Media
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Reading through the LA Times, as I do before The Oscars every year, I came across a fantastic Op-Ed written by a respected Hollywood author by the name of Neal Gabler. The opinion piece, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the “barometers of the American psyche”.
And what is culprit? You guessed it… the rise of social media! As Gabler elaborates:
“All of this has been hastened by the fact that there is now an instrument to take advantage of the social stratifications. To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. Television never questioned the very nature of conventional entertainment.
The Internet, on the other hand, not only creates niche communities — of young people, beer aficionados, news junkies, Britney Spears fanatics — that seem to obviate the need for the larger community, it plays to another powerful force in modern America and one that also undermines the movies: narcissism.
It is certainly no secret that so much of modern media is dedicated to empowering audiences that no longer want to be passive. Already, video games generate more income than movies by centralizing the user and turning him into the protagonist. Popular websites such as Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, in which the user is effectively made into a star and in which content is democratized, get far more hits than movies get audiences. ”
What Gabler calls “narcissism,” I prefer to use the term “digital self expression”. And as I wrote almost a year ago in a piece titled “Social Networks are the New Media”…
“To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the “products” are the people… or as Marshall McLuhan might say, “the people are the message” when it comes to social networks. So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”.
In the past century, the creation of cultural products was centered in Hollywood. Now, social networks are broadening the scope of cultural media to include “identity production” (a very appropriate term coined by danah boyd), all the while decentralizing the ecosystem out to the edges. For traditional media companies that are seeking to enter this space (e.g. MTV, Martha Stewart, etc.), it’s critical to follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression. ”
What Gabler and I both seem to be focusing on is the very real possibility that what is truly disrupting Hollywood is not technology per se, but what the technology is enabling the audience to do and how it’s affecting the public’s “consciousness”. In other words, the future of Hollywood may not ultimately rest on issues like how well the studios transition their business models to adapt to digital distribution schemes or how they handle massive copyright infringement.
Instead, what Hollywood might look like in the year 2020 could have more to do with how studios develop new “products”… much like they did with the advent of television (when they created sitcoms, game shows, movies of the week, etc.). But this time, future Hollywood products will probably have to integrate and leverage the virtually unlimited digital resource of self-expression and social media.
At the end of the day, what we’re talking about is the emergence of a new medium with its own art form. And whether Hollywood will remain at the epicenter of future cultural production is the big question. For the first time, Hollywood should be concerned like never before simply by virtue of the fact that, this time, the means of production are now in the hands of the audience itself. What this implies, at the very least, is that the studios will have to increasingly democratize their business model. What does that mean exactly? Go ask the CEO of Veoh.
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Written by Robert Young on February 26th, 2007 with no comments.
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I’m a big Slingbox fan but have been puzzled about the company’s business model beyond selling $200 hardware to consumers. So, I figured I’d address this issue while meeting with Greg Wilkes, Sling Media’s VP of sales, earlier today in Toronto. But before I could dive into the business model question, Wilkes spent 15 minutes talking about the new Slingboxes in the market or about to launched. Depending on your needs and budget, Sling plans to have a Slingbox to meet your needs, which is pretty impressive. (If you aren’t familiar with a Slingbox, it’s a device that you attach to your TV and/or satellite-cable box that lets you watch your TV using a computer while in another room or away from home. If you spend $100 on cable or satellite service, buying a $200 Slingbox to get more from that package is a no-brainer.)
So what about the business model? How does a company, which has received $53-million in venture capital, drive sales beyond hardware? The answer is syndication, licensing and advertising deals with content makers - a strategic initiative led by the company’s Sling Catcher service (it’s in beta) that lets people easily capture video clips using their Slingbox, and then share them with friends/family, or the Web community. While the financial details have yet to be worked out, Sling figures it can make money by providing content makers with ways to market and sell their programs, while Sling gets to generate some advertising revenue. Sling Catcher is also a sales and marketing tool because, in theory, people who are sent Sling Catcher video clips could be inspired to buy a Slingbox. Wilkes said Sling is also looking to generate revenue from software sales by putting the Sling player in a variety of devices such as laptops.
I also got a chance to meet Dave Zatz, who writes the Zatz Not Funny blog, which focuses on connected home and digital lifestyle. Zatz started a new gig as Sling’s manager of online communications - proving you never know where blogging will take you. Zatz said Sling plans to launch a corporate blog fairly soon that will feature Sling products, as well as tips, tools and news about digital media. It will be interesting to see how Zatz balances Sling’s blog with his own blog.
Technorati Tags: Sling Media, TV
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Written by Mark Evans on February 23rd, 2007 with no comments.
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Back in the 1990s, you knew things were getting a tad frothy when you found companies with essentially no expertise in a “hot business” expanding into businesses they had little or no clue about. A good case in point: Enron and its broadband push. They thought bandwidth was like energy, and well rest is a well known tragedy.
That’s just one example of 1990s style corporate stupidity. If you go through the archives of The Industry Standard, I am sure you will find more. Well into the first decade of the new century, you see delusionary behavior making a strong comeback.
Today, WalMart, which has enjoyed little success with its previous technology expansion plans, announced its desire to get into the movie download business.
One can’t fault them for trying, after all how much can you squeeze your ecosystem and offer everyday low prices. The landscape, when it comes to movie downloads is no different than the digital music market. Every one came, saw, and whimpered away. (Read: Digital Downloads or Dot Bombs of today)
One should expect the same play-by-play action this time around. There are too many me-too download services out there, muddying the waters and confusing the consumers about which movie or television they can download from where, and why. Which device should they get in order to take their digital purchase along with them.
In this land of confusion, it seems once again Steve Jobs will look like a messiah - a device which works with the videos you download from iTunes store. Simple - unfortunately you can’t say the same about Wal-Mart. As Paul points out on NewTeeVee, “There is a question of what might happen to always low prices when customers start calling up asking for online support. Hard to steer them to one of those friendly greeter-folks through a browser.”
Photo: courtesy of Desktop Wall Paper downloads for the movie Jack Ass 2
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Written by Om Malik on February 7th, 2007 with no comments.
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Has Web 2.0 reached the tipping point where it’s about to stumble into the mainstream? Read/WriteWeb’s Alex Iskold believes this is about to happen based on the activities of mainstream media such as Time and the NYT that are enthusiastically embracing tools such as RSS, deli.ico.us and Digg.
