Lets face it, professional sports is a big business and big name athletes can bring in big $$$ for the city they represent…
So on July 1, when LeBron James becomes an unrestricted free agent, everyone will be speculating about where he will choose to play. However, New York City isn’t leaving anything to chance… They have decided to mobilize the social media internet blog-o-sphere by launching a microsite on nycgo.com, with the sole purpose of convincing the king to sing for the home team, The New York Knicks!
On the site you will find links to the dedicated facebook page, live streaming twitter and facebook feeds with the hash tag #cmonlebron and a “C’mon LeBron” tool kit for spreading the word any way you like… Put it on a T-Shirt, tattoo it to your forehead… WHATEVER IT TAKES!!!
But ultimately, it’s his decision and he will most likely choose the team that pays him the largest salary (remember, this is a business). Although I’m sure it’s tough to ignore a city who’s fans embrace you before you even play for their team…
C’mon LeBron… We know you can’t resist the temptation of New York City nightlife!
And if all else fails… There’s always the Knicks Chicks?
For more information about the “C’mon LeBron” campaign visit: http://www.nycgo.com/cmonlebron
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Considering I financed WatchMojo.com myself (admittedly on a much smaller scale) and at various times in the early years scratched my head wondering if the business would generate enough revenue to survive in the long term, I find the following story by Owen Thomas absolutely fascinating, it’s on Elon Musk, who poured the fortune he created in the sale of Paypal to eBay into Tesla. Here’s one passage:
“About four months ago, I ran out of cash,” he wrote in a court filing dated Feb. 23, reviewed by VentureBeat. That’s a problem not just for him but for Tesla, where he is the lead investor and chief product architect, as well as CEO. Musk’s willingness to funnel his own cash into Tesla has for years sustained the faith of fellow investors and reassured would-be car buyers in 2008 when the company’s finances were in perilous shape.
According to the filing — part of his pending divorce case from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk — Elon Musk has been living off personal loans from friends since October 2009 and spending $200,000 a month while making far less. Musk confirmed this in an interview with VentureBeat.
Here is a document with more details (he’s getting divorced from his wife):
I was on Adam Carolla’s podcast (he’s the one in black, in the picture above, by the way) a couple of weeks ago to chat new media, traditional media, entrepreneurship and many other things, listen here or download the MP3 here.
A week after Yahoo! picks up Associated Content, Forbes steps up and buys True/Slant. We’re seeing more and more acquisitions of companies who can create good content at low costs.
Content in the news:
- AOL about more than connecting users, it’s about creating content.
- Hearst turns to “content mill” Demand Media.
I think this is one major reason why Associated Content sold to Yahoo! last week, with AOL pouring millions into content and Demand Media churning out more content than ever on the strength of their $355M in funding, I am not sure Associated Content felt it has the mindshare and traction to remain independent.
The most interesting play here remains in video, as what applies in scaling content creation in text is very different than video (while maintaining a level of quality that advertisers will require).
Tech Crunch’s Disrupt conference kicks off this morning: John Doerr just took the stage with Charlie Rose.
Follow on Tech Crunch, I will be adding “streams of consciousness” posts on my Twitter account.
1st wave: microchip and computer: early 1980s with Andy Grove and Steve Jobs
2nd wave: 1995 and the internet, kicked into higher gear in 1999 with Google (the 15th search engine)
3rd wave: a combination of social, mobile and new kinds of commerce, reinventing the Web.
More to come for sure, here is the live stream:
According to the Diffusion Group, online video will surpass broadcast video by 2020. To find out exactly what they mean by that, read the story on NewTeeVee or read the actual study here. And… here’s a splashy graph to prove it’s gonna happen:
Hmm… just worth noting that a few years ago I wrote:
- Video Ads to Surpass Search Ads by 2018
- Will Web Advertising Surpass TV Ads by 2021
Interesting.
What an interesting period in the business media world?
Rafat Ali - the pioneer of the business blog - decided to step down two years after selling his influential and trail blazing PaidContent.org blog to The Guardian. While Ali did eventually raise some financing from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft fund, he captured the spirit of the bootstrapped startup that went on to stratospheric heights. Ali will take some time off before making a decision on the next step. I interviewed him last year, at one point we talked about the deal with The Guardian:
It’s interesting to see how much Ali created a whole new category and how others took that genre and ran with it. Fittingly, I am in New York Ciy now splitting my time between meetings for WatchMojo and covering two big conferences, both organized by “blogging business barons”: the first one being Startup 2010 by Henry Blodget’s Business Insider, the other being Disrupt for Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch (disclaimer: as some of you know, I have written a bunch of articles for Tech Crunch over the past few months). Of course, both blogs have - like PaidContent.org - morphed into major media companies.
This past Thursday, I attended Business Insider’s Startup 2010 contest/conference.
Red Beacon won, you can see more pictures on Business Insider. Fittingly, I covered the event via my Twitter account and also embedded a live video feed last week and spoke to company COO Julie Hansen about distributing some of their videos through the WatchMojo network - so expect those soon.
All in all, it was a great event (more on just how great below): the quality of the 10 presenters seemed much higher than last year and I was very impressed with the attendees and speakers (nothing against last year’s event).
If that all wasn’t enough, I was also one of the four lucky winners of an iPad. Pretty sweet indeed. Thanks once again to Business Insider for that!
Now If that wasn’t enough… tomorrow I will be attending the 3-day Tech Crunch Disrupt event… so if you are there I look forward to meeting you. I will also definitely be adding comments and what not on my Twitter account and doing some kind of recap on this blog, so make sure to check back in.
I am at Startup 2010 in NYC.
I will post a wrap up later on. Stay tuned… and watch in the meantime:
Follow and watch online, here is the video embed, below:
Yesterday Yahoo! forked over $80-100M to acquire Associated Content.
The move signals a few things:
- It shows that how content is created is more valuable than the content itself (what the content is). It also drives home the point, much to the chagrin of the Establishment, that who created the content is almost irrelevent.
- As well, it marks off the last chapter of the text content creation debate (which shall end when Demand Media files for an IPO), opening the debate on how one can successfully and profitably scale video content creation efforts, which takes us, of course, to WatchMojo.
With May being a profitable month for us, it’s too early to tell if we can remain in the black for good, but with 5,600 videos in our catalog and nearly 150,000,000 all time video views, it’s worth stressing that neither Demand Media nor Associated Content have successfully cracked the video market.
In fact,
- Demand Media’s eHow is largely user-generated content which advertisers continue to shun.
- Associated Content has the platform for text, but when it comes to videos, it has hitherto aggregated videos via Grab Networks.
- Aol is a work in progress, at best.
No one has managed to scale content production profitably the way we have. Admittedly, we’re still small in many ways… but if we can replicate what we’re doing at larger scale… then that bodes very well for our future.
