The latest from TechCrunch
- It's Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans
- eBay Maps Out Black Friday Online Transactions
- Winner's Curse: Why Losing A B-School Biz Plan Competition Is Better Than Winning
- "Misunderstanding": Twitter Japan Now Says There Won't Be A Subscription Model
| It's Not Easy Being Popular. 77 Percent Of Facebook Fan Pages Have Under 1,000 Fans | Top |
| In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim ). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos , a social media monitoring and analytics firm. Once a fan page is set up ( here’s ours ), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above. The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans. Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans. It breaks down as follows: 95% of pages have more than 10 fans 65% of pages have more than 100 fans 23% of pages have more than 1,000 fans 4% of pages have more than 10,000 fans 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans 0.047% of pages have more than one million fans (297 in total). The Internet has long been defining celebrity down, and now we know by how much (if you accept that Facebook, the world’s fourth most popular Website with more than 300 million members , is as good a proxy as there is for the Web as a whole). To be Facebook famous, all you need is a moderately popular fan page, with the biggest chunk of those pages (42 percent) having between 100 and 1,000 fans. Another 30 percent have between 10 and 100 fans. The categories Facebook fan pages fall into are remarkably evenly distributed. Celebrities, products, stores, restaurants, bars and clubs, websites, music, organizations, and non profits each make up between 6.9 percent and 7.5 percent of fan pages by category. So-called celebrities only make up 7 percent of all fan pages. Of course, there are also some real celebrities (both dead and alive) who attract massive followings to their Facebook fan pages. Okay, there’s only 297 of them. For instance, Michael Jackson has the biggest fan page with 10.4 million fans, and that’s not counting the probably-overlapping 4.7 million who are fans of R.I.P. Michael Jackson (We Miss You) . The action movie star Vin Diesel clocks in at 7 million fans, which is more than Barack Obama (6.9 million) or Megan Fox (5 million). Yes, people on Facebook are idiots (Megan Fox is much hotter than Vin Diesel). In contrast, the most popular person on Twitter, Ashton Kutcher, has 4 million followers, and Obama’s Twitter account only has 2.75 million—although that’s without even trying . The biggest product page is Facebook’s own page , with 5.8 million fans (hey, is this rigged?), followed by Starbucks with 5.1 million (the page is filled with wall comments such as, “MMMMM Pumpkin Spice Latte!”). Sysomos drilled down further, looked at the 297 pages with more than one million fans, and properly categorized them—or at least tried. It turns out many of them (39.2 percent) are uncharacterizable such as “Nights Out With Friends.” But the rest can be broken down into music (16.7 percent), celebrities 16.0 (percent), products (11.9 percent), TV shows (8.5 percent), films (3.4 percent), and games (1.4 percent). And that’s just like it is in the real world. If you have more than a million fans, chances are you are either a rock star or an actor. And unlike on Twitter, where popularity is correlated with how many times you Tweet , Facebook fan pages tend to be updated only once every 16 days. And that’s really the big difference between Facebook fans and Twitter followers. On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support of affinity. Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture. But then, fame is fleeting. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
| eBay Maps Out Black Friday Online Transactions | Top |
| While Black Friday has long been a popular phenomenon for brick and mortar stores, the deal frenzy has been extending to e-retailers and online stores. Now, sales on the web are equally as lucrative as those in the stores. eBay is launching a campaign to capitalize on the holiday shopping season, called “12 Days Of Deals,” and has also rolled out a new Deal-focused iPhone app and partnered with Microsoft to offer deals directly from Internet Explorer 8. Today, the e-commerce giant is launching a interactive map that shows all of the transactions that took place on eBay on Black Friday. The map provides a visualization of all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions that occurred on eBay on Black Friday. As the clock runs, points will appear on the map, representing the occurrence of buyer and seller transactions on eBay. eBay says the map visualization is based on raw data that includes eBay sales and purchases occurring in approximately 33,000 U.S. ZIP codes. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Winner's Curse: Why Losing A B-School Biz Plan Competition Is Better Than Winning | Top |
