Barry Diller vs. Rupert Murdoch.
Rupert Murdoch vs. Sumner Redstone.
Sumner Redstone vs. Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise vs. Sanity…
All right, we’ll stop there before Xenu gets upset.
A very interesting denouement is unfolding in the battle of the media moguls. When accomplished, wealthy and connected media moguls like Michael Eisner or Tom Freston left their respective fiefdoms, conventional wisdom suggested that they simply reappear shortly thereafter under a new corporate flag and crest.
But, the shifting of user’s attention and marketing dollars to the Web has changed plans. Today Paid Content reports that Tom Freston’s latest investment - coming on the heels of his investment in Veoh - is a company named Firefly3. No word yet on what they do.
Freston, of course, was the legendary MTV executive who led Viacom during a great run, but who was thanked of his services by Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, arguably for letting MySpace slip through Redstone’s fingers and into Rupert Murdoch’s.
Veoh, it should be noted, counts not just Freston as backers, but also the former Lord of Mickey Mouse’s house Michael Eisner.
Eisner, hasn’t stopped at Veoh and counts at least half a dozen digital media assets in his Corante mini-empire (though growing every day).
And what to say about former MTV and AOL boss Robert “Bob” Pittman who now runs Pilot Group, owners of Daily Candy and the popular StereoGum music blog, amongst other properties.
We’re seeing a rapid change in the media mogul landscape, because in addition to all of these folks, a new breed of new, new media mogul aspirations are spawning younger chieftains with deep pockets and long ambitions.
Namely:
Richard Rosenblatt’s Demand Media: armed with $200M in venture capital, Rosenblatt was doing user generated content before the term was coined, and more recently he was brought in by the Intermix board after it canned Intermix, aka eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan.
Greenspan, not to be outdone, owns a myriad of sites too, including LiveVideo (disclaimer: a WatchMojo.com video syndication partner), as well as video search engine Flurl.com and many others. In fact, his Vidilife got a glowing review after MySpace blew up but before YouTube became synonymous with funny videos (disclaimer: YouTube, too, is a WatchMojo.com syndication partner). I guess I should add one more headache inducing disclaimer: our MetaMojo.com video search engine is technically a competitor of Flurl.com, though Flurl.com technically should be indexing our videos - hey, as I say, it’s a cooperation and not a competition…
The list continues: former AOL CEO Jon Miller, who was replaced by Time Warner with NBC executive Randy Falco is in the mix too now, with General Atlantic backing he and former Fox Interactive Media CEO Ross Levinsohn’s new Velocity Fund… though that one has yet to make any investments…
It’s very interesting that traditional media and old, new media chieftains are all rapidly stepping on young entrepreneurs’ turfs by rolling up a myriad of web assets (Valleywag) in the quest for new media moguldum.
Related:
- Jon Miller and Ross Levinsohn Strike Back
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