Reposted from our music blog. Few websites, products, companies bring out the child in me, YouTube is one of them… now if only Google can make the lawyers and accountants happy.
YouTube (and some of the other players in the space) have an opportunity to do what Napster could not. In Google’s hands, they simultaneously have more leverage and a moving bull’s eye on their backs.
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WatchMojo NewsletterFedex, UPS et al. might want to invest - or partner with - massive digital data storage, hosting companies etc.
I had to send a very large file to my editor who is on vacation. We’re not talking a word document, a spreadsheet or a powerpoint, we’re talking over 1 hour of footage he has to edit.
I thought of the fastest way to send him the file, and naturally the fastest way is via FTP online… we would not think of that given the restrictive file size, so we ship it on a hard drive, but even “overnight”-ing is not fast enough sometimes…
All to say… if the powers that be at Fedex and company can see through the crystal ball, they might want to avoid a Kodak scenario and ride the digital divide sooner than later. In the Kodak example going digital was a linear change from what they are doing… for Fedex and company, investing in new faster planes will only get them so far.
In fact, don’t stop there, invest in digital payments as well. Why send a check if you can wire it, right? So get in on the action and compete with banks, we all know they need more, not less, competition.
What was it that Henry Ford would say: “If I would have asked my consumers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses…”
This morning, Yahoo! mentioned that it would partner up with a bunch of sites, I thought: “why?”
Mind you, as a Yahoo! shareholder, I was very happy. It’s a smart move from Yahoo! It’s also a nice move by newspapers, but if I was a newspaper executive, founder and by default, part time socialite and museum board member (what do they really do, anyway?), I would be a bit more aggressive.
What newspapers lack lack is not revenue, it’s “relevance.” In today’s once-again giddiness over new media, newspapers trade (both literally and figuratively) at a discount, online companies are seen highly.
That is why it’s a good deal for Yahoo! now, it probably get better terms. Newspapers look like the ugly sister even their resources are so impressive that they can always be the pretty girl if they do desired.
Which makes me wonder: why are you so shell shocked? Buy a company, buy two. If I were a newspaper, I would be buying a search engine, a classified companies, a video platform or two. I would go crazy.
Rupert Murdoch set aside $2 billion for online, he now closed the cash register after spending $1.5 billion and he is, in his eyes, positioned for the digital age.
You folks in the ink business, you are making online companies stronger at your expense.
[Editor’s Note: Original version has been modified on or about February 5, 2007.]
“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman.
What’s he referring to?
Mr. Murdoch is pulling the OJ Simpson book and TV show from his companies’ airwaves and printing press. If the court of law represents the public, maybe you want to apply this logic to others such project as well…
[Editor’s Note: Original version has been modified on or about February 5, 2007.]
According to comScore, Yahoo only trailed Google by 6.5 percentage points in search market share in June 2005 (36.9% versus 30.4%).
By the end of September 2006, that gap had widened to a 17 percentage point advantage, with Yahoo giving up some share and Google grabbing a significantly bigger share from its rivals large and small. Google ended the period with a 45.1% share versus 28.1% for Yahoo.
Somewhere, Intermix founder Brad Greenspan is foaming at the mouth. The man who orchestrated the sale of Intermix to News Corp. for $580 million, Richard Rosenblatt is buying back all of the non-Myspace assets.
That’s interesting, let the conspiracy theorists run amok.
Read more about this deal from the folks at Paid Content.
Pretty interesting, I think this pretty much cements what FIM will look like in the next 1, 3 or 5 years. While Murdoch had earmarked $2 billion for online acquisitions, it looks like the deals will all come in the $1.5B range (with IGN and MySpace parent accounting for some $1.3B of that). I guess they simply did not see much else in the landspace, and this was confirmed with Ross Levinsohn resigning from the company. A lot of VCs and Web so-called 2.0 startups cried when that happened, I guess.
It is interesting to see how IGN will fit in all of this. Time will tell.
The losses due to software piracy are large. The Business Software Alliance reports that the U.S. lost $6.9 billion to software piracy in 2005. Read more on how MSFT is about to tackle their billion dollar problem here.
Honestly, considering we’re talking all software, I expected a higher number. Then again, $6 billion isn’t a tidy sum either.
That’s a stretch, but let’s take a stab at this:
Agloco, aka All Advantage was a failed venture that is making a comeback today with a similar business model and management team. Despite the fact that the “smartest people in the room” were quick to love them in 1999-2000, hate them in 2001-05, in 2006, they are now backing them once again. That is a freaking joke, read more here.
After reading this comment, Brad Garlinghouse is the equivalent of Agloco in this context.
And both remind me of hapless NFL coaches that fail in one city, only to pop up in a new place and fail over and over again while younger, smarter, mor eagile potential coaches sit on the sideline. How long did current Cincinnati Bengals coach Marvin Lewis or Bears coach Lovie Smith get passed up when the members of the old boys club like Dennie Erickson got chance upon chance? No, I am not raising the race card (I’m not African American, either). I’m just calling it like it is.