“It appears that we are nearing a tipping point for the mass adoption of prominent web 2.0 services, like digg and del.icio.us,” he said. “Endorsement by mainstream media opens these services up to millions of people who otherwise would either not know about them, or not take them seriously. So these are not just links, these are literally endorsements - or recognition of additional value for mainstream media.”
McManus is definitely on to something given some of the recent conversations I’ve been having with corporate executives who realize this Web 2.0 phenomena is starting to get interesting, and perhaps it’s time to start looking at whether any of them can be adopted. One of the challenges facing the mainstream is figuring out what applications are worth exploring. Do you get into Digg and del.ici.us, or try to find tools that are better, more user-friendly, easier to install, etc. - not an easy task given the growing number of tools/services in each category. But the fact companies are started to talk about Web 2.0 tools is a fairly impressive indication that they’re catching up to the rest of us.
What I tell companies looking at Web 2.0 tools is experiment, dabble, play, and not be disappointed if something that’s rolled out fails to resonate with employees, customers, investors, etc. It’s still early in the game so there is plenty of time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The only way they’re really to going fail is if they choose to ignore Web 2.0 tools.
Written by Mark Evans on February 1st, 2007 with no comments.
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Fox Interactive Media, after a period of relative quiet, is getting acquisitive again. The company is said to be in talks to acquire Strategic Data Corp., a company based in Santa Monica, California, that helps online publishers optimize their online advertising yields.
Talks are at an advanced stage, though no deal has been finalized. Fox routinely talks with various start-ups with an eye on possible acquisition or an investment. Fox Interactive spokesperson declined to comment.
If the deal does close, then it would be the second deal by News Corp.,-Fox Interactive this year. Earlier today, News Corp., took a 10 percent stake in a company called Roo Group; a fact that apparently wasn’t known to the FIM Group, up until this morning, when the Wall Street Journal reported the story.
Strategic Data Corp., (SDC) however would be an ideal acquisition for Fox because it would help them boost the revenues off their MySpace and other web properties. SDC claims that it has technology that “typically achieves network wide revenue increases of 50-150%.”
If true that could give MySpace revenues a rocket like boost. MySpace has notoriously low CPMs. MySpace page views however continue to grow. According to comScore, Fox Interactive had 39.5 billion page views in November, primarily driven by the 38.7 billion pages consumed at MySpace.com.
SDC and FIM have a bit of a history. SDC counts Intermix, the parent company of MySpace (prior to FIM acquisition) as a client. We chortled a little when we read this description of some of their clients.
Our clients include large ad networks, web publishers, and advertising supported software (“adware”) vendors, serving millions of dollars of popup and other ad types from thousands of advertisers across thousands of publishers and sites every month.
Honesty is typically a great policy, except when admitting that you do business with adware vendors.
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Written by Om Malik on January 30th, 2007 with no comments.
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The title of this piece is a quote from Nancy Robinson, VP & Consumer Strategist at Iconoculture (from this recent CNET article). Now that’s a great quote! It’s right up there with something a very close friend/mentor used to say in the early ‘90s… “let’s put the Me back in Media!” (That was the late John Evans, former right-hand exec to Rupert Murdoch.)
I consider the remote control, first commercialized in 1956, one of the greatest inventions in electronics. It’s so ridiculously simple, yet that little device was powerful enough to dramatically impact the evolution of the TV & cable industries. Think about it… without the remote control, there would be no interface to manage hundreds of channels, no serendipitous discovery of new shows enabled by channel-surfing during commercial breaks, no watching two or three shows simultaneously by clicking back and forth between channels.
Without the remote control, watching TV would not be the relaxing, lazy experience we’ve all come to enjoy… it would, instead, be a stressful and annoying experience, having to get up and down, up and down, over and over again.
The titled quote is very apt now, as the emerging interface for video is now the mouse and keyboard (see YouTube). Being “remote” gives way to being in full, interactive control. Content “programming” shifts away from the Hollywood elite to the masses. The critical point here is that we now get to decide what we want to consume, and increasingly do so in a format, and from a menu, that’s not pre-selected by the old media gatekeepers. So just as the adoption of the remote control ultimately fragmented the TV industry, the mouse & keyboard will fragment it even further. In fact, any media that gets digitized and put online is experiencing hyper-fragmentation.
Just look at music and publishing. Via the Internet, these industries are feeling the “remote control” effect. A great example is the rapid obsolescence of “albums” in the music industry, giving way to individual tracks. The same goes for newspapers and magazines, where the value of the curated/edited package gives way to people wanting specific articles that are only relevant to them.
All that said, let’s be careful when we interpret what all that means. For instance, it doesn’t mean that the need/demand for quality content will decrease. For the old media guard, that’s good news. But it does mean that the need/demand for “packaging” and programming, old-fashion style, will rapidly decline. This is where control in the hands of users will have a diametrically opposite, and negative, effect on the control previously held by the traditional gatekeepers. Bundles get unbundled… user control causes hyper-fragmentation.
At the end of the day, the strategic implications for such change towards user control ultimately ends up being an issue of business models. Media industries that built their businesses based on the model of branded packages are now going the way of the horse-and-buggy. With consumers increasingly in control, it’s not only the markets that are fragmenting. It’s also the business models themselves that are being sliced and diced. Monetization techniques must adjust to this new environment as the economic rules are being redefined.
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Written by Robert Young on January 23rd, 2007 with no comments.
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In this morning’s stories on NewTeeVee I mention no less than five companies whose name started with “pod”: PodShow, Podtrac, Podbridge, Podscope, and Podzinger. Seriously, they should just put smush those three letters onto one key on my keyboard! The funny thing is, the two companies I was writing about are named Kiptronic and Nexidia.
The stories: Kiptronic, a video and audio podcast advertising platform, has raised $4 million in Series A funding. And Nexidia, a speech recognition vendor, has what looks like a working model of the technology you’d need to do “AdSense for video.” So, while these companies’ names may not overlap, they have pretty complimentary technology, both taking smart and unobtrusive approaches to online video advertising. We’ll be watching that space closely.
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Written by Liz Gannes on January 23rd, 2007 with no comments.
