LinkedIn Earnings - Soaring Higher than Forecasted

Story first appeared on USA Today -

Online professional-networking service LinkedIn's fourth-quarter performance added another line to its sterling resume as a public company.

LinkedIn's fourth quarter earnings came in far above Street expectations, boosting the stock in after-hours trading.

The results announced Thursday extended LinkedIn's uninterrupted streak of exceeding analysts' projections for both earnings and revenue. It marked the seventh consecutive quarter since LinkedIn's May 2011 IPO that the company has pulled that off, to the delight of investors.

The run of pleasant surprises is one of the reasons that LinkedIn's stock has tripled from its initial public offering price of $45. The shares surged $12.11, or nearly 10%, to $136.20 in extended trading after the numbers came out.

Wall Street's embrace of LinkedIn contrasts with the cold response given to other Internet services that have gone public during the past few years. Most of them are trading below their IPO prices. The most notable is Facebook, whose stock is worth about 25% less than it was when it made its market debut in May.

Although both run websites devoted to connecting people with common interests, LinkedIn and Facebook are targeting different audiences. Facebook focuses mostly on letting friends and family share good times and swap stories, while LinkedIn concentrates on helping people advance their careers and helping companies fill jobs.

Facebook, which is based in Menlo Park, is the larger of the two services, with more than 1 billion active users and $5.1 billion in revenue last year. LinkedIn, which is based in Mountain View, California, has 20 million account holders and revenue of $972 million in 2012.

But LinkedIn is growing more quickly, partly because it's less dependent on advertising than Facebook and most Internet services. In the fourth quarter, advertising accounted for 27% of its revenue. The remainder comes from various tools that it sells to help recruit workers and glean more insights from the information that its users post on its website.

LinkedIn earned $11.5 million, or 10 cents per share, during the final three months of last year. That marked a 66% increase from $6.9 million, or 6 cents per share, a year earlier.

If not for the costs of employee stock compensation and certain other charges, LinkedIn said it would have earned 35 cents per share. That was far above the average estimates of 19 cents per share among analysts surveyed by FactSet. Analysts excluded certain items from their calculations.

Revenue soared 81% from the previous year to $304 million — about $24 million above analyst forecasts.

LinkedIn's revenue outlook for the current quarter and all of 2013 were roughly in line with analyst estimates, setting the stage for the company to clear those financial bars once again.

Content Isn't King Anymore....

Story first appeared in All Things D.
“Content is king” has been a long-lived mantra of media. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was true.

But over the last several years, the Internet has upheaved the aphorism.

It used to be that media was linear. And in that world, content and distribution were married. The HBO channel had HBO content. A New York Times subscription bought you New York Times content. And Vogue and Cosmopolitan each month delivered exclusive and proprietary content from Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

Until the internet came along. In every single one of the varied businesses the Internet has touched — from commerce to media to communications to payments — there has been one common impact: disaggregation.

Content and distribution have parted
In the case of the hundreds-of-years-old media business, the Internet has fundamentally separated content from distribution.
Today a consumer can watch hundreds of South Park and Jon Stewart clips, all without a cable box — on Apple TV, Android phone, or YouTube on desktop or laptop computers.

But wait, South Park and Jon Stewart? Content is king, you say. It’s now even more free to reign, unfettered by distribution channels!
No; because content is no longer enough. Content has always been a means to an end. And the end has always been audience.

Content isn’t the goal. Audience is.

When it comes to the business of media, there’s no question: advertisers don’t pay to reach content. They pay to reach an audience.
What’s the first item in every brief from every advertiser? It’s not Target Content, it’s Target Audience.

Media has been slow to adjust to this new dynamic. Companies have sunk billions into content management systems — using CMS as the cornerstone of their modernization — under the impression that they traffic in content.

But they don’t. They traffic in audience. And how much have they spent on audience development systems? Not much, if any at all.
Now that distribution of content to audience is no longer linear, distribution decisions are suddenly more complicated. And, at the same time, they are immensely more important — and more dynamic — to create the impact media companies are looking for: drawing an audience! Social distribution can outperform search, if you use it wisely. Day-parting your postings can boost post performance by 100 percent or more. Packaging can triple the effectiveness of content in reaching an audience.

And yet, few in media have even begun to optimize these decisions.

Who’s your Chief Audience Officer?

Distribution decisions are just as important as content decisions in building and serving an audience, and yet they are being largely ignored. Everyone has an Editor-In-Chief or a Chief Creative Officer. But how many have a Distributor-In-Chief? Or a Chief Audience Officer? A Head of Digital Programming?

The myopic focus on content over distribution is widespread, and it’s a bad business decision. It ignores a critical access of leverage, and one of competitive advantage.

The smartest media companies will do three things to take control of their digital opportunity:

Put someone in charge of audience development.
Give them latitude to think about the interplay between distribution and content, so that they can marry the two. Like a head of programming for a cable network, they should be tasked to realize the full potential of your digital channels. They should support the delivery of your content, and they should also provide back pressure to your content creators. Don’t merge it into your editorial jobs — that’s too precarious. Make it its own discipline.

Adopt an audience development strategy.
There are three basic components you have to master: insights (know your audience segments, and what each one will like); channel selection (identify the highest value distribution outlets for your brand, whether it’s search, social, YouTube, Hulu, or your own channels); and optimization (use data to create a feedback loop and tune your content, packaging, and timing to what works for your audience).

Systematize it.
You have sunk millions into content management systems. But how much have you spent on your most monetizable asset, your audience? You should be as systematic in audience development as you are in content creation, if not more so. Whether it’s with established processes or dedicated algorithms, make audience development a competitive advantage. Get so good at it that you truly know how to maximize every piece of content you create — and multiply your ROI. Use technology for what it does best: Systematize your advantages over your competitors.

With the rise of new distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Hulu, there’s no question that the next generation of digital media is as much about distribution as it is about content. Media companies that orient their organizations to prize audience development above all (with distribution as a key component) will catch the upside of these tectonic shifts. And they will be the ones that survive and thrive in the digital age. After all, audience is the ruler of media companies’ fortunes.

Top SEO Companies argue that relavent content within the internet world is still a primary traffic driver. Being in a digital world does not negate the need to have proper content.


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Infected PCs May Lose Internet In July

Story first appeared in USA Today.

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.

This image provided by The DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG) shows the checkup webpage. It will only take a few clicks of the mouse. But for hundreds of thousands of computer users, those clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing their connections this July.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org, that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

The FBI started to realize that there might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because if they just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service. The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get 'page not found' and think the Internet is broken.

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in the chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn't enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, the full court press is on to get people to address this problem. And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address — such as www.ap.org — into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.  Many corporations utilize Managed IT Services that provide quality control and Security Solutions to avoid situations such as these.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.

Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, the FBI will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations.

Now, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, they get to the point where they say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before.


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