Demand Media, the online content company, said it had earned nine cents on an adjusted basis in the first quarter, on revenues of $100.6 million, topping Wall Street estimates of eight cents on $99.6 million in sales. On a fully diluted basis, earnings were one cent a share, or $700,000, compared to a loss of two cents, or $1.8 million, in the three months compared to a year ago.

“Strong growth from our owned & operated content and media properties drove our Q1 results, highlighting the unique capabilities of our content discovery, creation and distribution platform. Further, we accelerated our paid content strategy with the acquisition of Creativebug, a premier online destination for arts and crafts instruction, which will provide our large eHow crafts audience with an expanded learning experience. In addition, we signed up over 400 resellers to our new gTLD tools and received more than two million expressions of interest for domains to be registered with new gTLDs,” said Richard Rosenblatt, chairman and CEO of Demand Media in a statement. “We are excited about the distinct long-term growth opportunities for both of our businesses.”

Demand’s eHow site seems to have driven a lot of the gains in the content area.

Demand shares rose in trading yesterday by close to two percent, to close at $8.58, also its stock is down 7.6 percent for the year.

The company did not mention the planned split of its registar and content business that it announced in the last quarter in the current results, which might be covered on the conference call the Santa Monica, Calif. company will have with analysts at 2 pm PT.

In its last earnings release for the fourth quarter, Demand said it was spinning off its domain registrar business from its media one in a bid to better clarify the company to investors.

Since it went public several years ago, there has been some level of difficulty for each part of Demand to easily explain itself to Wall Street, given the very different natures of its key — but very different — revenue units. In a statement at the time, Demand said that it was “our intent to spin off our registrar business and separate into two independent, publicly traded companies.”

The company noted that the two units “divergent strategic priorities and opportunities” would be better in the new configuration with a pure-play media company and domain services company. At the time, the company said the transaction was expected to take place in the next nine to 12 months, although it required a number of company and regulatory approvals to do the tax-free spin-off to create two different stocks.

In a different kind of transaction, Demand had talked a little more than a year ago to a private equity company about taking the company private. The effort was abandoned, in which Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners would have purchased Demand for a price of up to $1.2 billion, due to a number of challenges. Its current market valuation is now about $744 million.

Until we hear more about the spin-off plans from Demand execs, here’s the full release from Q1 to peruse:

1Q 13 FINAL RELEASE

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD.com this week:

1. Daily-deals site LivingSocial was hacked, compromising the names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords of 50 million users.
2. In an essay, Reed Hastings laid out his predictions for the future of streaming video, which includes not just his company, Netflix, but also HBO, ESPN and anyone else transitioning from a channel to an app.
3. Walt Mossberg reviewed the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, and concluded that “while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer.”
4. What are Google’s plans for its high-speed Internet project, Google Fiber? Theories abound, but good luck divining an answer from CEO Larry Page’s words.
5. According to multiple sources, Twitter is testing local discovery features that will help you better understand what’s happening not just around the world, but also down the block.
6. Android’s seemingly inexorable ascension over the iPhone may not be inexorable, after all. A new report says customer loyalty will let Apple overtake Google in smartphone market share by 2015.
7. On the 10-year anniversary of its sale to Google, Applied Semantics co-founder Eytan Elbaz explained what he and his partners learned from starting up and getting acquired.
8. For the first time, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer publicly commented on the controversy created after Yahoo banned its employees from working from home.
9. Speaking of Mayer, she’s officially joined the board of wireless gadget maker Jawbone, and it’s likely to be a good fit.
10. Apple needs some new hit products to drive growth, and CEO Tim Cook says they’re on the way… just not until this fall.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD.com on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

That may change. According to multiple sources, Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location. The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are in the world, serving up tweets from others around you — whether you follow them or not.

The feature, as I understand it, came out of the company’s recent hack week at the beginning of this month, where a few engineers worked on projects related to local discovery. A number of employees have been testing the feature in the Twitter app ever since.

The type of tweets you’d see, ideally, are the most relevant ones nearby, especially when they follow a trend or a flurry of closely connected activity. So a football game or a concert, for instance, may be a great use case here.

Or perhaps even more importantly, it could be used in completely unplanned, spontaneous instances.

Here’s an example, and a real kicker: I’ve been told that a few employees were testing the new feature in Boston last week, around the time that the brothers Tsarnaev allegedly carried out a series of horrific bombings during the city’s annual marathon.

When reached for comment, Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner said the company had nothing to share on the matter.

It’s fascinating to me that Twitter is toeing the waters of discovery through a local lens more explicitly than ever before. Currently and historically, the company already factors in location when suggesting content inside the Discover tab and also when serving you ads. It also goes without saying that to try this stuff out during the recent Boston tragedy — which was arguably watched by much of the world through Twitter just as intensely as it was over broadcast networks — is incredibly interesting, if only to imagine what possibilities it could hold for other mass events in the future.

The big question for me: Twitter, what took you so freaking long?

For a company that prides itself on its interest graph — the pulse of what everyone in the world is talking and thinking about — something like a localized version of discovery seems like a natural extension of what it means to use Twitter in a meaningful way.

Yes, Twitter makes much of the foo foo special moments its users have when connecting with people on the other side of the planet (or in some cases, connecting to others off our planet entirely). I won’t begrudge them that; it is pretty fantastic.

I’d argue, however, that Twitter could be infinitely more useful to me were I to open up the app and see something happening down the block: A yard sale, a car accident, half-off a tasty fried chicken sandwich. That’s Foursquare’s entire value proposition with its newly revamped, search-focused app. If done right, Twitter could potentially be even more powerful in this respect, feeding off the hundreds of millions of potential intent signals flowing through its pipes on a daily basis.

So this may have come out of a recent hack week project, but ideas like this have been in the works for a long time. People I’ve spoken to said that for years Twitter has kicked around just exactly what discovery is supposed to mean for the company. Does Twitter relegate it to the Discover Tab alone and “experiment” with how people use it, as product VP Michael Sippey said at our D: Dive into Mobile conference recently?

Or perhaps an even bigger coup: Does Twitter insert these local tweet suggestions into your main Twitter timeline directly? I hear Twitter has considered both options — again, for years people inside the company have agonized about the right way to handle this — but there’s no decision quite yet.

To insert suggested location-based tweets into your main timeline, however, is a really big deal for Twitter. Touching the holy grail that is the timeline — the list of people that users have selected to follow — isn’t something the company takes lightly. For one, it could tick off Twitter’s early user base, or alienate all the folks who have carefully curated their follow lists over time.

