I’d put rules in quotation marks… but I am not trying to imply that the rules are bad, they’re quite good, and some of them, quite unique:
Felix Dennis is the founder of Maxim Magazine.
- prune overhead regularly
- team spirit is for losers
- pay yourself enough to eat
- hire others to do the day-to-day
- ownership isn’t the important thing, it’s the only thing
- if it floats, flies or fornicates, rent it… it’s cheaper.
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WatchMojo Newslettera) my first day at my new company
b) my last day at my old company
c) one of my famous motivational speeches
Office Worker Goes Absolutely Insane - Watch more free videos
Are the people that Rodale chose for the job bad, or is Rodale facing even deeper issues and challenges than their peer group and this is causing a revolving door at the company?
Via PaidContent:
Bill Ostroff, who was president of Rodale Interactive and CMO, is leaving the company. He was in the interactive position for only a year… previous interactive head Michael Silberman left in May last year to join as GM of New York magazine’s nymag.com. According to Mediaweek, two of Ostroff’s direct reports will now report to Steven Pleshette Murphy, CEO of Rodale. Gregg Michaelson was promoted to EVP, customer marketing and will assume Ostroff’s interactive duties. The other, MaryAnn Bekkedahl, continues as EVP, group publisher, Rodale.
More in the press release.
When I was running AskMen’s sales and partnerships, we tried doing some kind of deal with Rodale (publisher of Men’s Health), but nothing… I’ve also tried doing business development deals between WatchMojo and Rodale (you have to figure magazines would be very open to adding video to their websites etc.) but again, radio silence.
A few years back, Bolt ran a seemingly successful content company targeting teens, a lucrative market.
Driven by either greed, envy, or both (hmm… both, including stupidity), Bolt totally did a 180 and dived into the UGC video market. It got crushed by the weight of its own stupidity, then got sued by Universal. GoFish put it out of misery by acquiring it… but then GoFish itself went out of business as a me-too video file sharing site. GoFish is now a totally different thing, essentially an ad network for kids. Hey, better than a me-too clone going nowhere, I presume.
But now I learn that Tickle - one of the more successful dating sites - is going out of business. Tickle was known as eMode until Monster bought it. It was one half dating site, one half personal development site. Now it’s one full portion of Fail… and the reason is really pretty dumb: driven by greed and envy Monster positioned the company head on against MySpace and Facebook…
You can imagine the end result. Best sign that some people don’t deserve to get near a computer:
We will be shutting down Tickle as of June 30th 2008. You will no longer be able to access your saved test results after that date. If you would like to keep your test results, please print them out before that date. Many thanks for your understanding! … There is no action required from your side, you don’t have to delete your user account or cancel your subscription; Tickle will do this for you.
Way to go. Why don’t you just mail people the news that you’re going out of business.
Lesson #1 - not everything needs to be a social network.
Lesson #2 - if you have an existing, successful business and then change it into a faux, wanna-be, me-too anything, it shall fail.
Lesson #3 - don’t be driven by envy and greed.
In 2006, people would call me and offer to turn WatchMojo into a user-gen site by adding content from the annals of the Web; or by morphing into a social network. I told them I’d rather be #1 or #2 in video content than a non-player in those spaces. If only Bolt or Tickle would have bought into that philosophy.
Time looks at Google, Facebook and Apple as likely winners of the Web wars.
Google, Facebook and Apple do make me think of the 3 Cs:
- Google = commerce
- Facebook = community
- Apple = content.
Interesting that none of the three create any of the underlying C, they just enable it. That being said, I don’t buy any of these “the future of this” or “how this will kill that” pieces, nor do I buy many of these “X company is the future of so-and-so”.
Google’s place in business is cemented: it’s catapulted itself to IBM and MSFT status and while it may or may or not change, it won’t go anywhere.
Apple today is kicking ass and won’t be disappearing, but just a decade ago it was going nowhere.
Facebook is a great story but has yet to prove itself. It can become Friendster, quickly, and last time I checked, MySpace remains much bigger…
But the bigger reason why I take these articles with a grain of salt is two-fold:
- didn’t an analyst from Sanford Bernstein argue just last week that - on the strength of their respective 20-30% revenue growth - Amazon and Google would own the future of the Web?
- isn’t the future of the Web a video-based one? Sure, Google has video mojo thanks to their YouTube acquisition. But Facebook? Not really. Apple can’t really claim leadership - let alone leadership - either.
This makes me wonder: if video is the future of the Web, who will win between the technology players versus the content players. Hmm… let me think about that, a post is coming soon.
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