reporting Archive

Phil Gainley from FounderSpeak has put together a detailed, in-depth report regarding bootstrapped startups. As an aside, I hope one day we can get to industry accepted definitions for “bootstrapped” and “startup”. Two years ago I provided my definitions for both terms and many CN readers provided their own definitions. For example, can a company started in 2005 really still be considered a startup?

Phil’s analysis provides a lot of data points around bootstrapped startups and is well worth a read. Phil interviewed 107 startups to gather the data for the report. Phil notes, “included is a breakdown of trends in the tech space, what the lifetime and demographics of a startup looks like and where they fail and what their biggest problems are. Also it has my latest research around the tech startup space all put into a process that other tech startups can use that is around 10 pages long. This research will be part of my Aston Business School MBA.”

The survey provides data and charts on the following areas:

• Number of founders
• How do you provide monetary support for your startup
• Monthly hardware costs
• Misc. spending costs per month – marketing, networking, travel, etc.
• What phase is your startup currently in
• How long have you been working on your startup
• When do you expect to reach breakeven
• Why haven’t you reached breakeven yet
• Type of product/service

I think it would be great to be able to refine the data – for example, breakeven data for startups with 2 founders that are in business more than 18 months, etc. I believe most of the startup data in the report comes from startups based in London/UK and note that the monetary figures are in pounds not dollars.

We were the first to report last month on Twitter tracking your links. The click functionality adds a “click event” to add links clicked on the site. So if you click a link to CN, click a friend’s profile or click a link over to one of the third party apps, Twitter is tracking it.

The links appear normal to the naked eye but when clicked they morph to something like this:

http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url

From my previous post, “It does not look like third party apps (HootSuite, Tweetdeck, Sobees, etc.) are affected by this link tracking change. Frankly tracking links without tracking the third party apps seems silly as apparently the hardcore Twitter users use some application with the service.”

My guess is that they are tracking the links for both internal and external purposes and perhaps this is the first step to some sort of ranking matrix. Please leave your thoughts on the reasoning behind tracking every link in the comments below.

Update: A CN reader tells me that TweetMeme appears to not be counting correctly and he wonders if this new click tracking has anything to do with it. I don’t use TweetMeme but will contact the service for more details.

If you read CN regularly, you know that I am an analytics nut. I’ve been interested in analytics since I was a baby playing with my Fisher-Price cash register. In the online space I like Clicky because they offer a real-time spy where you can sit and watch where your users and how they are interacting with your website.

Today analytics service ClickTale has upped the ante on real-time analytical monitoring with their own “Real-Time Monitor”. The ClickTale service provides a similar set of features to the Clicky real-time Spy product but adds additional functionality that monitor user’s mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes.

Each user session is recorded and can be viewed as a video where you can watch exactly how the user interacted with your site or service. You can watch how users scroll, click, etc. This is pretty powerful stuff as it enables the ability to modify a site not just based on content but also with interactivity and location. It’s a great complement for any A/B testing plan.

The new Monitor service is free for all ClickTale plans including their free offering. ClickTale notes, “the Real-Time Monitor automatically refreshes itself every 10 seconds for our paid plan customers, and every 60 seconds for our free plan customers.”

Checkout all of our ClickTale coverage including why I think Omniture should acquire the analytics service.

Earlier today Digg announced the launch of their new "DiggBar". Basically the new version of a toolbar from the early 90s, the idea is to provide an easy way to see if someone has submitted the story to Digg along with related stats and stories from other publishers via Digg. Lots of other tech journalists covered the story including Michael Arrington, Frederic Lardinois and MG Siegler. I hadn’t planned on covering this story but after reviewing the code behind the toolbar, there are some very important points that these journalists seem to have missed that I thought were worth sharing.

Tracking

From checking the code, Digg is running (at least) two sets of analytics within the toolbar. One appears to come from Microsoft and the other comes from Quantcast. The Quantcast code is identical to the main site – just how will that play into Digg’s monthly numbers on Quantcast? It sure looks like each DiggBar load will also increment the counter for Quantcast 1-for-1. Should they be credited on a toolbar load as if it was a full page load? Of course not – I have an email into Quantcast to verify how these toolbars will be counted. Toolbar and widget counts and analytics are the most difficult today because of the way they load and are handled – this was a part of my discussion with ShareThis last week.

Ad Serving

As MG noted, there are ads inside of the toolbar… how do those ads load? While they only "appear" when a tab is selected, are they actually loaded upon initial DiggBar load? I will need to confirm but it does appear that the ads are all loaded into the page when the DiggBar is loaded. It’s a pretty damn interesting question – not just for Digg but for any site that hides ads on pageloads.

Double Pageviews

Since Digg has changed their entire site to use this new DiggBar, sites that hit the Digg frontpage may benefit from massive double pageviews. Why? For users who click the big X to eliminate the toolbar, Digg is then forced to reload the exact same webpage again. Should advertisers be paying for this double pageview? If I was an advertiser on x or y site, this would certainly be something for me to consider. Of course the favorite Digg sites will love the bonus pageviews. I think there were some actions around this double pageview ad behavior in the mid-90s.

Also, Digg gets a double pageview when stories are clicked from Digg.com. You view a story on Digg and click a link (say Ars Technica). Digg loads up the bar with full goodness and grabs a second pageview from the bar load. Interesting…

Page Load Times

The DiggBar is nearly 100k in size – what does that do to page load times, especially when browsing from a mobile?

I will leave the topic of URL stealers (similar to conversation stealers) for another post as the issue is wider than just the DiggBar.

I would be careful to put DiggBar in the same category as other URL shorteners like MooURL, TinyURL or even Bitly. This is much more of a Digg play than an actual URL shortener.

Late last year there was a lot of talk and bitchmemes (fake and real) about measuring "influence" for a Twitter account. A new startup believes they have the answer for actually measuring the influence for a Twitter account.

Klout measures a variety of factors to arrive at a score for a Twitter account. The service can also tell you who you are influencing and who is influencing you. Klout is in private beta but if you note "new york times" in your request, apparently you will be granted access quickly.

The Klout founders are located in Los Angeles and NYC. Check out an additional review on Black Web 2.0. Here’s their demo from this evening:

Online business optimization software provider (that’s their tagline!) Omniture announced last week a number of new partners for their Genesis program. Omniture Genesis brings together analytics and online marketing tools together under one customer dashboard. It’s interesting to see Omniture in the news while I rarely ever hear about WebTrends anymore.

The list of new partners is interesting because many of them are startups we’ve covered here on CN. The new partner list includes:

• Brightcove (our coverage)
• ClickTale (our coverage)
• Keibi (our coverage)
• ShareThis (our coverage)
• Visible Technologies (our coverage)

It’s a smart move for the startups - they gain a bit of visibility and a good deal of distribution. Omniture has a wide reaching customer base worldwide and could provide a spark for each of the startups.

comScore has released their latest m:metrics report showing mobile search usage in the U.S. and several countries in Europe. Nearly 10% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. completed a mobile search and the total mobile search usage is up 68% in the U.S. In Europe where mobile usage is further along, usage is up 38%.

For all of the countries in the chart below, Google leads usage of mobile search. In the U.S., 63% of mobile searches use Google while 34% use Yahoo. In Germany, 85% use Google and in France 62% use Google. Spain and France were the only countries that had near 10% MSN search usage.