But here’s something to think about: Right now, Twitter isn’t worried about the longtime, early user base. The company is launching products on “Good Morning America.” It’s cooperating with the Grammys and the Oscars. It’s pushing products like Vine at Cannes. It’s making the head of comms into a consumer marketing director as well.

The service’s 200 million active users pales in comparison to Facebook’s billion. Twitter needs to go truly mainstream.

Ultimately, if that means changing some of the core elements of the product and peeving the hardcore Twitter users, I’d guess Twitter may soon be approaching the point that it is willing to make that choice. It has already chopped off the legs of its client developer base and shifted everyone’s attention to the official Twitter apps.

My impression here, though, is that even Twitter isn’t sure yet what it wants to do. It could again test how this feature works within the Discover tab and maybe move it into the timeline later. Or perhaps just keep it inside Discover. Or, in all possibility, scrap the feature as it stands entirely and try it a different way. Twitter doesn’t move that fast on major changes like these.

I will say, however, that I’m glad to see the company is at least looking at tweaking its formula, even if there’s potential to upset part of the user base.

Frankly, it’s about time.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

And that’s a wrap! After Monday’s half-day kickoff to D: Dive Into Mobile — Global Edition, Tuesday saw a full day of great speakers on topics ranging from messaging to activism to driverless cars. In case you missed it, here’s a good place to start:

1. Starting at the end: “We’re big believers that this [phone] screen is the first screen,” said Bob Bowman, president of Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media, in the conference’s final interview. “Anybody that doesn’t believe that is living on another planet or doesn’t have children. Reality is the second screen.”
2. “Our goal with Android is to reach everyone,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said. “We’ll cross one billion Android devices in six to nine months. In a year or two, we’ll hit two billion.” Schmidt also talked about Google’s self-driving cars and the company’s new gadgets.
3. Intel said it is getting the hang of mobile — which is good, because the company also reported bleak Q1 earnings today, with a 25 percent drop in profit as demand for PCs declines.
4. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said his messaging app is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users. WhatsApp has eight billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages per day, Koum said.
5. Meanwhile, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said his photo- and video-messaging app has grown by three times in four months, and that users are now sharing 150 million ephemeral photos per month, versus 40 million permanent pictures per month on Instagram.
6. A mobile app called Better launched onstage, promising to provide 24/7 concierge medical care to paying users. Better’s offerings include the ability to directly contact doctors and nurses, through a partnership with the Mayo Clinic.
7. Twitter’s VP of Product Michael Sippey said the site is heavily investing in and focusing on improvements to Twitter’s once-poor search and discovery experience.
8. Microsoft’s Terry Myerson said Windows Phone is a global competitor, because it has had stronger momentum in markets where carriers do not subsidize phones. He also aimed more than a few potshots at the likes of Android and Facebook.
9. Nonprofit activism organization DoSomething’s Nancy Lublin announced that the company had reached one million teens via weekly text messages, with a 97 percent open rate.
10. And lastly — mobile security provider Lookout demonstrated how phones can be hacked via phishing emails with phony app-download links, urging users to be wary of unfamiliar download sources.

These 10 blurbs only scratch the surface, though. For more, please check out our full list of stories from D: Dive Into Mobile.

Imagine being Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of product, who spoke at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday. You’re charged with taking a product as stripped-down as Twitter, which started out as a short messaging service, and gradually adding features and enhancements over time without alienating the very user base that grew to enjoy it in the first place.

Tough problem, for sure. And I’d doubt Sippey would want to change the core Twitter experience, a reverse-chronological, never-ending flow of tweets moving through your stream. So what do you do?

I sure can’t tell you the answer, and I’m not even sure Twitter can quite yet. But it’s certainly trying to figure it out.

Take search, for one. “We’ve made a big investment over the past few years in real-time search and archive search,” Sippey said, improving Twitter’s once poor experience of sifting through the billions of tweets that regularly flow through the service. So instead of missing out on all the conversation floating around in the ether, one could search for specific words, phrases or hashtags. (And yes, I can say it has grown better over time.)

More important, I’d argue, is Discover.

“The Discover tab and product on mobile,” as Sippey put it, are “essentially experiments that we’re trying out there.” It’s a way for Twitter to serve up user-suggested content, based on the accounts they follow, their histories of interaction with others — basically the stuff they care about. And ideally, if Discover worked perfectly, it’d be the best place for users to, well, discover all that stuff they’ve missed, the stuff they haven’t searched for — the stuff you didn’t even know you wanted to see.

Problem is, Discover is far from perfect. It launched essentially as a beta product a few years ago; suggested content wasn’t great, the design was lacking, and people just didn’t use it.

Now, Sippey said, people are using Discover (sadly, he wouldn’t disclose just how many). And, to be fair, I’d say Discover certainly has grown better over time. But I’d argue that it’s still not compelling enough to take users out of their main streams and into the Discover tab on a regular basis. (TBD if Sippey and pals ever figure that problem out.)

But! There’s a curious light at the end of this tunnel. Twitter’s answer to simplicity seems to be less in worrying specifically about major changes to its core product, but rather focusing on building separate standalone apps built entirely for different purposes.

Put another way: “There are times when you need a single purpose-driven knife when you’re in the kitchen, and there are times when you need a Swiss Army knife,” Sippey said. “We want to build the best Twitter we can build. But we also know that we want to build other things that can use the Twitter infrastructure to basically serve different purposes and different needs.”

Hence, the Vine acquisition last year, and the forthcoming Twitter Music app to drop soon (which Sippey was pretty mum about). Create these sort of satellite apps, and perhaps you don’t freak out your core base of users. In the meantime, perhaps you’ve also found a new on-boarding mechanism to capture and convert non-Twitter users into living, breathing tweeting machines; neither Vine nor Twitter Music (from what we’ve heard) require you to have a Twitter account in order to use the service, but sure make it easy to sign up for Twitter if you want to!

So, in Twitter’s perfect world, we’re able to find stuff — video, music, whatever — using these other services without screwing up Twitter’s proper app. Great, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. People actually have to download and continue using all the apps to make it a successful strategy, and Twitter isn’t exactly keen to break out its engagement stats for us. Guess we’ll see if Vine can maintain its download success, and if Twitter Music is a hit when it launches.

If not — good luck with that whole simplicity thing, tweeps.

So here’s its latest strategy: Copy TV’s programming stunts.

Specifically, copy Discovery’s “Shark Week” — the cable channel’s enduringly popular week of programming about … well, you know.

YouTube’s plan is to do a handful of themed weeks each year. The first, focused on comedy, is set for May, industry sources say. I’m told to expect a combination of pre-taped video packages as well as live events; one source tells me the company plans on hosting at least one event from its YouTube Space studio in Los Angeles. Scheduled for later in the year: “Geek Week.”

