del.icio.us Analysis What is del.icio.us? social bookmarking web - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

del.icio.us Analysis

What is del.icio.us?

• social bookmarking web service
• a user can

– store his links – share his links – discover new links

How does it work?

• Install del.icio.us buttons into your

browser

• Whenever you find yourself on a site you

want to bookmark --> click on „tag“ button

• describe site with tags relevant to it's

content and click save

How is del.icio.us Web 2.0?

• public web service
• tags
• community, wisdom of the

crowds

• share and find information

• users are main contributors
• software gets better the more

people use it

• data as the „Intel Inside“

How did del.icio.us become so popular?

• tag bookmarks instead of storing into

folders

• share bookmarks with friends
• find super relevant pages tagged by other

users

• measures importance and relevance of

site: how many other people have tagged this page?

How did del.icio.us achieve the critical mass of users?

• when building a social network, value for

first users is very small

• achievement of critcal mass is crucial
• del.icio.us provided real benefits to it's

first users even though network is empty (tagging and organizing your bookmarks)

• once certain amount of tagged websites,

very valuable for users who want to find new content

Growing as a platform

• In a market where each customer gets his
• wn version of a product

– initial product will copied and improved by

competitors

– market share is distributed over several

players

• Internet platform is different:

– Software gets better the more people use it – The first player will have the most users -->

most attractive platform for a new user most likely his friends already on that platform

– if you want to challenge main competitor -->

substantially better or completely new product

how does this apply to del.icio.us?

• del.icio.us often cited as „perfect

example“ of Web 2.0 application

• first to be in social bookmarking
• a lot of early adopters tried the

product

• very unlikely to change service

(How) Does del.icio.us make money?

• contextual advertising
• on the side of search results like

Google

• highly profitable model

• but, different kind of users and

queries on del.icio.us than on google

• danger: the more relevant your

search results are, the less likely users are to click on ads

• many people use del.icio.us to

increase relevance of search results

Why has Yahoo bought del.icio.us?

• Why did Yahoo buy del.icio.us when they

have their own social bookmarking service called My Web 2.0 ?

• strong brand, independent from yahoo

URL and branding

• very active user community
• experience of developers
• huge potential

But del.icio.us makes little money?

• direct traffic and ad revenue not the only

factor

• huge amount of data about websites

being collected by a huge community

4 ways to monetize social bookmarking

• contextual ads
• sell or use tag-Stream data

– how do people perceive my and competitors

websites?

– trends

• advertorial tags

– use tags that are related to buying products – business owners pay for good ranking with

those tags

• contextual advertising based on user

value

– not only relevant to query but also relevant

to user behavior (what kind of ads does he click on?)i

Competitors

• three types of competitors:
• other social bookmarking services
• directories
• search engines

social bookmarking services

• same market with new functionality

and/or paying of users to attract new users

• different geographic market, e.g. Mister

Wong for german speaking market

• StumbleUpon

– let's user „stumble“ randomly on new pages

according to their interests

simpy.com

• same core market as del.icio.us
• Create private or public groups, invite
• thers, collaborate
• sync with del.icio.us
• earn money by having people click on ads
• n your link page
• use Simpy to find like-minded users
• compared to del.icio.us, unimportant

Directories

• since beginning of the internet, before

search

• to little flexibility
• run by a certain organization who has to

check every submitted site for correctness/relevancy

• users are not contributing

Going against Google

• Google has very complex algorithms to

determine the relevance of a site for your search (Pagerank et al.)

• Sites in del.icio.us are simply tagged by

users

• Google gives a lot more results than

del.icio.us, but amount of results is often not important

• user wants the top three results, and they

should better be super relevant with great content

• top results from del.icio.us are relevant

because tagged with that keyword and important because many people have tagged it (wisdom of the crowds)

• del.icio.us has a big potential in the

search field and might see an increase of search queries soon

del.icio.us potential

• SEO not possible with del.icio.us
• Pages shown are relevant not because of

SEO but because of users liking the content

• if del.icio.us provides better results than

google, expect a shift from google to del.icio.us

• for online businesses, about 80% of traffic

comes from search engines

• when social bookmarking becomes more

important for search --> del.icio.us becomes very important for everybody who makes money online

Conclusion

• del.icio.us could dramatically change the

way we navigate the web

• is not going to replace search engines

entirely, they still can do things del.icio.us can not

• has very active community that tags the

whole web --> huge amount of valuable data

• wisdom of the crowds helps increase

relevance of search results

• find better information faster with social

search

• increase of importance of social search
• del.icio.us is number 1 for social search

huge advantage in market

Thank you for your attention

by Flavio Rump