Where Are All The Good Internet Ideas?
I had lunch today with a Silicon Valley VC, a guy who's made some pretty good investments in his time, and we got to talking about interesting business ideas in the Internet and online marketing spaces.
I pride myself on being more up to speed on where the industry's going than the next guy, and spend an inordinate amount of non-work time learning about what's new/next/big in the Internet.
But as we talked, it occured to me that there are far fewer big, new, promising Internet startups than even just 12 or 18 months ago:
Chitika - for a while people thought it would beat AdSense, but now it's looking good, but mortal.
SpotRunner - that *is* a good idea and Google's investment in DMark confirms it.
Technorati - blog search, a cool idea but don't you think that's more of a feature than a company?
Efficient Frontier (where I work) - applying portfolio trading applications from Wall St to the optimization of large paid search campaigns. I'm a believer, so sorry for the self-promo, it won't happen again until my next post.
There are a bunch of problems in the Internet and online advertising that have yet to be solved, but where the heck are all the interesting startups?
Anyone have an idea, or a strong opinion on what startups are out there whose model and potential evokes 9 or 10-figure future valuations?
3 Comments:
chris -what about betterPPC :)
Are you going to SESNY? We will be there... let's get together.
3:16 PM
BetterPPC *is* one of the rare, good Internet ideas. I actually thought about including it, but decided against it - not because it's not a great idea, but rather because while I'm convinced it's a great feature, I rather expect it to be bought by another firm and incorporated into a larger, more end-to-end solution.
The same could reasonably be said about keyword management (EF's focus now), but I tend to think that using math to optimize auction-based marketing spend is going to end up being a full-fledged business that will eventually touch TV, radio, print, billboard, etc.
I'll be at SES NYC for sure; see you there!
10:18 AM
Thanks for the compliment, and point taken.
But consider that we use math to optimize ad copy, similar to the way you use math to optimize keyword bid prices. I would argue that these techniques have the same applications in all the areas you cite, whether for optimizing bid prices or the message itself. The key (for both of our companies) is whether the results can be measured.
In fact, we have found that many times there are more gains to be had overall by optimizing ad copy for individual keywords (in part by reducing the labor and effort to do so) as there are to be had by adjusting the max cpc on individual keywords.
Looking forward to continuing the discussing at SES NY (maybe after a few beers!).
5:12 PM
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