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Apple Inc. is having a bad day after a spectacular evening when it reported a blowout financial performance. Sold more iPods (21 million), and Macs, banked billions in cash and what not. However, like all of us who have had a bottle of wine (or two), they are waking up with a hangover. The outlook for the second quarter of fiscal 2007 isn’t so rosy, and as a result the stock is down almost 4 percent, and still heading south.
I think Apple is experiencing the down side of over-hyping. By announcing iPhone at the Macworld, the company has put purchasing decisions on hold for millions who were in the market for a high-end iPod. There might be little risk to the lower-end iPod Shuffles and Nanos, but the big profit-making high-end iPods might be at risk.
“We believe this [seasonal] risk is particularly pronounced given our concerns that some consumers may delay iPod purchases ahead of the iPhone lauch,” Bill Shope of J.P. Morgan wrote in a research note to his clients.
The iPhone could pose a bigger challenge to not just Apple but to other handset makers as well. A lot of non-geeks, non Mac fan-boys have emailed or called us, gushing about the iPhone and are willing to wait for the device before buying their next device — an Mp3 player or a mobile phone. Could it prove to be a collective “oops” for the tech business as the “Apple Shock” ripples through the entire ecosystem?
It is also interesting to note that Apple did not announce a single product at Macworld that was available instantly and could add some zip to the Apple revenue stream. Apple TV and Apple Airport are not available till next month. Both are expected to do well, but will they be the two “advils” you need to cure the hangover?
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Written by Om Malik on January 19th, 2007 with no comments.
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Update #2 at 12.35pm, Friday: A Fox Interactive spokesperson just emailed us this statement: “The toll booth rumor is categorically untrue. We have no plans, current or future, to charge people for widgets. We are working on a filter for security reasons – so there may have been a bug due to that…if so, it’s fixed now and working – no more quicktime worm or flash probs from here on out.”
Updated at 4.22 pm, Thursday:A couple of days ago Robert Young hinted that MySpace might be looking to block-and-tackle-and squeeze some of the widget makers in an effort to bolster its bottom line. Well, looks like the day has arrived sooner that we thought. A senior executive from a very prominent widget maker just emailed us and pointed out that:
So as of this morning, new embed tags to MySpace do not work. Photobucket, Youtube, etc… Their site might be broken, but there have been rumors for weeks that they are thinking of blocking everyone. This might be it, or just a test.. “
Our instinct on this one is that it is a test, and FIM is testing how far they can push the widget makers. Saber rattling is the word, but we would appreciate your feedback in realtime. If FIM does decide to erect a toll booth, well the widget economy is going to have its first fiscal crisis. We will follow-up with FIM and find out.
Update: We emailed FIM but have not heard back from them as yet.
Mashable reported that there were some problems with the Flash-based widgets, but they have resumed working. Brad Greenspan, one of the original founders of MySpace
is speaking out this very public muscle flexing. He is involved in a legal tangle with FIM. Here is what Greenspan had to say:
Anyone that understands MySpace and the internet space in general realizes MySpace is a monopoly. A great article identifying this came out this week by John Barrett a director of research at Park Associates. The media needs to wake up, shake off the spell of News Corp and realize that if we don’t educate the public on the abusive practices of News Corp and MySpace, then everyone who uses sites and services online can be considerably harmed.
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Written by Om Malik on January 19th, 2007 with no comments.
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So what’s in a name? On the Web, picking a corporate name can be a painful process. You have to find a name you like, make sure your investors like it, bounce it off some regular folks to see if passes the sniff test, and, if you’re lucky, the URL is available. Then, you have to worry about a lawsuit from someone who may have registered the name at some point or launched a product using the name that no longer exist. Given all these hurdles, I wonder how much pain Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis experienced as they thought about a new name for The Venice Project (a very cool moniker, by the way) before selecting Joost?
What’s a Joost? A quick Google search suggests it’s some kind of programming tool, a truck accessory retailer or an Australian artist (I think). I guess Joost for work for Zennstrom and Friis, although I suspect they could have called their new Internet-based television program “mud” or “dirt”, and it still would have generated the same amount of buzz for a product still in beta. For more, check out CNet and IP Democracy.
Technorati Tags: Joost, Niklas Zennstrom, Skype, TV
Written by Mark Evans on January 16th, 2007 with no comments.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking through an oft-discussed scenario involving MySpace… one that I have good reason to believe is now highly likely in 2007. What if MySpace suddenly decided to put up tollbooths and all the players within the MySpace third-party ecosystem had to start paying the mothership access fees?
Without doubt, a strategic shift in policy by MySpace along such lines could cause significant ripples, if not outright panic, among many of those vested in the MySpace economy.
While I can’t reveal the “deep throat” reasons for my speculation, let’s discuss some of the more publicly-known factors that could influence such of move:
- With the departure of Ross Levinsohn as the President of Fox Interactive Media (“FIM”), the MySpace economy lost its best internal corporate champion and defender of the Web 2.0 “open & share” ethos. While the cofounders of MySpace, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, are also net-savvy and remain ostensibly in charge of the social network, they are no match when squaring off against Peter Chernin (COO of News Corp) and Peter Levinsohn (the new head of FIM). The loss of Ross was a tremendous setback to FIM, and it looks like the pain will be felt by hundreds of entrepreneurs as well.
- Unconcerned by the virtues of operating under Web 2.0 principles, the aforementioned two Peters of the old media guard live by a different ethos: money and control. And as MySpace continues its quest for improved monetization, their objective to deliver a “clean” environment to major advertisers is increasingly aligning with their vigilant efforts to improve safety & security.
- Given such internal momentum, Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam has identified its existing level of openness to its third-party ecosystem as the number one threat to its unifying objectives.The problem here, of course, is the everlasting delicate balance between openness and control. The question is, which is the optimal path to continued growth and sustained profitability? In my view, it would be very premature and self-destructive for MySpace to close up now as social networking monetization schemes are in their infancy and the major innovations are yet to come. Put another way, while extracting rents from its third-party ecosystem may prove financially beneficial in the short term, such a strategic shift may sow the seeds of its destruction in the long run.
