Last year our April Fool’s Joke was that FOX was buying Tech Crunch… but before long Tech Crunch pulled its own prank.
This year Michael Arrington seems to have tried to pull off a trifecta of gags:
- TheUnfunded counter punches TheFunded.com (TC gets accused of covering some dumb startups, but this one would have taken the prize for dumbest)
- Tech Crunch sues Facebook
and last but not least, he now pulls CNET into the mix by getting them to run this article.
Oh, what’s CSD? Chief Shit Disturber.
See our April Fool’s Day joke here.
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WatchMojo NewsletterFor the past 2 years, the WatchMojo.com family has tried hard to get leading thinkers, technorati and pillars of the financial community to respect content creators.
But now, after a lot of effort, time and money, I realize that this isn’t simply trying to change an engine at 30,000 feet, in fact, it’s more like trying to make the world stop and spin in the opposite direction.
It’s just not worth it, nor is it possible. Why continue to go against the grain? “We should not be in the content creation business, we should be in the platform business,” voices echo in my head.
This past weekend I spent a lot of time finalizing terms of a soon-to-be-announced financing round, and as part of the deal, we have to purge the site of all of the original content we’ve produced.
This, I’m told, is the path to riches, the road to attain the brass ring.
That amounts to:
- 3,500 videos published (4,000 in all including pipeline, which also has to go, sadly)
- With each clip being an average length: 1 to 3 minutes.
- 99% of which is in English, with 1% being in French and Spanish, with plans for content in German, Mandarin, etc.
- Across 12 categories: Automotive, Education, Fashion, Film, Food, Health, Music, Politics & Economy, Space & Science, Sports, Technology, Travel, Video Games
- Over 30 or so subcategories: Cooking, Instruments, How To, Workouts, Languages, Tips, etc..
- 100 to 200 hours of programming
- 500 hours of filmed material (I failed to read the fine print of the Term Sheet, I must burn those tapes, too… nothing to prove that once-upon-a-time a content empire stood here)
I’d be lying if I said I agreed with this 100% initially, but after endless hours of discussions, prolonged negotiations and considerable regression analysis in a Google Spreadsheet, I was effectively check mated and came to the conclusion that we should Control + All + Delete everything we’ve done and everything I’ve invested in the company and become a hybrid of:
- a next generation YouTube
- a Digg for non-clickable media files
- a MySpace for broadband files
- a Google of motion picture
- a Facebook of related moving slides
and get the most passionate and volunteer-minded 6 billion people of the world find out about our tools and platform and empower them to use our platform so that we can take on Digg, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook head on. Oh, also Google. Yeah, let’s add Google, they’re rich!
Initially I had my doubts about yet one more platform… but with Bebo being a part of AOL, my newfound backers smelled an opening…
You know what, they’re right: I don’t think it’s too late to create a profile on a 14th website, I really don’t… at least that’s what the investors convinced me of… why own content when you can own an email address? Content is so easy to get your hands on, but an email address? That’s scarce!
Hmm… Obviously if you’ve been reading me for the past two years and wonder why I have made a total 180-degree and capitulating on my content is king mantra… it’s not become I’ve lost my marbles, it’s because it’s April Fool’s Day folks.
More so with every passing day of the calendar… Content is King!
For more April Fool’s Day fun, check out our friends at RWW.
Jason Calacanis goes crazy this morning… but I wonder if he realizes the irony of his attack on YHOO.
First, his beef:
Yahoo made a huge critical blunder today: they decided to compete with their customers. Today they launched a content site called Shine dedicated to women. It looks really slick, and they make a point of talking about all the great editors they have working on it from Jane and the Wall Street Journal.
Anyway, back to Shine: wow, really dumb idea on Yahoo part. I would kill myself if I was running the publisher network right now. Can you imagine what it would be like to go to WSJ, Jane, iVillage, Glam, or Sugar publishing and try and get them to support Yahoo services?
- Yahoo sale person: “Hello, I from Yahoo. We would like you to use Yahoo Publisher Network and share ad revenue with you”
- Glam/Sugar/Jane/publisher “oh, really? That’s great! I hope you take the profits and put them into your competing content site that will drink our milkshake!”
- Yahoo sale person: ” You bet! We will drink it up…. we will drink your milkshake.”
When Microsoft takes over Yahoo this will create even more problems. MSN/Live is trying to compete with Google AdSense and Yahoo’s blunder is going to feed right into Google’s “we won’t compete with publishers” position.
If I was running a women’s site today I would make a point of puling everything I have off of Yahoo and building a voting block of women’s sites to do the same. If Yahoo wants to go “winner take all” that’s their right, but the niche content sites should stand up for themselves and vote with their partnership dollars for a true partner who doesn’t run off with your business in the night.
Someone please explain to me why they would do something so dumb right now. Rafat Ali? Kara Swisher? Mike Arrington? Om Malik? Henry Blodget? Someone please clue me in… because this seems so dumb I can’t understand it.
Second, this is hypocritical.
Let me explain. Yahoo! did this for the same reason Mahalo.com started off creating pages linking out to 7 websites per a given topic… and then after a while decided to create full articles on said topics.
Pretty much like this vs. this.
Content is king. Having a page with links out (gee, sort of like YHOO and Mahalo 1.0) is somewhat limiting… but having a page with actual content is slightly more valuable. Jason, you of all people should know this.
I appreciate the nuance that Yahoo! has an ad network for publishers, but that is no Google network. In fact, this is no different Google.com competing with Google’s network for ad revenue (if a client’s ad budget is tapped, it’s tapped, after all).
To boot: Yahoo can leverage Shine to get more ad dollars for themselves and for their publisher partners.
I do agree that Yahoo!’s excessive hail marries are starting to seem desperate, but this move in of itself is not all that dumb.
Disclosure: long YHOO stock… but trust me, no one enjoys criticizing YHOO more than I do.
ZenithOptimedia expects online ad spending in the U.S. to grow 23.4 percent this year, an upgrade from the 19 percent it forecast in December. Overall, global ad spend for online will rise 26.5 percent this year to $47.7 billion.
And something we’ve long argued (see our old post here), now being accepted as “fact”:
– Soft economy means more for online: With the economy limping along, more marketers will be encouraged to rely more on digital media the detriment of traditional media. Internet advertising is a low price buy, with large amounts of inventory, targeting capabilities and ads that can be quickly changed. The consolidation that began last year promises greater efficiencies for advertisers as well. Zenith believes still more merger activity to take place and expects that to play a role in propelling online ad growth. Zenith also cites the emergence of mass-appeal, high-profile video sites like Hulu. Search engine marketing is also expected to experience continued growth as more small businesses embrace online as part of their overall local marketing strategies.
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