Ages ago, well, in Web time, I spoke to the CEO of Grid Networks who was telling me about some of the feedback he was getting from media companies, particularly TV companies. The gist was that until 1 Million viewers could in tandem watch a movie online at once without it affecting the user experience, the Web was not really going to matter to them as much as the “smart crowd” thought it should.
It was clear that he - both the CDN CEO and the media executive - was right. But today I got an example of that, biggatime.
PaidContent finally published a video of its EconSM panels and for whatever reason (well, it seems obvious and like the right thing to do), they decided to publish the entire 65 minute clip in one piece (Update: I see this morning that they reduced the screen size, which will actually help quite a bit).
Until you publish video that seems like a harmless thing to do… It’s not harmless. The Web just ain’t there yet.
I emailed them to give them some friendly advice as someone who has produced, published and syndicated 100 hours of broadband content for web, wireless and out of home networks, this is suicide!
The simple solution is to publish 6×10 minute clips or better yet, 12×5 minute clips… though I hate to say it: even that is pushing it! Anything over 3-4 minutes and the streaming gets messed up and fuggetabout it, all of a sudden Rafat is a ventriloquist.
I swear for the love of all things holy this ain’t a knock on PaidContent, Ali or the Brightcove player, it’s just a dose of reality on where things are at… and why publishing video online is a programming and tech challenge. And that’s really a fraction of the issue at hand. I’d tell you the rest of the issues, but I’d have to disconnect you.
All to say, it’s bad now, and it will be worst tomorrow morning when the site’s readers get online and check out the site.
This also says a lot about Brightcove. I’m not knocking them, I’m knocking the state of matters. The firm’s raised a gazillion dollars and is backed by everyone you can imagine, it’s founded by the cream of the crop, but in the time it’s taken me to post this post, I’ve yet to get to the 10th frame of the freaking video. I’m on ultra fast cable, I was on wi-fi, just logged on wired up, and still, not much.
Yes, online will one day be huge, but right now, to a TV executive, it’s a freaking joke. Mind you, the last laugh might be on them, but please, let’s not get too drunk on the koolaid just yet.
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WatchMojo NewsletterDaylife raises $8.3M in round 2. There was a round 1? Wasn’t social news over? And does that mean investors are twice as dumb? Not quite.
Yet another news service is getting funded though, does this suggest that indeed news on the Web is still a wide open game?
In all fairness/to clarify, I have not spent much time looking at Daylife, there are simply too many to go through these days. Not a day goes by where a new social bookmarking icon doesn’t pop up below an article, in fact.
But if news is still wide open, this begs the question: what would constitute the perfect news product of the 21st century?
I think I can sum it up with three things: Topix + TechMeme + Digg. But, there’s something missing, or rather, all of those things have something to be desired. Oddly, none of those are search engines!
Maybe fittingly so, because search engine will forever be slightly or very late to index new sources… maybe that’s why Digg, TechMeme and Topix work well in their own right.
- Admittedly, Topix was great until newspapers invested in it… after that it’s almost useless… but the premise / theory is great. You almost think that it’s become the poster boy for “don’t accept money from old, old media.”
- TechMeme is useful and in many ways never ceases to amaze me, but then on some occasions I find it makes some of the best minds braindead because it becomes a downward spiral. People don’t want to start writing original things because they just want to continue the “discussion.” By the way, that term (discussion) should also be in the most obnoxious terms.
As a side note, one thing that is great about TechMeme is that it encourages editors to go back to old stories and add links to new ones, keeping old articles fresh in that regard. Only TechMeme encourages you to that as a publisher, and for that it deserves some credit. Admittedly, few editors will admit they do that, because on the surface it seems like you’re chasing links back, but it does add context and relevancy to older posts so it’s worth doing it, even if TechMeme won’t index you all the time. I’m curious if Gabe realized that or sought to do that. Better yet, I’ll ask him.
- Digg is a waste of time in many ways, but it’s a fascinating concept. If it wasn’t hijacked by a dozen 12 year olds, it would do wonders.
All to say, if I had, say $1M to venture into a social news arena, I’d do something along those lines.
For the record, we have a social bookmarking/news tool ready to go, but we’re so busy with WatchMojo.com, the blogs, the search, and of course StreetMojo.com that I have not yet even dove into social news, and probably won’t… but as I see it, news and the entire information challenge is still wide open.
What do you think is missing from that recipe?
Earlier this week I wrote: Ask.com, Stop Wasting $100M on Dumb Ads and Start Buying Search Technology.
If I were an IAC shareholder and could have a private chat with Barry Diller, that is probably what I would say to him.