- As I’m told, one of the key drivers for MySpace to start charging their ecosystem has to do with YouTube. Specifically, FIM wants to monetize all those YouTube videos that are embedded within MySpace pages. Now that YouTube is owned by Google, internal forecasts are estimating that MySpace can add as much as an additional $500 million in revenues to the existing agreement they have with Google (which is guaranteed at $900 million of revenues over 15 quarters). That’s a lot of cash, and who can blame them for wanting to secure that income stream? But if MySpace starts charging YouTube, do they have to set up tollbooths for everyone else? They’re pounding their heads against the wall on this one.These are vexing issues and I empathize with the management of FIM and MySpace.
- And let’s be clear, erecting tollbooths is not the same as closing up behind walls. It’s a monetization strategy that could conceivably add much to the bottom line — something Murdoch insists of all his companies. At the end of the day, there’s only one thing that we can be certain of: the current relationship between MySpace and YouTube will not continue as is. MySpace will either move to monetize the relationship, or it will cut YouTube off. In either case, it will set a new policy for the third-party ecosystem.
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Written by Robert Young on January 16th, 2007 with no comments.
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The trials and tribulations of AOL are quite well known. Time Warner, perhaps recognizing the inevitable is slowly but surely taking money off the table. It has sliced, diced and pocketed around $3 billion as the company transitions from an “access” to “free” model.
- May 2004: AOL sells Japan business to eAccess for $18.6 million.
- September 2006: AOL sells German broadband business to Telecom Italia for about $853 million.
- September 2006: AOL sells AOL France for $365 million to Neuf Cegetel
- October 2006: AOL UK, the broadband business sold to Carphone Warehouse for $725 million.
- October 2006: AOL sells AOL Call center in Ogden, Utah to Teleperformance USA for an undisclosed amount.
- December 20, 2005: Google buys 5% stake in AOL for $1 billion.
- January 2007: AOL sells paid music service, AOL Music Now to Napster for $15 million, valuing each subscriber at $43 a subscriber. Napster’s 566,000 subscribers are valued at $328 million.
It seems that 2007 will prove to be a challenging year for AOL, as Time Warner contemplates a spin-off. The page views are stagnating and even have started to show a slight dip. For now the company has managed to bring in about $2 billion in revenues every quarter. How long is that going to last? . We will find out in a couple of weeks if the so-called free model is actually working. What are the other portions of the company they can hock to others? Any suggestions?
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Written by Om Malik on January 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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CBS CEO Leslie Moonves’ keynote at CES managed to squeeze in more Web 2.0 buzz words, and viral videos references than I’ve heard all week — the Numa Numa kid, diet coke and mentos, Second Life, YouTube, wikis, avatars, mashups. Well, CBS has been proactive recently in embracing new media, Internet communities, and mobile services, and it was pretty endearing listening to Moonves joke about the Chenbot video, a viral video of his wife’s favorite catch phrase crutch (Julie Chen outed as stiff and repetitive? truly shocking).
CBS also announced a contest with YouTube that will bring user-generated videos to the Super Bowl commercials show, and said it was beta-testing new video clip-sharing software from Sling Media. Read more in the full post over at NewTeeVee.
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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Friday afternoon at Sling Media’s HQ in San Mateo, we got a look at a prototype for one of the first entrants in the bring-Internet-video-to-the-TV race: The SlingCatcher, a sort of Slingbox-in-reverse that should hit the retail shelves sometime this summer, priced at $200 or less.
Handling it quite literally with kid gloves (OK, they were cotton gloves so he didn’t scratch the surface), Sling’s PR director Brian Jaquet lifted the device out of a box and showed it off — with component ports as well as S-video, HDMI and a couple USB ports, as well as Ethernet, the SlingCatcher is ready to sit between your PC and your big screen, to bring those grainy YouTube clips (or maybe something higher definition) to the living room. The unit, about half the size of a basic Slingbox, also has a hard drive on the bottom of the unit, with a USB port for local storage.
While all the details (including the name, which might change between now and then) won’t be revealed until a press conference in Las Vegas Sunday night, the Sling folks gave us a green light to talk now; according to Jamie Odell, Sling’s VP of product marketing, the SlingCatcher is different from other digital media servers because it just relays whatever is on your PC screen to your TV, without file conversions.
“It works completely independent of how the media was encoded,” Odell said of the SlingCatcher, “so you don’t have to worry about what file format it is.” Though it’s not a wireless router, the SlingCatcher will have wireless support, so you can send material via your local WiFi net. It also works with a regular Slingbox to let you send a cable signal or DVR material from one TV to another in your house, or at a remote location — so instead of watching those movies on the road on your laptop, by carrying around a SlingCatcher you could instead watch them on the hotel or condo’s TV.
Sling has a couple other tricks up its sleeve, which we should hear about tomorrow night, so stay tuned.
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Written by Paul Kapustka on January 7th, 2007 with no comments.
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With GUBA facing an upheaval in the boardroom, the company has put itself for sale. The San Francisco-based online video startup has hired a high powered banker to shop it around. Our investment banking sources say that Blake Warner of Thomas Weisel Partners is the man looking to find a new home for the company. Warner was one of the main bankers who helped shop MySpace to News Corp., and is described as someone with considerable connections in the media and technology community. Our sources close to GUBA were able to confirm that GUBA indeed is for sale.
Our sources say that there is considerable interest from a few tech companies and a handful of media companies, primarily because of Johnny, a digital fingerprinting developed by GUBA. For that reason alone, the company could fetch between $25 to $30 million, our sources say.
Johnny allows the company to spot and stop illegal content from cropping up amongst uploaded videos. It is one of the main reasons why GUBA has been able to convince large media companies to partner with them and sell television and movie downloads.
Digital video fingerprinting is an area of intense interest. Yesterday, YouTube got into a fracas over a sex video of a Brazilian soccer player’s wife. Earlier this week, Macrovision bought Mediabolic for about $43 million, hoping to extend its copyright protection and digital rights business into new digital devices such as PVRs and set-top boxes. For GUBA, interest in this space could offer a timely parachute.
There’s no denying that the San Francisco-based company is facing a crisis, as more executives have followed co-founder and chief executive officer Tom McInerney out of the door. Roman Arzhintar, vice president of strategy at GUBA and Bart Myers, senior vice president of product development, soon followed, citing their desire to start yet another Internet video company.
GUBA’s current crisis is also a reflection of company’s confused business model. The company could not shake off its adult content roots, never raised venture capital and could not leverage its business partnerships with large media companies into a meaningful position in the hyper competitive online video market. Straddling two distinct businesses - user generated videos and premium video downloads - GUBA could not decide on one.
