more traffic than itsmy.com, they claim to be “worlds stickiest mobile web community” and “No. 1 Brand in Mobile Social Networking” – I wonder how they measure this ‘success’ :o) 

Update: I found another one impressive ad: “gofresh – europe’s LEADER in mobile social networks & mobile communities“. Just crazy :o) 

But I was even more amazed by the statement “gofresh - Europe’s FIRST mobile UGC Company” in Mikko‘s presentation on the Mobile Monday in Munich (2007.02.05), because they founded in 2003 and Peperoni already started in 2000 and please don’t forget our old combatants wap3 Technologies GmbH and IMOCOS International Mobile Content Service AG.

And the conclusion? It seems to be like Sajeed Sacranie, CEO Virgin Mobile, said in a Press Release of Virgin Mobile: “They’re still nowhere close to offering our value… but at least they’re trying and customers will benefit”. We will see what will happen in the next months, everything seems to be possible and (unfortunately) allowed in the mobile 2.0 race. May the best win :o)

Mobile User Generated Content (MUGC)

Mobile User Generated Content is a very thrilling subject, because it’s very multifaceted and mostly unpredictable. But is it a good amendment to marketing activities via mobile device? Under certain conditions it could be! And now I have almost five hours to find out the main conditions on my way to Augsburg in the train :o)

I should start to study more about phenomenons like Web 2.0, Social Networking and User generated Content, but definitely to write more about our work. You can already find articles about internet communities like myspace or youtube at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. You have to take a look on the article about the Internet Phenomenon – the power of the internet is impressive!