I’m still not convinced that NBC can or should be blamed for not maximizing the Web opportunity with its Olympics coverage. The simple fact is TV loses when Web grows, I’m not saying Web viewership cannibalizes TV audiences, I’m just saying the sooner the Web becomes less of a clown industry, the worst that is for TV. Don’t be a buffoon in denying that; once readers and marketers realized audiences get their news online, print only died faster.
Anyway, where I do fault NBC is not using the Olympics to get any momentum. During the closing ceremonies, NBC began to heavily promote the political conventions… here’s what I did not understand:
- NBC and in turn MSNBC and MSNBC.com (which are 50-50% and 83-17% between NBC and MSFT respectively) will be duking it out with CNN, FOX News, ABC, CBS for ratings (online and offline) during the elections, which unlike the Olympics it does not have exclusive rights to.
- MSNBC.com bought Newsvine, one of the more political oriented social bookmarking sites last year.
- Social media sites Digg and YouTube partner have a strangle hold on efforts to tie in “the people” with mass media… is it just me or NBC could have and should have leveraged Newsvine to get people to vote and interact with the Olympics (vote for the day’s performance, shocker, etc.) and then transitioned this interaction from the Olympics to the elections.
Now, without having leveraged the Olympics (which it had exclusive rights to) it will have to catch up quite a bit to be relevant with the elections since its resources have been so focused on the Olympics.
All to say, I still don’t fully fault for NBC’s cold shoulder to the Web, as I said, they went out of their way to sit on any spark the Olympics could have generated online… but not leveraging the Olympics for the Elections will come back to haunt the peacock network.
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WatchMojo NewsletterHmm… is it just me or does the boldfaced part describe about 99% of the web 2.0 funded projects?
TripHub, a Seattle-based group oriented travel site, has closed its doors. We described it as a good way to help compile and centralize information for a group trip, but questioned if it was viable as a standalone business, especially against other players in the travel space like Yahoo Travel.
Yep. That’s about 99% of the projects we’ve seen funded over the past 4 years… expect more of these deadpool-style announcements on Tech Crunch in the months to come. It’s a shame, because most of the entrepreneurs behind these ventures are smart, but they were misled by the fickle moneymen who fell in love with trends (and hype).
Lesson #1 of building a successful company:
Build something You (the entrepreneur) can reasonably connect to a paying client. Investors are way too fickle and emotional to really rely on… which is ironic because the stereotype of being emotional is usually cast on entrepreneurs, which is total BS.
I can tell you from the front lines that a few VC-backed companies will see the rug pulled from underneath them in the next 3-6 months… I won’t name anyone (but feel free to do so in the comments), but you don’t need to be a genius to figure out that a lot of companies raised wads of cash and won’t see any exits near those amounts (1x), let alone worthy of those amounts (target of 3, 5 or 10x).
From Fred Wilson:
The forcing function is usually a bad market when nobody wants to write a check. Then the existing investors are forced to look hard at each other and decide if they want to keep investing. And then, if the company is really not making good progress, the answer is usually no.
Indeed. In fact, I’d add that what defines “good progress” has changed quite a bit. Traffic or user growth is meaningless if you don’t have real revenues and a path to profits. So many companies I interact with are on their 5th or 10th iteration of their business model, one more pathetic and ill-fated than the next.
VCs have already moved from social networking to online video and they’re now largely chasing things like clean tech and whatever else that seems like a big pie in the sky. Facebook’s coming down to reality won’t help social networking projects, and eMarketer’s slashing of online video revenues forecasts and NBC’s paltry windfall in online video won’t help video.
The best part is: companies that have avoided VC altogether or raised a little bit of money and will see merit in continuing to build a sensible business will win, just as they did coming out of the 2001-03 nuclear winter.
PLAY