The user-generated video-sharing business move was prompted by the growing popularity of YouTube, and GUBA betting that it could leverage its high Alexa ranking (mostly because of a profitable adult content business) into becoming a rival to Chad-and-Steve’s baby. The high Alexa ranking was also a justification for the company to stick to the GUBA name, a move that can be deemed a strategic blunder. GUBA, like a reformed bent nose, hasn’t been able to shake off its questionable past.
The recent changes have come as a result of disagreement over the direction of the company should take. While McInerney was in favor of selling the company, the engineering side of the house wants to soldier on. “I think we can all acknowledge that YouTube has won the big prize,” McInerney bluntly told News.com. He is said to have argued that in the post Google-YouTube world, small companies need a big brother, someone with deep pockets and major media company connections.
The pragmatic McInerney wanted to cash in the chips before the music stopped, which might have been logic too cold for others. But with Warner in charge of selling the company, McInerney might get his wish after all.
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Written by Om Malik on January 6th, 2007 with no comments.
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Google confirmed its investment in Chinese P2P startup Xunlei according to various reports. We wrote about the investment in early December. The New York Times reports that Google invested $5 million for a 4% stake, which means Xunlei is valued at $125 million — we were pretty close when we put the pre-money valuation at $100 million. The NYT also says that Xunlei.com will use Google’s search capabilities.
China-based analysts at Pacific Epoch know more and say:
According to an unnamed insider, Xunlei recently received US$20 million in investment, in which Google invested US$5 million. Ceyuan Ventures, Morningside Ventures, IDGVC and Fidelity Asia Ventures invested the remaining US$15 million.
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Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on January 6th, 2007 with no comments.
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To much ado, Daylife has has officially moved into the news aggregation market. (See Michael Arrington’s critique). One thing Daylife has is cache given its investors include Arrington, Craig Newmark and Jeff Jarvis but I do wonder about its ability to differentiate itself from Topix, Newsvine, Google News, Tailrank, etc. I spent some time on Daylife yesterday, and it has some interesting features that hint at its potential. In particular, I like how photographs and related links are displayed, and how you can “train” Daylife to aggregate the news you want to see by using its “My World” feature.
One thing I do wonder about is where Daylife gets its news - something Scott Karp also questions. I did a bunch of searches and, to be honest, the results were, at best, average. To be fair, it is still early days. Jarvis promises a number of improvements will be forthcoming, including the implementation of RSS.
Daylife’s launch got me thinking about how Gabe “Techmeme” Rivera plans to expand his news aggregation empire, which now covers technology, baseball, politics and gossip. Will Rivera move into other areas such as health or business, and will he bolster the amount of advertising on his sites?
Note: For a more in-depth review on Daylife, check out ZDnet’s Dan Farber (an “unabashed Techmeme fan”), who describes Daylife as “listless” (ouch!).
Technorati Tags: Media, Techmeme
Written by Mark Evans on January 6th, 2007 with no comments.
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The most important market challenge for social networks in 2007 can be summarized in three words: monetization, monetization, and monetization.
Regardless of whether social networks will splinter into niches and verticals (e.g. sports, pets, moms, teenage girls, etc.), regardless of whether social networks adopt interoperability (e.g. OpenID), regardless of whether individual profile pages morph into widgetized and personalized start-pages, regardless of whether 2007 will be the year that social networking goes mobile… all such market development activities will prove secondary to a much more fundamental issue.
And that issue is whether social networks can innovate on the revenue generation side of its business model sufficiently to pull its average ad rates out of “junk” status into “premium” rate levels (e.g. from today’s $0.50 CPMs into something closer to $10 CPMs).
Towards such ends, there are four critical success factors that any innovation in monetization scheme for social networks must adhere to:
Social networks, and online communities in general, are terrible platforms for advertising formats designed for any type of call to action. As such, Google Adwords-type direct-response PPC ads have proven highly ineffective. On the contrary, the significant opportunity for social networks is to become highly-efficient branding vehicles. In fact, it is my prediction that social networks will prove themselves to be the most effective brand communication platforms on the Internet.
As we all know by now, social networks are a new media for self-expression and communications. And since the core revolves around people (not products), it is vital that any innovation in brand communication include the active and explicit participation of those people within the process itself. In other words, people themselves are the platforms, capable of message amplification and network effects, and they should be treated as brand re-communicators, not just end-receivers. So just don’t advertise at them, advertise with and through them.
Given the extreme pressure to monetize with low CPMs, many of today’s social networks are way too cluttered with ads. Virtually every pageview that is generated carries an ad. This is highly wasteful and counterproductive, for both users and advertisers. Instead, improved methods of monetization yielding higher CPMs, must correspond with a reduction in the volume of ads. To some extent, old-fashioned artificial scarcity must be imposed on available ad inventory in order to achieve improved performance and satisfaction for all parties involved.
Scalability is key; therefore, automation is critical. Google represents the best comp here. Every scale-enabling innovation that has been built into their Adwords & Adsense platform, from Do-It-Yourself purchasing to auction-based pricing to placement by performance, even the fact that they take credit cards, are all key reference points for anyone seeking to optimize monetization within social networks. The need for scalability also implies the capability to service the needs of smaller advertisers, alongside the big Madison Ave spenders.
The bottom line of all this for anyone running a social network already, or if you are in the process of building a new one… make sure that everything you do is designed to maximize monetization, as the difference between success and failure will rest on this metric. For instance, if you are creating a niche social network, do so in order to fetch high CPMs. If you are going to widgetize profiles, make sure it results in an enhanced path to monetization. 2005 and 2006 were years that proved that social networks were not a passing fad, but superior monetization is what will prove key for social networks in 2007. Consequently, it’s likely that M&A activity will also accrue towards those who are able to crack this nut.
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Written by Robert Young on January 5th, 2007 with no comments.
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I should be upset that News.com wrote about GUBA CEO Tom McInerney leaving the company today, without even acknolwedging that NewTeeVee.com got the story first. Oh well, that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes.
Nevertheless, I was actually glad to read the interview - an honest and a realistic assessment of the online video space. Here is how McInerney assesses the market. (Some of the details come from previous conversations with him.)
- YouTube won the big prize, everybody else is looking for a consolation prize.