Of course, I’m no longer an IAC shareholder, so in many ways I could care less what Barry Diller does with his shareholder’s money… especially since he’s the “Decider.”
But maybe I was wrong, as is most of the blogosphere.
Ask yourself: if Ask.com crafted really effective, and while we’re at it, sane, logical ads, would anyone give a flying you know what?
Probably not.
But while it (IAC, Ask.com and its agency Crispin Porter Bogusky) publishes, produces and releases one confusing ad after another, more and more bloggers take the bait and like the ham we oftentimes are start to pontificate about what Ask.com should be doing… what they should be stressing.
I’m probably giving CPB too much credit here folks, but that inadvertantly becomes very effective.
Maybe I am all wrong on this and Ask.com actually thinks that the Unabomber, Kato and words that don’t exist actually will help their business, who knows?
Any thoughts?
I was just taking a look at some data and it made me go back down memory lane. I think the new media types are busy scaring old media because deep down inside the new media guys fear what old media could do to them if they actually got their acts together. That’s the problem, old media probably won’t.
The other factor is that for all of their offline swagger, they really are clueless when it comes to a few things us online types take for granted.
Here are a couple of images showing to demonstrate what I mean.
Graph 1 shows the traffic trajectory of my old company, an online publisher, from 2001 to now. I was there from 2000 until I left in Dec. 2005.
Clearly, the company’s traffic rises from 2002 to mid-2003. Then, something happens in early 2004 and traffic begins to slide… it reaches a low in Fall of 2004… and then suddenly, poof, like magic, the trend totally turns around.
Why? I might talk about that a bit later on. Not today. We’re already at way too posts in one day (for a busy executive… anyway).
But the point is, look now as a I transpose the online traffic graph of our closest competitor, that being a venerable, well-known offline competitor.
As you can see, their traffic was always smaller, lower… but notice how when we had hit our low in Fall 2004 they were larger than us for a brief moment. Had a few things not happened, that graph suggests that they would have overtaken us.
History would have forever been different. But it’s very interesting to imagine what Web-savvy with so-called old media resources can do… quickly.
Here’s what I love about the Yahoo! move today: swift action, finally. Well, sort of. Yes, the Rivals.com deal was in the queue for months.
Three Questions.
1 - Some will ask if this was Yahoo!’s attempt to make it seem like they are doing things and taking action.
2 - Others are wondering if this will help them.
3 - Some are wondering if the price was high.
Now, the answers. Here’s what I think:
1 - Yahoo! has been criticized for becoming fat, slow and multi-layered. Indeed this deal was probably sitting on many people’s desk, creating a backlog. I think that why Yang makes sense as CEO is he has nothing to prove to insiders, so he need not waste energy and resources on winning them over. He can instead look at the ever-growing company to-do list and say: “let’s scratch off some items by either pulling the trigger and doing them or realizing that we won’t and moving on.”
$100M is both a small and a large deal. Don’t kid yourself, for a company with $3.52B of cash as of Dec. 2006 on the books, it is material.
The problem with sitting on deals is that you create a backlog. Your bizdev guys are busy rereading documents and running numbers. Your lawyers are sending drafts back and forth. When all of this happens, they don’t get to business development, sales and marketing.
2 - Yes. Advertisers love sports, it is a very strong psychodemographic. Yahoo!’s sports get 15M users but Rivals.com’s 2M users are the hardcore variety. Advertisers prefer flocking to these sites when they want sports fans, hence why ESPN and SI are doing so well. Yahoo! had invested a lot in music but not as much in sports. This is a strong vertical.
Speaking of verticals and the entire context is king mantra, Yahoo! is hopefully going to understand that having a strong Yahoo.com portal and My.Yahoo.com will only get them so far. The rightmedia acquisition will help them monetize and optimize the oh-so-not-premium inventory, but strenghtening verticals will hit the sweet spot.
3 - We already covered this point earlier today, after seeing CBS buy Maxpreps and Fox buy Scout, they could not let TW or IAC make this buy.
All in all, the stock market does not reward multiples to cash, so if Yahoo! today took $100M from its cash account and bought a profitable and niche community site like Rivals.com, I welcome it.
The question now is: what next?
I think the only other acquisition that Yahoo! should consider in the short term is Facebook. Realistically, the M&A window of opportunity for Facebook is long gone, but there’s hope, especially with Yang on the other side and not Semel. That’s not a knock against Semel, but Mark Zuckerberg will be swayed more easily hearing it from Yang - a Web pioneer - than Semel.
