myYearbook, a social network for teenagers that launched in 2005, has raised $13 million in a Series B funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, US Venture Partners, and First Round Capital. The new round brings the company’s total funding to $18.6 million.

myYearbook says it sees 10 million unique visitors monthly, and also makes the claim that it is the third largest social network in the US. (Not quite. It is only a fraction of the size of MySpace or Facebook, and Bebo and imeem also attract more monthly unique visitors. According to comScore, myYearbook had 4.5 million unique visitors in June, versus 5.2 million for Bebo and 6.4 million for imeem). When we last wrote about them, there was speculation that the site may have more high school users than Facebook. This is almost certainly no longer the case. Facebook has seen dramatic growth since that time, with 37.4 million uniques in June, with 10 percent of those between the ages of 12 and 17, says comScore. MyYearbook has a larger percentage of users in that age group (23.8 percent), but less than a third as many total.

Still, myYearbook continues to produce impressive stats if you look at Hitwise, with 384% in year-over-year growth.

The site intends to use the money to further expand its feature set and reach out to new members. As part of the deal, Norwest Venture Partners’ Sergio Monsalve will join the company’s board of directors.

Source:TechCrunch.com

Today, Hasbro and EA announced that the Facebook app EA has been working on for more than six months will be launched later this month, although a version on Pogo (EA’s online casual gaming site) is available today.

There is a Facebook Scrabble app in private beta, but the company is still testing it. It is not clear what is taking EA so long. After all, this is just a Facebook app, not a fully-featured video game like Spore.

It is also not clear what will happen to Scrabulous, the unofficial version of Scrabble that has become one of the most popular apps on Facebook.

Scrabulous, which was developed by two brothers in India, was almost shut down earlier this year because Hasbro claims that it infringes on its trademarks. Scrabulous was in acquisition talks with many different companies, including Electronic Arts (which has the domestic license to digital versions of the game) and Real Networks (which has the international digital rights), but everyone balked on price.

Rather than force Facebook to shut down Scrabulous immediately, however, Hasbro and Electronic Arts realized that they would suffer an extreme backlash if they took away everyone’s favorite Facebook game without offering up an alternative. Now that the alternative is almost here, it remains to be seen whether they will try to eliminate the competition.

Are social networks such as Facebook and MySpace over-valued today? The price tags we put on them are steep in my opinion - in the billions of dollars! Although, are these sites and other online communities just a fad that will be replaced by the next big ‘It’ technology shortly down the line, or will they all see a long and prosperous future?

MySpace was a huge success in its early days and managed to stay on top for a good while. However, many people today consider that MySpace, as a brand, has lost its champion title to Facebook.

I slightly digress from my original thoughts but want to put this perception to the test and undergo a couple of benchmarking tests.

Step One - The Site Traffic Test

I got some interesting results whilst conducting a traffic rank comparison between Facebook and MySpace on traffic ranking site, Alexa. For your reference, all the following figures are based on a snapshot of a three month average.

MySpace receives a traffic rank of 6 [this traffic rank is based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach)]. The number of unique pages viewed per user per day on MySpace is 34.52.

Facebook comes in just behind MySpace with a traffic rank of 7. The number of unique pages viewed per user per day on Facebook is 21.26.

The graph above, however, shows us that the traffic rank of MySpace has dipped over the past two months. Over this same two month period, Facebook has grown considerably. To be completely honest, i’m a little surprised with these figures. I definitely thought that Facebook would have had a bigger lead on MySpace.

Step Two - The Member Test

This next step isn’t really a fair test but I thought I would throw it in to add a new dimension into the mix.

An interesting sociology study was posted on Mashable about one year ago now addressing the difference between Facebook and MySpace users. According to the study ‘jocks’, ‘athletes’ and ‘goodie two shoes’ are the types that frequent Facebook whereas MySpace is the hang out for the ‘alternative’ crowd, ‘punks’, ‘emos’ and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm!

Based on the vast differences between the member bases of these sites, I am starting to feel a little guilty for comparing the two. Apples with oranges?

After completely digressing from my first questions in this post, I want to go back to my original question on the longevity of these online sites. And are we or are we not over-valuing them?

