Despite largely anecdotal media speculation, it’s not clear how the acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo for $1.1 billion will be greeted by users of the New York blogging service.

But rival blogging service WordPress’s founder Matt Mullenweg posted a blog last night that said that imports from Tumblr to his service on Sunday had risen from a typical 400 to 600 blog posts an hour to more than 72,000.

Whoa!

That said, this is not an uncommon occurrence. Some users of Posterous fled the blogging service when Twitter bought it, and some Instagrammers huffed off when Facebook nabbed the photo-sharing site.

And, by comparison, Tumblr says it get 75 million blog posts per day — so 72,000 are just a drop in the ironic blogging ocean.

Plus, Mullenweg thinks the high price paid by the Silicon Valley Internet giant was low.

“I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years,” wrote Mullenweg.

Here’s his post:

It now looks pretty certain that Yahoo has pulled off a deal to buy Tumblr for 1.1B. The relationship between WordPress and Tumblr has always been pretty friendly: Tumblr’s own blog used to be on WP, WordPress.com supports Tumblr as a Publicize option alongside Twitter and Facebook, our Akismet team sends them daily emails of splogs on the service, and there’s healthy import and export traffic both ways. (Imports have actually spiked on the rumors even though it’s Sunday: normally we import 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, last hour it was over 72,000.)

News like this, whether from a friend or a competitor, is always bittersweet: I’m curious to see what the creative folks behind Tumblr do with their new resources, both personal and corporate, but I’m more interested to know what they would have done over the next 5-10 years as an independent company. I think we’re at the cusp of understanding the ultimate value of web publishing platforms, particularly ones that work cross-domain, and while Yahoo’s all-cash deal by some metrics, like revenue, is very generous, I think it’s a tenth of the value that will be created in these platforms over the coming years.

The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

But if you want to make the “pro” case for the deal, here’s how to do it: Pretend that Yahoo is Facebook, and Tumblr is Instagram.

The Facebook/Instagram deal is just over a year old, which means it’s still pretty early to gauge it. But so far it seems to have worked perfectly.

Facebook promised that Instagram would operate autonomously after the acquisition, and from the outside it appears to have kept that promise. People who read sites like this know that the two companies are linked, but lots of other people don’t, which is a huge plus for Instagram. (See: Parents who won’t let their kids use Facebook, but are okay with Instagram. For giggles, tell them the two are owned by the same company, and watch their faces turn ashen.)

And we’ve yet to see Instagram clutter up with lots of ads — or any ads at all. Result: The app is still growing like a weed, which helps mollify critics who worry about Facebook’s inevitable slowdown.

So that sounds like a pretty good model, right? Can Yahoo do the same thing with Tumblr?

Maybe. Tumblr is a much more mature company than Instagram, with a much bigger infrastucture. Kevin Systrom had about a dozen employees when he sold his company. After keeping his staff super lean for many years, David Karp has been on a hiring spree, and Tumblr’s head count is on track to hit something like 200 this year, with its own sales staff. So it will be harder to just tuck that away in the Yahoo org chart.

The crucial difference between the two scenarios, though, has less to do with the seller than the buyer.

Facebook bought Instagram because Mark Zuckerberg wanted to remove an obstacle. If Marissa Mayer buys Tumblr, it’s because she’ll be looking for a boost.

That makes it much less likely that she’ll be able to resist leaving Tumblr alone, and letting it figure out how to sell ads. Zuckerberg can drop a billion (or so) on Instagram, leave it unmonetized for a year, and Wall Street shrugs. Hard to imagine investors reacting the same way to this one.

And guess what? Like many other startup visual layouts today, it’s beginning to look a lot like Pinterest.

Three-column design spreads the content — photos, video, etc. — across the whole screen instead of relegating it to the single column Google+ uses today. Something cool: Photos and video are dynamic, sometimes spreading out over the entire column view.

Like Instagram and Twitter, of course, Google+ wants to co-opt hashtags into its service more deeply — but with a slightly different take on them. Google can scan one of your entries — text or photo — and impressively add a few hashtags it thinks relevant to your post (delete-able, obviously). Click the hashtag, and you can go down the rabbit hole of conversation based on that given hashtag.

So it’s pretty! Now to see how many people actually want to use it.

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In addition to feeding the tireless AllThingsD news machine, our editors also dropped by a few other outlets this week to talk about lots of things, including the fate of long-form journalism in a short-attention-span world and how to restore the Start Menu on Windows 8 until Microsoft decides whether or not to restore it for you. Here’s a rundown of those appearances:

• Kara Swisher spoke with Bloomberg West about her recent article for Vanity Fair magazine chronicling the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook:

• Kara also dropped by “Marketplace” for a chat about the place of long-form journalism on small-screen devices. Her take: Mobile devices offer plenty of room for both in-depth journalism and short-form “listicles” like those popularized by BuzzFeed:

• Walt Mossberg appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” program to discuss his review of Start8 and Pokki, two third-party utilities that restore the Start Menu to Windows 8:

• Finally, Peter Kafka joined “On The Media” to discuss the future of digital advertising as streaming online video grows in popularity:

As has been widely reported and according to sources we have confirmed it with, Facebook is indeed in serious talks to buy Waze for $1 billion, the social traffic application that helps drivers navigate the road with crowdsourced traffic information.

While no deal has been struck as yet, these sources said, the discussions are advanced and closely resemble the social networking giant’s lightning-fast purchase of Instagram a year ago.

The similarities do not stop there. The price is the same and is a mix of cash and stock, said sources. In addition, as Facebook has done with Instagram, Waze will be allowed to operate relatively independently within the company if the deal is struck.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently praised the purchase of Instagram, which has grown to more than 100 million active users in a short time span. More importantly, it has been a critical perceptual part of Facebook’s effort to distinguish itself in the mobile space and has added a highly engaged audience to its audience.

