| In This Issue:
* NEWS AND COMMENT * Demand Media: Revenues Up, But So
Are Losses in First Quarter of 2011 Reporting its financial results for the first quarter of 2011, Demand Media, Inc. has good and bad news for shareholders. The good news is that revenues have jumped 48 percent compared with those in the first quarter of 2010. The bad news is that the company's loss has also increased. Demand Media's revenues hit $79.5 million in the first quarter of 2011, 48 percent higher than the $53.6 million earned in Q110. The company's operating loss, however, increased by 31 percent - from $3.2 million in Q110 to $4.2 million in Q111. Its net loss climbed 37 percent - from $4.1 million in the first quarter of last year to $5.6 million in Q111. Since Demand Media's performance exceeded analysts' expectations, its CEO, Richard Rosenblatt was upbeat about the results. "We reported better-than-expected results in Q1 2011, driven primarily by continued momentum from our owned and operated sites," Rosenblatt said. The company's performance was largely driven by its content and media businesses, which rely on advertising revenue. Content and media revenue was $51.9 million, a huge 72 percent gain over the $30.2 million in Q110. Demand Media's domain name business also did well, with registrar revenue
for the first quarter of 2011 reaching $27.7 million, 18 percent higher than $23.4 million last year. Clearly, for all its revenue growth, Demand Media will need to reign in costs before shareholders can truly be happy about their investment in the company. Click here to comment on this article 
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* FEATURE ARTICLE * Bitcoins: Could This P2P Virtual Currency Topple Governments
(Or Could You At Least Use It to Pay For Web Design?) Move over PayPal. Move over credit cards. Move over dollar bills. Introducing bitcoins - a peer-to-peer (P2P) virtual currency that is, according to Jason Calacanis, "untraceable and un-hackable... that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband." So, um, what is a bitcoin... or what are bitcoins... exactly? Bitcoins are a form of virtual currency. Each bitcoin is a virtual coin that takes the form of a file you can store on your computer. As with other forms of currency, bitcoins are negotiable instruments you can trade for goods and services which, in turn, enables the new holder of the bitcoins to trade them for goods and services. Or you can simply give and receive bitcoins. Either way, bitcoins are a store of value you can use to buy stuff. How do you get your hands on a bitcoin... or two... or three? Well, you can't physically get your hands on bitcoins, of course, but you can virtually send and receive bitcoins in three ways: via P2P software you can download from Bitcoin.org; using an escrow service such as ClearCoin; or via a bitcoin currency exchange. Bitcoins are potentially disruptive because they fall outside the control of governments (for now). They can't be frozen, tracked or taxed and using them carries very low transaction costs. That's not to say governments and financial companies aren't increasingly giving bitcoins a good deal of attention. The kind of attention that may stop bitcoins from, um, gaining currency. For example, PayPal and the major credit companies have banned users from buying and selling bitcoins, making it difficult to exchange 'real' money for bitcoins. But that may not stop the growth of bitcoins. People can still barter goods and services for bitcoins and once there is a critical mass of bitcoins in circulation you may not need to exchange real money for them. Already there are 6 million bitcoins, worth USD $6.70 each, in circulation, making the bitcoin economy worth about $40 million. If it isn't obvious by now, there enough creative minds on the planet - and particularly on the Internet - to give the bitcoin economy a lot of impetus to grow. On the other hand, no right-minded government will stand by while a black market currency takes off. It's certainly conceivable that various authorities will clamp down on bitcoins before they reach any kind of critical mass. In that case, bitcoins will stay underground. Or perhaps bitcoins will somehow become regulated and legitimized... although looking at how they are created and used right now, it's unclear how bitcoins as conceived would offer the same key benefits to users (i.e. being untraceable, escaping tax, etc). Jason Calacanis predicts governments will begin outlawing bitcoins in the next year or so, just as more and more people use them and they soar in value. He reckons outsourcing websites will allow bitcoins (for fear of their competition doing so). So you could very well end up paying your web designer in bitcoins! I'm not sure, however, that such sites will allow bitcoins if it means breaking the law. Should YOU use bitcoins? Assuming they're (still) 'legal' (and I'm not sure they are – be sure to get legal advice!) their use still relies on an enormous amount of trust in other Internet users. Put it this way. The reason why people comfortably use 'real' dollar bills is that, ultimately, the government guarantees the value of those dollar bills. There is no such guarantee with bitcoins or any other form of P2P currency. By definition, a P2P currency relies on the goodwill of your peers. Bitcoins will only be worth something if other people recognize their value. If, due to legislation, scammers or otherwise, very few people recognize their value, then you'll have few 'peers' with whom to exchange bitcoins. This will lower, and perhaps negate, their value. Imagine, for example, that you acquired a lot of bitcoins, planned to use them on an outsourcing site so you could pay for web designers, programmers, etc and then discovered that the outsourcing site no longer allowed you to pay in bitcoins. Your bitcoins would then be useless on that site. If more and more outsourcing and other sites refused to allow bitcoins then, ultimately, the whole bitcoin economy would crumble. Or, at least, stay underground. But, then again, the reverse is also true... the more peers who recognize and accept bitcoins, the more value they will have. It's the networking effect in action. Just don't think for a moment that governments and financial institutions will watch all this happen from the sidelines. If they can't 'beat em' they'll certainly want to tax 'em! Whatever the future of bitcoins, one thing is for sure: there are certainly some creative people on the Internet! The creation of bitcoins is yet another example of ingenuity in action. Click here to comment on this article
Source: Jason Calacanis and the LAUNCH team, "L019: Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen," Launch, http://launch.is/blog/l019-bitcoin-p2p-currency-the-most-dangerous-project-weve-ev.html Back To Top
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* KIKABINK LAB * Do Follow Search Engine An often cited way of generating traffic is to leave comments on blogs and forums along with a link to your website. Write a relevant and well written comment and this could bring visitors to your site. Even better, if the link is 'do follow' the major search engines such as Google and Bing may recognize the link as a 'vote of confidence' in your site, thereby helping your site rank higher in the search engines. Of course, many blogs use software that automatically treat links added to comments as 'no follow' which means Google, Bing, etc will ignore the links and NOT count them as back-links to your site for search engine ranking purposes. That doesn't mean you shouldn't still comment on such sites. There's still value in building a relationship with the blog owner and attracting real people to your site. Yet, you might want to prioritize those blogs and forums that do allow links to be followed by the search engines. How do you find such blogs and forums? Enter Digerati Marketing's free 'do follow search engine'. Simply type in the topic or category of blog or forum you're interested in, and the do follow search engine will generate a list of blogs and forums that allow links to be followed by the search engines. Click here to comment on this article
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That's it for now. If you have any questions or feedback click here to drop me a line. To your profit, 
Anna Johnson
Editor, Kikabink News
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