Plush Search
I was asked to speak at one of Search Engine Strategies New York conferences today, and I talked about how membership based ecommerce companies were using search to drive acquisitions. You can see the slides below:
I'm getting better at keeping my slides low on bullets and high on imagery, but think the key points can be understood even if you didn't hear me speak:
- The ecommerce 2.0 sites (Groupon, Gilt, Lot18 etc) dont sell many different items at any one time
- As a result we can afford to highlight each one is a deep, curated manner
- This depth of content is blurring the lines between commerce and content
- And so, despite being ecommerce companies, we are also acting like publishers
Its a period of change in the ecommerce industry, which hasn't seen much innovation in the last decade.
Returning
It's been a while since I've posted here, and there are a couple of reasons for that:
- I've been on a hiring spree these last few months, and we now have over 70 people across Gramercy Labs. We still have over 40 open positions, so check out the collective if you're looking for something new. Its been a busy year, as in May 2010 I had 8 employees and we were able to move with a 14 foot U-Haul. We're now spread over 13,000 square feet, across 3 locations, and I'm embarrassed to say I don't know everyone's name any more. I'm going to fix that.
- I'm working on something really big at one of the companies, and its been all consuming. I'm hoping to be able to announce it soon.
I spoke today at a conference and will post the slides next.
An Apology to CellarTracker
Thank you to those who gave me, and the company, the time to investigate the claims made. It’s very easy in the digital age to simply hit “retweet” and join the virtual mob, and to those who hung back to wait for the truth, thank you. Separate to the public discussion being played out over Twitter, there’s been a parallel discussion between Rich Tomko, CEO of Snooth, and Eric LeVine, Founder of CellarTracker, as we all work to understand what the genesis of the issue is.
To be clear, we do not scrape data, we do not steal data. Typically, data on Snooth is sent to us, uploaded via our Merchant Hub, or is crawled using web standards (robots.txt, which is how Google and other search engines work).
I think CellarTracker provides a great service to serious wine collectors out there. I know this, because members of the team here continue to rave to me about how awesome it is. It was because I knew this, that way back in April 2007 when Snooth first launched I negotiated an agreement with CellarTracker to feature reviews from their site (announced here). The relationship evolved over the ensuing six months, and ultimately in October 2007, the partnership ended and we were asked to remove “user reviews" -- which we did, in its entirety.
At the end of October 2007, CellarTracker wrote to us asking us to remove not only the reviews (which had been done), but to take down other pieces of content on our site. This is where everything gets complicated, so bear with me as I explain how Snooth is built.
Snooth is an aggregator -- we collect data from around the web. We’re more than that today, with a thriving social community and a strong editorial component, but back then when there were just two of us and we worked off my co-founder's kitchen table in Brooklyn, to make our efforts stretch, we decided to go build a “Google meets Expedia” for wine.
Today we aggregate information from over 10,000 sources, with thousands of these sources actually sending us information in the form of Excel and csv files, or data feeds. All of this is managed via our Merchant Hub, which is an incredibly sophisticated tool able to recognize and fix wine data errors on the fly. It’s something we are very proud of, and continuously working to improve. In addition to the Hub, we have the Snooth Crawler. This is essentially a robot that behaves like a mini-Google, wandering around the web looking for wine content to add to the site. We currently monitor more than 50 million pages focused on wine, and we check in every few days to see if there’s any new information on each page. The Snooth Crawler “behaves” well: We don’t visit sites too frequently, and we leave a signature behind so that webmasters can see that it was us calling, and if they want to stop us from coming, it’s simple to request that and our Robot will not visit that site again.
To date, no site has ever asked to be removed from our index. It sometimes takes some explaining (“What are you doing with my data?”), but site owners mostly recognize the value of what we’re doing: namely to raise a winery’s visibility of their products and to drive sales to both wineries and retailers. It’s the wine equivalent of Google, Expedia, or CitySearch.
Back to CellarTracker. We realized yesterday that some of our wine descriptors, namely the user tags (not reviews or information that is, or could be, copyright-protected) that are automatically extracted from user reviews, were still being calculated using CellarTracker information as one of the thousands of data sources. This data was being pulled via the original CellarTracker XML feed, which was set up under the 2007 agreement. Once we discovered that this data is still contributing to the compilation of these tags, and having been informed by CellarTracker about their position on this issue, we immediately switched the feed off and have begun the process of extracting the information from the site. The process will take several days as we have to recalculate the wine tags across over 3 million wines.