The news of the Waze acquisition interest by Facebook was first reported by Israel’s Calcalist. The Israeli-based company has been the subject of numerous rumors of acquisition, including by Apple and Google, neither of which seems to have panned out.

Not so here and the main question now: Why would Facebook buy a mapping company?

It’s not that much of a surprise, actually. The digital industry has moved its focus to mobile over the past few years, as users are increasingly accessing sites through their smartphones instead of desktop sites. As of Facebook’s last earnings, more than 750 million people visit Facebook via mobile device on a monthly basis.

After intense investor worry over its lack of mobile strategy caused a huge drop in its stock, Facebook quickly shifted to the idea that it needed to own the mobile experience. First, as has been reported by AllThingsD.com previously, that was going to be a proper phone. Then, abandoning that effort, the company mulled creating its own operating system. Finally, it settled on Home, essentially a Facebook-ified version of the Google Android mobile operating system that can be downloaded to run on many Android-enabled phones.

Clearly, Facebook has wanted to own the mobile experience without doing the intense work and uphill fighting of creating its own hardware or building an operating system from the ground up, both of which would struggle for marketshare, just like RIM’s BlackBerry or Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

But as we’ve seen with Google and, most recently, with Apple’s iPhone, if you want to truly own a mobile operating system, you’ve got to own the maps.

Why? Well, it’s an endless treasure trove of continuously updated data directly from your users, including their locations, their habits, their preferred businesses and their travel destinations. It’s why Apple snipped off Google Maps and switched its users over to its own mapping product, despite some problems with its software. And it’s why Google spent the past decade building up its maps to lead the industry.

To avoid getting left out, Waze, in particular, makes a certain amount of sense for a Facebook buy. For years, Facebook has yammered on and on about “social from the ground up” — you can’t just build apps and services and then slap a social layer on top and then just call them social. The network, Facebook argues, doesn’t work like that.

Waze is a perfect example of social from the ground up. From the beginning, the app has relied on not only the passive input of traffic and location data from its users, but the active contribution of data like accidents, police traps and more.

In other words, Waze is based on social contributions for the greater good of others using the app. Talk about something Facebook would be into, even at the high cost of one billion dollars.

But that’s something the company is used to pulling the trigger on. It outbid Twitter for Instagram almost one year ago, in a deal that was closed over the course of a weekend. While Zuckerberg had spent a lot of time creating a relationship with its co-founder Kevin Systrom, in that instance he showed the inclination and the power to grab for what he wants and very quickly.

Facebook declined to comment, with a spokesperson saying: “We don’t comment on rumors and speculation.”

Pheed wants to take that a step further. On Thursday, the company launched an update to its iOS application that allows Pheed users to watch streaming pay-per-view broadcasts from other Pheed users directly from their mobile devices.

Pretty straightforward: A user wants to do a live broadcast of some material. Say they’ve got a song to perform, or a discussion to hold, what have you. They set up the event and decide what they want to charge — if anything — for other Pheed users to view the live broadcast. The in-app payment system accepts the cost of admission and sends it to the user’s bank account, and viewers are sent a reminder before the broadcast goes live.

Smart. It’s obviously something that could appeal to the masses of musicians and artists out there who are promoting themselves via social and apps — think of the Lady Gagas, the Snoop Doggs and others who are creating their own mobile apps to promote their albums and content — while giving random small-timers the ability to promote their material as well.

After all, it may be easy for Snoop to get his spliff-happy app downloaded thousands of times to push his new album, but the starving artist in L.A. may have a tougher time. Live performance could be a novel way to garner an audience. (I think of early YouTube stars who came from being nobodies to hosting their own TV shows.)

Unlike some other more high-profile social video apps, Pheed is bootstrapped, fairly small and doesn’t bankroll stars to join the service. “We’ve never paid anyone to join, we never gave out equity and we’re not that rich,” Pheed co-founder O.D. Kobo said in an interview. “We really tried to do it the old-school way by just showing off the product before we launched.”

It seems like the service is already doing fairly well. Pheed won’t give me hard numbers quite yet, but the app grew by 1.2 million users in February, and also gained traction from the missteps of some competitors. “We benefited from the whole Instagram mess,” Kobo said, referring to the time when the photo-sharing service came under fire last winter after announcing its intent to eventually monetize user photos in a vague way. “Lots of photographers came onboard back then, and we gained something like 5,000 to 10,000 users per day.”

I’m curious to see how a pay-per-view option could help bolster the service, if at all. I’d imagine it could introduce some headaches to artists if technical problems arise and users want refunds for a faulty broadcast; customer service is never an easy task, and I’d guess even less so for a small-time creative trying to deal with an angry customer via mobile app.

Still, targeting the creative class niche is clever, especially when a large part of the service already skews somewhat young, in the 18-to-mid-20s range — the crowd companies like Facebook desperately want to keep inside their services and other startups are still trying to court.

The update should be live in Apple’s App Store today.

Earlier this week, I appeared on Bloomberg West with the ever-delightful Emily Chang to talk about my recent article in Vanity Fair magazine about the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook, titled “The Money Shot.”

You can read the full piece here or here, but this turned out to be a long — 10 minutes — interview that has a lot more detail (if you are interested, of course).

Among other things, Chang asked me more about the fractured relationship between the mobile photo-sharing app’s co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom and one of his key mentors, Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey, in the wake of the billion-dollar sale to Facebook (and not Twitter), which I called a “bromance gone awry.”

Indeed, Dorsey’s quote on the end of their relationship over Instagram’s choice was pretty sad:

“I found out about the deal when I got to work and one of my employees told me about it, after reading it online I got a notice later that day since I was an investor,” said Dorsey. “So I was heartbroken, since I did not hear from Kevin at all. We exchanged e-mails once or twice, and I have seen him at parties. But we have not really talked at all since then, and that’s sad.”

As I also wrote, “Dorsey’s last Instagram shot perhaps said the proverbial thousand words about it all: A picture of an empty Muni bus” (which is seen above).