The company plans on talking publicly about the idea, which it has been referring to as “Destination Moments,” at its May 1 “Brandcast” event for advertisers in New York, sources say.

It’s easy to see YouTube’s logic here: If you package together a bunch of similar content, and distinguish it from the rest of the site’s clips, that should make it easier to sell to advertisers.

That’s the same logic that is behind the company’s “channel” strategy, which has had a mixed record. But one advertiser complaint about YouTube’s channel strategy is that it’s still too hard to buy on the video site the way they’d buy a TV show, when they can attach themselves to a certain property at a certain time with a certain audience.

YouTube seems unlikely to radically change the way it sells its stuff — it’s a Google company, and Google doesn’t seem interested in selling video advertising the way it has been sold for the last few decades — but this is a relatively easy concession.

As far as I can tell, the company isn’t offering video makers any special incentives to participate in the themed weeks, beyond the fact that they’ll be part of a high-profile programming push. And that may be more than enough.

The real question is whether YouTube viewers, who show up to snack on videos at all hours, and usually want to consume specific clips — that’s why the site is the world’s second-biggest search engine — will care about videos programmed like TV. But we should see soon.

(Shutterstock/Pupes)

Those currently using Foursquare’s app are used to a three-tabbed main screen, where you’re always greeted with a home screen of your friends’ check-in updates. From there, users can navigate to the “explore” tab, essentially a feed of business recommendations based on your location, time of day and regular check-in habits. (There’s also a third tab, which leads you to your profile page.)

“Explore,” however, is the direction Foursquare wants to go in for the future. Over the past year, the company has slowly moved away from its heavy emphasis on badges, mayorships and “gamification” (my least favorite word in tech), instead moving toward a mobile discovery service somewhat akin to the space Yelp currently inhabits.

“Years ago, search queries were more high-level, for ‘food’ or ‘drinks,’” said Andrew Hogue, Foursquare’s head of search and data. “But now people are starting to treat ‘explore’ with a bit more depth. And as people search more often, there will be a lot more exposure to ‘explore.’”

This has been a long time coming. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has said in the past that the search function should have been on the front door of the app from early on, calling it the company’s biggest mistake, in retrospect. He has also said that there should be fewer friction points in navigating the apps.

That’s what we should expect from Wednesday’s app update. Fewer taps, heightened emphasis on local search, and little bells and whistles like autocompleted suggestions in the search box to serve up recommendations for places to discover.

Ostensibly, that’ll be better news for Foursquare’s paid products, as well. Local updates — or business suggestions inserted into a users’ feed at the paid request of an advertiser, based on location and time of day — will now receive more prominent placement in the app by default, as users won’t be forced to make those few extra taps to navigate into the “explore” tab to see those suggestions.

An important thing, considering that Foursquare is feeling the pressure to monetize, four years in.

Expect the update to roll out Wednesday morning.

On Sunday, AppGratis, which promotes paid apps by offering one for free everyday, abruptly vanished from the App Store without explanation or comment from Apple. This, just a week after Cupertino had approved the iPad version of the app. At the time of its disappearance, word on the street had it that Apple banished the app for violation of an App Store Review Guideline clause that states:

2.25 Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.

And that was indeed the case — partially. Apple confirmed to AllThingsD Monday that it removed AppGratis from the App Store for violating clause 2.25. But it said that the app also violated clause 5.6.

5.6 Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

Apple declined further comment on AppGratis’s ouster, framing the move as a standard response to guideline violations. But sources close to the company say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure. “The App Store is intended as a meritocracy,” a source familiar with Apple’s thinking told AllThingsD.

In other words, app-discovery platforms are fine as long as they’re not built on paid recommendations.

In other words, app-discovery platforms built on paid recommendations aren’t going to fly with Apple.

This is a tough turn of events for AppGratis, which recently closed a $13.5 million Series A round of financing. But it’s also foreboding news for other apps with similar business models. Sources say that Apple is looking at them, too, and they could face the same consequences if they’re found to be in violation of 2.25 and 5.6. Recall that this isn’t the first time Apple has eighty-sixed a discovery app for running afoul of its guidelines. Last December it ousted AppShopper for violating 2.25.

AppGratis did not respond to a request for comment.

According to sources, Amazon paid about $150 million for Goodreads, the popular books recommendation service. But that number could close in on $200 million, if certain performance metrics are met.

And, while BusinessWeek ran a we-are-just-guessing story today that posited a self-described “overly simple, back-of-the-envelope estimate” of $1 billion, sources said that number is simply wrong.

I am still trying to determine how much of the deal was cash — most of it, said sources — and how much was stock.

The San Francisco-based Goodreads had raised close to $3 million from a range of angel investors, as well as True Ventures. The sale is a big win for the firm, which apparently owned between 20 percent and 30 percent of Goodreads.

The online retail giant bought the company to help its book-y social discovery efforts for customers.

Amazon declined to comment, but the Seattle-based company said previously that the deal should close in the second quarter. It’s not the first time Amazon has bought a social book site — in 2008, the company acquired Shelfari for under $10 million.

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

1.) ESPN’s Cunning Plan to Stream March Madness: Head to Bill Simmons’s House

2.) Foursquare’s Yelp Problem

3.) BlackBerry CEO Says iPhone Is Passé

4.) Seven Questions for the Man Shaking Up HP’s Operations, John Hinshaw

5.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough?

6.) Hey, Remember How Awesome the iPhone Is?

7.) Looking East to Predict the Next Billion-Dollar Mobile Company

8.) Jerry Yang Is Back (And Investing More Than Ever)

9.) Global Platform Head Carroll Departs Yahoo for Go Daddy, While Yahoo News Head Leaves for NBC

10.) Mossberg on Apple’s Rivalry With Samsung and Why the iPhone Is Like Switzerland

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

I’m talking about Swoon, a new, real-world, Android-based discovery app, created by the social company Tagged, which launched on Friday morning. The concept is about as simple as it gets: Connect your Facebook profile to the app, and you’re up and running with a Swoon profile filled out from that data. From there, you’re presented with cards of different people using the service, complete with big, bold pictures and their profile details below.

Like them? Hit the check mark to say you’re interested in meeting them. Not your cup of tea? Tap the “X” box to move on to the next person. If the other person wants to meet you too, Swoon will connect you two. If not, nothing happens. Easy as that.

If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Right now, another slickly designed social discovery app called Tinder is basically doing the exact same thing. And Let’s Date, the app released last month from Los Angeles-based incubator Science, is also offering a similar service, though with the express intent of setting people up on dates. (Tinder and Swoon only profess to help you find “interesting new people.”)