| One of the best things about being an academic is being able to mold young minds and guide them to success. When one of my students , Andrew Leblanc told me he was entering the Duke Startup Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition , I told him to come and see me and do a practice run. After all, I had judged several of these contests at Duke and other universities. I thought I knew what worked. After the eleventh iteration, Andrew got it right. He wasn't trying to pack his presentation with unnecessary details. He had slowed down his pitch, added a personal touch and was now exuding confidence. Andrew even researched the background of the judges and tailored his message to their interests. So after two hours of intense preparation, I had little doubt that Andrew would win. Andrew lost. I was surprised. But what I told him afterward is that it really doesn’t matter. Contrary to what the organizers of these competitions will tell you, university business plan contests don't produce winning companies. Yes, a number of companies have emerged from business plan bake-offs that have been moderate or small successes. But not a single home-run has emerged from this now-omnipresent practice. This is not to say that the contests are bad. Instead, they educate students in entrepreneurship and motivate them to come up with interesting ideas. But for all of you out there who think a biz plan victory is a ticket to the big time, think again. And for all the engineering students who think any outcome but victory is a waste of time, you also need to think again. Even though he lost, Andrew met a potential partner and also got to speak with Bill Maris of Google Ventures, a priceless encounter. (Bill promised to introduce Andrew to the Google Power Meter team. Don’t forget, Bill!). In fact, let me throw out a radical thought. I submit that losing in a business plan contest is actually more beneficial than winning. There is a growing body of research that children who are praised too early and too easily end up under-performing peers who are not praised but are told, in constructive terms, they can do better. This is one of the core tenets of Po Bronson’s new book on parenting, " Nurture Shock ." Extending this to the realm of entrepreneurship might be a leap (and it could be great fodder for a future PhD dissertation). But to me the outcomes don’t lie. Business plan competitions don’t breed winning businesses. Rather than winning a beauty contest, building a business is a marathon that requires steady and constant effort , surmounting regular difficulties , and living through emotional peaks and valleys. The very roots of the current business plan craze go back to one of the periods that represents a low-point in sane business practices. The business plan competitions first started in the dotcom days. At that time, there was a frantic rush to start new companies. Entrepreneurs would create professional-looking, buzzword-laden business plans. Venture capitalists would then trip over each other to fund these plans, usually with way too much money. The prevailing theory was that a good business idea and enough money were enough to create the next hot IPO. B-schools readily jumped on the bandwagon and soon an arms race ensued to see which school could offer a bigger prize to winners. With the bursting of the dotcom bubble, the tech world was reminded that even a great idea funded by venture capital didn’t necessarily produce business success. In hindsight everyone saw that it took more than a good idea. It took a thorough understanding of the market, excellent management, and the ability to navigate rough waters to build a thriving enterprise. Some of the biggest dotcom winners came from me-too ideas that were executed better than the originals. Nor was this anomalous. Ask any seasoned entrepreneur in any industry, and he or she will likely tell you that his or her first business plan was probably the best work of fiction they ever created. A glimpse back through the big winners of the Dotcom Era also underscores the lack of impact business plan competitions actually had. Amazon, Google, Ebay, Yahoo—none of them won a business plan contest. In fact, not a single home run from that era won a business plan contest. And one of the biggest successes of its time, Akamai Technologies, actually lost the M.I.T. $100K contest . After the great Internet Bubble burst, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs quickly adapted to the new reality and went back to basics. But no one told the b-schools. From Silicon Valley to Research Triangle Park to New Delhi and Shanghai, new contests are still sprouting. Only now, the prizes have gotten bigger and the competitions more serious. Yet real successes remains non-existent. (If I’m wrong in five years on this, then call me out). But failure is no surprise for these b-school business launches Without a solid understanding of market needs and real-world validation of their ideas, few young entrepreneurs can achieve their business-plan projections. The hottest startup methodologies of today, built around ideas fostered by Y-Combinator and TechStars emphasize giving startups almost no money and encouraging them to get a product to market as quickly as possible in order to get real world validation. This is almost the exact opposite of the current business school competition ecosystem, where market validation is non-existent. So realistically, few of the business school plan entrants can even understand whether their business plans even make sense. Business plan judges, for their part, are equally in the dark most times. Andrew’s plan involved utilities and power management, a topic I know virtually nothing about. B-school contest judges are usually generalists who have only superficial insights into the internal dynamics of the industries at which these plans are aimed. It would seem, then, that the insights of long-time experts in those industries would likely be far more valuable to a prospective entrepreneur. Again, I am not at all saying that business school plans are inherently bad. To the contrary, Andrew learned an enormous amount