Tuesday, January 22, 2008

China's Undiscovered Interenet: BBS

I came across a great article this morning discussing one aspect of Internet usage in China that I certainly wasn't aware of, namely that bulletin board services are one of the top two or three most widely & often-visited types of sites. The article was written by Gang Lu on his blog Mobinode.

In the article the author interviews Kevin Day, the founder of the largest Chinese BBS company (Comsenz) and asks him whether or not social networks (SNS) will supplant BBS in China, to which he responds:

“BBS will not be replaced by SNS and they will not be the competitors to each other either. BBS is a must-to-have application in SNS, at least in China. The features of BBS can help the social network users to exchange their ideas efficiently. On the other hand, SNS is a people-centric networking platform but BBS is a topic-centric platform. SNS is to map the social relationship in real life into the cyber space, which in my opinion is one of the reasons people love Facebook; But BBS is there for users to follow the hottest topics and expand your social experience virtually. In BBS, people goes there because they are interests in the topics, and whom they communicate with are not really matter.”

To me, BBS makes a lot more sense than social networking. As Day implies, people care more about topics than they do about what topics people are interested in - a distinction that the Facebooks of the world would IMO should take to heart as they try to build long-term, viable businesses.

It's also interesting to note that Comsenz (Kevin Day's BBS company) has its own AdSense-like BBS monetization platform, called Insenz, and that Sequoia, Google and Morningside invested in Comsenz in 2006. Perhaps this type of diligent, forward-thinking investing is why Sequoia is one of only a couple dozen VCs (out of 1000+) to have actually made money for its investors over the last decade...

Friday, January 18, 2008

Latest Count: 2,475 SEM Firms

Ah, how I long for the good ole' days of 2003, when there were a mere 5 or so SEM firms. It was soooo much easier for advertisers to make SEM decisions, the SE's themselves knew who to spend time with, and the SEM's could track competitors with a 5-column spreadsheet.

Fast forward to 2008 and the SEM vendor list (tools and/or agencies) looks much like the long keyword tail everyone's been talking about. Here's a partial list of SEM vendors to give you an idea of just how many there are:

Efficient Frontier
Doubleclick/Performics - product is called DART Search
Did-It
360i/SearchIgnite
Marin Software
Clickable
Kenshoo
The Search Agency
Reprise Media
Omniture SearchCenter
KeywordMax
SearchRev
SendTec
RKG
Apex Pacific
Yield Software
Acquisio
Bid Maximizer
Adapt.com
BidHero
Web Trends Dynamic Search
Coremetrics Search
Salesforce.com for Google AdWords
iCrossing
SEMPhonic

European SEMs
Efficient Frontier
The Search Works (BidBuddy)
Lattitude
MakeMeTop
Iando
OneUpWeb
ESearchVision
MediaBoost

 
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