But it goes back much further than that. Remember “Hot or Not”? Launched in 2000, it was the original social network, where users were presented with a picture and a single choice — is this person hot, or not? (Even Mark Zuckerberg was influenced by it, creating a similar version of the site using photos from schoolmates back in his Harvard days.)

Because of its simple nature, the website’s growth curve exploded. It was easy: All you had to do was make a choice, and move on to the next person.

That’s exactly why the Swoons, Tinders and Let’s Dates of the world are so potentially addicting. Perhaps you’ll actually meet someone new, or perhaps you’ll just have fun looking at all the pretty (and not so pretty) people, checking off which ones you like and flicking away the others. The point is that it’s fast as hell, a single-serving app that carries out its purpose.

That’s unlike, say, one beefy app that can do a bunch of different things. “We’re transforming from being used to single, multi-use-case apps into multiple, single-use apps,” Greg Tseng, CEO of Tagged, said in an interview. “Just take a look at the simplicity of Instagram.”

Tseng’s comparison is interesting. Facebook has launched multiple stand-alone apps over the past year — Poke, Camera, Messenger and the acquired Instagram — some of which offer features that are already inside the main Facebook app. And now Twitter has Vine, a standalone video app, and also plans to soon launch a music-centric app as well.

My theory here: All of these services — Facebook, Twitter and Tagged — have smaller, satellite apps surrounding their main services. If they can bring in new users via these single-use-case apps and get them to start using the main service, then that’s a net win for everyone.

Tagged is going after the Android market first, launching in the Google Play store beginning immediately. More Tagged users are on Android over iOS at a ratio of 2 to 1, and apps like Tinder and Let’s Date are iOS only right now. But expect another release for iOS in the future.

But other magazine publishers insist things are fine. Or if not fine, then potentially fine.

Now, it’s entirely possible that publishers like Conde Nast and Hearst are whistling furiously and loudly past the graveyard.

But those two do differ from Time Inc. in some significant ways. For instance:

• They don’t have the burden of publishing expensive weekly magazines like Time and Sports Illustrated, whose futures are especially fraught in the digital era.
• They have owners who are spending some of the proceeds from their lucrative investments in cable TV (Hearst owns a chunk of ESPN, Conde parent Advance owns a slug of Discovery) to expand/diversify their core businesses (Hearst bet $1 billion on European publisher Lagardère, Advance has a $500 million M&A fund it is spreading around the Web).
• They have owners that are private, not public.

Want to hear more optimism? Hearst magazine boss David Carey is happy to oblige. Here’s the extended version of our onstage interview at D: Dive Into Media last month, where Carey touches on Hearst’s international ambitions, its forays into TV, and mobile ads. Oh — and also its adventures in tabletland, where Apple is a very big deal, Amazon is, too, and Google has yet to make a mark.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130312/david-carey-says-hearst-is-no-time-inc/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130311/ceo-dennis-crowley-on-foursquares-biggest-mistake/ http://allthingsd.com/20130311/ceo-dennis-crowley-on-foursquares-biggest-mistake/#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:57:48 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=302334

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

For years, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has been SXSW’s “It boy.” He’s sharp, quick, charming, and it helps that his location-based app blew up at South By for the first time in 2009.

But four years on, Crowley finds himself in a different place. Foursquare is in the midst of a major brand and product transformation, and he’s rethinking how he wants to position his company in a crowded social space.

What was clear from his talk at SXSW on Monday was what he thought Foursquare hasn’t done well, along with some on what Foursquare wants to be.

The early emphasis, as he’s been wont to say over the past year, was placing far too much importance on badges, mayorships and the game-like aspects of the app.

“Foursquare is much more than mayorships and badges,” he said onstage on Monday. “It’s a perception issue. We’ve definitely been phasing a lot of that stuff out.”

That’s not what Foursquare wants to be in the future. The app has pivoted into the location-and-discovery space, aiming to direct users to points of interest based on time of day, check-in history and past data. That’s also where Foursquare hopes to make its money going forward, offering strong tool sets to local businesses and large national companies willing to pay for better analytics services.

That’s an uphill battle, considering how Foursquare rose to prominence in its early days. The avid “superuser” fan base would vie to be the “mayor” of a specific location — the person who had checked in the most. This, Crowley admits, was likely one of Foursquare’s early strategy stumbles, along with almost completely marginalizing the discovery capacity of the app.

Foursquare’s biggest mistake, in his words: “In terms of product, not putting search front and center from the beginning.” He also wants to reduce the amount of taps and friction for users to navigate the app, and to reimagine how badges and mayorships work in the real world.

The issue now is time and competition. Foursquare has 30 million users, a respectable amount of onboarding in the four years the app has been around. But major competitors like Google, Yelp and now Facebook are all delving deep into the local discovery space. Google has Google+ Local. Yelp is Yelp. And Facebook just unveiled Graph Search, an early tool with the potential for changing the way people find businesses of interest, through their friends.

Foursquare is also rumored to be in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital, though it’s facing skepticism from investors who are iffy on the pivot to discovery, and aren’t convinced that Foursquare’s business is growing fast enough.

Crowley, of course, continues to champion the “underreported” potential of his company, emphasizing the large growth Foursquare is seeing internationally in Japan, Brazil, Russia and Turkey, and the underestimated power of the company’s place database, home to more than 50 million points of interest. He even cites the potential of wearable computing, like Google Glass or smart watches.

“I’m bullish on making it easier for people to consume data about what’s going on around them,” Crowley said. Hopefully, for Crowley and his company, users are, too.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130311/ceo-dennis-crowley-on-foursquares-biggest-mistake/feed/ 13 http://allthingsd.com/20130307/discovery-app-spindle-beefs-up-its-search-product/ http://allthingsd.com/20130307/discovery-app-spindle-beefs-up-its-search-product/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:41:40 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=301376 Spindle, the mobile-only discovery app that allows users to better find places of interest around them, pushed a significant update on Thursday, amping up the app’s search capabilities to a much larger degree. Users will now be able to continuously search for keywords, which will notify them if a place of interest nearby matches the term. The service is also launching in three new cities — Chicago, Austin and Seattle — in addition to existing cities San Francisco, Boston and New York.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130307/discovery-app-spindle-beefs-up-its-search-product/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130305/facebook-is-the-google-of-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20130305/facebook-is-the-google-of-mobile/#comments Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:07:45 +0000 Manish Chandra http://allthingsd.com/?p=300638

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Morpheus, The Matrix

Even though we may not realize it, we live in the matrix today. Often, it is easier to date someone who lives across the globe through text messaging and Skype than it is to sit across the table from him or her having dinner. We have the red pill — the world before mobile — and then the wonderful blue pill that takes us to exotic places through our iPhones, Galaxies, and Droids via a rapidly growing and powerful mobile applications ecosystem. With these, we can instantly be transported to many places at the same time — our friend’s adventure in Egypt on Instagram, a heavily tweeted TED conference in San Diego, or a real-time fashion party joined by thousands of women across the country — all the while having a glass of wine at the Press Club in San Francisco.