You can’t always get what you want, but here’s the Bloomberg West interview, anyway:

Scenes from my not-very-artistic Oggl feed: Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick on the office roofdeck and animal heads on display

So, what next? Rather than evolve the core Hipstamatic experience — you know, one of those overhauls that results in pissed-off users who liked your old product just fine, so please change it back — Hipstamatic is launching an entirely new app called Oggl. And, surprisingly, it has all the same functionality as regular Hipstamatic, but with a new interface and business model.

Most importantly, Oggl is also meant to be more of an artistic community than a photo-editing tool.

“We’ve never really cared where you post your photos,” said Hipstamatic CEO Lucas Buick on Tuesday at Hipstamatic’s fancy-dancy San Francisco office. He noted that splintered communities of people who use Hipstamatic to take pictures have naturally emerged on services like Flickr.

But creating an entirely new app for a Hipstamatic community is kind of a drastic move — and one that reflects the ongoing trade-off between change and users’ resistance to change.

Spurned after so many “pivots” by app makers that get rid of their favorite functionality in favor of spammy new features, we users now wield our #fail hashtags readily.

Companies — which need to evolve and change, even if they are succeeding, and especially when they are not — are trying to figure out how to deal. So Hipstamatic’s approach with Oggl is to relinquish its core brand and audience, built with years of work, in order to reshape what it already built into something new.

Buick noted that the changing lineup will give stability to existing users. “Hipstamatic Classic is still awesome,” he said.

(Still, the fresh paint and the swank office don’t erase earlier Hipstamatic hiccups, like staff layoffs made last year in an attempt to regain focus.)

Launching for iPhone later this week, Oggl is a free invitation-only app that will cost 99 cents per month or $9.99 per year to access the full library of Hipstamatic lenses and films. Oggl will feature a curated selection of photos, and users will be encouraged to share only their best work.

People who have been frustrated with Hipstamatic’s inflexible editing may be pleased to learn that Oggl allows users to capture first and edit later. Oggl also has a sparse navigation around various icons that looks neat but seems like it might take a while to learn.

Buick described mobile photography as a balance between making art and capturing life. So Oggl is perhaps not the place to post your daily breakfast, but if you happen to eat at one of the world’s great restaurants, go right ahead and make a pretty photo.

“This isn’t a place for duck lips, it’s not a place for your cereal. But we do want your French Laundry shots,” Buick said.

There’s no picture of the moment when everything changed for Kevin Systrom. But if there were, it would look something like this: A lanky, very tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s sits on a bench at the Caltrain commuter station in Palo Alto, Calif. A sepia tone and weathered patina might underscore the mood of weighty contemplation.

It was early April of last year, and Systrom was waiting for his business partner, Mike Krieger, to arrive from San Francisco. Systrom had just left Mark Zuckerberg’s nearby house and was still digesting the offer that the Facebook founder and CEO had made him: To buy Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Systrom and Krieger had launched just 18 months before. The price Zuckerberg offered was $1 billion — $300 million in cash and the rest in Facebook stock, an especially generous-seeming deal on the eve of his company’s much-anticipated initial public offering.

The offer was even more impressive given Instagram’s size and age. At the time, it had just 13 employees, operating out of a cramped space in the South Park section of San Francisco. Still, the small crew had managed to attract 30 million Apple iPhone users in just a year and a half by offering a service that allowed a person to quickly upload, prettify through the use of filters and publish images to the Web for friends to see. A version for Google’s Android mobile operating system had launched the week before, attracting another million users in a single day.

What’s more, although the app generated no revenue, it had attracted so much attention from venture capitalists that the startup had nearly closed an impressive new round of funding at a wildly high valuation of $500 million. Zuckerberg had just doubled that, leaving Systrom with a lot to think about on that train-station bench.

Click. If there ever was a money shot to take for Instagram and Systrom, that was it.

(Photo by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson, used with permission by Vanity Fair)

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In tomorrow’s world, we’ll already be living online all the time, so the notion of “sharing” may change. And you can already see that future on Snapchat, the mobile app where millions of young people send disappearing images, taken in the moment and then deleted within 10 seconds of being viewed.

“We think it captures a broader use case,” said Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel, contrasting Snapchat with Facebook and Instagram in an interview at D: Dive Into Mobile. “It’s less about ‘I’m cool, I look really good,’ and it’s a lot more about communicating where you are, what you’re doing, how you feel. It’s more about chatting and messaging than putting yourself on display.”

Wait, what? Is he arguing that this weird niche-y notion of impermanent photos is actually a bigger opportunity than regular photos? He is. Broadly speaking: Communicating with photos is potentially a bigger market than scrapbooking.

Spiegel pointed to daily upload numbers that show that Snapchat is already bigger than Instagram, at least by one metric: Users upload 150 million Snaps per day, versus 40 million daily photos on Instagram.

Said Spiegel, “I think there’s definitely a place for permanence; we’re not anti-permanence by any means. We just believe ephemeral should be the default.”

Here’s the full video of the interview with Spiegel, in which he also discusses norms for teenagers in social media, potential Snapchat business models (a.k.a. ads) and the virtues of running a startup from Los Angeles:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130503/when-people-live-their-lives-online-the-concept-of-sharing-changes-says-snapchats-evan-spiegel-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130502/instagram-adds-an-identity-layer-which-could-be-a-big-deal-for-brands/ http://allthingsd.com/20130502/instagram-adds-an-identity-layer-which-could-be-a-big-deal-for-brands/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 17:00:06 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=317794 Your Instagram photos are about to get even more personal.

Like its parent company, Facebook, Instagram plans to roll out an added layer of identity to its 100-million-strong photo-sharing service with the introduction of a new section and feature called “Photos of You.”

It’s two things, primarily: One, it’s pretty much the introduction of photo tagging to Instagram. Take a picture of yourself and some friends, and you’re able to stick their name inside your photo via their Instagram handle. Sorta like the way you stick an @mention in the caption, only this @mention lives inside the picture itself.

