One thing I knew would happen sooner later was for blogs to fold their spinoffs under one URL.
When we launched the Blogger Mojo network, we initially had distinct URLs for each blog, so for example SoundMojo.com was the music blog, but soon afterwards we simply put the blog under WatchMojo.com and the SoundMojo.com blog redirected under WatchMojo.com/music/blog.
This week, we saw Gawker Media decide to direct Valleywag under Gawker.com… and now I see that Alley Insider has done the same thing with Business Sheet and Clusterstock, two blogs it launched but now seems to have streamlined, or as the saying goes: aligned.
I expect many more of these moves to come…it makes sense for the largest sites to separate blogs, especially if the topic (content and audience) are widely different… but otherwise, I think you are about to see a lot more of these moves.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo NewsletterUsually when someone wants to make a point, they write a Top 10. For Nouriel Roubini, it’s a Top 20. Via ClusterStock.
It’s that time of the year again, time to look ahead to 2009 and predict the news. Here are:
- Top 10 Predictions for 2007.
- Top 10 Predictions for 2008.
Amongst those, what did materialize?
- MSFT did acquire aQuantive.
- CNET did sell, and as I called it later, did sell to CBS.
- Yahoo! almost got taken out, too bad YHOO was too stupid to reject MSFT’s offers.
- Facebook did bring in a female Chief… though not as CEO, but rather, as COO.
- Satellite radio did face more challenges: Sirius XM trades at $0.25/share with a billion dollar debt load coming up for renewal next year, in this credit crunch, what are the chances the company’s stockholders avoid getting trounced.
- TV did get hit harder than ever: CBS, News Corp., NBC continued to face massive challenges.
- Free ad supported music came, in the form of MySpace Music.
What are the Predictions for 2009? Coming soon.
We’ve seen the housing market crash, the financial market go down in flames… is the worst over? Nope. Not by a mile. In addition to the credit card market’s impending bust, you now have the opaque hedge fund industry about to fall off a cliff.
“Managers have a pretty good feeling for what is coming, and there are significant redemption requests out there,” said Stewart Massey, founding partner of Massey, Quick & Co, an investment consultant that puts money into hedge funds.
Saturday is the last day for thousands of investors to notify hundreds of hedge funds if they want their money back by year’s end.
Hedge funds that require three months notice from investors who wanted to exit by year’s end had a similar deadline on September 30 - also known in the industry as “D-Day.”
More such deadlines loom for funds that allow investors to give less notice before taking their money out, fund managers said.
In the last two days, several prominent fund managers made public predictions that illustrate the depth of gloom now sweeping the $US1.7 trillion ($2.6 trillion) hedge fund industry.
Read more. As hard as it might be to believe, it’s just the calm before the storm.
The first time we came across Peter Schiff, we added an interview he did some time calling the economic meltdown when naysayers thought he was crazy. We added the post on WorldMojo, which covers politics and some broader economic news.
I am now adding this mix, found via Paul Kedrosky’s blog, which is a sort of Best Of from a number of interviews. He was 100% right, everyone else was 1,000% wrong. Wow.
In the past few weeks and month, I have become swamped with more deals. Just as the layoffs and belt-tightening began at media companies, the willingness to turn to third parties for content shot up.
Previously, a lot of media companies were contemplating the “build or buy” conundrum:
From our Top 10 Predictions from 2008, here is #6:
6- Video Content: Build, then Buy
2007 marked a year where many media companies attempted to build video content offerings, 2008 will see some acquisition activity as traditional media companies look to scale by buying into the space. This will surprisingly allow some print media companies to have more robust video content offerings on their web sites than TV companies, who continue to view the Web as a threat to their core TV advertising revenues.
Truth is, I know first hand from our talks with these media companies, the year went by and nothing: very few companies accelerated their video plans and offerings because they only saw digital pennies ahead. I touched on this in Online Video and Old Media: Those Who Can Won’t, and Those Who Want Can’t. They cannot be blamed. But now that companies are forced to lay folks off, forget about any new content development plans. Those plans - if any existed - will be shelved. However, the need for new video content will only spike, after all, as folks lose their jobs, they tend to spend less and consume more content and entertainment at home.
Since user generated content only goes so far to whet consumer appetite, the demand for quality professional content goes up, yet the slower economy means less advertising dollars, which gives less of an incentive to big media firms to open up their content archives and publish online… so in this vacuum a firm like WatchMojo.com will actually benefit from the meltdown… but of course no one likes seeing the wheels come off the economy.
Now other companies like Revision3, Next New Networks, and a few others who produce content can win. But the problem for them is that they all raised way too much money, have high burn rates, and need to first adjust and scale back, or as they say “align” their businesses with realities. Revision3 did this last month. I suspect N3 might have to, as well. I’d rather they not do that and charge ahead… but their VCs will ask for burn rates to come down.
In that chaos, we’re sort of lucky not to have to do any of that and can charge ahead, expanding on all fronts. It’s sort of ironic, because I spent most of 2007 trying to raise money and could never close the deal (for many reasons), but in 2008 it forced us to do less with more more with less (Ed. Note: Freudian slip, perhaps?) and generate actual revenues. That is why I am pretty bullish… though feeling upbeat about one’s company is pretty irrelevant when you see people losing their jobs right and left and signs of despair. Sadly, this is what America has come to after decades of greed and excess.
Alley Insider, who in the best of times could not be mistaken for the bullish and cheerleading CNBC, offers a Week in Review that, while negative and bearish, does not even begin to reflect on the current malaise and impending apocalypse that is sinking in.
“Google slips below $300/share” reads the headline. If only it ended there.
- Sun Microsystems yesterday announced 5,000 to 6,000 job cuts, with many more to come from the tech industry. Yahoo! is girding itself for 1,000-1,500 cuts, even though people expect the firm to lay off 3,000 to right the ship.
- Citigroup announced 60,000 cuts between now and 2009, reducing its headcount to a mere 340,000, starting with 10,000 cuts immediately.
- If that is not enough, the state of California is going down.
- People are realizing that something is amiss in online video projections. Indeed. This is the problem with too much supply in general, too much UGC in specific, not enough quality content to convince advertisers that online video is worth it. Even the so-called experts are scratching their heads.
- Which only means one thing, if before the crash you raised $10M on a ludicrous pre-money valuation, expect your VCs to give you call (if they have not done so already) telling you that you are about to be fleeced, see your stake reduced, so that they can make even on the next round… if there is a next round.
- VCs, meanwhile, have their own problems: they now are a net negative in the value creation category.
Since exits won’t happen overnight, the only reasonable assumption is a shrinking of the VC sector, which will mean less money invested, less innovation (if you consider half of the crap VCs funded of late innovation, of course) and less growth…
- On a somewhat related note: we have more faux engineers in the US than real ones (via Paul Kedrosky, via Andrew Lo)… and then we wonder why our bridges are falling apart and our financial world is exploding. Go figure.
Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning… maybe it is indeed the end of days?
I don’t know… as crazy as it sounds, I am far more bullish and optimistic than I was last year at this time. Why is that?
PLAY
