The Misplaced Bet on UGC
Back in 2006, we’d get the occasional call from someone pitching us a turnkey solution to add User-Generated Content (UGC) videos to our WatchMojo.com property, which houses professionally produced videos we have created. continue reading...
I never understood why some companies like Handheld Entertainment and Go Fish were publicly traded. With easier access to capital comes the fact that your premature business gets nailed by shareholders, especially if your underlying premise - that distribution trumps content - is faulty.
[Disclaimer: both companies were or are distribution partners of WatchMojo.com] continue reading...
Daily Motion is escalating the battle for #3 in their space (after YouTube and MySpace TV).
Online video advertising is growing, quickly. 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...
I was wondering what was up with the influx of signups from goFish members, then I realized why:
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When GoFish bought Bolt for $30M in a stock deal to help Bolt pay for its settlement with Universal Music, I could not help but take notice. Bolt, after all, had been around for some time, generated $7M in annual revenue and had migrated its business model from a publisher of content for teens to a user generated platform for video.
I had no real idea what GoFish was, but seeing them buy Bolt, I took a deeper look. GoFish was publicly traded, worth $100M in market value, and judging by its site, had decent traffic. Decent traffic, it turned out, was a unique user base of 9M, which made it the largest publicly traded company in the video sharing landscape. continue reading...