- No more billion dollar buyouts of video start ups.
- Sell now or cry later.
- Get big (media) brothers or get out of business.
- More GUBA executives will leave.
As a reporter, there is nothing more frustrating that talking to a chief executive who offers you canned statements, or politically correct and bland quotes (aka PR drivel), and of course a lot of spin.
Tom has been a straight shooter, and fairly candid whenever I spoke with him - and we often did about the state of online video, Internet startup scene and why New York is more fun. When I wrote about the coming video shakeout back in July 2006, Tom said, “There’ll be a lot of casualties in the next year.” No wonder he got out when he did!
Written by Om Malik on December 30th, 2006 with no comments.
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Looks like the much vaunted deal between Edelman PR and Technorati is all but done, according to Handelsblatt, a German news daily.
Wolfgang Luenenbuerger-Reidenbach, the head of online conversations at Edelman Germany (and a blogger himself), confirmed my information that both companies won’t renew their partnership which is about to run out at year end anyway.
This is not such a good December for both Technorati and Edelman. Google beat Technorati and surged ahead as the blog search leader. Edelman is dealing with the Microsoft Vista issue.
Steve Rubel from Edelman adds: “The European sites developed in French, German and Italian are operational through the end of January. Work on the Asian language sites - Korean and Chinese - has ceased. The partnership was never set to renew.”
Written by Om Malik on December 30th, 2006 with no comments.
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Shenzhen Xunlei Network Technology, the Chinese P2P video software company has confirmed that Google will become an investor in the company, according to a Bloomberg news report. The confirmation from a company official comes nearly 20-days after Katie has reported on the pending investment. Bloomberg story is scant on details for now. If you want to read more about Xunlei, check out Katie’s report.
Written by Om Malik on December 28th, 2006 with no comments.
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At b5media, pageviews are a core element of how we assess our blogs and how we appeal to advertisers. So it’s interesting to watch the fireworks happening within the blogosphere about whether the pageview is relevant anymore. Some of the issues involved the different methodologies and approaches used by analytics service providers such as comScore, Alexa and Hitwise to count traffic. Then, there are stickier issues such as Ajax, which don’t generate page views but nevertheless involve people visiting a Web site. Ars Technica offers up a thorough summary of what’s happening, including some thoughts on comScore’s goal to develop tools that include Ajax-related traffic.
“While page views will not altogether cease to be a relevant measure of a site’s value, it’s clear that there is an increasing need to consider page views alongside newer, more relevant measures,” said comScore CEO Dr. Magid Abraham, president and CEO of comScore Networks, added:. comScore is proud to continue carrying the torch as an industry innovator. With the development of a new suite of metrics that will effectively address the Web 2.0 landscape by including enhanced measures of user engagement and advertising exposure. We will be introducing these new metrics to the industry in 2007.”
Steve Rubel, who has been touching upon the pageview debate recently, weighs in that comScore is cooked, and that Quantcast is going “eat comScore’s lunch“. What I like about Rubel’s argument is this statement: “Comscore needs to wake up and realize that we’re in a Long Tail world where top 10 lists matter less. Marketers want to know about the influence circles within the niches that matter to them - and those niches are often tiny.”
This is particularly relevant to b5 because we’re a class long tail network with dozens of niche blogs with loyal readers that are valuable to advertisers looking to reach a particular audience. This approach has been a key part of b5’s strategy since the network was spawned last year. This means we’re focused on the value of our channels as opposed to single properties but we think this approach is valuable and relevant to our consituents: bloggers, readers and advertisers.
At the end of the day, the most important thing for advertisers looking to put more of their budgets online is having a standard or standards that they can trust to give them a better grasp of who’s out there and what they’re doing. This is going to be an interesting discussion to watch going forward.
Written by Mark Evans on December 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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The Venice Project, the much-awaited Internet TV project from the founders of Skype, started bringing in outside beta testers today. The beta program will be viral, with each user able to distribute invites to new testers. As soon as we give it a spin we’ll do some more in depth coverage here and on NewTeeVee.
Writes Janus Friis on his blog,
We set out to try to merge the best of TV and the best of the Internet and I think we have just taken a big step on a long journey. For a few months we have been quietly testing with a small circle of people. Now, we’re going to expand that circle – with more and more people getting invited. If you want to take it for a spin, get an invitation from an existing beta tester.
From Om: Someone who got to use the service wasn’t very kind. “To sum up, very bad interface, no text description of what the buttons mean, quality of video goes up and down very much, not really much better than a good flash file that you size up 250%.”
Exclusive screenshots beneath the fold:
Written by Liz Gannes on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
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Will pro TV networks kill web creativity? It’s a valid question and the sparring is fun to watch. But ultimately there is a much bigger, more interesting story — about the bold new places NewTeeVee will take us, where video has not been before.
Read the rest of this post over on our NewTeeVee site, where you can also find out how to upload Webcam shots directly to YouTube, a new way to add text captions to online video, and why CBS and YouTube are filtering and censoring some reader comments. All in a weekend’s work in the new land of the tube.
Written by Paul Kapustka on December 12th, 2006 with no comments.
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It’s always about the money, I like to say, because money is the great motivator. Now it is time to change that and say - in the world of consumer Internet media, it is always about the eyeballs that beget the page views that bring the money. That explains why the great New York Times is embracing new social news sharing sites - Digg, Facebook and Newsvine - to which its readers can submit the stories for further dissemination and discussion.
“The discussions are happening on the other sites, but there is still a way to link back to the (NYTimes.com) site,” Christine Topalian, manager of strategic planning and business development at NYTimes.com said to the Seattle PI. “So it is really to build awareness around the articles with users who may or may not have heard about the article.”
Discussions or not, it is about capturing them page views, and it is not a bad move, though I question how much traffic Facebook and Newsvine can drive to the Times. Digg is skewed highly in favor of technology stories, where the Times, well it is in New York. The fact that Times Select and staff blogs are not included in this “social news” makeover shows that the Times still doesn’t know what really gets people talking.
Still, cannot knock them for trying to do the right thing. Not like some other companies that are using dirty tricks like “pop ups” to buy traffic, and sell expensive advertising. The New York Times (there they are again), Entrepreneur.com, ForbesAutos, Condenast’s Concierge.com and Heavy.com are using pop-ups to prop up their traffic.