(It’s worth noting here that you’re only adding Instagram users to photos, not Facebook users — despite the nature of the relationship between the two services.)

Then comes the second part: Any photos tagged with your name will be added to the new tab inside your Instagram profile, aptly named “Photos of You.” Again, like Facebook photo tagging, it’s a way of crowdsourcing your online presence in photos, collecting all of the shots you’ve been tagged in and sticking them in your Photos of You tab. You can curate it as you please, approving and nixing which pics show up in the tab. And the privacy level depends on whether your IG profile itself is public or private. (It’s either publicly viewable or it isn’t. No in-between like Facebook.)

Tons of privacy arguments to be made here, I’m sure, which I will let my other colleagues in the Fourth Estate handle. What’s most interesting to me, for the moment, are the potential implications for brands and businesses who use Instagram.

Say I’m Nike, one of the brands with a large presence on Instagram. Normally, I’m curating my Instagram stream to show off the best products I sell. You follow my Instagram account and see the cool stuff I have for sale. Hurrah.

A tagged business photo, courtesy of a user

Photos of You, however, essentially gives a brand the ability to crowdsource photos of its products — likely put to use — from the millions of people who are on Instagram and taking pictures all the time. So, basically, if I’m Nike, I could potentially get tons of free content for my Photos of You tab, all courtesy of the rest of Instagram.

Fascinating! Although it’s admittedly contingent on whether Instagram users actually take the time to tag brands in the photos they produce. But potentially a boon for brands who want to bulk up their stream of content with minimal work — all they need to do is feature the best user-generated shots.

Interesting, too, considering Instagram’s dust-up last year concerning placing ads against user photos in the future. Last year, when Instagram first tweaked some of its terms-of-service language concerning advertising, everyone freaked out at the thought of, say, having a Geico ad slapped atop their precious baby’s face. So Instagram walked it back a bit to appease the angry mob of users.

But Instagram never killed the idea entirely. It basically said, “Sorry for making y’all mad. We’ll come back with a better explanation when it’s time to monetize.” This could be another step in the direction of monetization. Is a user’s tagging their own photo with a brand’s name a sort of implicit agreement to place ads against it? I don’t know — maybe, maybe not.

Another possibility: Maybe ads never come near the Photos of You tab, and perhaps brands ask users if they can share their tagged photos on Facebook, where there are already ad products. Get the permission to incorporate real user-generated Instagram content into an existing Facebook ad product, and you don’t need to worry about slotting ads into the Instagram stream itself. Big idea, that.

Whatever the case, now I believe Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s line about Instagram from yesterday’s first-quarter earnings call: “They’re really doing well and growing quickly, and that is the right focus for them,” he said. “They have the opportunity to … build community.”

In other words, this is a move toward growth, discoverability and community first and foremost. But if it actually works, imagine this as a big step toward a future where Instagram could actually be a moneymaker.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130502/instagram-adds-an-identity-layer-which-could-be-a-big-deal-for-brands/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130501/growth-mobile-and-more-facebooks-first-quarter-earnings-liveblog/ http://allthingsd.com/20130501/growth-mobile-and-more-facebooks-first-quarter-earnings-liveblog/#comments Wed, 01 May 2013 20:57:53 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=317427 Well, the numbers are in. Facebook made its revenue estimates this quarter, coming in at $1.458 billion, though missed its profits by a penny at earnings per share of 12 cents.

The real story here is mobile (as always). The company’s mobile ad revenue accounted for 30 percent of the overall ad biz — a whopping jump from the 23 percent of mobile ad revenue raked in last quarter.

A good thing for the social giant, considering the company’s entire user base is slowly trickling over to accessing the site via mobile device. Monthly active users viewing the site on mobile devices came in at 751 million, a 54 percent jump year over year.

Scary at first, perhaps, for the Web industry as a whole, with all the companies in the Valley scrambling to make the move to mobile effectively. Now, optimistic as ever, Facebook continues to position it as an opportunity, not a liability.

Check out my notes from the company’s quarterly conference call earlier on Wednesday, starring CEO Mark Zuckerberg, COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Ebersman.

———————
1:55 pm PT: Gotta love the flute music. Holding patiently.

2:00 pm: About to start!

2:02 pm: Buncha standard legalese. Please hold for actual substance.

2:03 pm: First up, Mr. Zuckerberg.

2:04 pm: Zuck says he’s surprised how the growth keeps going even though there’s more than a billion people using the service.

Funny, considering the growth rate is slowing overall.

2:04 pm: FLASH — Zuck is super stoked on Facebook Home, the company’s recent mobile software release.

It’s great! Gonna be huge! Alas, we just released it and only a few phones can use it. So please hold for more awesomeness.

2:06 pm: Next up, Instagram. Zuckerberg also loving how great CEO Kevin Systrom is doing with the platform. 100 million users. Fantastic!

2:07 pm: Zuckerberg playing up how important Facebook Platform is to the company. Especially mobile apps from third parties.

“I think it’s clear now that we can create a lot of value for devs by providing identity,” he said. “We’re starting to see real revenue from mobile app installs.”

2:08 pm: Platform emphasis makes sense. Facebook really needs great content flowing through the news feed to keep you coming back and looking at it. That means cool-looking apps and stuff.

2:10 pm: Again, big emphasis on Home, Graph Search and the like as “long-term investments.”

In other words — THE MONEY FROM THESE PRODUCTS WILL COME LATER, Y’ALL.

2:11 pm: Time to Lean In! COO Sheryl Sandberg is on the call.

2:11 pm: Sandberg reiterating how awesome the shift to mobile is. We check our phones so often, that’s perfect for mobile ads!

Mobile ads biz doing great internationally — “particularly in Asia.”