This mobile revolution is reshaping entire industries and perhaps more interestingly, shifting power from traditional search to new ways of discovery. Over the last six months, while the public has pondered its mobile strategy, Facebook has quietly emerged as the superpower of application discovery, and is progressively playing a powerful role in reshaping e-commerce, media and advertising on mobile platforms. Facebook’s new products — ranging from open graph and timeline to mobile installs — are reshaping how brands, companies and app developers can connect with their audiences and facilitate discovery in a crowded app world.

In the early days of the Web, portals, pop-ups and other advertising and discovery systems ruled the ways consumers connected with websites. The advertising engines and portals were very fragmented. Yahoo’s home page provided one of the most powerful discovery tools for the consumer. Then Google’s entry into search and the arrival of its advertising platform, Adwords, reshaped how e-commerce, brands and services connected with that same consumer. This repositioned the power of the Web ecosystem and put Google front and center in this new world. In response, advertisers and websites from e-commerce to media shifted their strategies to optimizing for discovery on Google. Whole new classes of advertising agencies were created, and new epicenters of commerce and media were developed to focus on Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search.

As we spend more time under the influence of the magical blue pill, increasing attention and spending is shifting to mobile. Mobile’s inherent advantage in being able to connect offline and online behavior will have massive ramifications on all industries as compared to the Web. Mobile is changing the paradigm of online interactions from searching for content with keywords to pressing a single button and being delighted with new content on our home screens. Collections of blue links are being replaced by visual feeds, keywords with button press, and search by discovery as the dominant method of information consumption. As the mobile infrastructure evolves, Facebook has increasingly positioned itself as the Sun in this new solar system. Last year’s acquisition of Instagram gives Facebook tremendous headroom as it slowly but surely rolls out its mobile products for brands and app developers. Increasing dollars and optimization energies are shifting toward Facebook’s mobile ecosystem and changing the shape of every mobile advertising network and mobile media platform. This seismic shift is akin to what happened in 2000 when Google arrived on the landscape with Adwords, and is positioning Facebook to do to mobile what Google did to search.

If the red pill is the world before mobile, do we even have the option of turning back to a world without navigation apps, instant access to email and photography filters? As we spend more of our time glued to our phones 24/7, we should take a moment to contemplate what is real. As Morpheus says, “If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130305/facebook-is-the-google-of-mobile/feed/ 20 http://allthingsd.com/20130219/mobile-app-discovery-engine-quixey-to-find-way-on-to-sprint-phones/ http://allthingsd.com/20130219/mobile-app-discovery-engine-quixey-to-find-way-on-to-sprint-phones/#comments Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:00:30 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=296002 Quixey said Tuesday that it is working with Sprint to have its mobile app discovery engine on some of the carrier’s Android devices. The technology will be included within the Sprint Zone on devices and at Sprint.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130219/mobile-app-discovery-engine-quixey-to-find-way-on-to-sprint-phones/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130206/nudged-by-apple-twitters-porn-saga-ends-in-a-raw-deal-for-vine/ http://allthingsd.com/20130206/nudged-by-apple-twitters-porn-saga-ends-in-a-raw-deal-for-vine/#comments Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:14:49 +0000 Mike Isaac and John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=292207 We spent last week watching Vine, Twitter’s new video-sharing app, get raked over the coals in the public eye for its so-called “porn problem”: If you searched for certain suggestive hashtags on the service — just think of a few four-letter words — you’d be privy to some six-second clips of sexytime.

Apple doesn’t like a scandal, especially concerning anything genitalia-related. And it seemed the immediate solution was to cut Vine from the prominently featured list of “Editor’s Picks” in the App Store.

But that wasn’t enough. On Tuesday evening, Vine pushed an update to its app for download. Now, when users download the Vine app or update for the first time, they’re faced with a “17+” age-restricted material rating.

That’s a big bummer for Twitter, but it seems it wasn’t avoidable. We’ve been told by people familiar with the matter that Apple reminded Twitter of Clause 3.8 from the App Store guidelines, which says:

“Developers are responsible for assigning appropriate ratings to their apps. Inappropriate ratings may be changed by Apple.“

In other words, Apple gave Twitter a nudge, implying Twitter might want to change its maturity rating in order to keep within the confines of the App Store guidelines. Otherwise, Vine could have faced ejection. Twitter did it, albeit begrudgingly.

Apple declined to comment on my report, and Twitter isn’t responding to requests for comment.

To some degree, we should have expected this. Apple cut Twitter a lot of slack when the porn scandal first broke — at least, by Apple’s standards. (This, after all, is the company that deep-sixed a comic-book-app version of Joyce’s “Ulysses” for depicting cartoon boobs.) Why? Probably because Apple and Twitter are elbow-rubbing pals, with deep ties into one another’s companies and software.

But as we argued last week, Vine doesn’t have a porn problem per se — it has a porn discovery problem. That gnarly porno found on Vine was all too easily surfaced in the app, due in part to the nature of the service itself. Search a hashtag keyword for sex, penis or what have you, and you’ll be taken straight to the hardcore stuff. That’s not as easy to find in, say, YouTube, which has a more mature engine for filtering out objectionable content. Or even Tumblr (though Tumblr is also rated 17+ in the App Store).

The prudish Apple can deal with the fact that yes, we are human, and yes, we watch porn (lots of it). And to some degree, it will always exist across the Internet. It’s a fact of life. But what Apple can’t deal with is said porn front and center, easily discoverable for any and all to see. It’s why SnapChat has a 12+ rating, and why Vine doesn’t.

In other words, think of yourself as a teenager to Apple’s repressed mother — you hide your porn under your mattress. You don’t leave it out on the coffee table.

This is no doubt a bad thing for Vine and Twitter. Video and photo sharing apps are some of the fastest rising among the teenage group. That’s the category that SnapChat is currently dominating, where Tumblr is killing it, and the age group that every social media company needs to dominate. Slapping a mature rating on Vine automatically eliminates any youngsters who have parental settings turned on from downloading it, potentially a large swath of the teen population.