Utterly shameful.
I am no huge fan of Terry Semel, he was given too much credit when Yahoo! recovered and probably will be blamed too much when he walks away with his millions, but Yahoo!’s many problems are directly related to all of the things that make Yahoo! strong. Think of MSFT, the company is tremendously successful and just because Wall Street is bored does not mean that the company is in dire straits, it just means that Wall Street is bored.
Disclosure: I own stock in Yahoo! but have as little stock in Garlinghouse as I do in Semel. They are one and the same, if one if a problem, so is the other; if one is the solution, so is the other. I am not making a judgment on either one personally, but professionally, I can imagine countless more creative and on-the-ball people being forced to exit from Yahoo! while members of the old boys club get yet another stab at it.
Why has no one on the blogosphere asked “who this memo was written to?” It could not have been company-wide, so the fact that the Snr. VP will write this and not say it you Semel shows that he is as much part of the problem as the man he is not-so-subtly criticizing.
Interesting to read that not everyone thinks that there is a dearth of advertising in online video.
The problems - mainly perception ones - are that:
a) many of the advertisers that favor and focus on online video ads prefer to work with the large sites… it does not make sense for them to hammer out IOs with smaller firms. Example: WatchMojo.com has 3,000 videos in its library but having launched in Jan. 2006, we’re still not large enough for an advertiser to sit down and strike out a deal direct. Working with a network is problematic because you want to control the ads that run before our video content.
b) Also, prerolls are just one tool. Product integration and placement can also be valuable options for advertisers, especially when you consider than a video seen elsewhere will be stripped of the preroll before it, but product placement and integration cannot be stripped, even when refeatured elsewhere. Say our videos are seen by hundreds of thousands of viewers on our site, but then when posted on major file sharing sites, they are seen by millions more.
If advertisers were really progressive, they would be focusing as much as possible on clever and tasteful product integration and placement to ensure they maximize the opportunity at hand in online video.
The Calacanis Effect?
There is such a thing as the “summer effect,” but by the same token, the summer effect explains traffic dips when there are no other factors to examine. In the case of Netscape, the site went from a portal with editors offering readers a wide array of content to a tech and web-savvy audience to, well, a Digg clone. Digg is a news site in which the community submits stories and votes the best to the top of the page. Its inherently flawed in the sense that the community becomes as “corrupt” as the editors who decide which stories get front page coverage, but it is a fantastic concept and its success of late has made many jealous and envious, which is rather typical in all of business and for this industry of late, which massive payouts for quick businesses becoming de rigueur again.
Anyway, if the graph is accurate, then I hate to say it, but Valleywag is pretty much 100% accurate with their description / assessment of the situation:
The numbers are brutal: in the middle of June, before Calacanis overhauled Netscape’s front page, the property commanded over 130m pageviews per week. Within two months, traffic had declined nearly 70%.
Here is Netscape’s pageview count dating back 6 months from today. You be the judge if Valleywag’s numbers are correct.
At this point, in all fairness, it should be stated that Valleywag’s publisher Nick Denton and Calacanis compete head on; but that notwithstanding, Netscape 2.0 (as in the Digg clone, not Netscape Navigator 2.0) was a disaster from the beginning. I do not know how much of that can lie squarely on the shoulders of Jason, but the fact remains that if the numbers above are accurate, then this means that while Jason was copying and blasting Digg, he was driving Netscape into the ground, and few in the cozy circles of Manhattan and Silicon Alley will actually point that out. Of course, Valleywag does and takes a few personal jabs (I have only taken the comments pertaining to the business plan, and not about Calacanis):
He’d been obsessed by Digg.com, a news site in which the community submits stories and votes the best to the top of the page. He’d offered to buy Digg for $4m, and been turned down; his solution for Netscape was to steal Digg’s model, and some of their star contributors.
Except Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason’s radical experiment. Traffic the week of June 18th, before the Netscape team remade the front page, was 137m pageviews. The following week, as Netscape decommissioned areas such as news and weather, it declined to 115m. The new front page, a clone of Digg.com, went live on June 29. The first full week after the change, traffic had plummeted further, to 72m pageviews. The Comscore numbers, which help advertisers allocated their budgets to different internet properties, mirror this decline.
Calacanis has resigned from AOL ostensibly out of loyalty to Miller, and, having founded Silicon Alley Reporter and Weblogs, Inc., he probably also has several startup ideas. Part of the truth, for sure. Valleywag’s more cynical theory: he messed up Netscape.com, and used Miller’s departure as cover.
That being said, Jason will probably be back sooner than you can say “Digg this.”
Disclosure: Technically, The Blogger Mojo network, which are a group of blogs in the Mojo Supreme network of media properties is a blog network, much like Denton and Calacanis run blog networks, though we doubt anyone will confuse us for either of those fine assortments of blogs…
From the “Added Later” File:
UPDATES and answers from JC himself: here. This is too funny, Pac and Biggie would be proud.
Like I said, Jason should be looking ahead, not behind and start focusing on his next venture… but who is I to give anyone advice.