2:12 pm: Sandberg, like Zuckerberg, is pushing the company’s mobile app install ads product. Basically a paid way to stick your app inside the mobile news feed. Click on it, and it’ll send you to the Google or Apple app store and have you download the app.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard anecdotally that those ads do indeed drive significant downloads. Good ad product, it seems.

2:13 pm: Sandberg talking about the Atlas acquisition, which closed last week.

Big deal for ad measurement success. Basically it’ll be another way to show the ad folks that yes, your Facebook ads are worth it and no, don’t measure by clicks like you’re used to with your stuffy old Google ads!

2:15 pm: Sandberg, in a nutshell: FORGET CLICKS. We got way better ways to measure ad success.

2:18 pm: Sandberg feeling great on Q1, and still pushing the fact that it’s early days in the ads biz for Facebook. Keep on keepin’ on.

2:19 pm: Here comes CFO Ebersman.

2:19 pm: Mobile still huge in terms of who’s accessing the site. As we know.

2:20 pm: Crazy. Mobile-only users visiting Facebook on a monthly basis at 189 million users.

2:21 pm: Payments and fees revs were up year on year. Games in particular were up 12 percent.

Huh. Q1 saw a record number of people playing games on Facebook.

2:23 pm: Warning: Expenses are gonna swell. But we’ve been saying that for a while. Infrastructure, engineers, new campuses, new products — all of that costs money.

2:24 pm: So take note of that last thing Ebersman said.

Q1 had a record number of people playing games on Facebook, while Zynga’s contribution to that dropped by 37 percent. Other game developers are up 60 percent.

That’s a big deal. Larger diversification of the games and payments ecosystem.

2:29 pm: Growth and engagement geographically is up internationally, Ebersman says.

Mobile obviously responsible for that.

2:30 pm: A question about different screen form-factors.

2:32 pm: Zuckerberg: Sure, there will be more screens. Whether it be desktops, or phones, or “glasses … whatever the products are.”

“The big question for us is which platforms do we see growing the quickest?”

2:32 pm: “Ads during the first six or seven years of Facebook were just in the right-hand column.”

“Whatever the form-factors going forward…” we’ll get it right. –Zuck

2:35 pm: A question on Atlas: “As people are looking more holistically at all the ad spend they’re doing, they’re looking at everything leading up to that purchase — not just the last click.” –Sandberg

2:36 pm: So again, the Atlas buy is about more measurement than just the last click before buying a product. Offline influence, etc.

2:36 pm: Sandberg “increasingly encouraged” by SMBs around the world in their willingness to take up Facebook’s ad biz.

Hope so! That’s not really where the focus is right now, though.

2:38 pm: Sandberg really pushing the fact that tons of SMBs have Facebook Pages.

Still doesn’t help the little guys without massive followings break through to the news feed, though. We’ll see.

2:40 pm: Ooh, a video ads question!

Hope they don’t dodge it.

2:40 pm: Sandberg says video is a “really exciting area” — and advertisers can use Facebook’s existing embeddable video product in their ads.

Continuing to explore the area, Sandberg says, but nothing to announce today.

Shucks.

2:41 pm: Ah, a question about Instagram and monetization.

When you gonna slap ads on our pics, Sheryl?

2:41 pm: Zuck on Instagram: “They’re really doing well and growing quickly.”

Focus should be on community building. He’s optimistic on biz opportunity, but they aren’t slapping ads on anything just yet.

“They’re growing a lot faster now and were faster to get to 100 million than Facebook even was,” Zuckerberg says.

2:43 pm: Boring question, boring response.

Mobile mobile mobile.

2:44 pm: Two questions: Platform and Graph Search.

Zuckerberg is super happy with gaming ecosystem and how it’s doing, despite “Zynga,” whose growth ain’t great.

Ouch!

2:45 pm: Poor Zynga can’t catch a break.

2:45 pm: Zuck on platform (in my words): Please, dear god, developers. Give us your apps. Distribute them here.

2:46 pm: As far as Graph Search goes, repeat after me. Early. Days.

2:46 pm: “The launch wasn’t this point where we expected a ton of people to start using it. … real roll-out will start pretty soon.” –Zuckerberg on Graph Search

2:47 pm: Fun question from Mark Mahaney: Do the kids still like Facebook? I hear it’s not hip anymore.

2:47 pm: Ebersman: Facebook is awesome for everyone, regardless of age! And yes, kids still like Facebook.

Telling: Ebersman really emphasized Instagram’s influence with the young crowd.

2:49 pm: Funny. I asked my 12-year-old neighbor the other day which apps she used — she told me Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram. (No Facebook!)

2:50 pm: Lotsa mobile app install ad buyers are new advertisers to Facebook.

Makes sense why Zuckerberg keeps making his call to arms for developers.

2:55 pm: “Owning our own data centers removes another party from the mix.”

Also lets them “build them exactly how we want them to look.” Best for efficiency, Ebersman said.

This in light of a recent announcement that Facebook would be building another data center in Iowa.

2:56 pm: Hmm. Sandberg advocates promoted Pages product to SMBs rather than other larger ad spend products.

Sort of a “no duh.” But I’m still not convinced the little guys are getting good ROI there.

3:00 pm: So, 3 percent of the payments revenue bump came from user-promoted posts and, to a lesser extent, Facebook’s Gifts product.

Hmm.

3:01 pm: And that’s a wrap, folks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130501/growth-mobile-and-more-facebooks-first-quarter-earnings-liveblog/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130424/social-commerce-startup-chirpify-raises-2-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20130424/social-commerce-startup-chirpify-raises-2-million/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:01:27 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=314948 Chirpify, the Portland, Ore.-based startup that allows users of social networks like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to pay for items inside a particular stream, has secured an additional $2 million in venture funding from Voyager Capital. This, along with capital from previous angel investors Andy Liu, Rudy Gadre, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes and others, brings the total amount of funds raised to $3.3 million.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130424/social-commerce-startup-chirpify-raises-2-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130418/time-100-list-is-packed-with-techies-from-musk-to-systrom-to-sandberg-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20130418/time-100-list-is-packed-with-techies-from-musk-to-systrom-to-sandberg-and-more/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:38:29 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=313554

While the tale of a print magazine embedded in a troubled media company makes for much better reading, everyone loves a listicle. So, Time has once again put out its annual countdown of the 100 “most influential people in the world, from artists and leaders to pioneers, titans and icons.”

