Category: Media/Tech Business Models

That’s what this NY Daily News story claims. Now that would be something. I think the Time Warner guys would sooner run AOL into the ground than give it back to Case and risk his turning it around, and making them look hapless twice.

Last Friday I had a chance to stop by the Palo Alto offices of Topix, in many ways a classic internet start up – Valley-based, run by a serial entrepreneur, good buzz – but it didn’t take long for me to sense that something was different this time. Before I get into that, let me first give you a few thoughts on the service itself, and the broader role it plays in the search business.

Background: Topix was founded by six guys, four of whom went to high school together in Pittsburgh. No, I’m not making that up. Most of them are IT/Valley vets, CEO Rich Skrenta founded NewHoo and sold it to Netscape a mere six months afterwards, then morphed it into the now famous Open Directory Project. But Netscape was sold to AOL, and after a while Rich got bored (I assume) and left with the intent of starting a company he could “work into my 40s on.” I like the sound of that.

Topix is an internet media play. More specifically, it’s a local advertising media play. The service takes a crawl-and-index approach to a vast array of internet news sources, then runs the resultant stew through a metadata engine which tags every news story with location and subject data. Topix then builds more than 150,000 topic- and location-specific pages, pages that live comfortably between the great gunky mass of search results, on the one hand, and the impersonal morass of most news sites on the other.

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Long profile of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel with integrated Yahoo back story and prediction that Yahoo will make it to the Fortune 500 list in five years or less. One intersting note: Yahoo used to be driven by the engineers, but has outgrown that approach. Sound familiar?

I believe the article may be behind a sub wall, if so, here are a few excerpts:

“Everyone talks about what he did with movies and entertainment,” Yang says, “but what he really did was pioneer how to take a piece of content and get it out there. He has a distribution mentality, which at the end of the day is what Yahoo does on the Internet. And so when we started talking about Yahoo generically as a distribution company, we both just went, ‘Gosh, this is going to be really cool.’ “…

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Good to see major papers getting on board with the “broadcast is dead” meme: Media Giants Need To Learn to Sing A New Tune (reg req’d).

Excerpt:

….it is only a matter of time before millions of consumers will be doing things like creating custom concert videos of their favorite artists. They’ll mix and match video from TV shows and DVD recordings which they (hopefully) will have acquired legally — much as music fans have been creating custom music discs and tapes for years.

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Dan Rosensweig (COO Yahoo, at far left) and Jonathan Miller (head of AOL, near left) have joined Eric onstage. A pretty lengthy discussion of the role of social networking in their businesses, including Orkut. Eric acknowledge that Orkut was strategic to Google’s ability to know more about its users so as to provide better service to them, and when it comes out of beta, it’ll be integrated in some way into Google. Miller says he sees social networking as not having its own business model, but rather as BASF – making other businesses better. Dan (and later Eric agreed) said that social networking is a way to make sense of a world that has 10-20 billion pages that are all indexed and available – providing a context for better and more intelligently filtered information. The entire conversation is pitched in the context – provided by Esther, who is very engaged this year so far – that these companies are playing in a market that is several orders of magnitude larger than the IT business – what Eric called the information/media business. Architecting the information space is their main product, they agreed, and that is a huge business which is in the early innings.

The details are out: AOL owns warrants to exercise 1.9 million or so shares of Google at a price of $22 million. A quick calculation says that’s a price of roughly $11.50 a share. This is due to a deal the two companies struck as part of their 2002 partnership. It came to light in Time Warner’s recent 10-K filing.

So…if Google goes all Priceline on its opening day and stays there (there’s probably a lock up on selling), that stock just might be worth ten times that amount, or more than $200 million. About as much as AOL is spending on marketing this year….

Note: Yahoo also owns shares – a lot more – in Google.

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Feedburner purports to solve a problem which I noted here. Should a blogger know who is reading them via RSS? As a publisher who has had loads of email newsletters, I like knowing who is subscribed. But shouldn’t RSS readers have the right to anonymity?

Feedburner, which I heard of from Fred Wilson, creates a feed which provides information on readers back to the publisher. Seems to me, publishers can give the reader a choice, and provide more service if the reader chooses to declare the relationship.

From the site:

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I’m tired of the prideful, ignorant, and painfully slow death over at AOL. How can you have the largest ISP/content site in the world, at a time when the entire sector is boooming, and manage to fuck it up so masterfully? The stink is starting to rise not from AOL, but from the folks really calling the shots, the top brass at Time Warner. And that means something must give, and soon. Time Warner is starting to realize, they can’t do any better with AOL than Case and Pittman could back in 2001.

It seems to me like the Time Warner execs, who clearly are still pissed that AOL bought them in the first place, are either killing it through supremely benign neglect, or are trapped in a morass of their own pride. Let me state what seems obvious: the right thing to do is call a spade a spade, and spin AOL out. The folks running Time Warner have other things to do, and they clearly are the wrong people to be driving strategy at AOL. The folks who report to them and run AOL on a day to day basis need independence – otherwise they simply will not be able to compete with Yahoo and Google. Note to the TW Board: swallow your pride and cut AOL loose. Just do it.

Readers know I distrust Comcast. Salon today runs a roundup of why. It’s sub required, but I think you can also get in by watching an ad….