Mark Pincus Blog

When huge net growth is a footnote

The last time we experienced growth numbers for net commerce and ads this big amidst so many yawns was 2002.

All numbers for holiday ecommerce are up 25 pct (same as 2002 only way bigger now). 20 bilion spent so far since thxgiving and possibly 25B by jan 1.

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My Niece is an Artist!

PICT0024.JPG
Originally uploaded by markpinc.

my niece, addie, drew this picture over thanksgiving to add a colorful flower to my living room that i wouldnt even have to water!

Paying for myspace on your cellphone?

Todays wsj reports a plan from cingular to offer myspace on your phone for 2.99 per mo. This is a terrific test case of willingness to actually pay for social networking services. I am skeptical as the audience is kids who notoriously pursue all things free.

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How come there's no dominos of the airline industry?

They all just suck ass. How come we pay penalties for being late or changing schedules but they don't? What ever happened to 30 minutes or its free? Yeah they do sometimes have real excuses but we've gotten so used to their shitty service that they don't even bother with explanations any more.

I just got stuck in jackson ms for 4 unintended hrs. American didn't even bother checking on why their plane is delayed 4 hrs and nobody else even asks. All I've got to say is wtf!
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When is opt out marketing spam?

I receive unsolicited marketing messages from lala.com every day. I made the mistake of using a *real* email address when their registration assured me that they take my privacy seriously.

Apparently, despite my deselecting the boxes saying 'send me info' (as we always do) they have chosen to send me other info daily. Now lala does post a link at the bottom that you can click to change your 'privacy options'. Of course that takes you back to lala.com where you must 'login' (meaning remember the username and password you quickly created. And of course you have several lest they be stolen and some sites even make you change those monthly so good luck.)

Now you are logged back into a service you decided long ago had no use. Let's see...searching the page for any link saying 'privacy options' or 'preference'. Nothing. After about 5 minutes you may notice a small link at the top of your missing 'profile' that says 'account'. Clicking that leads to more choices and eventually you find your original mistake which was providing a real email address. You quickly change that to markpinc@fuckyou.com and you're again free from yet another non-spamming service provider.

Is something wrong with this picture? How can services *legally* get away with spamming us and then making it nearly impossible to stop them?

Now we could also blame the 1 moron in 1000 who responds to spam or was that me for going back to this site and spending 10 minutes clicking through their pages? Maybe they made enough on the ads to justify it?

Amazing how the slick marketeers and MBAs do such a great job of helping craig win! All he has to do is focus on *not* marketing to differentiate. All google had to do was 'not be evil'.

Apparently, we live in a world where direct response marketing is driven by idiots and miss spellers. So companies are trained to actually cater to them over the intelligent consumer who pretty much doesn't respond to ads.

Aren't craigslist and google examples of services that went after just the part people wanted? What if all ads had to get a 1 pct clickthrough to be shown? Wonder if they'd earn just as much in thed end without the level of noise?

Google is a media company that first said no to ads, then said only 'relevant' ads. Craigslist only allows relevant ads. In a focus group we ran with his users they said they loved the service because there were *no* ads. Funny when there's really nothing else.

So ads that we want to see are content. Hmm...so if I go to your store and you tell me I can buy it for less across the street *and* you get paid, I'm happy and you make money too.

So lala, I say to bill nguyen, a former colleague and ceo of this service, clean it up. Learn from google and craigslist. If you're going to talk about doing right by artists and fixing the music industry, don't ignore the rights of your users either.

Not sure if anyone ever tried to calculate the added benefit of spam in revs vs the cost in bad will. Might be worthy of some calculating.
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Does the emperor of second life have no cloths?

I have to agree with nick denton and clay shirky that while secondlife's success is impressive, I really don't get it. As I mentioned, I tried it out and like sims online couldn't get what was fun and exciting about it. While the idea of a virtual economy is cool, I don't get why one cares about buying cool cloths for a character that has nothing clear to do. Hate to sound like such a guy, but I want to be able to kill people, steal stuff and do things we can't do in the real world.
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PS3 or Xbox 360?

Has anyone tried both? Which is better? Which is better for online game play?
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Is bad ethics becoming a normal cost of business?

It seems that corporate ethics problems are now so common that they've become *normal*.

* HP paying 14.5m for getting caught spying.
* Walmart firing its ad agency after learning that the marketing exec who selected the firm accepted perks.
* fannie mae restates 3 yrs of earnings wiping out 6.3 billion in false profits (the positive being that analysts were expecting 10.3 billion). * the supreme court hearing a case against wall street firms that allegedly manipulated ipo stock prices.

Those were 4 of barrons' top 10 stories this week.

I'm wondering how long before companies start taking early writeoffs for *bad ethics expense*. This could be like bad debt expense. analysts could start looking at executive track records to estimate the lilklihood of future earnings hits.
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More on the mac question

Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

I downloaded a few stock apps for mac and they seem to all suck equally. Why is it so hard to build what msn investor offers? That is a self updating app that shows multiple groups of stocks and for your portfolio shows p/l and other metrics you choose.

Also, tried to find a good offline rss reader. No brainer for planes right? Again, why isn't there an app that sucks in my bloglines list and grabs them all? With all the entrepreneurs building new apps how can these be missing? Guess they're not as sexy as the next youtube or google.
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moving to a mac? stock apps for mac?

as i witness the slow death of my ibm thinkpad from what many call *bitrot* and others call planned obsolesence (sp?), i am again trying to imagine running my whole life on my mac. the biggest single obstacle for me in switching is losing my msn investor portfolio tracking app which of course only runs in IE for pc's.

does anyone know of a good portfolio app for macs or firefox? it needs to do self updating with quotes and show news and other info on stocks. pls dont tell me yahoo finance. it's good in general but mostly lacking. i've tried some of the mac only apps and they pretty much all suck too.

also, i've grown highly dependent on x1 for real time searching of old emails (which of course will no longer be available on my mac anyway). is there an equivalent on mac?