List of essays on freemium, viral marketing, and online ads
= my favorites!
Essay categories:
Viral marketing and user acquisition
For web entrepreneurs, growing your userbase is a key challenge, alongside product development and financing. These posts emphasize a quantitative approach to getting traction and growing users.
- What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption
- Adwords is not enough for success on the consumer web
- Are your SEO efforts working, or failing?
- Bridging your traffic engine with your revenue engine
- Facebook viral marketing: When and why do apps “jump the shark?”
- How to calculate cost-per-acquisition for startups relying on freemium, subscription, or virtual items biz
- Is your site really viral? Viral Branding versus Viral Action
- Social network marketing: Getting from zero to critical mass
- Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy
- 10 obvious strategies to ruthlessly acquire users
- Growing renewable audiences (a talk at O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures)
- Go-to-market strategies for vertical social products
Engagement and product design
Using principles from game design and analysis of consumer behavior, these essays cover the process of creating experiences your customers will love.
- 10 signs you’re a product fanatic
- 25 reasons users STOP using your product: An analysis of customer lifecycle
- Are people like lab rats? Using reward schedules to drive engagement
- Do you ever say, “MySpace is sooo ugly?” This blog’s for you…
- Does Facebook reflect your true friendships? How about e-mail?
- Facebook Apps: Why they’re focused on fun instead of utility
- Friends versus Followers: Twitter’s elegant design for grouping contacts
- Is your website a leaky bucket? 4 scenarios for user retention
- Public and private spaces, and why YouTube comments are so awful
- Social gaming design – Bartle types versus Web 2.0 participation pyramid
- Social network death spiral: How Metcalfe’s Law can work against you
- Talk to your target customer in 4 easy steps
- Technology always changes, but people always stay the same
- The design of social spaces
- User retention: Why depending on notification-driven retention sucks
- Users, customers, or audience – what do you call the people that visit your site?
- Why your friends list gets polluted over time
- Your site will succeed or fail in the first 10 seconds
Freemium and online ad monetization
Social web product have unique characteristics as it applies to online advertising and direct monetization levels. These posts cover some of the issues around key topics such as ARPUs, conversion funnels, CPM rates, behavioral data, revenue modeling, etc.
- 3 key ideas from a recent Freemium dinner conversation
- 5 factors that determine your advertising CPM rates
- 5 things that make your social network monetize like crap
- 7 ideas for billion dollar startups in online advertising
- App monetization: Gambit launches, funnel metrics, and ARPU versus “CPM”
- Data portability: Is the social network data you’re hoarding treasure or trash?
- Counting your big pile of Benjamins: 5 startup tips for maximizing ad revenue
- Creating value versus optimizing revenue
- Free to Freemium: 5 lessons learned from YouSendIt.com
- Freemium case study: AdultFriendFinder ARPU, churn, and conversion rates
- How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)
- How NOT to calculate ad revenue
- Online advertising during a recession: 5 key trends for ad-based startups
- Vertical ad networks: What are they, and why did Cox just buy Adify for $300MM?
- Virtual goods summit video, The Whirled Case Study: metrics for the virtual goods business
- What’s the value of a user on your site? Why it’s hard to calculate lifetime value for social network audiences
- Your ad-supported Web 2.0 site is actually a B2B enterprise in disguise
- “Stealing MySpace” and my personal experience monetizing MySpace ads
- Super Rewards and the leadgen side of Facebook virtual currency – can it last?
- Remnant ads and the advertisers who love them
- Ad targeting talk from Community Next: People Not Pages (updated x2)
- Revenue, ARPU, Funnels, and RPM: My talk from Startonomics on Revenue metrics
- Ad-based versus direct monetization: Which one is better for you?
- What would Facebook look like if it sold out to ads? Click here to see…
- Will social payment platforms really work long-term? (Guest post by Jay Weintraub)
Metrics
Without metrics, web entrepreneurs are just flying blind. These essays cover some of the organization and development issues around instituting a metrics system – what to measure, in what order, and how to implement them.
- 5 warning signs: Does A/B testing ead to crappy products?
- 5 steps towards building a metrics-driven business
- Benefit-Driven Metrics: Measure the lives you save, not the life preservers you sell
- The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics
- Are you misusing Alexa numbers? (Probably)
- Lessons from the casino industry on engagement metrics and lifetime value
- Obama and McCain: How political marketing has evolved from offline to online
- omg I’m just a startup, I can’t do those fancy analytics!
- Recency Frequency and Monetization (RFM): Optimizing your notifications strategy
- How to measure if users love your product using cohorts and revisit rates
- How to generate awesome test candidates for A/B testing
Media and games
Traditional media, including TV, music, games, and movies are at a crossroads. Here are some thoughts on how the industry is changing and evolving.
- From analog dollars to digital pennies: The crisis in traditional media
- Game design tutorial at the GDC
- MySpace versus Facebook: Analysis of both traffic and ad revenue, using Google Trends
- What every Web 2.0 entrepreneur should know about virtual goods
- Social Gaming Summit: Recap and observations
- Early adopters vs the Mainstream: Google Insights points out websites only used by Silicon Valley nerds
- YouTube vs Webkinz: Case studies for new product adoption
- Prosper.com and peer-to-peer lending in the economic downturn
- 4 major cultural differences between Games people and Web people
Entrepreneurship and startup life in San Francisco
Just a couple thoughts on things I’ve encountered while arriving in SF.
- 10 tips for meeting people at industry events
- 2009 conference schedule for the digital media industry
- 5 ways to break past the San Francisco echo-chamber
- Are Web 2.0 startups wasting their time with Web 2.0 early adopters?
- Bay Area investors I’m following on Twitter
- Couple quotes on Facebook in Wired, Fortune, and NYT
- How do you find a badass co-founder, Part 2
- How do you find a badass co-founder?
- How do you do concrete interviews for non-technical people?
- How do start a professional blog: 10 tips for new bloggers
- Is blogging worth it? What’s the ROI?
- Moving to SF and joining the tech community – Lessons from my first year
- What’s an Entrepreneur-in-Residence?
- What is your W2SAT* score? (*Web 2.0 Startup Aptitude Test)
- Which startup’s collapse will end the Web 2.0 era?