Snooth’s code base, the guts of the code that make the site live and breathe, has been written by tens of people over four years, involving more than 10,000 individual code submissions and over 1 million lines of code. Amongst that spaghetti of code, this routine slipped through -- specifically, the code that pulled the CellarTracker feed was not switched off when the agreement between us ended, although no reviews went on the site, the wine tags were still being calculated with CellarTracker as one of the sources.
For that I’m sorry. To Eric LeVine, who single-handedly has built CellarTracker into the best tool for the serious wine collector, and to any CellarTracker users who feel their data was misused, my apologies.
Again, thank you to those who gave us the time to understand the situation and to respond appropriately.
Digging into the Details
Some people in our business were surprised by the claims I made in the last newsletter I wrote (Powering Wine Online), and I am providing further evidence to clarify some of the points made:
Our Goal at Snooth
Our goal is to turn casual wine drinkers into enthusiasts and make wine data more accessible -- with the ultimate goal of helping each of you to move more bottles.
Our Reach / The Numbers
Our traffic and reach numbers that we recently published are all accurate. Quantcast “quantifies” reach by calculating impressions only on pages that our content/widgets are featured on -- not the entire site’s traffic. Also, our traffic and reach doesn't include our content being syndicated on many sites including The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.
The fastest way to verify this claim is (*geek alert*) to compare Quantcast’s own traffic measurements for the portion of myRecipes site that features the Snooth widget (here listed as 2.7M users in the last month) versus the traffic that Quantcast shows for the full myRecipes site (here, listed as 3.4M users last month). Both these numbers are “Quantified,” i.e. Directly Measured and are accurate.
Don’t forget that the Snooth wine pairing widget is present on virtually every recipe detail page for these sites, and the recipe pages make up the majority of page views of any recipe site. Our partner sites are large, and we’re serving tens of millions of Food and Wine pairings per month on them.
To round this out, see a screenshot taken today of our internal Google Analytics data, showing 13.3M visits in the past month across our entire network. Snooth has around 2M of those visits, the rest being direct visits to Snooth content on partner sites.
Getting wine information to new audiences is an important part of the work we do. Snooth, and its network reach, is huge. We do have over 10x the reach of any wine website in the world, and we are working hard every day to make it a lot bigger.
The User and Winery Experience
All in all, creating a better experience for the end user is key. People want to be able to find the most relevant information in a specific category when they search -- that's the nature of the web and we understand that being able to provide accurate wine data is a continuous effort. Wineries that claim their pages and have updated information help provide a better experience for the end user. We see this happens on many different sites on the web, aside from Snooth, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, CNET, IMDB, etc.
We’re a small company (less than 20 employees) and fortunate enough that we’re still nimble, so when we see an issue we’re able to respond quickly. A recent point raised, helped create this new “Out of Stock” popup that further helps drive traffic to a winery if we don’t have any relevant prices on our site.
Wine data management is certainly an area we can do better in, and it's one that we’re working on. Merging and manipulating wine data is hard. I remember back in 2006 when I first started Snooth, I’d go speak to the guys leading the way in wine data and everyone would try to steer me off trying to create a clean and unified database. Well, there’s a reason why they warned me off it. It really is hard. I know that now. We’ve had PhDs and genome sequencing scientists working on it for four years now. We’ve invested over $1,000,000 in building the first unified database for the industry, and we’ve still got a long way to go.
We have made some progress though -- we’re now processing data from over 10,000 sources; we’re still the only site that offers both reviews and prices on the same page. Offering either one or the other is simpler, offering both simultaneously is exponentially harder. We’ve also successfully merged over 6 million duplicate listings. I bet there still are 2 million left, and, that’s the problem—it’s a work in progress.
The winery hub, that we’re continuing to develop, is a key part of the arsenal, and it’s what gives the winery the power to control how their data is represented on our site, as well as the sites we power. You can see at the left in Related Images a screen shot showing a Mondavi wine that’s been “verified”. This listing is presented exactly as the winery wants it to be -- the image, the name and the rest of the specs are controlled by the winery. I wish we didn’t have to ask the wineries to even do this amount of work themselves, but as yet we’ve been unable to devise a faster way.
