Caterpillar Cowboy

parislemon:

In the don’t-call-them-comments notes section on my post about Tumblr’s new Highlighted Posts feature, Jenna Wortham brings up a good point:

Def agree its smart of Tumblr to try new things - but the return here seems minimal. You aren’t broadening yr audience by highlighting content to people who already read you. Best case: Someone spends an extra 5 secs looking at your post. Then what?

On the surface, true. But I think there are several interesting things this feature opens up for Tumblr. A “Highlighted” area is the most obvious. Or maybe something like: pay $1 to highlight a post to your followers, pay $10 to highlight to all of Tumblr. That would probably get a bit spammy so maybe you only have the option to pay the $10 to highlight to all only if you got enough “hearts” from the $1 highlight of those following you. 

That’s just a few quick ideas. There is a lot of potential here. 

But even the most simple angle may be interesting. You pay to highlight and your post get more hearts and reblogs as a result, so perhaps that post is seen by many more people than they normally would be. Doesn’t seem like a bad bet for $1.

More importantly, if Tumblr can get more credit cards on file for one-click transactions… a whole new world opens up.

I’d love to see that $10 option but maybe make it pay for performance - you get charged up to $X, depending on the results you see of the promotion. Sort of begs the question, what is a “Like” worth on Tumblr?

I also want to see this tied to tag / search pages. Then you can set up something more like AdWords - I can buy keywords to get highlighted in those results.

Regardless of what happens, huge kudos to Tumblr for having the balls to try stuff. I know from my time at Etsy that pissing off your community is a real and tangible fear. Keep trying guys, see what sticks.

noupside:

Above is a screenshot of the SharesPost Venture-Backed Private company index. It’s composed of seven Companies of Interest, which have changed several times this year as the big names in private tech companies have IPO’d.  Since FB is obviously going to be removed from the index fairly soon, I thought it’d be fun to do some Russells-inspired guessing on what the replacement company would be.    

The methodology is a little bit opaque…no company can be more than 25% of the weight of the index, though FB has >10x the “index value” of Twitter, its closest neighbor.  Considering last price for EHarmony and Linden Lab would lower their value substantially, but the last trades were in Sept 2010 so they’re outside of the 120-day input period. Intriguingly, index member with the lowest value (Serious Energy) has no disclosed numbers at all for any of the four inputs. 

The companies with current buy-side interest at the moment are Dropbox, Eventbrite, SolarCity, Square, SugarCRM, Yammer, and Yelp.  On the sell side, we have a different list of companies, a bit longer…household names include Ideeli, Path, and Chegg.  The only one that overlaps is SolarCity.   

The problem with this index is that ‘research’ based on unknown factors (and maybe private data) is what really determines the index values. My guess is that the addition will be Yelp, which has a last trade on 11/9/11 “valuing” it around $1.6B.  Silver Spring and SolarCity are also contenders based on quasi-recent trades and indicated interest.  But really, this seems like a vanity index with little quantitative rhyme or reason to what’s included.  What is clear is that FB has been driving this business.

On a related noted: NYT has a Dealbook piece today about what happens to secondary markets when FB goes public. SecondMarket has built a solid business in other asset classes.  It’ll be interesting to see how SharesPost fares.

Agreed - Yelp would be my pick from this list. Chegg isn’t really well known enough to generate interest from non-techies. LivingSocial seems to have lost it’s luster, especially since Amazon disclosed they lost $558M last year.