And, as usual, global techies represent big-time on the list, including:

* Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk — about whom Virgin Group’s Richard Branson wrote, “It’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.”

* Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom, who gets inexplicably feted by entertainment bon vivant Ryan Seacrest (we are down with this anyway).

* Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos (yay for Ted, who is Mr. Nice Guy, especially for Hollywood).

* Ren Zhengfei, CEO of China’s telecom giant Huawei.

* Oh-Hyun Kwon, Samsung CEO, about whom former Apple CEO John Sculley wrote, “As Samsung builds a campus in Silicon Valley, all eyes will be on Kwon to see if the CEO with a PhD from Stanford can be as successful with software as he has been with hardware.”

* Music manager and Internet talent discoverer Scooter Braun.

* Minecraft developers, Markus Persson and Jens Bergensten, whom my sons revere (and therefore are deserving of kudos!).

* OkCupid founder Sam Yagan, who is now CEO of Match.com.

* Microsoft and Apple irritant David Einhorn, who is the only hedge fund investor dude I like.

* Deservedly ubiquitous Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose “Lean In” is a bestseller.

* Apple design guru Jony Ive, about whom Bono noted, “Jony Ive is himself classic Apple. Brushed steel, polished glass hardware, complicated software honed to simplicity.”

* Coursera co-founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are among many in tech trying to change education.

* Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.

* Google Ideas guy Jared Cohen.

* Afghanistan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who gets praise from Sandberg.

* Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen, about whom “Veronica Mars” star (and user of the fundraising tool) Kristen Bell said, “There’s something so smart and magical about that idea — connecting consumers with creators and letting them vote with their own money.”

* And listicle Olympian and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, garnering a major feting from Google’s Eric Schmidt, who wrote: “Google was lucky to have her help us grow into what we became, and Yahoo is lucky to have her taking them someplace new.”

(Cover photo by Mark Seliger for Time)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130418/time-100-list-is-packed-with-techies-from-musk-to-systrom-to-sandberg-and-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130417/whatsapp-snapchat-and-the-real-second-screen-10-things-you-missed-at-day-two-of-dive-into-mobile/ http://allthingsd.com/20130417/whatsapp-snapchat-and-the-real-second-screen-10-things-you-missed-at-day-two-of-dive-into-mobile/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 07:13:50 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=313038

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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130417/whatsapp-snapchat-and-the-real-second-screen-10-things-you-missed-at-day-two-of-dive-into-mobile/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/the-pros-and-cons-of-selfie-destruction/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/the-pros-and-cons-of-selfie-destruction/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:00:27 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=312642 With 150 million pictures a day being sent by its users, there’s no doubt that many of the self-destructing pictures flowing through Snapchat could be described, as, er, compromising. As Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel conceded during his D: Dive Into Mobile interview Tuesday, “Sure … some Snapchats have … erm … people without clothes on.” But it’s not anything Spiegel wanted to dwell on. Here’s a video highlight:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/the-pros-and-cons-of-selfie-destruction/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/deletion-as-the-default-snapchat-and-ephemerality-in-a-mobile-photo-world/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/deletion-as-the-default-snapchat-and-ephemerality-in-a-mobile-photo-world/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:15:56 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=312355 Everyone loves a good selfie — just not necessarily for more than 10 seconds.

That looks to be evident with Snapchat, the self-destructing photo messaging service that has exploded in popularity in just a short time. Even for mobile photo services — which are incredibly popular right now and certainly in no short supply — the growth rate is impressive, moving more than 150 million photos through the service daily.

Here’s a question: Why? Is there something inherent in the medium that allows a small company like Snapchat to dwarf Instagram’s daily photo volume in such short order? Part of the answer, at least, could be found in our inclination to forget.

“In this world, deletion as the default works pretty well,” said Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat, at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference. “We believe the default should be ephemerality.”

Interesting, considering that the focus of competitors like Instagram, Twitter and the like is on curation of an album over time, a collection of moments to be shared, reflected upon and ultimately revisited.

Obviously, people enjoy that aspect of mobile photos. Instagram is still considered highly successful, boasting more than 100 million monthly active users and a volume of more than 40 million photos moving through the service daily. It’s why Facebook bought the thing for three-quarters of a billion bucks.

But, as Snapchat proves, there are obviously other use cases outside of curation. Namely, photos as “communication rather than artwork,” as the young founder put it.

Not to mention the benefits of fading away. “Snapchat allows you to acknowledge where you are without having to have a picture of me in seventh grade with braces or headgear,” Spiegel said.

Here’s the big quandary. How does Snapchat monetize? It’s not like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, in that there’s no flowing stream to easily stick ads into.

Still, Spiegel said he’s open to ads, in whatever form they may take.

“I like ads, personally. I think ads can work really well on mobile,” Spiegel said, citing a recent hire who will focus exclusively on monetization efforts. “We’ve been playing around with a few prototypes.”

Good news for Snapchat’s investors, I’m sure. I just hope that when and if ads do end up on the service, Spiegel can convince advertisers that users won’t forget them as well.

(Hat tip to the New Yorker’s Matt Buchanan for his wonderful use of the word “ephemerality.”)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/deletion-as-the-default-snapchat-and-ephemerality-in-a-mobile-photo-world/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130416/snapchat-now-boasts-more-than-150-million-photos-taken-daily/ http://allthingsd.com/20130416/snapchat-now-boasts-more-than-150-million-photos-taken-daily/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:40:29 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=312373

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

Snapchat, the wildly popular messaging service that lets users send self-deleting photos to one another, has exploded in volume over the past few months, now moving upward of 150 million photos through the service on a daily basis.

