This month, we crossed 75,000,000 all-time streams, so I decided to do a considerable audit and analysis of WatchMojo.com’s content and distribution. This might explain why my blogging has been a bit less frequent, by the way.
Is Openness Really a Good Thing?
I am thinking of posting the full report, which gives an amazing insight into our business and the video industry as a whole, but I am not sure, because there are a lot of trade secrets and competitive intelligence in there that is worth a lot to our competitors. This touches on a key motif online, which is openness and transparency; two things that set us apart from traditional businesses and executives who are generally more reserved.
Normal Distribution and Diversification
By virtue of publishing 5,000 videos spanning a wide array of content across hundreds of destinations and multiple platforms, WatchMojo.com has become a bellwhether or barometer for the video content space, specifically because our library and distribution is so diverse.
Not All Investors Are The Same
Interestingly, while mutual fund managers adhere to the mantra of diversification, most VCs don’t. VCs aim for the fences, which explains why they strike out so much.
Fittingly, today I came across a couple of articles on GigaOm: one is on new media business models, the other on diversification’s pros and cons.
The first was written by Josh Auerbach, who is a senior vice president at betaworks, a media company focused on the real-time web and social distribution of content. He published a post called New Media Demands a New Kind of Media Company, in which he touches on many points:
- new media companies have a different set of challenges and opportunities than traditional media (which is admittedly an obvious statement to make).
- that in new media, you don’t need to own 100% of a unit or project you get involved in, and a by-product of this is collaboration between companies.
- but the one theme that caught my attention was the content creation vs. distribution motif, because now that WatchMojo.com does over 5M streams each month and reaches 20M consumers in the out of home digital market, I realize we have a nice opportunity in the distribution space, as well.
A related post that he links to on diversification, economies of scope is linked to here, written by Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Director and venture capitalist Mike Speiser. They’re both good reads.
I appreciate Speiser’s arguments, that when you diversify you cannot attain the positive abnormal returns, but I respectfully think that explains why we have done so much on so little capital whereas every other venture funded content company will have challenges generating the kind of return VCs usually look for.
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