LinkedIn recently valued itself at $1 billion. Similarly, according to Computerworld, Facebook received a market valuation of around US$15 billion after Microsoft bought 1.6% of the site for US$240 million last year. Other networking sites have had valuations between US$200 million and US$560 million, based on transactions from this year. In the same vain, Facebook received a market valuation of approximately “…US$15 billion after Microsoft bought 1.6% of the site for US$240 million last year…”

I’ll leave this one with you to ponder on. Will this bubble burst?

Nothing represents the changing of the guard as much as how the Big Three Portals have fallen from grace. Don’t get me wrong: from an operational standpoint, Yahoo! (YHOO) is a fine property, but that company is a bit of a… how do you say, disaster.

MSN is there, trekking along, costing Microsoft (MSFT) billions in losses over the years without really making a push for #1. Sort of like all other MSFT products not named Windows or Office, basically.

Meanwhile, Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL is drifting along, buying up more and more assets - some smart, some not - but now putting itself up for sale. While the company sold a 5% stake of itself to Google (GOOG) for a $1B sum - valuing itself for a tidy $20B - word is that it might be content with a $15B offer… which means either Yahoo!, MSFT, News Corp. (NWS), or Comcast (CMCSA) would show an interest.

While some will be quick to say the portals lost to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, make no mistake about it, they lost to search. Revenues matter, everything else is noise. Google has the web ecosystem in the bag, and considering that Google’s YouTube is more dominating in video than Google is in search - and that video is the next high growth opportunity after search’s decade - then you have to wonder how much more hurting Google can put on the Web.

When you consider how leadership in search helped Google propel itself to King of the Web, you sort of understand why MSFT just shelled out $100M for something that basically can be summed up as Wikipedia site search.

As more and more people download albums and watch movies via the web, are we heading for an ‘internet crunch’?Did it take your browser a little bit longer than normal to open this article? Have you found yourself twiddling your thumbs recently as you wait two or three seconds (rather than the usual millisecond) for an email to send? Perhaps you’ve even found yourself making a cup of tea while waiting for the homepage of a particularly image-heavy website to download. Using the web, do you sometimes feel like you’re stuck in 1998 – all slow connections and snail-paced emails – rather than 2008?

If so, it might be because somewhere else on the web, a few thousand people are watching last week’s Question Time or downloading the new Coldplay album (though heaven knows why). Welcome to the internet crunch. As more web-surfers listen to music and watch TV shows and movies, there is great concern that the broadband infrastructure won’t be able to cope, and that things will slow down and possibly even come to a standstill.

New audio- and video-based sites have started to take up more and more bandwith, yet the networks – all those miles of fibre-optic cables that were laid in recent years – have not been properly upgraded. As a result, the infrastructure of the internet, the physical stuff it is built on, will potentially struggle to cope with increased demand for new, improved, snazzy online services.

All of these new services are putting an extraordinary strain on the infrastructure. For example, downloading a film in the Blu-Ray format (that’s high definition) takes up as much bandwith as a whopping 2.5m emails or 100m webpage downloads. Fifteen years ago, people like me thought it was amazing that we could send an email to a friend; today’s web-users think little of sending the equivalent of a couple of million emails as they download the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

And when you consider that the first episode of The Apprentice was watched 100,000 times via iPlayer – which must be the equivalent of someone sending millions and millions of emails, or visiting an ordinary website a few billion times – it is clear that the bandwith and infrastructure issue is one that needs to be resolved.

Is there likely to be a collapse of the internet, or is than an exaggeration? Clearly the infrastructure needs to be improved, but who should fund that improvement? If we demand that the government stumps up the money, won’t that mean increased government control – and therefore more government regulation and restriction – of the internet in general? Does anyone want that?

These questions will be answered in the future when the real internet needs will be visible.

