Today I attended the Straight from the Gut Conference held by TIE. This event was sold out, and no tickets were available for walk-ins.

It was a great intro to the Internet industry and a great place to get the latest feelings from the VCs on the current state of venture capital. From the point of view of many entrepeneurs and VCs, this is actually a good time to gauge the quality of the VC firms. The general agreement is that the quality VCs will stay with their selected companies during this economic downturn and the marginal ones will close up shop and get very defensive. An overly defensive fund will end up missing some great companies if they do not continue to invest. After all, good companies are always being created regardless of the economic cycle.

The most interesting part of the show for me was the advertising panel. The people on this panel had real world experience in online advertising including numbers for ad revenues and what new sites that are depending on advertising will need to be successful. One number that I thought that was really interesting is that the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for general web sites has dropped to $0.50. The last that I heard, I thought that social networks and their poor advertising connections were selling for $1-3 per CPM.

Tags: advertising, Internet, TIE

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Business Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.