That’s a 3x increase in just four months, founder Evan Spiegel said at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday, a massive jump by any measure.

(Here’s some perspective: Facebook’s Instagram, one of Snapchat’s closest competitors — though a photo service that strives for permanence over Snapchat’s ephemerality — moves around 40 million photos through its service on a daily basis, according to Instagram’s press site.)

The growth is good news indeed for Snapchat, which just closed a $13.5 million round of funding led by Benchmark Capital in February. Great volume! Especially compared to the relatively dead “Poke,” Facebook’s total rip-off of Snapchat. Great engagement, too!

Now it’s time to look at how they monetize.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130416/snapchat-now-boasts-more-than-150-million-photos-taken-daily/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/app-non-gratis/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/app-non-gratis/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:27:13 +0000 Dan Porter http://allthingsd.com/?p=311101 When OMGPOP was an independent company with limited resources, releasing apps you never heard of, someone whispered to us that for a low six-figure amount, they could propel us to a Top 5 ranking in the App Store. Those were the days, well over a year ago, when bots ruled the App Store. Fake downloads in India, Chinese bot farms, all were tricks you could use to game the charts. We, like many companies, could never ethically use these tricks, and Apple moved quickly to shut down the scamsters. What was so scary was that, after the shutdown, I immediately saw some Top 10 apps drop hundreds of places in the App Store.

On Tuesday, they were No. 3, by Thursday they were No. 400. It was mind-blowing how fast some of these supposed “hit apps” fell quickly to obscurity. Given what happened — and Apple’s response — the question remains, why did app developers use these tricks?

The main reason is that it is hard to get discovered in the App Store. Without some advantage, users might never find your app — and the amount that you can spend to get there above board is limited. Another reason is that when you hit the Top 25, then the Top 10 and then the Top 5, the exposure in the App Store generates significant organic downloads. In other words, people see you on the charts and they decide to download your app. In some ways, it’s not unlike how record labels manipulated the SoundScan charts in the 1990s to make seemingly unpopular records become hits.

But it’s hard to keep the schemers down. When Apple smartly moved against the bots last year, there was a brief gap in the market. Into that gap stepped a new breed of companies to help market apps. Sure, the scamsters always had their tricks. Notice an app pop up at No. 1? Look for hundreds of reviews that only have one word (amazing, incredible, awesome), or look for a shockingly low number of reviews for an app that’s No. 1. These are indicators that folks are doing something shady to make it to No. 1. And Apple, to its credit, tirelessly shuts them down and closes loopholes. It’s a thankless task.

But there are known, above-board companies whose mission it is to help also market apps. AppGratis, until getting booted for violations of the App Store rules, was one of those companies (Free App of the Day is another). In some ways, Apple’s halt to AppGratis is a big deal. Many of the games and apps that are at the top of the charts recently engaged AppGratis, which uses its large audience to drive large download volume. They do this by offering their members discounts on paid apps. This is particularly important to small or independent developers who lack the cross-promotion networks and marketing clout of established companies, and who can rely on a deal with AppGratis to expose them to a large audience.

While it is a big deal — to both developers and consumers — for Apple to remove AppGratis, in many ways, in the long-term view, it does not matter. And that is the key point.

There is no doubt that Apple’s vigilance makes the app store a friendly, clean and amazing place for consumers. But the fight to keep it that way is tireless and never-ending. As long as there is money to be made, app developers and app marketers will find new angles to lay siege to the charts.

But the win for Apple, and ultimately the loss for the app developers, is that in the end, the App Store really is a democracy, and no amount of cheating ever truly wins. What I mean by that is that there is a hidden meritocracy in the App Store charts. By hook or by crook, you might find a new angle to drive your app to the top, but at the end of the day, if consumers don’t like it, your app is going to fall.

What matters more than hitting the Top 10 is the ability to stay in theTop 10. That is the secret. There is tremendous movement in and out of the chart rankings, but the apps that stay there day after day and month after month — games like Candy Crush or Words With Friends, or apps like Instagram — they are the true winners. And staying there just cannot be gamed. The other apps are like shooting stars. They hit the charts via AppGratis, but there is ultimately something not sticky or fun or compelling about them, and they quickly slide back down.

So AppGratis may be gone, but companies like it will continue to crop up to take the app developer’s money. A hit is always going to be a hit, and that can only be achieved by creating an amazing product that people truly love.

Dan Porter is the former CEO of OMGPOP.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/app-non-gratis/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130403/cheer-up-facebook-investors-maybe-people-arent-bailing-on-mark-zuckerberg-after-all/ http://allthingsd.com/20130403/cheer-up-facebook-investors-maybe-people-arent-bailing-on-mark-zuckerberg-after-all/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:59:43 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=308791 Close to a year after its IPO, Facebook is still trying to figure out its ad business. But none of that will matter if users don’t stick around.

You can find plenty of anecdotes about people who have bailed on the social network, or are at least spending a lot less time there, sometimes because they’re using rivals like Twitter, WhatsApp or Snapchat, and sometimes because they’re doing other stuff, period. And that thinking must have resonance inside Facebook, too — otherwise it wouldn’t be trying to roll out a Facebook phone.

But J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth thinks those concerns are overblown. In a note this morning, he uses his own data and comScore’s to make two conclusions:

1) Facebook users are spending much less time with the service on the PC. But they’re spending much more time on Facebook on the phone, so overall engagement is up.

2) Facebook’s mobile competitors — including Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram* — have seen a lot of growth in the last year. But Facebook has seen more. 

(You can see a full breakdown of the data set at the bottom of this post.)

And Anmuth figures all of that means that even as Facebook plays around with different ad tactics and strategies, the overall trend is still moving up and to the right. He predicts the service will end this year with $5.5 billion in ad revenue, up 30 percent, and that it will do $6.9 billion in 2014.

