Once again, I give you another reason why YouTube is everything that Napster was (in its illegal, bootlegging heyday) and then some. I also think this once again shows why Mark Cuban is seeing the glass as being half empty. Of course, he’s somewhat biased given his investments. I doubt, seriously doubt, anyone over at Island Def Jam (Leppard’s label) and the boys themselves (Def Leppard) mind that anyone uploaded this.
I only pray that the forces of evil don’t kill it.
If you like good guitar rock, you will thank me for this. If Google messes YouTube up, I will cease using it, I will I tell ya, I will.
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WatchMojo NewsletterToday Yahoo! and IBM announced a partnership marking their foray in enterprise search. This was really the last nook and cranny of “search 1.0″ that did not rely purely on advertising. Google made less than $1M in annual sales from enterprise search, not because the product held no value, but because it focused on generating ad revenue on Ad Sense from web search.
Today, by making enterprise search free, Yahoo! and IBM just ensured that enterprise search becomes a freebie and galvanized advertising’s role as the holy grail online.
This is both surprising and not so surprising. FHM is really not all that different than Maxim, which in turn is not all that different than Stuff. Felix Dennis - who owns both Stuff and Maxim - launched Stuff to eat upshelf space from FHM.
FHM is doing great in the UK, but in the US, it’s a different story. And the story will end soon.
When I was at the AXE House Party in Miami back in 2003, I ran into the online editor for FHM, he told me that FHM’s web team was barebones but that eventually, the parent company would come around. The time is nigh.
“The decision is consistent with the group’s strategy of focusing resources on faster growth platforms and has been taken in light of the difficult trading conditions in the U.S. market,” says a release from the company, which sold its other U.S. titles to Primedia in 2001. “The U.S. online site … which forms an important part of the brand’s ongoing and increasing international presence, will continue to operate.”
Read more. Maybe this has something to do with the disappearing print ad.
But rest assured, Vida Guerra’s derriere, seen below, will still be available on fine, respectable news stands everywhere.
You got to hand it to Cisco CEO and Chairman John Chambers. He recently came out and labeled video the “killer app.” When I was reading his comments, I thought: “man, I hate that word: ‘killer app.’”
Of course, like a major league hypocrito, I just penned a post on how Google can put the kybosh on Salesforce.com and used the dreaded term myself. So, I’ll tone down the lashing I was going to hand out over the excessive use of the term.
All to say, it’s interesting to hear Dear John say that, for if indeed video is the killer app, it might be because it might kill your business.
All right: disclosure time: as founder, investor and executive producer of WatchMojo.com, a producer of original video content, clearly I am bullish on video. Obviously I am happy to see someone as brilliant as accomplished as Chambers decree that video is the killer app. But, it does make me think of a few things that video brings with its status as “killer” that can and will probably kill a few [content] companies who rush into the production thereof without first doing some soul-searching.
Sit down, cause we’re about to go on a trip.
Chambers listed “converged video, data center virtualisation, the connected home and the next-generation service provider infrastructure” as key growth markets for the networking vendor in the coming years. Cisco is a networking vendor.
“If there is a killer app, it’s video,” Chambers said during a keynote address at the Cisco C-Scape Global Forum 2006 industry analyst conference in San Jose. “Just watch what has occurred with YouTube, just with what I would call baby steps in terms of loads on networks.”
GOLD DIGGERS VS. SHOVEL-MAKERS
All right, no doubt there. He is right. If you liked Cisco in the late 1990s, you would love Cisco in the 21st century. I picked Cisco as the Top High Tech/Internet Stock of Past, Present and Future recently.
Compare MSFT and CSCO’s stock over the past two years. If MSFT was the Computer and Software play, then Cisco was the Web play. With the burgeoning traffic emanating from digital media, Cisco is poised to benefit even more so than the Akamai’s of the world.
Still not convinced? Compare the 1-year stock charts of MSFT, CSCO and Google. Yep, Google has trailed Cisco. Cisco has outperformed Google.
You know that saying about don’t invest in the gold diggers, invest in those who sell the helmets and shovels, right? Well it applies to Cisco. But, the fact remains that for every one Cisco (shovel and helmet-seller) there are thousands of goldiggers. Technically, at the risk of sounding like a hypocrito again, our company is a major gold digger in the sense that we create video content, lots of it. We have over 3,000 video clips in our library, and counting.
There are many other content creators who look at video and don’t know what to do. Online these days, there are many content companies who know that video might be the killer app for them too. I sometimes think that one way magazines can make up for their disastrous strategies with migrating online in terms of text content would be to launch aggressively into video content. But by the same token, I am not sure that would work.
Why?
I just spoke to a company who I advise on video strategy. They told me that they “did not know what to do with video,” and that they had “put up some videos and people were not really clicking.”
Hmm… Here’s why: This company (whose name will remain confidential out of courtesy) is not a video site. It’s a content site with loads of text content. I know, not narrowing it down exactly. The point is that its visitors are readers, not viewers. That is an interesting distinction to make and understand as obvious as it might be.
