From CenterNetworks’ coverage of the Conversational Marketing Summit:
“In other news, ultra popular, been around forever, hardware news, reviews and community forum site AnandTech has joined the FM publisher network. AnandTech reports 8 million monthly users with over 55 million pageviews. I guess this is a good replacement for Ars Technica which has left FM after being acquired by Conde Nast.”
“A month after announcing his resignation from PC World magazine, tech journalism veteran Harry McCracken has announced a new venture: Technologizer, an online destination for general technology news and analysis.
“The new site will be launched later this summer in conjunction with advertising start-up Federated Media Publishing; founder John Battelle is himself a veteran of the tech press, having co-founded Wired magazine and founded The Industry Standard in the 1990s.
“Federated will also work to develop the site, in addition to providing ads, much as it did for Boing Boing Gadgets and Webb Alert. Technologizer will join the company’s ‘Tech Federation’ division alongside blog powerhouses such as TechCrunch and GigaOM.”
It’s sad when relationships fall apart, and this movie looks to be a serious tear-jerker. You know the story — Advertiser doesn’t listen, offers coupons and a bigger logo when he senses trouble, but Consumer will have none of it, she’s done. The producer credit is “Microsoft Advertising.”
In this week’s New Yorker, financial-page writer James Surowieki offers a pessimistic outlook on the CNET-CBS marriage.
First, he argues that a good partnership strategy is often better than an owned and operated (O&O) approach:
“Merger mania also rests on what you might call the fallacy of ownership — the assumption that you have to own a company to make money from its properties. In fact, much of what mergers are supposed to accomplish can be achieved through partnerships and alliances. Google has made deals to handle searches and advertising for companies like A.O.L. and I.A.C., giving it access to their customers without the hassle of an acquisition. And I.B.M. has, in recent years, marketed the products of its competitors Sun Microsystems and Novell, enabling it to expand its offerings and its potential customer base. If CBS and CNET had simply agreed to cross-promote each other’s brands and distribute each other’s content, CBS would have had many of the benefits of merging without the costs.”
Second, he suggests that the merger makes the most sense if the gameplay is layoffs and cost-savings:
“There are, of course, situations in which acquisitions do make sense. According to a recent meta-analysis of a number of merger studies, mergers that rely more on cost-cutting — combining back-office operations, eliminating redundancies, and so on — than on promises of vast growth are more likely to be successful. (The merger of J. P. Morgan and Bank One, for instance, led to more than three billion dollars in annual cost savings.)”
Emily Bazelon ponders the ethics of blogging about your kids (see Slate), and gets some advice from Dooce’s Heather Armstrong:
“Armstrong’s approach is a common one among parent-scribes: You caricature your kid a bit, picking out his funny or more outrageous habits, but your parenting struggles are the real subject, and you’re the butt of all the jokes. (And your spouse is the font of all wisdom, on the theory that flattery helps.) You mine your kid for material, but you tell yourself that certain categories of behavior are off-limits.”
That’s what the New York Post did yesterday. “Today’s New York Post is greener with less paper and fewer ads. Enjoy.”
Actually, I bet the Post made more money yesterday by dropping a bunch of standard ads in exchange for a more lucrative sponsorship idea. Great move on all fronts. Less advertising clutter, so the ads will likely to work better for the sponsor, the cable channel Planet Green. Readers, I bet, also prefer the lighter advertising mix. And, hey, you can’t dispute the claim that fewer total newspaper pages is better for the tree population.
The trees may be safer, but don’t count on the Post going soft on its other victims.
Social Media’s Seth Goldstein posits that sponsored questions are to social media advertising what keywords are to search marketing: the ad unit that’s native to the user experience. And the performance metric will become “cost per conversation.”
We announced this morning the newest addition to our “tech federation” of sites, DeveloperShed.
“The sites attract 6 million unique visitors and 27 million page views per month and are growing rapidly, with an enormously valuable audience. More than 60% of the DeveloperShed audience will make or influence IT decisions, have purchasing authority for their company, and will purchase hardware, software or other products for personal use.”
VentureBeat scooped the story. (Ok, disclosure: Matt Marshall and I are friends and VentureBeat is part of the FM family, so I didn’t exactly get in the way of his scoop.) But VB continues to have doubts about FM’s long-term viability:
“Federated is in a bind, I told Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards, if its properties keep growing up, and getting acquired by others. In other words, the more successful Federated is in creating business for its properties, the more it is grooming those properties for an eventual sale to a hungry acquirer — and the vicious cycle continues.”
It doesn’t look quite so bleak to me. Here’s what I said to Matt:
“While we’d love each partnership to last forever, we don’t expect zero turn-over, and our model anticipates more turn-over than we actually experience. We know that a handful of our partners each year will decide that an exit and a day job will beat out the appeal of entrepreneurship. For many many others, there’s a long-term desire to operate an independent content business supported by premium advertising rates — rates previously unavailable to anyone but Big Media.
“…Because of this dynamic, we do two things at once. One, invest aggressively in supporting the growth of our partners’ businesses, because the more successful they are (and the fewer stress points they need to overcome each day), the more likely they are to be long-term partners. Two, we are always on the hunt for the next rising star.”
“Federated Media Publishing (FM) and Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival today announced a groundbreaking partnership. FM will help the festival expand online opportunities and exposure while incorporating onsite technology and digital media into the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, August 22-24, 2008.”
What a great pay-off to a Graffiti contest: Jones Soda invites Facebook users to make art on the theme of create some change, and the 4 top winners will have their work featured on bottles of Jones Soda.