Twitter might be advised to hurry up and release that Vine Android app post haste — Google isn’t as uptight with its app market.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130206/nudged-by-apple-twitters-porn-saga-ends-in-a-raw-deal-for-vine/feed/ 52 http://allthingsd.com/20130128/yahoo-beats-earnings-estimates-on-flattish-revenue/ http://allthingsd.com/20130128/yahoo-beats-earnings-estimates-on-flattish-revenue/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:35:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=289324

Yahoo reported its fourth-quarter earnings today, with earnings higher than expected, but with a continued flattish revenue.

The Silicon Valley Internet giant aid its non-GAAP net profits were 32 cents a share, compared to 25 cents in the same period a year ago. But GAAP net earnings per diluted share were 23 cents in the fourth quarter of 2012, compared to 24 cents last year.

Shares jumped just above four percent in after-hours trading to above $21 a share, given Wall Street analysts were estimating a profit of 27 cents per share in Q4.

Net revenue, without traffic acquisition costs, was expected to be $1.21 billion. It was $1.22 billion and which is essentially flat from a year ago’s $1.17 billion. Search revenue was up nicely, while display sales declined.

Overall the results showed a non-sinking but none-too-powerful ship and not very impressive given almost every other Internet company grew revenue significantly in comparison. For example, Google reported last week that core revenue was up 21 percent in the quarter.

Still, up is up, even if it is not up that much. “I’m proud of Yahoo!’s 2012 and fourth quarter results. In 2012, Yahoo! exhibited revenue growth for the first time in 4 years, with revenue up 2 percent year-over-year,” said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer in a statement.

In other words, she’ll take two percent, given the nearly persistent revenue declines of recent years. It is progress, of course, even if investors are looking for more robust increases ahead.

Also of note: Yahoo said it repurchased 79.6 million shares at an average price of $18.24 for $1.45 billion in the fourth quarter, which most definitely was one of the reasons for its recent stock run-up.

Yahoo did not release information on consumer engagement and traffic in the Q4 report, which it had done until Mayer took over. As AllThingsD.com had previously reported, most metrics in the quarter were down significantly over last year.

The fourth quarter was the first that was entirely under the new regime of Mayer, who arrive at Yahoo in July from Google.

She’s gotten a big break from Wall Street, which has sent Yahoo’s stock up in recent months on the hopes of her turnaround plans.

Last week, Mayer said the long-suffering Silicon Valley giant would be returning “back to its roots,” as part of an effort to finally turn it around. It’s actually part of a bigger plan which AllThingsD.com had reported on previously, to focus Yahoo on being a center of content discovery on the Web, across multiple devices, with wide-ranging and “very friendly” partnerships with other companies.

More to come at the 2 pm PT, conference call with Mayer, which I will be liveblogging as usual.

Until then, here’s the official press release and deck from Yahoo:

YHOO_News_2013_1_28_General

Q4’12_Earnings_Presentation.vsFINAL

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130128/yahoo-beats-earnings-estimates-on-flattish-revenue/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130116/youtubes-reign-threatened-by-a-spotified-revolution-and-other-reel-truths-for-video-in-2013/ http://allthingsd.com/20130116/youtubes-reign-threatened-by-a-spotified-revolution-and-other-reel-truths-for-video-in-2013/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2013 23:50:29 +0000 Mo Al Adham http://allthingsd.com/?p=286162 From the continued growth of online video to Socialcam and Viddy’s up and down spiral, 2012 was a crazy year for the world of digital video, and I expect it to take a turn for the insane in 2013.

In the past year, we’ve seen several niche social media networks blow up around images, music and ideas — Instagram, Spotify and Pinterest. But what happened in the digital video space? Many mobile video start-ups entered the scene this year, yet despite the increasing demand among consumers for Web video, none of these companies could crack the code on the most critical element of digital video: Discovery. But as content multiplies at an increasing rate, 2013 will finally be the year that the future becomes clear on the next advancement in video.

• Online video consumption hits a historic inflection point, doubling in 2013
  We are at the threshold of the second digital video revolution spurred by better and more affordable hardware and connectivity. Smartphones are in the hands of nearly one billion across the globe, and tablets, or “the second television,” are blowing up. The iPad alone has climbed the ladder of adoption three times faster than the iPhone and Gartner predicts tablet sales will hit 13 million in 2012, with this number expected to triple by 2016.

  Couple the rapidly increasing penetration of tablets and smartphones with LTE connectivity, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that consumer appetite for video will grow, transforming mobile video consumption into a daily habit. This will ignite a digital video revolution that mirrors the shift from dial-up Internet to broadband. The revolution that happened on desktop years back is about to transpire on mobile, as 2G and 3G are traded up for LTE networks on smartphones. Even with its incredible user adoption, the broadband’s impact on desktop video will pale in comparison to the more accelerated mobile video craze that’s about to kick off.

  In the last three years we’ve seen about a 140 percent increase in the amount of video content viewed online. comScore’s Video Metrix from April 2009 — when total video views hit 17 billion — sharply contrasts with 40 billion videos viewed across Web on November 2012. As consumption of video continues its march from the living room and desktop to smartphones and tablets, I predict that demand, production and consumption of video will double, and video views will hit 80 billion per month by the end of 2013.

• A newcomer will challenge YouTube for the other half of video consumption
  Declining hardware and distribution costs coupled with a steady increase in consumer demand for video has provoked a huge surge in production of pro and semi-pro video. Because of this increase in more professional-grade video, we have seen a major shift in where people are going to find digital video content.

  People are still watching just as much video — but they are now looking to different sources on the Web. In the past five months there has been a 34 percent drop in the total volume of video consumed on YouTube compared with the rest of the Web. YouTube views peaked in June 2012 at 18.3 billion, but have since declined to 12 billion on November 2012. comScore’s Video Metrix measured total Web video views in June 2012 at 32.9 billion; fast-forward to November 2012 and total video views across the Web hit 40 billion. While YouTube lost about six billion views within that five-month period, the other half of Web video shot up by 13 billion. As online video fragmentation increases in 2013, so will the need for a newcomer that aggregates YouTube and the second half of the Web’s video under one roof.

• TV networks and the top content creators will be forced into unchartered distribution and economic models
  Big media has seen the rapid shift toward Web and mobile consumption, and sites like Discovery.com, Disney, MTV and CNN continue to produce more online content. Now the real challenge becomes the fight for more audience, monetization and market share. These content creators and their advertisers won’t be satisfied with the results they get within their own silos, and will start looking for a way to expand their reach while still maintaining control over their videos.