Just because we’re online does not mean we cannot and should not differentiate a reader from a viewer.
My old company was an online magazine. It published text content. People came and were in a certain mindset: they came to read. Simply throwing up a video was no guarantee of success.
VIDEO AND TEXT: PULL VS. PUSH
Text - and thus reading - is a pull mechanism. Video - and thus viewing - is a push mechanism. In the latter, you chase information and proactively read. In the former, you sit back and watch. Generally speaking, with the Internet population at 16% and growing, it is early adopters that have migrated online. As such, people who “pull” information.
Over time as more and more people put the remote control, newspaper and print magazine down and come online, then we’ll have more people online who do not want to chase information, but rather have the information come to them.
DO ALL MAGAZINES NEED TO OFFER VIDEO ONLINE?
For purposes of illustration, I think some offline companies are better suited at diving into video than others. In the men’s market for example, Playboy and Maxim have better chances at succeeding in video than Esquire or GQ. GQ could do well because its fashion angle conveys well to video. Esquire however is article heavy. Just because you can get a writer to speak his story does not mean he should. Why? Because Esquire’s consumers are readers, not viewers. By pushing video too much, video will in fact be a “killer” of sorts to its business.
Maxim and Playboy have fantastic articles (I have heard) but they are visual sources of content mainly. As such, they would convert well to video. I think Maxim is doing a great job at this. They finally bought Maxim.com (the url) which should only help them convert their audience and grow online.
The lesson for magazines is that some need to focus more on getting their text content online (Esquire-types) whereas others (Maxim-types) should start to focus on video, Maxim after all throws parties that gives them cool video content. They also have model shoots that make for great video fodder. Of course, they have started doing this already. But an online magazine that targets Maxim’s demographic but publishes text-heavy content out of an igloo, for example, might not have the same visual asset to launch online in video format.
These are entirely new markets for them, that is what needs to be understood from the get-go. It’s essentially reshaping your business. My old company, for example, was a text company (online magazine) whose readers, I doubt, care much for video. But the euphoria over video got to them too: after showing no desire to produce video and mocking the idea in company-wide meetings, they sued me and tried to convince a judge that I stole their idea. The judge sided with me and literally laughed them out of court.
It’s now been twelve months since I left and they have yet to publish a video, so I think that argument died a long time ago. But having stated on record that they do intend on going into video one day, when the day comes that they publish a video clip, they will probably learn that a reader is in a different mindset than a potential viewer, as my client learned and told me yesterday.
WHAT ABOUT NEWSPAPERS?
I have also advised a couple of newspaper chains about video and search. With them, it’s different. Sure, the feeling of reading a newspaper is unique, but the overall need-satisfying offer is news. As such, newspaper sites need to get on the video train ASAP. Of course, they have greater issues in that they need to lose the “paper” status and embrace the “information through any outlet, in any media, at all times” mantra.
Bottom line: sure, video is great. Video and web mesh very well together, but before every content company seeks to video-ify their content, they should ensure that it won’t kill the user experience either.
Now that would be killer…
LOS ANGELES, CA — (MARKET WIRE) — December 13, 2006 — Left Behind Games Inc. announces it’s Beta launch of www.DreamWebSpace.com, an alternative to MySpace and other popular social sites for those who want language filtering, more security and live monitoring. ComScore reports that about 12 percent of all visitors of MySpace.com are less than 18 years of age.”We believe the same audience that wants inspirational content, also wants a cleaner and more secure environment than what is currently found on the Internet,” said Troy Lyndon, co-founder and CEO, Left Behind Games Inc. “We are excited to offer this free service in our continued quest to make a difference!”
“There are 50 million evangelicals in America, according to Wall Street Journal. Theses people are completely underserved by technology,” said Jeffrey Frichner, co-founder and President, Left Behind Games Inc. “We believe this represents a tremendous opportunity to create a social network which will meet the unique needs of
I am so impressed with Google. While many like to bash them because they make 99% of their revenues from search and Ad Sense, I give them credit for aiming for the fence even though they keep, at least financially speaking, striking out. Gmail is great. Their maps could be better. But their spreadsheets (and overall online file management services and productivity system) are what really impress me.
Google has basically made it so I do not use Microsoft Office anymore. That’s pretty impressive. Sure, they might not make money directly from me not using MSFT and using their applications, but who cares about money when you’re sitting on $10 billion in “cash and equivalents.”
But they have also made our office more productive. At my old job, I ran the sales department for a rapidly growing online magazine. I generated some $7 million in sales, closing some thousands of advertising deals with several hundred clients. I never used Salesforce.com. I found it clunky. I also though that integrating it with Outlook was not so obvious. Mind you, this all says more about me than Salesforce.com, a company whose CEO and founder Mark Benioff defined the word cojones, and whose stock I regret never buying, cause I incorrectly thought that its market was limited.
Its market, I still think is limited in some ways, but it’s nonetheless a huge market. The stock IPO’d at $15, plunked down to $10.95 and is now flirting with $40 a share, valuing the firm at $4 billion.