We all hate pop-ups, but these guys have done it one better. Instead of serving pop-up ads, they are serving up their content in pop-ups. “You would hope that publishers of high-quality content would use advertising techniques that were in keeping with that,” Scott Symonds, vice president for media at Agency.com to the New York Times, said in reference to the tactics adopted by the aforementioned sites.
Amen to that - but then it is about the eyeballs and the page views and the money…
Written by Om Malik on December 12th, 2006 with no comments.
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Fred Wilson has come to the conclusion pre-rolls (ads before a video starts playing) are dead on arrival; while post-rolls (ads played after a video are promising because they're "well targeted and entertaining". He's wrong because its way to early arrive at this conclusion given we're arguably only 11 months into the online video revolution.
To date, pre-rolls have failed to resonate because advertisers are approaching video clips in the same way they approach traditional television. This is misguided because consumers are willing to watch a 15-second or 30-second ad if it's before, during or after a 30-minute or hour-long program. In the online video world where clips last 30 seconds to five minutes, showing a 15 or 30-second ad using a traditional approach before a short video is a disconnect with the medium.
What the advertising industry needs to do is re-calibrate its approach to online video (and pre-rolls and post-rolls) by realizing ads need to be shorter, punchier and more aligned with most video content, which tends to be bubble gum-like entertainment. Look at the way that Rocketboom has made post-rolls part of its modus operandi by creating its own ads, which also tend to be entertaining. The ad industry needs to embrace an edgier and shorter approach to online video spots. They - and Fred Wilson - will discover that pre-rolls work if you do them right.
Note: One more thought about online advertising in general. One of the challenges facing advertisers and advertisers critics is getting their head around the fact it's still early, early days, and there's still an awful lot of experimenting and testing happening. This makes it very difficult to come up with a sweeping generalization about many of the things happening online.
Technorati Tags: Advertising, Video
Written by Mark Evans on December 11th, 2006 with no comments.
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Edgeio has one of those blogs posts that forces you to take some time to digest it. It's a post based on the idea the gap between the giant portals (Yahoo, AOL, et al) and the rest of the world will shrink/has been shrinking - and we're entering an era of de-portalization (a term coined by Fred Wilson). For bloggers and blog networks, it's a thought-provoking thesis because it suggests that people will consume information in different ways and go to different places to do it. The question is if it's not the portals where people are going to get what they want, then will a new mass market vehicle emerge to supplant them, or will the audience disintegrate much like the TV universe has splintered in 500+ channels? For more, check out Scott Karp (who's back in the blogging saddle after being strangely quiet for awhile) and Mathew Ingram.
Written by Mark Evans on December 11th, 2006 with no comments.
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Can a tiger change its stripes? Can you turn water into wine? Can Ray Ozzie and Steve Berkowitz transform Microsoft into an Internet company from its Windows/Office roots? This is a question highlighted by the New York Times, which looks at Microsoft efforts to beef up is online operations through initiatives such as Live. At the risk of under-playing the dominance of Internet Explorer and the popularity of MSN.com, Microsoft isn't an Internet company and, frankly, it will never be seen as anything else other than a giant software company with some interesting side projects (e.g. Xbox).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it is what it is even though Microsoft has been struggling to convince people otherwise for the past decade. If you take a step back, Microsoft's track record beyond Windows and Office has been, at best, mediocre. A good example is television where it has toiled for years and spent billions of dollars to establish a foothold in the living room. Microsoft has acquired stakes in cable companies, purchased start-ups (anyone remember WebTV?) and, most recently, tried to developed an IP-TV platform for carriers. But after all this time, money and effort, Microsoft only has a modest presence in the TV or video markets.
Microsoft's problem - and challenge - is the Internet isn't part of the corporate DNA so it's hard to really be a vibrant and innovative Internet player when it's not really who you are. A part of this reality is Microsoft continues to make billions of dollars from selling Windows and Office. It's the business so Microsoft's lack of success in diversifying into other businesses is no different than what many other companies have faced over the years. Microsoft, however, is fortunate its core business continues to rumble along as opposed to being forced to diversify because the core business is eroding.
What Microsoft and investors need to accept is Microsoft will continue to be a software company with a Web presence as long as its continue to operate in its present form. If, however, the company decided to break itself into independent operations (Windows/Office, Xbox, MSN/Internet) then it might be a different story because each entity would have its own core mission and raison d'etre. In the meantime, Microsoft will attempt to fight the good Internet fight while chasing after dyed-in-the-wool Internet rivals such as Google and Yahoo.
For more on Berkowitz, News.com recently did a Q&A with him. By the way, read what you will into this quote Berkowitz gave the NYT about life at Microsoft compared with his previous employer, Ask.com: "I’m used to being in companies where I am in a rowboat and I stick an oar in the water to change direction. Now I’m in a cruise ship and I have to call down, Hello, engine room!. Sometimes the connections to the engine room aren’t there."
Technorati Tags: Google, Microsoft
Written by Mark Evans on December 10th, 2006 with no comments.
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Now that Yahoo has announced its reorg, many are wondering and speculating as to what the ailing Internet giant might do in terms of M&A. Put another way, will Yahoo rely on acquisitions to fix its problems and plug up its holes? Or will it depend on its internal resources, now that they have streamlined for improved execution, to strengthen its strategic weaknesses. Given the company’s weak stock price, itís much more likely that they will opt for the latter path if at all possible.
Take Facebook as an example. Rumors of on-again, off-again acquisition talks notwithstanding, Yahoo must take steps to gain a leadership position in social networking. As the Internet’s largest community and communications company, the fact that Yahoo is not a leader in social networking represents one of the biggest missed opportunities in our industry’s history.
Just as Viacom’s Tom Freston got fired by Sumner Redstone for losing the MySpace deal to Rupert Murdoch, someone’s head should roll at Yahoo for the fact that they have virtually no meaningful presence in social networking.
But what to do? Should Yahoo take the highly dilutive plunge and buy Facebook for $1 Billion-plus? In my opinion, no, they should not — there is an alternative that is better, and a lot cheaper.
Yahoo should immediately clone Facebook. But as not Facebook is today; rather, as Facebook was before they opened up. In other words, Yahoo should develop and launch a social network designed exclusively for college and high school students. This market opportunity, which is the exact same opportunity that Facebook exploited several years ago, is now available once again. It’s a low-hanging fruit in the social networking space, one that would be very easy for Yahoo to pluck off. Cloning the original Facebook would also shore up one of Yahoo’s most glaring weaknesses it would bring back the 14-22 student demo.
