I’ve gone through many of the recaps of 2007 and predictions for 2008 and been trying to find one common theme between them. Up to now, I’ve not been able to wrap my arms around any one thing. I’ve personally spent some of the time between Christmas and the New Year looking back at the good, bad and ugly in 2007 for WatchMojo.com and Mojo Supreme and strategizing for next year…
Then it hit me. The timing was no coincidence: we are about to announce a pretty major partnership - one that took one month to negotiate but three months to launch (and it has yet to launch, but should any day now).
I think buried under the many storylines of 2007: Facebook’s euphoria, AOL’s implosion, the massive consolidation amongst ad networks, Yahoo! scooping up a handful of these to itself, and major media companies re-engineerings is the mantra of distribution over destination.
Personally, I started 2007 wanting to build WatchMojo.com into a large destination, focused around niches. I might do this in 2008, but 2007 saw our distribution take off. At some point, you can’t let your predetermined conclusions supersede what the market demonstrates. Our site - or what I call the property - now accounts for 5% of our total relevance and reach. By way of syndication partnerships with distribution points such as YouTube et al., we have grown over 10x in 6 months.
We’re tiny compared to major media companies, but they too began to drink from the same koolaid. CBS is all about distribution over destination. I think this is also why AOL totally set Dulles aflame and imploded AOL.com in favor of Platform A - a hybrid of Advertising.com, Quigo, Tacoda and all of the rag tag ad networks they have bought over the years (mind you, in this case, ragtag refers to assorted only and not meant to be derogatory, all were leaders in their respective spaces).
Don’t get me wrong, if I had millions in the bank, I’d probably allocate a chunk of that to develop our destination. In fact, I will anyway because I think it’s smart to do that, particularly, when everyone is going gaga over distribution and networks… but I won’t lie, I anticipate to further build up our network and distribution in 2008 and in one year’s time, our syndication business will account for 99% of our business.
I do reiterate however, that it’s always good to go against the grain when people jump on bandwagons, as the saying goes: those who can, build a destination; those who can’t embrace the distribution (just don’t ask me who said that saying).
On that note, expect a long overdue announcement pretty soon.
Tags: Internet & Web|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Dec 28th
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