As much as I thought as a sales guy that the service was clunky, as a President, I view Salesforce.com as a great tool for my sales guys and for myself. As such, sooner or later I would consider subscribing to the service. But as I tweak the Google spreadsheet and think of what made my old job hard for myself and our team (Finance, Ad Implementation, President, Sales) I realize that Salesforce.com’s product can become limited pretty soon.
Think about it: Google can essentially take:
- Gmail
- Docs and Spreadsheets
- Google Payment (what’s the name again?)
- Google Talk (replace all of the other instant messaging services you use as a sales person)
- Google Maps (for directions to clients’ offices, or meeting spots)
- Google Calendar (obvious, to track dates, calls, meetings, etc.)
- Picasa (so you can see what people look like or people can put a face to their favorite salesperson’s voice and name)
- Video player (for demos, presentations etc.)
- Analytics (prospecting tool par excellence, I mean most sales people rely on Alexa, not Nielsen Net Ratings or comScore)
- Blogger (so your clients can read about you, your products and services)
- Jotspot (so employees can share intelligence, or clients and salespeople can share information)
- Alerts (a prospective client announces something, you can hit them up ASAP)
- Finance (so you can check out the size of the company you are hitting up)
- I could go on.
Catch my drift? I am not telling anyone to short Salesforce.com here. I’m just saying Google can technically aggregate its products and features and deploy a pretty strong strategy in many markets.
Oh… That’s just half of it: Google should then integrate Ad Sense to create an embedded lead generator. That would be insane. That, my friend, would be the Salesforce.com killer.
Yahoo! can’t buy a break.
First off, 2006 sees its arch-nemesis Google trounce it in the grand ol’ derby we call the stock market. We’re talking trounce. Google scales to a market cap of $150 billion while Yahoo! waggles to a plateau of $40 billion.
Then, as the year goes by, it’s slow to launch Panama, which is set to cure improve its monetization rate and of course, cure polio.
As the year drags on, CEO and Chairman tries to calm the critics and naysayers by carving up the company into not two, but count ‘em three units, cleverly named Technology, Audience and Advertising. The market reacts coolly. He loses a barrage of executives, loyal and otherwise.
Soon afterwards, talk creeps up on the Web about a so-called trend labeled deportalization. Fact or fiction, it strikes a dagger at the core of Yahoo!’s business model.
The next week, Yahoo! finally announces the launch of its magical, mythical and monetizable Panama.
How does the market and critics react?
Well, on the same day, news gets out that News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, who bought popular social networking site MySpace for $580 million in 2005 is now the largest property when measured by pageviews.
News Corp.’s MySpace recorded 38.7 billion U.S. page views last month, compared with 38.1 billion for Yahoo Inc., according to comScore Media Metrix. MySpace’s growth was 2 percent over October and triple the 12.5 billion recorded in November 2005.
The shift focuses on that, and not Panama here. In our humble opinion, once again, the ones who best hit it on the head of the nail are the folks at Paid Content. Well, at least the ones who hit closest.
Forget the fact that a lot of smart people are talking about the Imminent Demise of the Page View (here) for a second. For the record, we don’t think the pageview is going anywhere. We don’t think it’s all that relevant in many ways, but it’s also an easy thing for advertisers to grab onto and make decisions off of. That’s very important.
Pageviews should not be the driver of a company’s market cap, nor should it really be seen as a gauge of one’s revenue, because advertisers don’t care about 100% of a publisher’s real estate, they care about the top, they skim a website’s real estate. But that’s a debate for another day. Actually, it’s not. That’s today’s debate.
Put in another way: I totally understand why Ross Levinsohn left or was asked to leave from FIM. Monetizing FIM - in particular Myspace which accounted for the lion’s share of the growth and inventory within FIM - is going to be nearly impossible.
You think Yahoo! has a monetization problem relative to Google, MySpace is going to be a headache that will - mark my words - cost the job of numerous talented executives at FIM because it will never fully able to turn a decent revenue per page, or user. Rupert Murdoch who has once again proven his Midas touch simply looks at the growth, user count and pageviews, then probably sees what some of his news websites and non user-generated content sites generates and estimates that MySpace should do this, and should do that.
As such, MySpace will prove to be the double edged sword at FIM. That’s why Mark Jung left (amongst other reasons) and that is why Ross Levinsohn left too. Levinsohn’s legacy was perfect: he helped land the toughest boss out there the most-sought after digital media asset for a song. He hedged himself by getting the largest concentration of men 18-34 boot, a non-user generated content site (IGN). After that, there was nothing he could do to outdo himself. He knew it, Rupert knew it.
Ask yourself this: has Murdoch sat down for more than ten minutes and sifted through MySpace’s pages? Nope. But he’s probably looked at the excel spreadsheets and salivated at the potential top and bottom line contributions. For these reasons, if Murdoch thought raising Lachlan was a challenge, MySpace will prove to be the toughest child to raise and love.
Disclosure: I own Yahoo! stock.
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