  We have seen that relying on social networks like Facebook and Twitter for viral spread is not enough. At Twitvid, we saw major brands with over five million followers post videos to Twitter and receive only a few thousand views. Even major television networks such as CBS and ABC are struggling with this issue. ABC’s Modern Family and Glee, which previously only distributed episodes to Hulu, are now opening distribution to anyone as the effort to reach viewers continues. But no one has found a sustainable combination of large audiences and ability to drive traffic and revenue back to content creators.

  In 2013, studios and networks will be eager to experiment with new disruptive models, and expect to see a new breed of startups that can cater to their desire for both large audiences and strong control over content.

• All of this will lead to a new opportunity in video discovery that resembles something more like Spotify and less like Instagram
  Digital video is currently plagued by the lack of any real means of video discovery capable of meeting the needs of a social, mobile world. I’m confident that in 2013, someone will solve video discovery through social content aggregation — not just from YouTube, but from the exploding long-tail of semi-pro video. Many have pointed to an “Instagram for video” as the cure-all for the video space’s current state of disarray. But this is much bigger than that. Instagram focuses on user-generated content, which as Socialcam and Viddy proved this year, is not the way to win in the long term. Digital video is insanely larger than just user-generated content. The long-tail of video content is where consumer eyes draw the brands, and ultimately, revenue.

  In the same way that Spotify, Instagram and Pinterest successfully solved discovery for music, pictures and ideas, new models will emerge aiming to figure out a way to tap into this massive new world of video and somehow find a way to weave it all together.

What other predictions do you see for the world of digital video in 2013? Please submit your predictions in the comment section below.

Mo is the CEO and Founder of Telly, a social video network for discovering and sharing the best videos. You can follow him on Twitter @maladham and on Telly.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130116/youtubes-reign-threatened-by-a-spotified-revolution-and-other-reel-truths-for-video-in-2013/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130115/with-graph-search-facebook-needs-to-go-beyond-the-like/ http://allthingsd.com/20130115/with-graph-search-facebook-needs-to-go-beyond-the-like/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 20:57:54 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=285605 Facebook unveiled its Graph Search product on Tuesday morning, a personalized search engine built for users looking to surface content inside the social network.

Problem: One of Facebook’s main ways of serving up relevant content is based on the “Like” button. Think of the stuff in your news feed — much of what flows through it comes courtesy of the types of items you’ve “Liked” in the past.

This is not to say Facebook only relies on the “Like” button. Things like profile visits, things you’ve listend to and photos you’ve viewed all serve as signals. But to serve up the best search results — especially in terms of places — Facebook needs far more signals to return the most pertinent stuff to its users.

In other words, “Liking” isn’t enough to cut it anymore.

That’s why the company will begin to lean heavily on a greater number of signals, emphasizing new ways of collecting data from users inside of Facebook. As Mark Zuckerberg said at the press conference this morning, check in to a restaurant, for example, and Facebook will now prompt you for a little bit more insight on your feelings on the place. It’ll ask you to rate the restaurant from one to five stars, for instance, and prompt you with a question on how much you like the place.

The other hope is that users will begin to check in to more Places using Facebook’s location services on their mobile phones and discover other points of interest using the new “Nearby” tab — also on their mobile phones. So not only will you be able to use the services to open up local discovery, but your history of check-ins and visits can help refine the types of places you’ll search for and are likely to visit in the future.

This is well-trodden territory from competitors like Yelp, which relies heavily on ratings, and Foursquare, which is the go-to mobile application for checking in to places. Both of these services are essentially local discovery engines, aiming to make it easier to navigate the world.

But if Facebook can rely on its powers of suggestion to get people to enter more data — like ratings of places and check-ins — the more signals will feed into Graph Search, and ostensibly, the better the results will be.

Potential roadblocks: Right now, Facebook isn’t known well for either check-ins or ratings — those are verticals owned by Foursquare and Yelp. But again, Facebook is far, far bigger than the 30 million-user Foursquare, and has potential for many more place ratings if the company can convince users to dole out their judgments.

Beyond check-ins and ratings, there are a number of other signals that Zuckerberg wouldn’t get into onstage (my guess is that they’re nerdy to the extreme). But one thing is for sure: If Facebook wants to own relevance, it’ll need to go far beyond our willingness to “Like” things.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130115/with-graph-search-facebook-needs-to-go-beyond-the-like/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yousendits-brad-garlinghouse-talks-about-found-acquisition-rebranding-and-more-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yousendits-brad-garlinghouse-talks-about-found-acquisition-rebranding-and-more-video/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:30:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=285484

YouSendIt, the file-sharing and enterprise collaboration company, said it had bought a small startup called Found Software that helps users find and discover a wide range of data across many devices and cloud services.

The Campbell, Calif.-based YouSendIt, whose newish CEO is former Yahoo and AOL exec Brad Garlinghouse, said it had found a “cloud-nostic platform” — no, really, it did coin that term — to increase the mobile capabilities of its services.

YouSendIt did not disclose the price it paid for San Francisco-based Found, which was co-founded by Stephen Brady, Vijay Sundaram and John Mitchell. They will all join YouSendIt.

But the acquisition does give the company some differentiation in search and discovery in the fast-growing data storage and sharing space, as it seeks to compete with powerful rivals from Dropbox to similar offerings by big companies like Google.

I talked to Garlinghouse about this, as well as why he went to YouSendIt, and how it might be rebranded going forward, in the video below:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130115/yousendits-brad-garlinghouse-talks-about-found-acquisition-rebranding-and-more-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130111/groupon-acquires-glassmap-a-location-based-discovery-startup/ http://allthingsd.com/20130111/groupon-acquires-glassmap-a-location-based-discovery-startup/#comments Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:41:45 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=284744 Groupon has acquired Glassmap, the location-based deals discovery app, the startup announced on Friday.

Groupon confirmed the acquisition to AllThingsD. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Our goal when we started building Glassmap was to help people find what was interesting and relevant around them,” Glassmap said in a company blog post. And that’s pretty much the thrust of the app: Glassmap tracks users’ locations in real time, using a smartphone’s GPS system.

What’s most relevant to Groupon, however, is the feature set Glassmap launched back in October, where local businesses are able to target Glassmap users based on their interests, activity and location. That could potentially tie in to Groupon’s immediate deals service, Groupon Now.

Glassmap will shut down its service next month as the team migrates to working for Groupon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130111/groupon-acquires-glassmap-a-location-based-discovery-startup/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20130109/mayers-10x-challenge-yahoos-homepage-mail-and-search-traffic-show-significant-year-over-year-declines/ http://allthingsd.com/20130109/mayers-10x-challenge-yahoos-homepage-mail-and-search-traffic-show-significant-year-over-year-declines/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2013 20:45:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=283688

This week in Las Vegas, the new management team running Yahoo — including CEO Marissa Mayer — is at International CES to schmooze with big advertisers and convince them that Yahoo is the place to put large chunks of their marketing budgets.