It has long been assumed by many investors that acquiring Valueclick (VCLK) would be the first step in “plan B” for Microsoft (MSFT) if its bid to take over Yahoo (YHOO) was unsuccessful. When MSFT’s Steve Ballmer recently ruled out a slew of acquisitions of smaller internet players after pulling its bid for Yahoo, ValueClick’s stock seemed to lose some of its “takeover bait” premium over the next couple of trading sessions. Since that time, the sell off in ValueClick shares has intensified and the stock has set new 52 week lows three times over the last week as rumors swirl that it is now hunting for some strategic acquisitions of its own. As might be expected, investors appear to be pricing in 1) concerns over dilution that might accompany any acquisition 2) typical “sell the buyer, buy the seller” arbitrage or 3) that an acquisition is signaling the switch of management efforts to acquiring instead of being acquired.

Much of the chatter regarding ValueClick acquisitions has focused on the possibility of their acquiring a company that would gain them entrance to the “Pay Per Click” [PPC] advertising space, the very high margin business that the Google empire was built upon where advertisers bid for placement in search results that are offered when consumers seek information on specific keyword search terms. This business was invented by Goto.com, which became Overture.com and was acquired by Yahoo and is now Yahoo Search Marketing. This space has been dominated by Yahoo and Google (GOOG), with Microsoft making a late run to gain a foothold in this space and round out “the big three” in the PPC space. While there has always been a “second tier” of companies trying to gain traction in the pay per click space, none have been able to come close to challenging “the big three” for various reasons.

While we are not in a position to know if there is any substance to the rumors, it does seem that the recent upheaval at Yahoo might make a historic opportunity for the right company to make waves in the pay per click space. If a Yahoo/MSFT deal were to reemerge or if Yahoo moves forward with its plans to outsource much of its premium PPC business to Google, the combination of the #2 and #3 players or the #1 and #2 players in this space would leave the door open for another company to slip into the #3 position. While we don’t think there is any magic associated with being the #3 player in PPC search, we do think that there are quite a few deep pocketed advertisers out there who view both Microsoft and Google as their most feared competitors and would like to see their advertising dollars flow to someone else, particularly newspaper publishers, magazine publishers, TV, radio and other legacy media companies.

Another factor that could make for a historic opportunity to enter the PPC search fray is the current market valuations of the second tier players. Just over a year ago, all companies in the online advertising space (but particularly the owners of ad networks) were being bid up to new trading highs after the frenzied buying of many of the other players ((ie.Aquantive, Doubliclick, 24/7 Media, Linkshare, Digitas) in this space for large premiums to their trading prices. As the deal volume dried up, much of the money flowed out of these names and many are now trading at historic lows.

The two names we have seen tossed around most often as a ValueClick acquisition targets fit neatly into this category - Miva (MIVA) and Think Partnership (THK).

Miva Media Solutions, previously known as Findwhat.com, is the largest of the second tier networks. With over $100 million in annual click revenue flowing through the company’s North American and European networks, Miva stands out as the quickest option for an acquiror looking to gain heft quickly. Miva also owns a number of valuable content sites including the rapidly growing Spill.com, Screensavers.com and WeatherStudio.com in addition to a growing toolbar segment that currently boasts of over 6 million active users.

In addition to offering the possibility of instantly becoming the next largest player in PPC behind MSFT, adding highly regarded content sites and leveraging the possibilities inherent in having an installed base of over 6 million toolbars, ValueClick and others have to look at the current market valuation of MIVA as extremely attractive. With a current market cap of $32.5 million (closing price July 1), no debt and over $22 million in the bank, the same marketplace that one year ago placed a valuation on these operations of just over $225 million is currently placing a value on this same business of less than $10 million. While the $250 million+ valuation achieved during the height of the ad network buying frenzy of a year ago might be on the high side, its hard to imagine that there are not buyers out there willing to pay three or four times the current trading price to take down such a large piece of pay per click market share. ValueClick in particular does seem like a company with the complementary assets, existing clientele and market cache’ necessary to take a business like Miva’s that is struggling to be profitable and significantly expand the margins by reaching the critical mass of advertisers necessary to ramp profitability quickly. With an existing CPA (Cost Per Action) network and display advertising business that reaches 74% of US internet users, its quite likely that ValueClick’s reach and brand name would bring many more advertisers into the fold quickly and also that existing advertisers would be more likely to bid higher and spend more through a ValueClick ad network than they would through Miva owned network.

