Rafat Ali will go down as one of the poster children for the resurgence of the web. At a time when people were running as far away from the Web - after the Nasdaq market crumbled and took the dot com industry down with it - Ali dived deeper in the eye of the storm and launched PaidContent.org.
Somewhat akin to eBay’s mythical “pez dispenser” story, Ali claims that he launched the site as a way to showcase his writing skills in his quest to land a journalist gig somewhere. “No one was hiring at newspapers or magazines,” Ali is known for saying… but I think that’s his modesty. I presume deep down inside Ali knew that Paid Content could become the poster child for lean blog-based, trade publishing empire that we see today at his Content Next Media, Tech Crunch, Giga Om, etc.
One area where I do think Ali misjudged the outcome, however, was that content would be paid for, hence the moniker of his site, PaidContent.org. Ultimately, consumers balked at the notion of taking out their wallets and paying for content, and today, free, ad-supported business models run amok.
Ironically, Ali kept his site free, mind you, so maybe I am misreading things a bit (after all, the site is certainly for-profit and profitable I presume, despite the .org URL… so maybe I am getting everything wrong here).
Regardless, when it came to premium reports and what not, Paid Content usually charged for those. Yet today, the site seems to have thrown in the towel on that, wisely I think, and made its reports available for free.
Anyway, reading the reports, be it on M&A or VC (I’ll link to the signup page, and not the ultimate PDF reports), you’ll see that the market is quite homogeneous in the sense that there’s a lot of me-too firms. Don’t get me wrong, the reports are Social Media M&A and Social Media VC, but come on, I could pretty much draft 3 company descriptions and 95% of the companies would fall in those three buckets. Is social media really only about
a) sharing media
b) reviewing stuff
c) online identity/social networks
or a mish-mash of the three above? That can’t be good for anyone.
Anyway, check out the reports here.
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WatchMojo NewsletterYou’d almost think that WatchMojo.com’s PR department was coming up with this stuff:
Social networking sites garner big audiences but little ad dollars,
Video advertising to be fastest growing segment of online advertising.
Man, you’d almost think we were scripting this and all, since we are creating the most valuable video apps to help monetize big fat social networks.
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