Ross Levinsohn leaves News Corpoartion / Fox Interactive Media, read more on GigaOm, PaidContent and TechCrunch.
“We are also hearing from fairly reliable sources that Levinsohn plans to raise this money and buy-and-aggregate an online media property of high traffic sites.”
Apparently he is about to do what we suggested someone should do here:
One thing that I have expected is for there to be a consolidation in the linkdump category of websites: Fark, and company (Fark is essentially social bookmarking before the term came in vogue).
I was expecting for someone to come in (private investors or a VC), consolidate a number of the linkdump sites with little or no content, amalgamate a massive audience of 10-25M and be in a position to ask for better advertiser clients, higher rates and what not.
The main challenge that sites like Fark.com face in in fact that they have no proprietary content. I know Fark’s Drew Curtis and he is one of the smarter entrepreneurs out there, but the fact that he has no content of his own will always handicap him a bit with marquee advertisers. This year Dennis Publishing, publisher or uber men’s magazine Maxim decided to buy/sell inventory on Fark. I am sure there was even some talk of an outight sale, though this is unconfirmed.
The content that Fark bookmarks from around the Web is somewhat controlled and filtered, so it will not have as much of a hard time as social networks (who have larger audiences but far more risque content) to monetize the traffic with quality advertisers. With Maxim’s magic touch, it has already started. But there is one Fark for a million… others.
While there has been some consolidation in the segment, it never really materialized (InterActive Corp. for example bought another popular link dump site, College Humor, though College Humor has over the years added its own content and cannot simply be seen as a link dump). One reason I personally think this whole consolidation did not materialize is that VC or private equity investors would probably not feel comfortable in the management depth chart of some of these sites. As such, they passed up on the opportunity.
Indeed it is a once in a lifetime opportunity not to have a boss.
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