And, once a winery gives us price data, we list them first. Ahead of any retailer, we call the winery out in their own specific area: “buy direct from the winery.” Another new addition: We now link to a page with the winery’s phone number on it if we don’t have recent price data, as well as link directly to the website. Ideally, as we do in many cases, we’d deep-link into the shopping cart to drive the user experience the best, but we don’t always have the data for that. In either case, we’re committed to working with the winery.
Success Stories
The following are just a couple of examples, but when Snooth links to a winery we can change their business overnight. We have started to warn advertisers that their websites may not be able to handle the traffic once we start directing users to them, as was the case with both the Zinfandel Advertisers and Producers (ZAP) and the Italian Trade Commission recently. Both sites collapsed under the pressure of having thousands of users click through to learn more -- traffic typically peaks at around 200 users per second.
A couple of winery examples: we wrote about Dan Petroski’s new wine Massican in an article, and became the single largest source of customers for him. No mean feat, when you realize Dan is the Assistant Winemaker for the excellent Larkmead Winery and has been profiled in both the WSJ and SFGate. We also wrote about a small winery called The Grand Dalles. Our post generated so much sympathy for their struggle and so much support for their cause that our users cleared out the winery's entire inventory and the owners phoned us up in tears telling us we’d saved their livelihood.
Direct to Consumer is a channel I believe in strongly, so much so that I founded another company based on it. Called Lot18, it launched just three months ago, and it’s a rocket ship. I’m really glad to be doing even more to help wineries.
The CEO/Founder newsletter series, of which the original post was a part of, is designed to be just that -- sometimes I write about Snooth, but in many cases I write about how wineries can best leverage other, competitive, sites. My co-founder here at Snooth, Mark Angelillo, is currently writing an SEO guide for wineries, which will be published in the same newsletter. You can sign up to receive it by signing up for Snooth and going to your account settings.
Looking Ahead
We’re really pushing the limits of what can be done in the online world of wine, and we certainly make some missteps. But, fundamentally, I and the rest of the team here are truly excited each day to come in to the office, work 70-hour weeks, and do our best to help bring new consumers into the wine world. We’ve created a profitable business without needing to resort to “pay for play” (we’re an ad supported media business). Wineries and retailers do not pay to be listed, they do not pay for traffic or placement, and we generate tens of thousands of referrals of real consumers to retailers and wineries each month, ultimately helping everyone in the industry do what’s important, and that is to sell your wine.
Thank you,
Philip James
Founder, Snooth Media
Powering Wine Online
The de facto web analytics company, comScore, produces something called its "Distributed Content Publisher" report, which measures the reach of sites like Snooth and its network. Snooth was listed as the 5th largest content platform on the web, across the whole of the U.S.
On Quantcast, a newcomer to the space, Snooth.com (visits to the site directly) is listed as the 2,822nd most popular site worldwide, which puts it first out of any wine company, and amongst the top food sites. Interestingly, Snooth gets more traffic than Visa (7 places behind us at 2,829), Amazon in Germany (4 places behind us at 2,826) and, by some strange coincidence, many of the other banks and card issuers are clustered tightly just behind: TD Bank, MasterCard etc. We're still behind Wisconsin.gov (2,803) -- it's 19 places ahead of us, so here's hoping.
I've spoken before how Snooth "powers" content on Epicurious (Time Inc.), Yahoo!, Facebook, Epicurious (Condé Nast), Food and Wine and many others. We reach 10-12 million people per month by doing this. In fact, more than 300 companies use Snooth's data to power their websites and applications via our open API, including many of the most popular mobile and social wine apps, such as HelloVino and Swirl. Looking through the list just now, I see Nielsen and Samsung, as well as universities Cornell, Wharton and UC Berkeley and some random entries like Accenture.
Right now, Rich Tomko, Snooth's new CEO, is doing great work bringing on new partners, helping grow our reach. The most recent of which is RecipeTips, and there are plenty of others in the works.
