As readers of this blog know, from 2000-05 I worked in the men’s space…
Anyway, today I came across a couple of interesting, albeit ironic stories:
- Rodale - publisher of men’s health - might raise $100M to roll out its online properties.
- Emap - publisher of FHM - looking at breaking up its assets.
To think that these companies could have bought my old employer for $13.51M and been relevant online… for months and years we tried to strike a deal with these firms, and they were still in their shell. Oddly, an online media company, IGN Entertainment, bought us, and they strenghtened their hand online, ultimately selling for $650M to News Corp.
I wish execs at these firms were on hand tonight, my father in law, my wife and I were in a room. She was reading a magazine, he was watching TV, I was online. I’m 29. He’s not. Follow the audience, don’t wait too long.
Sounds simple enough, no?
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WatchMojo NewsletterI was trying to find a page of the first “main page” we had. It was this clip: how women can cover their hips. Don’t ask, I was trying hard to skew towards women in order not to violate the terms of my non-compete which prohibited me from doing a men’s online magazine.
Oh, did I mention it was a video and not an article?
Thankfully, the quality has increased a tad.
Anyway, at the time, we didn’t automatically archive old main pages then… so I do not unfortunately have a copy of the first “main page” we published.
I recall showing that video to my friends at the Super Bowl party in 2006… indeed, they thought we were crazy for publishing video. Fitting, then, that the first sentence of a recent article on WatchMojo.com was entitled “Producer’s got his mojo working with video site” and starts off with:
Friends of Ashkan Karbasfrooshan said he was crazy to start an Internet video production company.
Of course, I knew it wasn’t only about production, it was about publishing and syndication. We now have one of the largest syndication networks out there.
Back to the point: ironically, or fittingly, the earliest archived page I have is this one, which leads off with one of the Fake News skits we did when we launched. I didn’t blog much like I do now, so to keep my sanity I’d write the fake news stuff… some of it was good, some of it was so-so. In the linked example, the first reference is an inside joke of sorts pertaining to my former employer Rupert Murdoch/News Corp., which I won’t get into right now.
Oddly, on March 17 2006, the time stamp on that page, the site was far less chaotic than it is now… I knew we’d scale our content production and publishing but to think we’d hit 4,000 or so videos under that CMS/design was not something I expected.
Starting in September 2006, after 9 months of planning, we’re pretty much (I’ve been saying that for some time, I know) on the cusp, literally, of relaunching soon on a new CMS, new redesign, new platform.
I’d love to drop a link as a sneak peek, but we’re tweaking some final things, so here’s a screen grab:
Check back next week for the real deal…
Wow.
All right, I lied, though a short post would be fitting for my first ever Twitter post. Brad Burnham and that “other guy” Fred Wilson’s USV invested an undisclosed sum in Twitter today.
For once, I’ll abstain from commenting.
All right, I lied again. I think what I meant to say is I’ll hold off judgment on this for a couple of reasons. Notably, while many VCs have yet to show off any tangible returns from their Web 2.0 investments, USV has Delicious, Feedburner and Tacoda to show off as investment of the second wave of web investments, if not Web 2.0 related per se (Tacoda?). And, of course, Wilson also got a exit - albeit small - on his personal Wallstrip investment.
In fact, even Valleywag, that has been known to grill VCs on their lifestyle and investment, this week gave a glowing review of Fred’s philosophies and moves. In fact, this 2-year old article in Business 2.0 has proved might prescient.
To his credit, on the VC’s blog, they admit that much like the investment in Delicious, they did not know what the business model - if any - would be. Of course, Delicious’ business model was selling for $20-30M to Yahoo! and then seeing Yahoo! muck it up to some extent by missing out on the video tagging boat (what - along with flash video and embed codes - partially made YouTube become a $1.65B exit, by the way).
That being said, since I did clearly lie about not commenting… one has to wonder what the rationale is on this one, because while Delicious had built a lead in tags etc., Twitter remains a tool by the few for the lessor. Sure, by the early adopter crowd it has caught on, but by and large do you really see that many people twittering and others really caring? And, did Jaiku and Pownce not practically overnight duplicate their respective version of Twitter on steroids?
I don’t know,
- on the one hand, yes: Wilson and USV really have proven to be in a league of their own in terms of exits, but this one does remind me a lot of a given era that shall remain nameless when the more uncertainty existed around an idea’s business model, the more welcome it was by the investment community. I’m not alone there, by the way, since a member of said community chimes in and seems to agree, here. Wilson himself, conceded in 2005: “Looking back on [Flatiron’s portfolio] now, Wilson offers a blunt assessment: ‘Yeah, boy, we really screwed up a bunch of things.’”
- on the other hand, I’m a believer that any business model can win online if you have a good team and you can execute. It’s early enough that no one can predict user - and consumer - behavior. In fact, I’ll add this: that same B2.0 article quoted Wilson as saying three fields would be most impacted by the Web, the three being a) media, b) marketing and c) finance.
Wilson made and exited several investments in a) and b). Perhaps in Twitter’s future Wilson sees an answer few others do, d) which is all of the above.
Time will tell. Like I said, the jury’s out on this one…
Not sure where Scott Karp got this figure, but it’s important to reiterate why the Web is a shrinking business:
That’s why the newspaper industry is worth about $60 billion offline but only $3 billion online — they only have about 5% of the pricing power that they did when there was only a finite amount of space in for printing ads.
In other words, it’s easy to rag on the offline media companies, namely newspapers, for not moving online, but why should they?
The sooner the do, the sooner they kill their business. Hate to be a newspaper guy, also understand the angst and envy TV execs must be feeling… after all, digital revenues are not so incremental, despite what some will say.
TV is the same way:
- online video ad market? $700M in 2006.
- TV ad market? $75B in 2006.
Yeah, that’s right: Must not watch [online] TV.
They are. Even God took seven days - all right, six - to create earth. Old media, mere mortals after all, need to understand it will take much longer to build any kind of respectable media property, especially with something as embyonic as video content.
HBO shuts down This Just In. File under shocking. Last year WatchMojo.com was in talks with HBO to do something online. It had something to do with our comedy clips, the rest I don’t recall. Anyway, they canned the guy I was talking to, and now they canned this site.
This just reiterates what I’ve been saying: irrelevant of how big or small online video gets, TV companies will have very little to do with it, and if they do, it will be accidental. Please, please, please, prove me wrong, but the short term incentives are not there, and in TV’s mindsets, it’s all about the short term.