The company whose name seems to be most frequently mentioned as a takeover candidate for ValueClick is called Think Partnership, (THK). Think Partnership (hereinafter THK) is in many respects similar to ValueClick, albeit a smaller version as it is most widely known for the affiliate marketing platform (Kowabunga) within its “network” segment and the lead generation operations within its “Direct” segment.

THK’s Kowabunga is a highly regarded player in the affiliate marketing space that has long been a thorn in the side of ValueClick, whose “Commission Junction” is the largest player in the affiliate marketing space. While Kowabunga is much smaller than Commission Junction, many high profile corporate names have either chosen Kowabunga over ValueClick’s Commission Junction when they started their affiliate program (like Microsoft and Yahoo Search Marketing’s affiliate programs ) or migrated to Kowabunga after testing the Commission Junction platform (like Intuit). Taking ownership of Kowabunga would make ValueClick’s Commission Junction not only the largest affiliate program provider, but also the “go to” provider for the largest names in technology, not to mention that the removal of a competitor like Kowabunga from the playing field might allow them to raise their percentage take on affiliate transactions.

While the lead generation operations within THK’s “Direct” segment are much smaller than ValueClick’s lead generation ops from a revenue standpoint, THK has actually had more success at maintaining strong margins while steering clear of Federal Trade Commission sanctions. Additionally, the specific niche’s served by THK’s direct segment (home based business owners and life stage niche marketing) would be complementary to ValueClick’s lead generation offerings.

Despite the obvious synergies of the THK businesses above with ValueClick, it is a third aspect that makes it most attractive to ValueClick. THK’s ValidClick AdExchange offers ValueClick an entry into the Pay Per Click space with what is arguably the most differentiated offering in the PPC space and also what is likely the fastest growing ad exchange. The ValidClick AdExchange platform combines a unique patent pending technology for eliminating click fraud combined with an exclusive technology alliance with Fair Isaac Corporation (FIC) that uses analytics based on artificial intelligence and patented profiling technologies that adapt to each click and conversion, scoring publishers on their ability to drive conversions for advertisers. This new exclusive partnership with the company whose FICO score has become the standard in the lending industry makes the ValidClick Ad Exchange that much more attractive to a company wanting to differentiate themselves from the pack in the PPC space. It has also caused many of the second tier networks to run their own ads through ValidClick’s Ad Exchange to take advantage of its Click Fraud protection.

Recent comments by THK management and our own channel checks in several verticals suggest that the ValidClick exchange is experiencing exponential growth in clicks, searches and revenues generated. In the verticals we tested, we saw more than 100% growth in Q2 over the record clicks and revenue achieved by the network during Q1 2008. This Google-like growth stands in stark contrast to the declines in revenue experienced by most of the other Pay Per Click search networks (including Miva) over the last few quarters as Click Fraud concerns seem to have scared more and more advertisers away from second tier PPC networks. These concerns appear to be making the ValidClick’s click fraud prevention technology and alliance with Fair Isaac that much more appealing.

Despite the success of the ValidClick network, THK’s stock has recently traded down to a historical low, with a market cap settling in the $27 million range. With its existing business pieced together by acquisitions totaling nearly $90 million over the last three years, several business segments that appear to be flourishing and a company campaign to divest non core assets that could raise cash greater than its existing market cap, we believe that THK might look like a tremendous bargain to ValueClick and more importantly, a quick entry into the PPC space with a unique offering whose technology solves the biggest problem (Click Fraud) plaguing the second tier PPC networks.

We believe that ValueClick is uniquely positioned to make waves in the Pay Per Click space if it should make an attempt to enter the fray. We also believe that the timing is perfect for such an entry. The current Yahoo conundrum that will likely result in only two of the big three Per Per Click networks surviving combined with the capitulation among investors in the small cap online advertising names makes the “perfect storm” and possibly a historic opportunity for a well financed player with a good name to stake a claim to be the new “first tier” player in this highly profitable space. ValueClick’s sterling balance sheet (over $160 million with no debt) and scale would likely be attractive to MIVA and/or THK’s management team if they are in fact entertaining offers. We believe that they are and note that both have recently announced steps to divest of assets that would not be appealing to a ValueClick or other similarly situated suitor.

