Call me old school, traditional… but I generate my content the old fashioned way: I produce it.
Red Lasso does it the new media way: it was ripping off CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC et al. The first time I saw it, I thought it was - like Brightcove - backed by biggies, which thus explained why it had access to content from those sources.
Turns out, Red Lasso didn’t want to bother with those nagging licensing agreements…
The biggies are now trying to put the kybosh on the service.
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WatchMojo NewsletterWell… if nothing else, Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang will grow a thick skin.
Last week, the man he made a billionaire many times over (by agreeing buy Broadcast.com for $5.7B), Mark Cuban, joined the lynch mob that is eager to dance on his grave.
This week, the man he made a billionaire many times over (by agreeing use Google on Yahoo.com), Sergey Brin, gave him a back-handed compliment/insult. Yeah, I’m sure Jerry wants to give up reins of YHOO and go work for Sergey at Google, right.
Asked whether Google would ever consider employing Yahoo’s Chief Executive Jerry Yang if he lost his job he said: “Jerry is very talented and if he wants to work at Google we’d be very excited to have him, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
BBC via Paid Content.
Wow. Rough week for Jerry. And now he’s got the four horsemen after him, too: T. Boone Pickens, Carl Icahn, John Paulson and your pick of Gordon Crawford (Capital Research and Management) and Bill Miller (Legg Mason).
Where’s Steve Ballmer when you need him. MSFT is laughing quite hard now.
I was talking to an executive at IAC and told him that to differentiate Ask.com and one of their other properties, IAC should better merge content with search.
Looks like MSFT beat them to it:
The memo, first obtained by Gigaom, details the company’s effort to build on MSN’s vision of delivering “relevant” and “social” content experiences, whatever that means. It is also merging, to some extent, the search and content teams, as “it’s imperative that we setup for blurring of the lines between Portal and Search to drive experiences that enable more seamless exploration of content across the search-browse continuum.”
One of Ask.com’s strong differentiation points is that parent company IAC has a lot of strong properties in the content space. Since these are all branded differently, users won’t think or care that it’s from the same parent, they should offer more direct links to pertinent content. Yes, this might reduce clicks to paid ads, but the goal should be to drive more search queries overall and improve relevance of results, first.
Why? A few reasons:
- Users in the real world are not represented by the vocal minority in Silicon Valley.
- Google’s uber neutral approach to content is a strength and a weakness and MSN is well served in exploiting all of the content across MSN properties.
I think one of the more interesting things that has happened to me professionally on a personal note is just how much my role has changed in the past 3 years.
This week three years ago, I was a VP at a mid-sized publisher with a free hand to do what I want and find deals for the company I worked at.
By week’s end, three years ago, the company got acquired and became part of a 400-employee operation. Naturally my role as VP changed.
By year’s end, three years ago, I was out of a job.
I started WatchMojo in January 2006 and “dealmaking” was moot. I had to lay down the foundation to a company with no blue print or play book to model anything after.
By 2007, the foundation was laid and we had to start scaling:
- first content (in 2006 and onwards)
- then distribution (in 2007 and onwards)
- now it’s all about monetization (in 2008 and onwards).
As I went from an internally-focused to an outwardly-oriented executive, my role changed once again. I am now back in dealmaking mode, which is where I like to be… but what’s really interesting about it all is just how much I’ve had to step up my administrative and operational skills.
While we continue to sign partnerships (a full slate to be announced later this week) I realize the need to structure the company in an even more efficient manner. Between systems, procedures and control mechanisms, you’d almost think we were a Fortune 500 company.
Yet we’re a lean and mean fighting machine:
I like to say that we’re a dozen employees with hundreds of distribution partners and a library of thousands of clips generating millions of streams per month. To make that happen, it’s all about being on the ball admin-wise… which is something that was probably a weakness three years ago today.
I’ve written a number of screenplays in my life. One of them won an Oscar. All right, that last part is a blatant lie.
A couple of them are the first two that are meant to be part of a trilogy.
The first one talks about a couple of guys leaving school to start a company.
The second company is all about the start-up’s ramp up and obstacles to success.
The third one, I’ve yet to pen, but would talk about the post IPO sagas. While the first two have little to do with Yahoo! - I think Yahoo! provides the perfect Greek Tragedy backdrop for the storyline of the third.
Ego, hubris, greed, etc… Shocking and sad. How does a company like YHOO become the playpen for a bunch of arbitrage traders, corporate raiders and what not?
I was having a conversation with an online video executive about the video ad units.
Personally, I think content-as-ads (product placement, integration, etc.) will be a force. But that’s a separate point. Discussing display-around-video ads vs. pre-roll ads, I argued:
Generally speaking, let’s be realistic: pre-rolls are not popular, so the instant one loads, people tend to close the player and move on: the video ad is not seen nor is the video content.
My future livelihood depends on video ads yet I don’t watch any content that comes embedded with a video pre-roll… so I can imagine the Average Joe feels even stronger.
So… if we are to run a companion ad along with a video player (that comes with a pre-roll), even if someone does not click to watch the video (and pre-roll), if they are exposed to the 300×250 companion ad, then there should be a CPM corresponding to that.
Basically, I personally think long term the value of [companion ad x cpm x impressions] > [pre-roll ad x cpm x impressions]
Yes, the CPM for companion ads is much lower, but the impressions much higher…
I think sales people can and should charge a fee for the companion ad. In fact, we will start offering a unit like that to advertisers and I’d like the IAB show some leadership on this point.
What do you think?
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