Slide raised $58M and today lays off a bunch of people and none of the “influential” tech blogs come out and say anything remotely… anything.
Om Malik, whom I respect quite a bit, publishes a post that doesn’t really say much. Read his post a few times and tell me what are you supposed to walk away with? Of course, Om is a VC as well, so he probably won’t berate any of these crappy companies that have too much VC money riding them anyway.
Here’s what I want Om (or anyone) to say:
Slide was a joke, everyone outside of the Valley’s incestuous circle knew it, and Facebook-based business models were a joke (just as Twitter and Twitter-based business models are a joke).
Here’s a crazy prophecy: at a $500M valuation at its latest round, Slide will shut down before you know it. No way will their VCs want them to burn through their $58M in capital to find out.
Expect many more such clunkers to die soon. One more thing, Max Levchin is probably a brilliant bloke, but just because you kicked ass as a CTO, CIO, CXO somewhere doesn’t make you a badass CEO.
Hey Max, if you’re looking for a gig, let me know. You might found this hard to believe ut with $58M in funding, your VCs might be a bit unhappy with the state of affairs.
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WatchMojo NewsletterI am a bit wary of blaming Rupert Murdoch for anything. Read his bio, you’ll know what I mean.
Anyway, he’s blaming himself for MySpace’s woes. I blame Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. I’ve yet to read any media mention this, but it seems like a no brainer, around the time he began the proceedings to buy it, MySpace tanked.
A bit floored that Marc Andreessen is investing in content: Talking Points Memo. Not many investors are comfortable investing in content, unless there’s really no risk…
Personally I wonder why TMP bothered raising money if they’re profitable. I think some entrepreneurs (ie. me, in 2007) get enamored with the notions of raising capital… then reality sets in. Methings Josh Marshall will wake up from this nightmare sometime in 2011.
Read more.
“The biggest lesson - people want to watch great content,” former Joost CEO Mike Volpi.
“The challenge with the online video business is pretty straightforward - most of the economics accrue at this point to the companies that own the content itself and, for the intermediaries, there aren’t any, that I can think of, profitable business models out there. The challenge is that media companies have approached the sector with more of a self-publishing model, meaning the content comes from their websites, as opposed to through aggregators.
“The challenge that Joost had throughout it’s life was that it had virtually no access to exclusive content. Many people will make issue of the choice to go with peer-to-peer or not, to go with a client or not; fundamentally, the issue is the content wasn’t what we needed it to be. That’s probably the biggest lesson - people want to watch great content.”
—Who’s to blame for not having great content?: “You can’t really say that you’d blame anybody for it. Content companies have decided that it’s in their best interests to publish from their own websites. I still believe that consumers generally would like to have that type of content on a good aggregation site, they would still love to have it on Joost, or YouTube or whomever - but, broadly speaking, the media companies have decided that’s not the strategy they’re going to pursue. Everybody acts in their own self-interest.”
Nice to see content is starting to get its due. Read more.
Nice to see UGC not even mentioned anymore. Read more on the future of online video here and here. It’s funny to see folks write about things we did a year ago!
WatchMojo.com TV show, 30 minutes sliced up from our short form footage:
Show 2:
Show 1:
Online video continues its torrid growth, from comScore:
Google Sites Leads U.K. in Online Video Viewership
Google Sites ranked as the top U.K. online video property in April with 2.4 billion videos viewed, an increase of 58 percent versus year ago, driven by the popularity of YouTube.com, which accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed on the property. BBC Sites ranked second with 79 million videos viewed, followed by ITV Sites (34.7 million videos), Megavideo.com (31.7 million videos), and Microsoft Sites (30.2 million videos). Each of the top ten video properties experienced double-digit growth during the past year, while several saw their number of videos viewed multiply by a factor of two or three.“With nearly five billion videos viewed in the U.K. in April, online video is a powerful and growing vehicle for online advertising placement,” said Mike Read, SVP and managing director, comScore Europe. “The online video market currently relies heavily on display ads for monetization, and in the coming months and years we can expect that video ads will play an even more prominent role. Despite the market’s overwhelming size and audience at this phase of the growth curve, it is also clear that we’re still in the early stages of advertising optimization and effectiveness in this increasingly important entertainment channel.”
18 Million People Were Exposed to a Display Advertisement on YouTube in April
Of the 36.8 million U.K. Internet users in April, 35.4 million (96 percent) were exposed to some form of display advertising, which includes static banners, rich media, and video ads. YouTube.com delivered display ads to the most people in the multimedia category, with 18.5 million visitors viewing a total of 621 million display ads. Metacafe ranked second with 1.6 million ad-exposed visitors, followed by WindowsMedia (1.2 million ad-exposed visitors) and MySpace Video (1 million ad-exposed visitors).
Read more.
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