🔊 ON24 begins public trading

Asking the market to bet on the continued value of virtual engagement, webinar and virtual event platform ON24 began trading on the NYSE yesterday. The IPO of 8,560,930 shares of common stock was priced to the public at $50.00 per share. The offering is split between 6,315,789 offered by ON24 itself, and 2,245,141 shares of common stock offered by other stockholders. In initial trading, the share value jumped 54%.

CMO Steve Daheb, a recent recruit from Oracle, told us that the COVID-related lockdown had impacted ON24’s business. “I think our goal was to go IPO,” he said. “Obviously the lockdown helped accelerate it — we talk about 10 years of digital transformation or acceleration in 10 months. What’s been impressive to me is that it’s not just technology companies, but you see this transformation happening in financial services, manufacturing and healthcare providers; and so it’s all these different companies, not only trying to convert prospects to buyers, but trying to engage, which you can’t quite do physically any more.”

Why we care. The first hours or days of trading may not tell us how successful the IPO is proving to be, but we’re going to be watching the performance of platforms like ON24 once in-person events become viable again. How permanent is the virtualization — in part at least — of our professional lives?

Read more here.

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Last month, Google threatened to shut down its search engine in Australia if the country’s News Media Bargaining Code, which seeks to compensate news publishers for links to their content in Google’s search results, were to become law. Australia’s proposal carries implications for businesses outside of publishing and possibly even other search engines. And, should Google carry through on its threat, there may also be unintended consequences for domestic businesses.

The collateral damage from shutting down Google search could be significant. “I predict new user traffic for smaller sites that are driven by a lot of discovery via organic search will drop off substantially,” said Matthew Brown, managing director at MJBLabs and former director of search strategy for the New York Times, noting that larger media organizations are likely to fare better because people may seek them out directly.

Even so, organic traffic is almost certain to decrease for publishers across the board. And, fewer visitors means fewer revenue opportunities. “Publishers would lose detrimental amounts of traffic, especially when many media businesses rely on traffic for programmatic and direct sold advertising,” said Ben May, CEO at The Code Company, an Australian development agency that works with online publishers.

Read our in-depth analysis here.

Events platform Bizzabo yesterday announced it had joined the Adobe Exchange Partner Program. As an official Adobe partner, Bizzabo aims to help B2B marketers stage and manage in-person, virtual or hybrid events.

Bizzabo, previously focused on in-person events, launched a virtual events solution in 2020 aimed at mid-market and enterprise clients. Bizzabo also has an established integration with Marketo Engage, part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, to share registration and attendee activity data.

Why we care. As virtual-first B2B event platforms like ON24 prospered during lockdown, it’s been fascinating to watch platforms like Bizzabo, previously associated with physical events, pivot to serving a virtual environment. These platforms are positioning themselves to respond to whatever comes next: a return to normalcy, extended remote in engagement, or a mix of the two.

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Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported its Q4 2020 earnings the other day, and oh my does that company know how to make money. The company had a 23% increase in revenues year-over-year with $56.90 billion in revenue for the last quarter of 2020. Google credited a lot of this revenue to two streams: $31.90 billion to Google Search (an increase of 17% year-over-year) and $6.88 billion to YouTube advertising (an increase of 22% year-over-year). Yesterday the stock was up over 7% during the day, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, was in good spirits.

Why we care. In the earnings call, which you can listen to on YouTube, Pichai mentioned an example of how the company’s AI efforts are working. The example given was Google shipping BERT in search, he said it was one of Google’s biggest quality improvements. In the call, they also spoke about a lot of the changes they made to Maps and other features to help businesses and searchers during COVID.

“Remote work has shown us the benefits of flexibility. It’s also shown us how much easier it is to work too much.” Donna Kimmel, EVP, Citrix.