One of the longtime selling points of the company is the sheer size of its audience, especially for the key money-making parts of the site — the homepage, Yahoo Mail and search.

But private stats from comScore show that those three areas have continued their longtime decline over the last year, in some cases dropping significantly. In November and December, for example, compared to the same two months a year ago, U.S. search was down 28 percent and 24 percent respectively, while mail was down 16 percent and 12 percent.

This matters a great deal, since the troika of homepage, mail and search have been the critical driver of the Yahoo value ecosystem for advertisers.

The impact of those drops is felt all over Yahoo, whose music, movie, games and travel site have also seen massive drop-offs in traffic year over year in those same months.

Stopping the decline is critical for Yahoo, since Mayer herself has underscored the need for size in her pushing for new businesses at Yahoo that are 100 million users in size and/or have revenue prospects of at least $100 million.

While this is a lofty vision, the reality of traffic falloffs on key properties is a vexing issue, especially since they remain its main source of revenue and also an important element in launching future products Mayer is promising will turbocharge the company.

It’s not that Yahoo is not huge, especially compared to most sites on the Web.

As one of the top Internet brands, according to a recent Nielsen report, the average number of total monthly unique visitors for the longtime Silicon Valley Internet company in 2012 was 141.6 million, No. 3 behind Google and Facebook in the U.S. market. Similar rankings were reported by comScore, which placed Yahoo at the No. 2 spot after Google, with 171.4 million monthly visitors in November.

But, for many years, traffic to those important consumer destinations of Yahoo has been on a clear and unstopping decline, statistics (usually from comScore) that the company nonetheless always dutifully puts in its earnings slides — see below — for investors to get some idea of the major and vexing issues facing the company.

That was suddenly ended in the last quarter with the engagement slide removed from Yahoo’s public deck entirely. Not all companies include such stats, so when I inquired as to why the company had made the change, Yahoo PR never returned my phone call.

But it’s not hard to guess the reason for the shift — the numbers were not good and they called more attention to Yahoo’s glaring challenge, which is getting users reengaged with its products by creating what Mayer has dubbed several times “delightful” experiences.

According to numerous sources, that has also been the case within the company too, with the new regime restricting an internal transparency initiative pushed by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving that shared product performance numbers with the top 100 leaders at Yahoo.

And while it’s an interesting strategic choice, several sources inside the company this week urged me to get ahold of increasingly worrisome numbers from comScore — available to its private clients — comparing November 2011 to November 2012 and also December 2011 to December 2012 at home and work in the U.S.

So I did, getting the same stats from numerous sources — numbers that a spokesman for comScore confirmed were correct.

And, as promised, they are worrisome indeed.

In November 2012, compared to November 2011, the monthly unique visitors to the homepage declined 17 percent to 91.8 million from 110.9 million; Yahoo Mail dropped 16 percent (from 92 million to 77.7 million); and Yahoo search dropped 28 percent (from 93.3 million to 66.9 million).

Also off significantly for all three areas, often by one-third, were a plethora of other stats: Percentage of reach, total minutes, total page views, total visits and more.

One of the only bright spots for Yahoo was the relatively small Flickr sites, which were up 37 percent — 26.7 million versus 19.4 million — in unique monthly visitors year over year. The photo-sharing site — which has been getting a much-needed refresh — was also up in all other stats.

But Flickr — which Mayer (pictured here) has laudably touted and supported after years of inexplicable neglect — is not a money-maker for Yahoo, even if its return does burnish the company’s tech and innovation cred.

In December 2011 to December 2012, the homepage was more stable, gaining four percent in monthly uniques from 109.4 million to 114.2 million, but with other key stats both rising and falling. Total visits were up 14 percent, for example, while average minutes per visit was down 13.6 percent.

But the trouble for mail or search continued, off 12 percent (89.9 million to 78.7 million) and 24 percent (88.7 million to 67.4 million) respectively in monthly uniques, with similarly major declines in all other stats.

Mail recently got a refresh too under Mayer, despite some recent security glitches, so new stats will show if that will help stem the declines. Search is another story all together, with Yahoo in what can only be described as a dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft that numerous sources tell me Mayer is seeking to end.

The homepage, too, is undergoing a redo, with a design that has a decidedly more mobile and social feel, and pushing an ethos of Yahoo becoming a hub for content discovery. It is hoped the new look will boost traffic relatively quickly from its current downward trajectory.

To be fair, there can be lots and lots of reasons for these declines, although most of Yahoo’s competitors are, at worse, seeing a flattening of growth and not outright declines.

And sometimes Internet sites complain that services like comScore undercount, although Yahoo had previously used the firm in its public documents. More to the point, as multiple sources within the company note, the stats are directionally correct in that they closely track with internal Yahoo numbers.

Which is to say, traffic is going down rather than growing. That is clearly why Mayer has loudly stressed mobile since arriving at Yahoo, an area not included in these numbers that many sources said has strong growth to about 70 million monthly unique visitors via its apps and mobile-enabled Web offerings.

But unlike the homepage, mail and search — which push and pull traffic all over Yahoo and are responsible for most of its current monetization — mobile also makes very little money now. And Yahoo — unlike Facebook, which recently did — does not break out mobile results.

So, it will be interesting to see if the company does so when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on January 28 and also if it says anything about continued traffic declines of its traditional Web business in the period and the impact on revenue.

Still, there are lots of ways to counter declining or flat revenues, even with declining traffic — via cost cuts, efficiencies, charging more and selling assets (as Yahoo did in the last quarter). And Yahoo has ably managed to keep its operating margins growing over the years, despite both the declines in traffic and moribund growth in its revenue.

But the real and only fix is the drastic fix to existing tentpoles Yahoo has and the creation or acquisition of products that excite consumers and, therefore, advertisers.

It’s not an easy thing, of course, as well-known venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recently wrote in his blog about the need to focus on products over building and improving culture — one of Mayer’s other big initiatives at Yahoo.

Wrote Horowitz in what I consider one of the clearest articulations of what it takes to win for startups, as well as big companies like Yahoo:

“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10X better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does.”

If you want to take a gander, here are some more of those old Yahoo quarterly engagement slides, which were recently eliminated from its presentations:

(Note: I reached out to Yahoo’s outside PR firm — since they do respond to queries — and also some company execs to get a comment on this story, but so far there has been none.)

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