It's a real highlight to see the ecosystem evolve, and it's why every time I speak to a winery, either in private or on-stage (last week it was to 200 wineries at the Sonoma County Vintners annual meeting), that I talk about the importance of a winery claiming and owning their information on Snooth. Only you know what the perfect presentation of your brand is. We make it easy for a winery to do this at the Snooth Hub. Join the 3,057 wineries that have already taken the step of claiming their content. You'll be controlling how your information is presented, not just on Snooth, but on Time Inc., Condé Nast and across the 300+ other companies and sites that rely on the Snooth data stream.
Thanks to Nate for giving me the inspiration to write this.
Doing Less
By chance last night I found a fortune cookie, and when I cracked it open, the slip inside held the phrase "do less, not more."
I've been thinking about how to write this post. I think it's an important topic, but easily misunderstood. "Do less" doesn't mean be lazy, it means focus. Pick one thing you're really good at and make yourself an expert at it: world-class. It doesn't matter what you pick, just be the best. Be it marketing, dance, or winemaking. If your domain is playing Bolivian panpipes, then make yourself the best that the world's ever seen.
I used to work with a smart and upcoming e-mail marketer. Part of her job was to liaise with the designer on creating the e-mail templates. The emails are written in HTML code, and she would often tell me she intended on learning the basics of HTML so that she could be "useful" there. She was really good at marketing, particularly direct response (e-mail, search engine marketing etc), and was on a path to becoming the best I'd ever seen. If she had spent her nights and weekends learning to code, at best she was destined to become a mediocre coder, and it would likely result in the trade-off of her not reaching her potential in what she could excel at.
I'm hardly against people learning how to program -- in fact, I think it's so important that it should be taught in schools -- I just think that people need to be resolute enough to admit who and what they are, and then tenacious enough to pursue their goals systematically.
Seth Godin talks about this in his book The Dip. The latter part of the title sums it up: "A Little Book that Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)." The basic premise being that most people give up when the going's tough, and instead we should either give up before it even gets hard, or persist through it.
"Well-rounded" used to be seen as a positive. It's now a millstone of blah mediocrity. I'd rather be exceptional at one thing than average at 10.
As a winery, the goal of "making the best wine" is too nebulous to be useful. So pick something specific... and dominate it.
And me? I'm never going to be the world's best "marketer" -- I don't even know what that means. Instead, I'd rather aim to be the best "U.S.-focused online-enabled wine social commerce marketer." Not that my mother or half my friends know what that is, but it's what I think I'm good at.
The Medium is the Message
The wine industry is like the music industry... before Tower Records went out of business.
You buy a bottle of wine not just for the product, but for the story behind the winery. Just like a teenage girl buys her music not only for the song, but to fuel her unrequited love for Justin Beiber. The store just happens to be the medium through which you procure the product; the brand association, obsession and identity is with the artist him/herself.
In the U.S., the vast majority of wine (over 90%) is sold by retailers. The winery sells the wine (indirectly) to retailers, who then sell it to consumers. In this triangle, the weakest connection is between the winery and the consumer, although it's the one that the consumer almost always wishes were stronger. The winery conveys passion, excitement and image, while many stores only convey price and accessibility.
For those few fortunate enough to visit a winery and witness the heart and soul that each winemaker pours into his or her wine, they end up hooked and loyal customers for years, if not decades. This is known, and it's why tasting rooms are generally so well-staffed and -appointed, and why domestic wineries sell more than a billion dollars via this channel annually.
Not everyone has the opportunity to go to Napa, or Tuscany, or Walla Walla, and for the rest of us, the only experience with wine is often intimidating, either through the "wall of wine" in a retailer, or via a snooty sommelier in a local restaurant.
The internet is, slowly, changing this, allowing wineries to interact and forge relationships directly with consumers. Through sites like Facebook, Twitter, Snooth and Yelp, wineries are able to build communities and interact directly with their most excited and loyal consumers, and to listen in return. These digital brand ambassadors are best positioned to extend your reach, and with the proper tools can be empowered to do so.
Shrinking the gap between a winery and a consumer is powerful, and the internet presents the incredible opportunity of being able to do this at scale and cost effectively. Whether the goal is increased online sales, or just to drive consumers to know your brand and to ask for it in their local stores, the internet makes it possible for a winery to get its message to the buyer at the point of consideration.