If you want to poke holes in Anmuth’s argument, you could note that his data doesn’t break out usage by demographics. Which means it doesn’t address what ought to be the most worrisome of the people-bailing-on-Facebook stories — that teens and preteens are either quitting the service or not signing up at all. If those stories are true, though, we’ll see it show up in the numbers eventually.

*Obviously, Instagram is now a Facebook asset, but for the purposes of the study, Anmuth treats them as a competitor — which makes sense, since right now time spent on Instagram versus Facebook is a revenue hit for Facebook.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130403/cheer-up-facebook-investors-maybe-people-arent-bailing-on-mark-zuckerberg-after-all/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130402/facebook-photo-phenom-instagram-gets-a-business-lead-to-scale-its-operations-and-presumably-revenues/ http://allthingsd.com/20130402/facebook-photo-phenom-instagram-gets-a-business-lead-to-scale-its-operations-and-presumably-revenues/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:00:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=308579

According to sources, Facebook has moved well-regarded exec Emily White to a new job as director of business operations at its Instagram mobile photo-sharing unit.

In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money. The fast-growing service, which the social networking site bought a year ago in a billion-dollar mega-deal, has been popular with consumers, but it has not focused as much on its business operations.

(Update: Facebook confirmed the move and also released this statement from Systrom: “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”)

In fact, related to business, it has waded more into controversy — such as when changes to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom. That said, it left the door open to selling advertising of some sort on the app.

White has a lot of experience in the online ad space in smoothing out and organizing ops, both at Google — where she previously worked — and at Facebook, where she started in the deal-making arena and later worked on mobile partnerships.

White — who has recently been courted by other Internet startups, reportedly including scrapbooking phenom Pinterest — is also on the board of women’s yoga and running gear retailer Lululemon. That’s good since part of her new job will be to get more big brands integrated into Instagram, which has already begun to do that with some initial level of success.

Systrom will continue to focus more on product development and overall strategy and vision, which he has done since Instagram was purchased last April.

(That photo above is of White, which she just posted on her Instagram account — natch!)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130402/facebook-photo-phenom-instagram-gets-a-business-lead-to-scale-its-operations-and-presumably-revenues/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130328/klout-hooks-up-with-bing-and-instagram/ http://allthingsd.com/20130328/klout-hooks-up-with-bing-and-instagram/#comments Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:25:11 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=307505 Social media influence scoring startup Klout announced Thursday that it will more fully integrate users’ Instagram and Microsoft Bing accounts. Instagram influence will now be factored into a user’s overall Klout score. Bing accounts are able to be connected, but the data will be considered in Klout scores in the future. In the past, the company connected to a number of other accounts to measure social influence, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130328/klout-hooks-up-with-bing-and-instagram/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20130313/google-glass-will-disrupt-social-media-with-too-much-data/ http://allthingsd.com/20130313/google-glass-will-disrupt-social-media-with-too-much-data/#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:12:02 +0000 Jared Barol http://allthingsd.com/?p=303300 We’ve all seen the videos. Skydiving, sunsets with your girlfriend, lunches with friends (I had an amazing banana froyo shaped like Pikachu at this new place on Oak Lane!). With Google Glass, these otherwise mundane daily activities can actually become interesting, interactive and even fun. You can check in at places, take pictures and share them effortlessly, instantly and — more importantly — frequently. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger over at Instagram are probably jumping up and down with excitement right now — but they shouldn’t be, and here’s why.

At this point, there is no existing and widely used social network which can effectively manage the volume of photos that will result from accessible and wearable social tech.

There is a glaring problem with current social networks, specifically those that deal in photos, which is demonstrated by this funny picture I saw the other day comparing a teenage girl with Neil Armstrong. She went to the bathroom and took 37 pictures of herself in the mirror. He went to the moon and took five pictures of the universe. Over time, people change their habits because of the technology they have available to them and because of changes in social mores.

My Instagram feed is busy enough now at a time when, in order to take a picture, people still need to actively push a button on a device that otherwise resides in their pockets. When these frequent photographers get their hands (or heads) on a device that enables them to constantly share pictures of everything that interests them without them having to lift a finger — well, you see the problem.

At this point, there is no existing and widely used social network which effectively presents the information that will come along with those pictures.

When there is too much information, aggregators and hosts look for ways of slowing down the stream. Take Facebook’s use of Edge Rank, for example, as a way to fight the flow of information. You don’t see every post from each of your friends when you look at your Facebook News Feed. Instead, Facebook assigns a rank to each item, or “edge,” which would be visible to you and displays only a fraction of them.

However, using this form of social sieve comes with a cost: Information gets buried quickly. The assumption that “if it’s old, it’s not relevant” is not accurate. Information about your significant other doesn’t lose value over time. What your room or house or car looks like does not lose actuality over time. Who wants an “edge” (if we are to use Facebook parlance) — on which they spent time and energy — to simply disappear, buried under the mountains of data generated every day?

The next generation of social networks will enable users to easily digest and access large amounts of information.

I say next generation, and not new iteration, because existing social networks would need to rebuild themselves from scratch in order to do this, since it’s such a drastic change in how social information is curated. This is not an issue of redesigning the flow of a feed, it requires looking at information from a different angle. Structures suitable for social have existed among us for a while in different forms. For example, without Spotify’s or Netflix’s structure of genres, all you would find is a long list of recent tracks and films.

Social networks need to embrace pictures as primary user data points.

Technology like Google Glass will enable and encourage users to take many more pictures than they do now. Developers need to take this into account when building the next-generation social networks. Pictures are not momentary events which lose value over time. Instead, we value older photographs over newer ones. Why hide them behind a wall of recent information which some algorithm deemed more “relevant”? The next-generation social network will need to understand and support this. Even someone without $1,500 glasses can see that this is what we all should be striving toward.

Jared Barol connects We Heart Pics, a photo-based social network, with the outside world. You can reach him at jared@weheartpics.com or by following @jbarol on Twitter.

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