It’s not the end of the world for Yahoo! if Facebook files and IPOs, but if Facebook ends up in MSFT or Google’s hands, or News Corp.’s, it definitely won’t be a happy day in Sunnyvale.
But short of making one last push at Facebook, I’d say Yahoo! needs to clean house and optimize its product lines and units. Ironically, after Semel first came on board, he lowered the company’s units from 160 or so to 7, “does GE have 160 units?” I recall him saying in a Fortune article.
Today, after years of growth and acquisitions, Yahoo! is almost back where it was when Semel arrived.
Of course, if Yahoo! wanted to do some more deals to bolster itself to remain independent or sell, I’ve done the legwork for them: here are 20+ companies waiting to be gobbled. In fact, I also wrote “If I had a billion dollars [to build a digital media conglomerate]” which outlines some good targets as well.
The bottom line, frankly and simply, is that Yahoo! will make more money in 3, 6, 12, 18, 24 months that it does today. So it’s not really in any desperate rush to sell, even though there’s a who’s who list of buyers waiting, especially since its market cap is stuck in a rut. However, by leveraging its balance sheet and making a couple of moves and cleaning up its product assortment, Yahoo! can be extremely stronger in a few months without any radical changes.
Don’t forget, Yahoo!’s problem is as much of a perception matter than it is an operational or financial one. That’s why we have long made the argument that going private might work for Yahoo! in Take Yahoo! Private, Triple Your Money by 2010.
That’s what I would do if I were running Yahoo!
Disclaimer: long Yahoo!
Last night the word leaked that Yahoo! was paying $100M for Rivals.com.
Darren Rovell - the sports business guy - does a great job of breaking down the reasons why this deal makes sense.
Today a lot of people add their two cents, and Tony Hung has a few good points to make.
But the real lesson for any would-be acquirer is nugget from Rosell’s piece:
“In the back of your head, you have to wonder if this was a pay whatever you have to deal for Yahoo. Fox bought Scout, CBS bought Maxpreps. Yahoo might have paid a premium here by being the last one to the party.”
Translation: when the consolidation starts, don’t waste too much time, cause the last one at the party does have to pay a [steeper] price cover.
First Business Week, now USA Today (I’m sure I am missing a couple dozen in between).
The USA Today today covers the ascendancy of Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Some highlights:
“Om (Malik) and I love scotch,” Michael Arrington says. “But we never drink anymore.”
I’m thinking: man, I hope I never have to give up scotch.
The two friends no longer have the time or energy, in part because they’re too busy competing with each other.
I can imagine, but I see them more as collaborators than competitors. I think they both get that they’re the alternative to a large extent to the San Jose Mercury, Red Herring, Business 2.0, CNET etc. It could even be argued that those are complementary.
The simple truth is that the Web is growing so quickly still, and online publications are growing much slower than offline is shrinking, that it makes no sense for two online entrepreneurs to claw at one another. That explains the Nick Denton/Jason Calacanis frenemy PR act. That is truer than ever now that Denton is flying solo as a publisher of a blog network and Calacanis has cashed out - and provided a much needed M&A multiple comparable.
Arrington, 37, is the force behind TechCrunch, a blog chronicling the rise and fall of Internet start-ups. (They’re often called Web 2.0 companies.) Malik, 40, runs GigaOm, a slightly more scholarly blog that looks at all things techy.
Interesting to note their age. It helps that both have covered - either as businessmen or writers - a couple of cycles in the boom and bust that comes with Silicon Valley, though sometimes their giddiness makes me question that.
GigaOm has readers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and TechCrunch’s audience tops a million. But that doesn’t accurately reflect their far-reaching influence. TechCrunch is the fourth-most-linked-to blog on the Internet, says Technorati, a blog search engine. GigaOm ranks 34th, a still impressive number given that Technorati tracks more than 86 million blogs.
TechCrunch’s impact could soon be as great as Silicon Valley’s major newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, says Paul Gillin, author of blog guide The New Influencers. “It’s one of the first things I read every day,” says David Cowan, a venture capitalist for Bessemer Venture Partners. “It’s hard to describe the extent to which I rely on TechCrunch.”
GigaOm may not have quite as much pull, but it still has a long list of powerful readers. Malik is “a really smart guy, and he makes me think,” says Roger McNamee, a prominent venture capitalist with several Silicon Valley firms. “He’s really significant,” says Max Kalehoff, a vice president at research firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
It’s high praise for two blogs that started as hobbies. Both Arrington and Malik say they’re surprised at how quickly their side projects became businesses — and obsessions.