The Snooth Network – 10 million visits per month and counting
Throughout 2010 we've kept our heads down, rolling out improvements to our flagship site Snooth, while building our network with launches of sites including The Spir.it and WhatsCook.in. We've also worked hard at signing other major partnerships, like the one we recently announced with RecipeTips.com.
Snooth.com recently surpassed 1.5 million visits per month, double last year's traffic. According to Quantcast, this makes Snooth one of the top 4,000 websites globally, and the largest in the category. However, it's the Snooth Network that's seen the largest numbers. According to Quantcast, the Snooth Media Network sees over 10 million visits per month, and the network has a combined reach -- which makes it one of the top 250 most-influential properties on the Web. (Click to see Monthly Global Visits and U.S. network rank.)
In addition to the wholly owned sites Snooth, The Spir.it and WhatsCook.in, the Network now includes: MyRecipes.com (Time Inc), Epicurious (Condé Nast), Food & Wine Magazine, RecipeTips.com, and Lot18.
As well as the sites in the Network, Snooth powers other sites, for which we don't get credit. Mobile apps like Swirl, the most popular wine app for the Android platform, are powered by Snooth's data. And there are hundreds more.
We're powering wine online, and for a winery, store, importer or distributor, the easiest way to see your data stay accurate across the Web is to make sure it's accurate on Snooth. You can do that here.
Introducing Snooth Media
We announced on Tuesday that Rich Tomko would become the new CEO of Snooth.
I started Snooth on November 17, 2006 -- nearly four years ago to the day. Since then, we've raised several million dollars in financing, built the team to 20 and figured out the business model sufficiently to get us to profitability. We've undergone pivots, hit dead ends, failed (lots) and ultimately navigated our way down a successful path.
Snooth was originally conceived as an in-store kiosk company. The idea was that retailers would rent Snooth kiosks, which would function as "digital sommeliers." Customers would scan a bottle and the kiosk would display information about the wine. Snooth.com was built as a showcase to highlight the technology. Luckily, the demo site took off, iPhones and other smartphones were released, and the idea of the kiosk fell by the wayside. Looking back, I'm glad I'm not involved in renting and maintaining kiosk hardware.
You can see just how far Snooth has come from the evolution of the logo. In four years, we've been through five -- fortunately, the first "deerstalker" logo didn't last long.
Today, Snooth is a media company. In June of this year, we launched a second brand, TheSpir.it, focused on spirits and cocktails. We expect to continue to expand our range of products over the coming years.
I've known Rich for several years, and he's truly the ideal person to lead Snooth to continued success. He comes to Snooth with 15 years of proven success in the digital media world, from Digital Strategy at CNN to leading the digital food division (including MyRecipes and CookingLight.com) of Time Inc. to great success.
Rich has years of accumulated "best practices," and at the same time he "gets" startups and fits well into Snooth's culture. In the short time he's been here, he's run through walls, signed a ton of new partnerships, and led to a 50% increase in traffic. We're all excited.
Rich's joining allows me to focus on what I do best: strategy and product. I'll still be here every day, but I won't be involved in the day-to-day running of this growing media company.
Please join me in welcoming Rich.
Choosing inefficiencies
My friend Noah Brier first wrote about this a few months ago, while Lot18 was deep in stealth planning mode.
Why would a company choose to be inefficient? His example related to sites like Gilt and Groupon and their avoidance of SEO as a marketing channel. Their prices were so aggressive that the merchants preferred that they not be distributed too widely. One of the key advantages of the new breed of ecommerce sites is that they can sell products at a discount discretely and quickly, while gaining access to new customers that they would not have been able to market to otherwise.
Snooth is a company born around efficiency - all the information about all the wines, available all the time. Lot18 is none of that, its available to members only, you can't see the offers unless you have an account, and you can only get an account from an existing member. Very few wines will be offered at one time, and because they sell out so quickly there's often nothing for sale.
There are business reasons for all of this - we're controlling registration because many of the wines are available in very limited quantities for example. We currently have over 20,000 membership requests and we're not going to be able to invite all these people for over a month as we build up the pipeline.
Its exciting to have the opportunity to rethink efficiency, and while its typically the user that's the scarce resource, for Lot18 its the wines.