I’m kind of busy right now, so blog posts will be a little shorter and further between. The Insider counts the reported drop in new home sales to mean that Google will suffer. They haven’t drawn a clear line from A to Z, but whatever. Brad De Long puts up a graph putting this decline […]

Here’s a second-hand rumor that Apollo Group acquired Adteractive. If what I knew of Adteractive is still remotely true, the acquisition would be material to Apollo and have to be disclosed. Nothing on Edgar to date. They disclosed a month or so ago that they were acquiring Aptimus for $48 million. Adteractive would go for […]

Fred Wilson blogs his opinion on whether VCs should blog. The answer is somewhat self-evident, but his post is interesting reading, as always. He quotes one Boston-area VC saying, essentially, that he’s not giving away his hard-earned knowledge to anyone other than portfolio companies and potential portfolio companies. Fred thinks that intellectual property should be […]

Jay Weintraub–one of the few really knowledgeable people willing to write frankly about lead gen–writes about payday loan and subprime credit card lead gen. A pretty dense read, but information you’d otherwise have to spend a year and several hundred thousand dollars of misdirected email and mispriced offers to learn.

I’m not going to write about the mortgage market anymore (after this that is.) I’m not really interested in the mortgage market, I’m only interested in the marketing. I write about mortgages so much because mortgage lead gen and new car lead gen were the canaries in the coal mine for online lead generation and […]

The Insider points to a Barron’s story about the effect on Google of the sub-prime mortgage bubble popping. I feel like I’m beating a dead horse feeding a full horse here, but here are some quotes from the Barron’s article–the meat of the article was an interview with a hedge fund manager, who we should […]

A month ago I took Forbes and Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) to task for his articles about SCO that turned out to be profoundly misguided. To his credit, he has admitted that he got it wrong. I admire him for that. The part that still bothers me is that his apology is “I […]

Just yesterday I said I was going to try and write less. I am going to try, but I’m telling you now that I’m going to be unsuccessful. This Nielsen report on first half 2007 advertising spend is full of interesting conundrums! For instance, it reports that H1-07 ad spend is down 0.5% from H1-06, […]

Read in the Post this morning that Nielsen reports that advertising spend decreased in the first half of 2007 compared to the first half of 2006. Is the dreaded advertising recession upon us? Who cares? While overall ad spend was down 0.5% in the first half, online advertising was up 23%. Twenty-three percent? 23%. That’s […]

There used to be an idea that to understand something you had to try and do it. I think this is true: it’s impossible to understand the beauty of a pencil sketch hanging in the Met unless you’ve taken pencil in hand and tried to sketch something yourself. What I have usually learned from this […]