A few years back, Bolt ran a seemingly successful content company targeting teens, a lucrative market.
Driven by either greed, envy, or both (hmm… both, including stupidity), Bolt totally did a 180 and dived into the UGC video market. It got crushed by the weight of its own stupidity, then got sued by Universal. GoFish put it out of misery by acquiring it… but then GoFish itself went out of business as a me-too video file sharing site. GoFish is now a totally different thing, essentially an ad network for kids. Hey, better than a me-too clone going nowhere, I presume. continue reading...
Irony of ironies: Bolt.com, a site that started off as a content producer, got YouTube envy, became a file sharing site, finally shut down when GoFish changed its mind on buying the troubled company (GoFish is a syndication partner of WatchMojo.com).
This one is odd… I was talking to some colleagues today, telling them how it was in our interest to see all of the leading video destination websites succeed: YouTube, Revver, Veoh, GoFish, Joost, etc. We partner with them, so their growth and health translates to our health and grow. But I do think that you will see a fallout and many more cases like Bolt.com, and when that happens, it won’t be due to company mismanagement but rather, the background of how most of these file sharing sites came to be. continue reading...
As I alluded to in a previous post on Handheld Entertainment’s $17.5M acqusition of eBaum’s World, GoFish made it official today: the deal for Bolt.com is off. Bolt.com was a promising content producer once upon a time, but then envy and greed, I presume got to its head and it veered off into UGC (read: copyright violated content). Universal Music came knocking, sued for $30M and somehow, GoFish decided to buy it.
GoFish is one of the many distribution partners in WatchMojo.com’s web syndication network… continue reading...