We also note that timing is of the essence as there may be some increase in the valuations accorded many of the online advertising assets when Interactive’s (IACI) spin off is complete next month and they begin shopping with their $1.5 billion cash war chest and a stock currency whose valuation will be based on the prospects of Ask.com rather than many of the slower growth businesses that plagued IACI’s valuation for so long. It will likely take just one deal by IACI, CBS’s (CBS) recently acquired CNET or one of the other media players who would benefit from owning an ad network to make the valuations move back to historical norms - much higher than where the currently reside.

In Canada, nearly three-quarters of those ages 16 and older went online for personal reasons during the 12 months prior to June 2008, according to Statistics Canada’s “Canadian Internet Use Survey.” That was up from just over two-thirds in 2005.

Personal Internet use in Canada increased by 5 percentage points between 2005 and 2007. Users ages 16 and 17, who were not included in the 2005 survey, accounted for almost 1 percentage point of that increase.

In 2007, 96% of 16 to 24 year-olds went online, compared with only 29% of those 65 and older. However, Internet use increased across all age groups since 2005.

The overall age distribution of Internet users is fairly even between ages 2 and 54, according to comScore Networks’ “Canadians Online” study. For instance, there are nearly as many 35 to 44 year-old Internet users in Canada as there are 2 to 17 year-old users.

Statistics Canada estimated that 88% of people who accessed the Internet at home in Canada did so with a high-speed connection in 2007, up from 80% two years earlier. It attributed the growth to new users bypassing dial-up altogether and existing users switching from slower services.

Nimbuzz according to TechCrunch.com has has raised $15 million in a second round led by Naspers/MIH, with Nimbuzz’s other major existing investor Mangrove Capital Partners also participating. It’s already had $10 million from Mangrove (the original Skype investor). Apparently deals with 10 major social networks and three operators are already on the table. The latter see these kinds of apps as a way of boosting data use and therefore revenues. Nimbuzz offers free mobile VoIP, conference calling, IM and group chat and photo and file sending across multiple IM communities, including Skype, MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo!, AIM, Jabber and ICQ, plus 23 social networks, including apps/widgets for Facebook and Myspace.

That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

Many of the bloggers were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com a Web site that opposes Senator Obama. They include http://bluelyon.blogspot.com, http://comealongway.blogspot.com, http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com and http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com.

In an article that appeared on Bloggasm.com, the reporter Simon Owens spoke with some of the affected bloggers, who said they believed that Google had fallen prey to a campaign by activists supporting Senator Obama. According to the bloggers, the Obama supporters had clicked on a “flag” on the anti-Obama blogs alerting Google that they were spam.

If so, that would be an embarrassment for Google. On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.”

On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

“Without any notice, apology, or explanation, my posting privileges has been reinstated,” wrote the author of the blog Come a Long Way, who identifies herself as GeekLove. “Blogger’s ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach is appalling. As bloggers, it is a good thing we still have choices, and I have exercised my choice to leave Blogger and establish a new home at WordPress.”

Attempts to reach some of the anti-Obama bloggers were not immediately successful.

Personalized home page service Netvibes has quietly rolled out a new social feature called Buzz. The Buzz section tracks what links are getting starred the most throughout Netvibes network of home pages.

Netvibes users can star any of the links they like on their homepages, RSS readers, YouTube boxes, Digg widgets, and other widgets. And when items have been starred, they show up in users’ public activity streams, which can be displayed on home pages using an activity widget. With Buzz, these starrings are aggregated and displayed on a Digg-like front page where people can see what others are starring the most.

Buzz hasn’t been formally announced yet, but this is the first new feature we’ve since Tariq Krim announced he was stepping down from his CEO position.

While Netvibes lags behind giants iGoogle, My Yahoo! and MyAOL, it is the favorite among many early adopters for being fast and ad-free. With 2.4 million worldwide uniques in May, it makes sense to leverage its traffic for a link popularity tracker. There are already many social bookmarking sites, but adding a feature like this to an already-popular personalized home page service makes for easy adoption.

Buzz is currently on a separate page (and probably still in development), but we expect Netvibes to provide users with a widget that can be used to track popular items on their home pages. The name choice probably won’t go unnoticed by Yahoo either.

Source: Techcrunch