Some time ago I published a post called Financial Engineering: How to Triple Your Market Cap. I was referring to Marchex, a publicly traded company now worth less than $500M and founded by Russ Horowitz, founder of Go2Net, which merged with Infospace back in the day. But the strategy would apply to Marchex, as well as Name Media and any other owner of large domain name portfolio.
Anyway, the gist of that post was that Marchex - who was sitting on countless URLs and using them mainly for search marketing purposes - should bring those URLs to life by actually creating businesses, you know, websites with actual content and a purpose, instead of the kind with no content but only links to paid ads. Don’t get me wrong, the domain navigation business is lucrative, something I covered in Domain Parking Ecosystem here. continue reading...
The Four Horsemen
Some of you might recall that after eUniverse - renamed Intermix - launched MySpace, it got into some problems with the SEC and its board forced CEO Brad Greenspan to resign. Greenspan remained a big shareholder, but the Board brought in Richard Rosenblatt to run the company. Rosenblatt is the executive (with an impressive track record in social media dating back to the late 1990s) who ended up selling Intermix to News Corp. for $580M. Rosenblatt orchestrated the deal with his counterpart over at News Corp, Ross Levinsohn, who was responsible for building up News Corp.’s digital strategy for Chairman Rupert Murdoch. continue reading...
If you thought financing rounds were raising eyebrows, here’s a prediction, it’s about to get a lot more interesting, and competitive, starting… now. Part of the reason why is that exits are about to get more competitive.
Tech Crunch points to a press release that $15 billion hedge fund General Atlantic is backing Jon Miller - former CEO of Time Warner’s AOL - and Ross Levinsohn - former CEO of News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media’s roll-up fund. We’d heard a lot about these roll-up funds, and now we’re seeing that move from concept to reality. The challenge, now, is the execution. continue reading...
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