It is astounding that eBay forked over $3B for Skype and didn’t actually buy Skype’s underlying technology. continue reading...

From NY Times:

Why were so many people in the technology world wrong about Hulu? It was an idea that seemed like a relic of the worst excesses of the dot-com era: a portal for content run by a joint venture of media companies. Could any venture have more going against it? continue reading...

“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. continue reading...

Om Malik has a good piece on Joost and what went wrong.  We commented on it as well, we were one of the initial content providers when the service was, well, like hulu, full of buzz and something you wanted to be a part of.

We were being diplomatic in our post, though we outline some of the issues we saw from day 1, but Malik and his team are direct and candid: “Becoming a white-label video provider was what a business did when all other strategies failed.” continue reading...

Joost will now offer a white-label version of its software and lay off some folks, including CEO Mike Volpi.

We signed a distribution deal with Joost before they launched, we were very proud to be a part of their roster (read more in my post at the time called: Joost what does WatchMojo.com Have in Common with Viacom, CNN, Turner, Sony, CBS, Warner Music Group and the NHL?) continue reading...

And in a related story, Skype’s co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who sold the VOIP pioneer to eBay for $2.4B - $4.1B (time of purchase - final) are in talks to re-acquire Skype from eBay.

Oh, the two launched Joost, which has probably not matched the hype with which it launched. continue reading...

Our friends at Joost took a major step forward: GigaOm broke the news today.  I’ve know about this for a few months, but naturally could not comment much.  Man it’s hard to be a CEO blogger sometimes.

As a distribution partner of Joost, we have a lot of content on the service and having gotten a sneak peek at the social media bells and whistles I think this will push them ahead… a bit. In all fairness, the company - armed with a massive $45M and rumored to have raised even more this year - did lose a whole year in the market… in that time span, Hulu - armed with $100M and News Corp. and NBC’s content libraries - managed to crack the Top 10. continue reading...

According to eMarketer, the size of online advertising revenue is $1.35B in 2008.

Since launching WatchMojo.com in 2006, I’ve had some questions about that figure… so here goes: continue reading...

Everyone is freaking out over the fact that YouTube is trying to monetize but 4% of its massive inventory.

Truth is, I thought that number was lower.  But whatever the number, it’s a good thing. continue reading...

The Misplaced Bet on UGC

Back in 2006, we’d get the occasional call from someone pitching us a turnkey solution to add User-Generated Content (UGC) videos to our WatchMojo.com property, which houses professionally produced videos we have created. continue reading...