Regular readers have surely come across the short version of how my old company crushed old media stalwarts Maxim, GQ, Esquire, Playboy et al. and deeper-pocketed competitors such as TheMan ($17M of funding folks!) to become the #1 online magazine in the men’s lifestyle space:
It’s a three step process, are you ready?
1- We didn’t get buried by the weight of excess funding and irrational expectations;
2- We ran the company with an eye on costs and a desire to generate more and more revenues and thus be “profitable“ (pronounced “prŏf‘ĭ-tə-bəl” and is a derivative of the noun profit, profitable is an adjective that basically means “not being f*cked”);
3- Then when the [insert name of] bubble burst, we charged ahead while our peers had to scale back.
Well… the same thing is happening now with my new company WatchMojo.com. From NewTeeVee:
ManiaTV Lays Off 20, to Reduce Amount of Original Content
Layoffs are a common theme these days, mostly due to the current economic downturn. We’ve recently covered layoffs at Veoh, PermissionTV, Playboy, Heavy, Seesmic, and BitTorrent. Crackle, another site focused on original content, also lost most of its staff amid a move from Northern California to its Sony mothership in Culver City, Calif.
I am not sure I would put Heavy and Mania TV as our direct competitors… but seeing how we all produce original content, then I guess, to some extent, yes, we compete. The point is, both companies made cardinal mistake #1: believe your own PR, raise too much money, get cornered by VCs to cut just as the online video market takes off.
It is a shame, because in all fairness, back in 2004 when I was looking for new projects to pursue, it was the sight of Mania that led me into thinking that producing video content for the Web could work. I am actually rooting for them and hope that this bit of cost cutting will help them indeed reach profitability.
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