For a few years, the newspaper industry put Craig Newmark in a category of people that included Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin for having the audacity to encroach on their classifieds monopoly.
This year, having elevated Gawker Media as a likely candidate for company of 2008 as early as January, expect to see Nick Denton join Newmark in that category of people who are harming the venerable business of printing newspapers and magazines.
I think what Craig and Nick have done is genius - and I am not alone - mainly because they realized that print was carrying excess baggage and not delivering the goods in the areas that their clients were looking for.
I think more entrepreneurs should take a cue from Denton… he is his own boss and is laughing all the way to the bank without giving a you-know-what about what the publishing or investing establishment thinks.
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WatchMojo NewsletterLet’s connect the dots:
- YouTube’s market share is growing, nearing 75%. It is the market.
- YouTube is sucking the wind out of the entire video space, meaning that while the theory of long tail economics seems great in theory, the kind of inventory and reach is way too immaterial to be meaningless in practice.
- The only time YouTube seems to generate any news, it’s when it is getting sued by big media, who have historically had the best rapport with big branded advertisers, the very same ones who we are counting on making online video advertising revenues take off.
- Meanwhile, VCs continue to fund hapless technology video plays - who end up selling for 5% of the amount they raise - hoping the answer to online video advertising revenues lies in technology… when any sane individual will tell you the problem is a lack of good, high-quality, professionally produced, non-pirated video content…
Call me crazy, but if this is what we have in store for online video… I think I’m grabbing by can of beans and heading for the bunker.
You have to wonder:
Yahoo! gets most of its impressions in Y! Mail… and mail is notoriously hard to monetize.
Yet Google - who is printing money thanks to their search domination - invested heavily to get into email with Gmail. Is that smart management or allocation of capital? Not sure.
Of course, email is the biggest social networking platform out there (more here)… but then again, social networking inventory is really not monetizable… so what gives?
More on social networking’s woes with monetization here:
Related: Social Media
- Connecting the Dots: Why Social Media Fails at Generating Revenue
- Why Social Media and Advertising = Fail
- Dark Cloud, Meet Social Media. Social Media, Meet Dark Cloud
- Social Media Hype Train Continues
- When Will Social Media Get It?
- Why Social Media and Beacon Are Doomed to Fail and What Facebook Should Do
- Social Media Growing Pains
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