This morning I wrote about Business Week mentioning WatchMojo.com in an article. Maybe that’s why I feel guilty and dirty reading this?
Bloomberg LP, the global financial data and news empire created by New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is the winning bidder for BusinessWeek.
Terms of the offer will not be disclosed by Bloomberg and BusinessWeek parent McGraw-Hill Cos. But knowledgeable sources say that Bloomberg’s cash offer is in the $2 million to $5 million range and that it has agreed to assume liabilities, including potential severance payments. It remains to be seen how much of the magazine’s 400-plus staff Bloomberg plans to cut, but reports of a planned scorched earth campaign are overblown, say sources. BusinessWeek editor-in-chief Steve Adler told his staff shortly after the deal was announced Tuesday that part of the deal guaranteed that McGraw-Hill benefits would be extended to employees for one year after the deal closes.
Man. What has the world come to? Read more.
WatchMojo mentioned in Business Week article on online video content producers, written by Aymar Jean Christian:
Overdo it and you lose your audience, says Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, chief executive of online video site WatchMojo.com. Overexposure of a product will be more glaring in a three-minute Webisode than a longer TV show. “Are users that dumb to sit through and watch something that is blatantly commercial?” he asks.
Also re-published on MSNBC.
+ 1 for WatchMojo!
Indeed, with YouTube “becoming a top choice for music discovery, the labels need YouTube more than YouTube needs them,” but then one has to ask: why do some content owners - such as Warner Music - shun YouTube?
When it comes to content, you have creation, aggregation and distribution. Oftentimes the aggregation and distribution are bundled into one, as is the case with YouTube - who is not only one of the distribution partners in WatchMojo.com’s syndication network but the web’s largest aggregator of video content, period. Of the 40M streams we’ve done since launching, just under 50%, or 20M, have come on YouTube.
The largest news aggregator happens to be Digg, whose financials Business Week managed to get its hands on. Considering the site’s traffic, the figures aren’t pretty. Digg greets over 20M unique users per month, has an advertising deal with web sugar daddy Microsoft in placebut can only muster about $1-2M in quarterly sales, operating in the red to the tune of $5M per year.
Why? Basically, the site is a “link dump” and aggregates content headlines and titles and drives out traffic - lots of it - to underlying sites. By virtue of not having any content, it cannot really sell targeted and premium display ads; by virtue of its nature, no one is there to click on ads (unlike Google’s search, where even a small proportion clicks on paid links versus organic results generates billions in revenue).
Digg is one of the poster childs of social media, it has thrown news and publishing in a loop, but as an ad-supported business, like other social media companies (Facebook, notably), it is failing to gain any traction.
In good times when VCs are willing to underwrite losses, this is not a problem. In bad times, VCs are less willing. In the end of days-kind of times, VCs are seeing their own investors bail and as a result really can’t fund companies like Digg. True, Digg recently raised $28M (I think that was basically Kevin Rose cashing out in some kind of founder’s liquidity deal), but that was in the works before the “econalypse” hit. Today, no way would that deal get done.
As a result, it’s fair game to ask, as does VC Jeremy Liew: Will the recession kill “social media”? I hope so, personally. As a content producer, I think the whole web 2.0 / social media fad is just that: a fad… much like the B2B craze of 2000 was the frothy exclamation point on an excessive period that was due for a crash. This time around mind you: social media has been the sundae, icing and cherry of the bubble… and the time is nigh to nuke the whole social media as a business rhetoric. Don’t get me wrong: all media companies need to be aware how social media changes the rules… but to build a business based solely on social media? That’s suicide.
The problem - and stop now if this sounds familiar - is the utter lack of respect that the Web 2.0 crowd (and the financiers who inflated the bubble) have for content.
If you think about it, there is something deeply disturbing about companies that aggregate or scraping content to get mammoth valuations from VCs yet content creating companies are generally not favored for investment. That is a morally bankrupt position and the recession is now showing that it is also an economically hollow position as well. So to answer Jeremy Liew’s question: the recession is not the cause of social media’s death but simply the accelerator.
BW was the last business magazine I canceled, or should I say, did not renew.
But before me stands a $23 offer for 26 issues. That’s a cheap tab. I am thinking of signing up. Is print making a comeback?
No. But here’s the truth: most blogs suck and a lot of print media - while absurdly outdated and largely fluffy - have content that most blogs and new media sources have yet to match. Come on bloggers, if you want that $23 from me you have to step it up, not regurgitate crap.
Bartender, hold that $20 martini, I’m getting some Business Week.
But this begs the question: is BW better off asking me - a 30 year old C-level executive - for $23 or should it somehow get an advertiser to pay that $23 for this little commercial exchange. Think about it… there’s a lot more value for BW (or any print magazine) to get advertisers engaged in what just took place.
But then again, I think print should be free (man, we’ve covered every topic, haven’t we?).
On that note, bartender, hit me again.
The Globe & Mail’s Mathew Ingram describes an almost surreal story about Business Week asking people not to link to it, in 2008!
I canceled my subscription to Business Week earlier this year. It was the last subscription I had. Business Week spills a lot of ink on innovation and the Web economy… so it’s surprising to see them this archaic on understanding how the Web works and recognizing that asking people not to link to you is impossible, let alone impractical.
Anyway, it got me to think, in light of McGraw Hill’s so-so recent results (Ad revenue at BusinessWeek.com grew 10.5 percent in the quarter and 14.8 percent for the full-year 2007), was this backwardness affecting BusinessWeek.com’s traffic and revenue?
BusinessWeek.com is a good site, but I wondered, how does it do compare to a peer that seems more progressive, say Forbes.com?
Here is one graph comparing Forbes with BusinessWeek, as you can see, both sites have been pretty flat (yes I know Alexa sucks etc.)
Actually, the quote is a nice touch.
Anyway, so I wondered: what about taking linking to the extreme. If BusinessWeek.com does not want your stinking links, the site at the other extreme that really wants your links would be, well, Digg.com.
So what about a social media site such as Digg?
Notice how Digg seemingly took off in traffic just as BusinessWeek.com levels off, and falls?
But this is an incomplete assessment. What about sites who embraced Digg buttons. The NYT did that in late December 2006. What happened to its traffic?
Come to think of it: NYT did not seem to get a boost from Digg. Of course, one argument is that Digg - along with Reddit and other social media aggregators - democratized media by evening the playing ground between big media sites and blogs.
Or, maybe Alexa sucks and this doesn’t mean anything.
Either way, now maybe this is something worth linking to.
Still a lot of uncertainty and hope (hype) surrounding online video. I think in many ways, video is a better fit with display ads whereas video ads work better with text content.
But a new report by eMarketer, as seen on Business Week, released July 16, suggests Web surfers ain’t seen nothing yet. Video ad sales are expected to grow from an estimated $775 million this year to $3.1 billion in 2010 and then to $4.3 billion in 2011. That’s up from a November projection in which eMarketer estimated 2010’s video ad sales at less than $3 billion (see BusinessWeek.com, 11/7/06, “Up Next: Online Video Ad Boom?”).
Though the numbers sound large, the expected activity over the next four years suggests that advertisers will be merely experimenting with the medium. Even at $4.3 billion, spending on video ads would account for just $1 of every $10 of Internet advertising.
Read more.
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