For a company like Yahoo, social networking is not a market that they should buy into. Yes, Murdoch needed to, being a traditional media company with no real Internet competency. Even Google’s acquisition of YouTube made sense from the perspective of core competency since Google is notoriously bad when it comes to anything “social.”
But for Yahoo, social media is as natural a market as they come. It already possesses everything it needs to lead and succeed in that space. But they got lost during the last few years. Bringing in someone like Lloyd Braun to head up their Media Group was indicative of how misguided they were. Don’t get me wrong.
Braun is a tremendous TV executive. After all, he’s the one at ABC that green-lighted “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives”. But inside Yahoo, when the big opportunity in the market was clearly social media, it was inevitable that someone like Braun would himself become lost and desperate.
Written by Robert Young on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
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It's still early days but I think Google's move into the radio advertising business could revolutionize (or perhaps evolve) the way the industry does business. In a test project, Google is providing 20 AdWords customers with access to more than 730 stations, which run ads in more than 260 U.S. markets. The AdWords system is linked through Google's dMarc, division, which was acquired for as much as $1.13-billion earlier this year (it was Google's biggest deal before YouTube came along). According to CNet, the 20 selected customers will see a new "audio ads" tag when they log into the AdWords system, which allows them to bid on air spots and target their ads by geography, station type, listener demographics and time of day. Given that the radio business has operated in much the same way for decades, Google is trying to implement a huge new approach to selling advertising. It could be the wave of the future or it could fall flat on its face. Nevertheless, give Google credit for trying something that could potentially be extremely disruptive. As well, the beta test and Google's deal with BSkyB are more evidence of the company's strategic thrust into new markets beyond the online paid-search business.
Written by Mark Evans on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
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The Financial Post's Sean Silcoff has an interesting column looking at how Canada's private radio industry is thriving at a time when other media - newspapers, television, magazines - are struggling with the Internet's growing popularity. Silcoff points out radio listenership has remained steady at 532 million hours over the past six years, while sales have climbed by 5.6% a year over the past decade. Meanwhile, operating margins climbed to 21% - 3.5x the level in 1995.
So has commercial radio in Canada managed to thrive at a time when competition has increased from the Web, satellite-radio and the iPod? Maybe, it's the local nature of radio - the fact it provides people with local weather, traffic conditions and news; stuff that the Web and satellite-radio struggle to provide. While local search is all the rage these days as Google and others such as Ask.com look to expand, the job of providing local information has continued to effectively handled by local-based media.
This is something newspapers need to grasp as they look for a new recipe for success. Rather than trying to compete with Google.com or CNN, newspapers should put a lot more resources on local coverage in their print and digital publications. It's this kind of content that will keep them relevant to readers and advertisers. In Toronto, the Toronto Star's efforts to provide even more local coverage has been abundantly evident in recent months. This is a strategy more newspapers will have to embrace going forward.
Written by Mark Evans on December 8th, 2006 with no comments.
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The widespread criticism of the Yahoo reorganization announced on Tuesday has been a one sided affair - outsiders looking in. Much of the criticism while warranted, has become to personal. Was getting rid of CEO Terry Semel, the quick fix the erstwhile Internet leader needs? Nearly 36% of our readers didn’t think it was the going to help, versus 27% who thought it would help turn the ship around.
What do the Yahoos think? We did not hear much from inside of the company, up until last night when we came across a post on Jonathan Strauss’ blog. It is perchance that we stumbled upon this post. Strauss, who has a little transcript of the webcast, defends the company’s recent actions, and feels optimistic about the future.
At the next all-hands. Just as a reminder. I’m sorry I didn’t do it today. I’m gonna put up there all of the press reports on how Yahoo! was going out of business 5 years ago. And of how we were gonna be swallowed up by AOL, owned by Time-Warner, and by Microsoft, and by everybody else. And Yahoo! looked like it had a dim future. Well those headlines, of course, were used to wrap a lot of fish in a lot of people’s houses, as the expression goes. And they were all full of shit, and they had no idea what we had planned for them. And they do not now as well!
“So, we could read about how I’m gonna join some retirement home. And we could read about how the company doesn’t have a vision. And we could read about how we can’t do this and we can’t do that. Trust me, they will be as full of shit this time as they were last time.” (Terry Semel, Yahoo CEO on the webcast.)
There is a tiny little paragraph at the end of Strauss’ post which tells you that there is a pocket of resistance (so to speak) inside Yahoo, which sees the big picture clearly.
I hate to break it to all of you, but the Internet isn’t about technology. Cisco is a technology company, Yahoo! is a consumer services company — the fact that those services are delivered via IP is just a detail. The people who fault Terry for not knowing how IP switching works might as well have criticized Ted Turner for not knowing how to install a cable head-end.
Thank you! No all Yahoo has to do is stop obsessing with Google. Just focus on five things: make email the best experience in the world, make Yahoo finance better, use blogs and social media and build great media destinations, and of course, make My.Yahoo.com better.
I personally think of Yahoo as a consumer brand, not a technology company. Yahoo is a media company. It knows how to aggregate content pretty well, and it has the audience & has the ability to monetize it well. (My post from yesterday)
PS: We met Strauss before at the Widgets Live conference, and as a result we have him in our feed reader. If there are other Yahoo employees who would like to send me their blog links, please email me, so I can stay in touch with you.
Written by Om Malik on December 8th, 2006 with no comments.
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In a press release ("Yahoo! Re-Aligns Organization to More Effectively Focus on Key Customer Segments and Capture Future Growth Opportunities") that could become a classic case study for public relations students, Yahoo has cleared the decks for Susan Decker to become its new COO by firing Dan Rosensweig. You figure a media company such as Yahoo would figure out a more elegant way than issuing a 1,500+ word press release. Of course, Decker's ascension to COO has been the word's worst kept secret so you figure Rosenweig isn't too broken up about getting canned less than three weeks before Christmas. Tom Foremski raises a good point the speculation Rosenveig was the one who leaked the "Peanut Butter Manifesto" a couple weeks ago, while Paul Kedrosky wonders why co-founder D