about starting a business, the importance of understanding markets, utility and power management technologies, and team building. His plan to build software that would allow residents of college dorms to track their power usage through a visual interface and more easily understand the direct impact of their behaviors on electricity consumption was not a bad idea. In fact, it was a good enough idea that many others are currently attempting similar types of systems for various social settings and environments. My colleague, Lesa Mitchell at the Kauffman Foundation believes that these contests foster collaboration between business school students and engineers or scientists. This, she says, teaches valuable lessons about launching businesses to both potential inventors and would-be CEOs alike. Finally, let’s not confuse failure to execute or unrealistic plan expectations with bad ideas. Young CEOs going into industries they barely know armed with b-school plan competition money are like lambs to the slaughter. But the core idea behind their plan may be quite innovative and powerful. My takeaway from all this? If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, don’t win a business plan competition. If you do win, your first act might be to hire a CEO with industry experience. And win or lose, the most valuable lessons you’ll learn will come more from playing the game than from coming up with the best plan. Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa . Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| "Misunderstanding": Twitter Japan Now Says There Won't Be A Subscription Model | Top |
| We reported yesterday about Twitter Japan’s plans to start charging followers to view tweets from certain users starting January and explained why this paid subscription model could work in Japan . Well, please forget it, this won’t happen. Just a few minutes ago, Digital Garage (the company responsible for Twitter operations in Japan), issued a press release ( English PDF , Japanese PDF ) stating there won’t be any fee-based services of any kind on the site and that Twitter in Japan will remain completely free for the foreseeable future. There’s also a blog post by the Twitter Japan team (who just copied and pasted the press release text, providing no further explanation). Digital Garage says the media reports on their plans to monetize Twitter are based on a “misunderstood presentation by a DG subsidiary, DG Mobile”. So what happened? Kenichi Sugi, not really a nobody but DG Mobile ’s COO, delivered a presentation [JP] during a mobile tech conference in Tokyo where he talked about the future of the digital content business. IT Media, one of Japan’s most biggest online media companies, reported in Japanese (quoted in Robin’s article yesterday ). The report was later picked up by Japanese media (i.e. Slashdot Japan ) as well, as it laid out all the details of the plan: launch in January 2010, monthly fees ranging from $1.16 to $11.60, pay-per-tweet micropayment option, 30% cut for Digital Garage, celebrities as likely candidates to draw paying followers, etc. So first the company gets into such details and now says it’s all just a misunderstanding? Or is it the (mostly negative) initial reactions by Japan’s Twitter users that triggered this development? Whatever the reason, the payment model is scrapped for now. (We reached out to Digital Garage for a comment.) Asiajin is providing additional background on the relationship between Twitter Inc. and their partner in Tokyo. On a side note, it would have been interesting to see if paid accounts worked as a way for Twitter to monetize the service in the world’s third largest Internet market. The concept has proven to be successful in similar fashion elsewhere in Asia. Filipinos, for example, can subscribe to their favorite celebrity’s “lifestream” via SMS (not using Twitter but a service called KText). Every time the celebrity in question writes a message to his fans, all subscribers get billed a certain amount and pay via their cell phones. Some celebrities have tens of thousands of subscribers and share the revenue with KText (thanks @mikewalsh for the pointer). This is something Digital Garage had in mind for Japan, too. A comeback of their idea to monetize Twitter isn’t impossible, at least in some places in Asia. Here’s Digital Garage’s press release in full (”Recent Press Coverage about Twitter Service in Japan”): In response to media reports stating that Twitter Japan will be launching a paid-premium accounts service on Twitter, we would like to officially state that this is not correct. To be clear, Twitter service in Japan is a free service and neither Twitter Inc. nor Digital Garage, Inc. (JASDAQ code: 4819, headquartered in Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, CEO: Kaoru Hayashi, henceforth DG) have discussed or have any plans for paid-premium accounts. Also to clarify, Twitter Inc. and DG enjoy a commercial partnership but do not have a joint-venture arrangement in Japan. The recent media reports are likely a result of a misunderstood presentation by a DG subsidiary, DG Mobile, about potential business opportunities that it could explore as a third party. DG Mobile’s presentation was unrelated and separate from the Twitter and Digital Garage partnership. DG apologizes for this misunderstanding and for the delay in correcting the information. We hope this clarifies our commitment to helping Twitter Inc. continue to grow and enhance its free service for Japanese users. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment