Does music suck as an online investment or what?

LaLa was purchased for $17 million by Apple, according to our sources with indirect knowledge of the deal. And the company supposedly had $14 million in cash in the bank, meaning the actual purchase price was really $3 million. continue reading...

It’s easy to call MTV’s decision to restrict third party websites from embedding videos as a media company thinking within the box, but that’s unfair.

Last year, many criticized the WSJ for not canning the paid subscription strategy, but then as the ad market tanked (along with the economy), preserving the $120M paid business proved to be a wise move, especially with competitor NYT itching to find a paid content strategy. continue reading...

YouTube is not making meaningful revenue for Google, according to SAI.

MySpace, Facebook and their ilk are trying many things, but none of them are working when it comes to scaling revenues, according to USAToday. continue reading...

“Hire slow and fire fast” - those are not my words, they are the words of Seth Goldstein, CEO of Social Media, but they do strike a chord.

Last week we did an office pool to guess the score of a hockey game and I was taken aback by the fact that we were now 11 people on staff. Eleven employees is not a lot, mind you, but that’s more than we had at my old company. I don’t even know how we got to 11, mind you, but we’ve worked with well over 100 people in numerous capacities as freelancers and interns. The advantage there has been that I’ve been able to gauge people’s mojo without risking bringing on people that did not fit it or did not have their heart into it. It surely has been an indirect benefit of bootstrapping. Some times when companies get a massive injection of cash, they rush the hiring process and end up with bad apples that quickly become cancerous. continue reading...