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In response to this TechCrunch post on the Y Combinator equity docs, I left this comment:
A few notes:
1. Seed-stage deals that first sell equity aren’t doing themselves any favors. We work hard to always do fair convertible debt, which is much cheaper from a legal perspective, much more founder friendly, and preserves stealth mode per the Form D problems Josh Kopelman highlights.
2. I’ve posted our note form on Lookery’s blog: Download Word Doc

@humphrey
– Seed stage deals don’t need much if any custom lawyering unless either the founders or the investors are attempting to assert unreasonable control or take financial advantage.
– We start with the NVCA docs when equity deals are appropriate, but the Y Comb docs will be more popular. Your average founder has a lot more trust in the Y Comb brand than the NVCA. WSGR making Y Comb take their docs down reinforces these sorts of perceptions.

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See you in NYC in a month!

Many people ask us - “What can Lookery data do for me?” Sure, when you think about it - it’s all anonymous data that only tracks Age, Sex and Location (ASL), but what is that worth to a web site owner?

As you can plainly see by this tweet we saw this morning, ASL data can be very valuable to a site owner:

The recruiting has begun, and whether you choose to run ads and make money, or if you only choose to run the js code and gather your site specific demographics - that choice is entirely yours! Either way, there is great data for social network application owners as well as web site owners.

All you have to do is sign up to get started today and start seeing some great data about your online destination. You can see the data of sites that opt in to make their listing public on our network pages.

As a followup to their report on projecting Social Net revenues and our take on that optimistic forecast, eMarketer produced an analysis of Fox Interactive Media’s (FIM for short) most recent quarterly revenue numbers. For those curious, MySpace is the largest property within FIM but also includes other notable web properties like Photobucket, IGN and Scout Media.

The crux of eMarketer’s analysis is the breakdown of FIM’s quarterly revenue into average revenue per U.S. user per month. FIM announced quarterly revenues of $225 million which eMarketer estimates 80% or $180 million came from the U.S. Using Comscore unique user estimates of 88 million, that equates to $2.04 per quarter or $0.68 per month. To those playing along at home that doesn’t sound like very much and thus given all the reports of low CPM’s for social media traffic seems even more reasonable. And eMarketer draws the conclusion that MySpace is being better monetized then it used to be. That sounds like social media’s CPM’s are finally heading up.

That is until you do some basic math.

At a CPM of 10 cents (which exceeds our most recent flat rate for social media apps which folks can argue offer even better advertising options), that implies that the average user is seeing 6,800 ads a month - or 227 a day. That’s a lot.

But wait - the flaw in our analysis that MySpace is seeing better CPM’s is MySpace doesn’t equal FIM. In fact Comscore estimates that 73 million of their 88 come from MySpace. Also given the more vertical focus of some of MySpace’s sister FIM properties they’re likely seeing CPM’s much, much higher then MySpace and more like Yahoo’s - say ~$1.50. If we assume that MySpace’s other sites drive a proportional share of FIM’s traffic (17%) with an eCPM of $1.50, then suddenly those 10 billion monthly non-MySpace page views are generating $15 million a month or $45 million a quarter. So $180 million now is down to $135 million. And for comparison Photobucket before it was acquired was on pace for $10 million a quarter in revenues so $45 million from all other FIM properties seems more then reasonable.

Also, we shall not forget Google’s $300 million a year or $75 million a quarter giveaway to MySpace. Subtract Google’s $75 million and you are down to a mere $60 million a quarter or $20 million a month. Throw in some guaranteed sponsorship deals like those that Oberon Media likely paid for the right to run MySpace’s game channel and the straight advertising number gets even smaller. Let’s assume a 20% “sponsorship” rate and the monthly MySpace number is now a mere $16 million a month. At 73 million visitors a month - that translates to a mere $0.22 per U.S. user per month in CPM advertising. At that rate that’s still 2200 ads per user month. But that’s 73 per day and at 3 ads per page that’s only 24 pg views a day. Given the high page views per day we’ve seen with social media properties, that’s not at all out of the range of normal.

So the moral of the story is that social media ads are still getting $0.10 per thousand even on MySpace.