Yahoo!’s year-over-year profits fell from $151.3M to $54M… or a fall of 64%. However, they shelled out $37M to advisers to fend off MSFT’s takeover. Here’s the release.
Add that $37M back to their profits, and you get $91M in profits, or a fall of “only” 39%.
Proving the point: the advisers were just disastrous in their advice… and YHOO should be ashamed for not accepting the $31/share offer.
Right now, I think MSFT could offer $20B offer and walk away with the company for $25B.
What a disgrace.
The Dot com bubble gave us F*ckedcompany.com, Web 2.0 gives us this. No idea who is behind it, but Valleywag pointed to this link.
It’s about time… See our 20 Dumb Things About Web 2.0 here.
See my earlier post on Blip.tv’s funding, in which they state that it served more than 51 million video views in September 2008, from more than 37,000 actively updated Web shows.
Working out the math: 51M streams / 37K video producers = 1,378 streams per partner per month. While this seems low, it’s the quintessential quality vs. quantity dilemma. For the record, I think Blip.tv is going about it the right way, foregoing the UGC or pirated type of content for quality made-for-web video content.
As I disclosed previously in the earlier post, we use Blip.tv but also syndicate widely to places like MySpace, Hulu, YouTube etc. That would be our “network”, where we do anywhere from 3-5M streams per month on the Web, but only 100,000-200,000 (so less than 5%) of those come from WatchMojo.com/Blip.tv (since we’ve integrated Blip.tv’s player in our CMS), which is what I refer to as our “property”. Mind you, for some reason, this past month we’ve seen a spike in our daily streams on the property:
I keep an eye on our total streams, which are powered by our network… I have come to accept the fact that we will do 30-50x more streams on our network than on our property, but it is nice to see our property grow too.
Anyway, from those numbers, that would make us one of the larger video content creators using Blip.tv, I suppose. The challenge for Blip.tv would be to parlay the relationship it has with content producers such as WatchMojo.com to extend its reach elsewhere online. I am not sure it wants to do this, but if it did, it would tap into a much, much larger pool of high quality inventory. We shall see what Blip.tv uses this additional funding for… but when you consider that Blip.tv is headquartered in Manhattan, one hopes it is to extend its reach onto Madison Avenue, too.
Funny to see web entrepreneurs Loic LeMeur and Om Malik duke it out in the comments section of this entry, on Veoh’s layoffs, which was reported first by Valleywag, and confirmed to varying extent by PaidContent.
Says Seesmic founder Loic:
The first sentence “A Veoh spokesperson has denied a news report published today” with “news report” referring to Valleywag is both hilarious and sad for NewTeeVee.
Is it? Newteevee publisher (and VC!) Om Malik disagrees:
It is a report and it was making the rounds on the blogs and yes it was an incorrect news report. It doesn’t matter where it came from. chris did his job and did it well. I disagree with your read on the situation.
I see Loic’s point, don’t get me wrong. But I disagree with his assessment due to its source (yes, I think who says something has major bearing on the message). That point of view would be a fair criticism from a traditional media chieftain trying to hold on to any vestige of relevance in a new media reality… but for an uber web entrepreneur like Loic to say that?
After all, didn’t The National Enquirer break the John Edwards affair?
I’d argue that Valleywag is eons more news than National Enquirer is, but the point is: just because one does not appreciate or approve of Valleywag’s editorial style does not mean its content is not news.
Granted, it’s not news a la CNN… but it’s not The Onion, either.
For a new media entrepreneur to argue that Valleywag is not news is a bit hypocritical if you ask me… after all, didn’t Reuters build a business on republishing earnings reports?
I digress.
The main reason why I wanted to chime in on this isn’t even the bitching on the comments section, it’s that Newteevee mentions: “Veoh dumped its original video programming“.
Original programming? What original programming? I am rooting for Veoh, but as I tell my friends there, stop changing strategy and business models every other day people! The problems of having too much money. At last count, Veoh has raised nearly $70M.
Our friends at Blip.tv raised some money from Bain Capital. In case the name sounds familiar, that is the company that Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney ran for years. This is the second institutional round for Blip.tv, who Tech Crunch notes is keeping its cards to its chest. Smart move. A lot of companies spend more time issuing press releases touting how much capital they’ve raised, all the while neglecting their clients and partners. From our experience working with Blip.tv (disclosure: we integrated their player in our CMS when we relaunched the site in August 2007), they are the polar opposite of that.
In the summer of 2007, we had to make a call between:
- integrating VideoEgg’s player
- going with Brightcove
- building our own player from scratch
- integrating Blip.tv’s player.
We went with option d, and especially in light of Video Egg getting out of this market earlier this year, this ranks as one of the best moves I’ve made in my career… because had I picked Video Egg and had to migrate away to something else this year, I would have lost it. Every week, some company calls us and offers us their platform pro bono in the hope that we migrate away from Blip.tv… consistently, we say thanks, but no thanks.
As you know, financing processes take 6 - sometimes 12 - months. When you see companies raise money these days, you know they are top notch quality companies backed by great managers. Why? Financiers have the best excuse in the world to back out of deals these days (hmm… “the world is melting away!”) so when you see deals being announced now, it means that much more.
Worth noting:
Blip.tv was founded in May of 2005 and has grown to serving more than 51 million video views in September 2008, which would represent a 250% increase compared to September 2007. The company now distributes more than 37,000 actively updated Web shows, which release an average of three new episodes per month.
Technically, we’re one of those 37,000… but we produce 100-150 segments per month, and publish 50-100. Admittedly, our videos are 1-3 minutes… but still.