SVW exclusive breaking news stories on $400m in M&A deals! Plus, find out what is the most troubling question in media today, imho.
By Tom Foremski - October 11, 2005
The last few weeks have been great. Two big shows in town means plenty of stories. Not only that, Silicon Valley Watcher had two big scoops in two days!
We broke the news that VeriSign acquired Moreover Technologies, and the next day that VeriSign sold its online payments group to Ebay!
That's about $400m in deal flow, and you read it here first!
That's why you should come back often or subscribe to our RSS feed [just paste this link into your RSS reader: http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/index.xml.
Also, Silicon Valley Watcher got a very good mention in the New York Times on Saturday, right next to Silicon Valley's top blogger John Battelle. We are on Cnet's first ever Top 100 blogs list [picked out of 14m!] And John Battelle has invited SVW to be part of his premium brand top 20 advertising network, fmpub.net.
Chas Edwards is the man
I hear John snagged one of the most talented advertising sales guys in the industry, Chas Edwards, formerly of Cnet and TechTV.
That's what Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore's Media Survey told me. Sam knows who's who because he constantly watches the trades and mainstream press and talks to everybody. Lots of PR companies subscribe to Sam's interviews and teleconferences.
Sam has also encouraged me to dip my toe into podcasting. Last Friday I recorded a second podcast with Sam, a chat about what's going on in the media sector and about the Weblogs sale to AOL.
Sam interviewed me about my recent trip to New York, where I was speaking on a panel with Joe Trippi at Impact '05 conference. I was staying at the Yale Club, in mid-town, in the heart of the media center of the universe. It is an enormous thrill for a news reporter.
Shortly after I returned to California, the New York Times announced 500 job cuts and Knight-Ridder cut 100 newsroom jobs in Philadelphia.
Our media industry, Google, Yahoo, Ebay (they all publish pages of content and ads) is growing like crazy. These technology enabled media giants produce content mostly by machine, by aggregating content, harvesting links, etc. No newspaper or magazine can compete against those operating costs.
What happens if the old media withers away faster than expected, while the new media business models are still being created?
Let me use myself as an example. I was the first high profile newspaper journalist to leave a top global newspaper (Financial Times) to become a blogger journalist. The business models to support my work are still in flux. I'm betting that things will get better...eventually!?
Scary Media
But what if the new media business models improve slowly, as the older media business models collapse quickly?
That's a scary scenario because newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV are how society "thinks" and how it processes its thoughts; these are mechanisms used by society to make decisions on important subjects.
Can the Blogosphere get us through this huge transition in media business models?
That's what I'm hoping will happen. There are many great blogs and blog-like online publications that already shoulder a lot of society's media needs.
The Passion of Blogs
But the work of the Blogosphere is largely paid for by passion--or a day job. Passion gets you through the day, and the next, and the next, but it is a subsidy. My landlord or the supermarket doesn't recognize it as legal tender.
We need a way to harvest the true value of people-produced content and in such a way that quality is recognized and rewarded. I don't see anything like that out there yet.
Google can scale up by simply plugging in another bank of servers. People-produced content can only be scaled by adding more people, yet there is no revenue to support an expansion.
So, again, what happens if the old media businesses collapse faster than the new media business models can be created?
By Tom Foremski - October 11, 2005 | Permalink | Category:
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Comments (2)
While the blogosphere does deals like Winer's, Denton's et al, the low pay perception will remain. As a pro on the job, would you work for $4-20 per piece? I very much doubt it. But that could change if blog writer burn out sets in.
I favour the sponsorship model. At least you're in with a batting chance of making a living. And then you can move the model forward. At least in the B2B world.
Posted: October 11, 2005 3:28 AM
Right now its inaction that must be avoided. As the new CMP CEO pointed out, its revenue growth not profit, a prior obsession. So the best route for traditional media is to step outside of itself and try a large number of small, different, low cost things - do the metrics, learn, rinse, and repeat. They do nothing attempting to weather the storm, since many who did try things many years past made themselves targets by such, and were shot for the trouble it caused.
Some do pet projects, highly invested in ego and little else, and use these half-measures to show that they are trying something, even though they don't have any confidence in the effort. But the "not invented here" mindset on these "innovators" is worse than cyanide to a business, killing subsequent genuine efforts.
On the bootstrap side, its either piecework revenue driven off search engine derived marketing nanobubbles, or sponsorship that comes from your networking skills, fame, and virtuous circles. There's a definite lack of regard for this chimera that unfairly taints independent bloggers, restraining emergence of blogs as a part of the industry by undervaluing work.
The obvious answer is a flood of better, richer content seen by the reader. Like a river, it finds its way to the sea. But the emerging model isn't driven by active thought but by the chaos of hype and neglect. Not my first choice of effective business process. So its attitudes and desires that slows things down - not lack of a roadmap.
Posted: October 11, 2005 10:06 AM