Not in any shape form or fashion trying to lump myself in their lofty category, but it’s too easy to lose sight of striking balance and trying to build a compelling online publication. I’ve been the lead blogger on this site since February 2006, that’s 15 months… 1,700 posts later I clearly see that blogging software and everything that comes with it has changed the publishing game for good. Of course, it helps when you get praise, here are some of our media mentions and press pickups. Then again, I’ve had a few other preoccupations.
The point I’m trying to make is that blogs needs to fit in an overall corporate strategy. For a blog or blog network to become a standalone business, the publisher needs to frame it in the context of: “how will I survive when the party is over?”
For us, the blogs fit in the “Context is King” mantra of creating, aggregating or indexing all types of digital content across all major categories. It helps us ride the upside but protects the unit in a downturn. With all due respect to ContentNext Media, Gawker, Weblogs Inc., Tech Crunch, GigaOm and the hundreds of other blog networks, I am not sure how many will survive. I stress not all blog networks are the same. We have a unique raison d’etre for ours in our company. But the bottom line is: once you start, you sort of have to understand that it’s a 24/7/365 kind of thing. Just ask Om:
“Sleep and I have broken up. Coffee and I are having an affair,” says Malik, cup in hand.
Hey man, no pain, no gain… (as I put down the coffee post).
“We’re making $200,000 a month in revenue. We’re super-profitable. We don’t need (venture capital) money,” he says. Yet, offers are on the table, which they’re evaluating, he says.
(…)
Malik, often known as Silicon Valley’s nice guy, grew up in New Delhi. He taught himself English by reading The Times of London, moved to the USA, and became a journalist for tech publications Forbes.com, Red Herring and Business 2.0. GigaOm was a side project.
But its readership and reputation grew, and venture capitalists began offering money. Malik resisted, because he liked being a magazine writer. But he finally accepted less than $500,000 from True Ventures.
He went full time, hired five full-time and six part-time employees, and launched companion sites, such as Web Worker Daily, a site for technologists who work from home, and guest editorial site Found+Read.
Malik is less controversial than Arrington because he has stricter rules. He does not invest in companies he covers, and is less likely to pass along rumors.
The business is not profitable, but Malik hopes it will be by late summer.
(…)
Then there’s the lingering fear that Web 2.0 could be as big a bust as Web 1.0.
Arrington wrote a much-discussed post in which he complained that Web 2.0 wasn’t “fun” anymore. Most start-up ideas are either good or stupid, Malik says. “There is nothing in between.”
Some days it’s tempting to cash out. “It would be really interesting to sell this thing for $20 million and go live in Hawaii the rest of my life,” says Arrington.
But that seems unlikely. Arrington and Malik each confess to being fanatically attached to their jobs. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything else,” Malik says.
Is TechCrunch worth $20M? Well, Weblogs Inc. sold to AOL for $25M. But all blogs - or blog networks - are not created equally.
Related:
- April Fool’s Joke 2007: News Corp. buys Tech Crunch.
- A Blurry Blogosphere
- Evolution of Blogs
- From writer/executive to publisher/founder
- Will Blogs displace books?
- Is blogosphere maturing or normalizing?
- Is blogging vested journalism?
- Blogs, blog networks and blogpimping
Lord knows I’ve criticized LinkedIn enough, either for being annoying or for not doing enough to be useful.
But today I saw something that was actually intuitive, obvious to offer and useful.
I searched for someone, landed on their LinkedIn (that’s one advantage LinkedIn has over Facebook, since you cannot search for Facebook) and once there I saw “the degrees of separation and how I am connected to that person.”
Of course, the fact that LinkedIn randomly and superficially connects people, then I’m not sure how strong those connections / degrees of separation actually are, but nonetheless, that makes Linked In something I will probably be less cynical of.
Related:
- Facebook: the Database of Connections.
- My Wife Left me for Mark Zuckerberg.
- LinkedIn vs. Plaxo: Masters of Nuisance.
- How Much Revenue Can Plaxo Generate?
Somewhat odd that on the day that Yahoo! makes a $100M spend to reinforce its sports vertical, GigaOm asks:
Who should buy Yahoo!?
Their options are:
- Private Equity firm. We covered this previously, in Take Yahoo! Private, Triple Your Money by 2010.
- MSFT. We covered this aplenty in Should MSFT Spin Off MSN/Live.com into Yahoo!
- News Corp./FIM. Been there, done that, here, here and here.
- Disney/CBS/GE. Touched on the whole old media fit when we did a post Q1 complete round up, go here.
ZDNET chimes in as well here.
