kpkelleher
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@statspotting Yes, but that map he was talking about was drawn in 2010. A lot of that territory has been colonized since then.
@hopefuleefair Facebook raised plenty of money when it went public, so buying the stock may not help so much. But the advertisers that give Facebook most of its revenue are trying to reach consumers under 25, which is why they matter so much to the company.
@jonathanjaeger I don't necessarily disagree. When I was writing this, I wanted to avoid veering into speculating on actual deals and merely show theoretical examples of bold steps that would be needed.
That said, let me make a purely speculative counterargument: What if Specific/Interactive/Myspace approached say Soundcloud and said they were junking the Myspace name and wanted to help them monetize their content with a successful ad platform that could bring brands like Chevy and Ford to sponsor bands and content? That is, what if the pitch wasn't Myspace so much as it was a way to help the people in that $50 million round make a bigger profit on their investment? If Soundcloud or Bandcamp didn't bite, some second-tier startups probably would.
@jonathanjaeger What about Specific? Interactive Holdings - the entity owning Myspace and Specific - has annual revenue around $325 million. If you consider that Google and Yahoo are trading around five times their annual revenue, that's a $1.6 billion company. So yes, buying them would be expensive but a deal involving the stock of a growing parent company wouldn't be unrealistic.
@mcarney It's a good question for Specific, but they didn't get back to my request to talk with them. I'd say it was justified, if only because at $35 million they were paying a little more than a dollar per active user. Even with the very low click-through rates Myspace has seen historically it wouldn't take too long to make that worthwhile. In addition, they bought tons of data on how people used social networks at MySpace. Granted, that's not as good as a peek inside Facebook's data, but for a company that understands only the ad-network business it was probably a great introduction to the social networking game.
@steven_cox Fixed. Thank you for catching it.
@tedsp90 Um, at least since John Donahoe has been turning around the company, focusing on Buy It Now sales and de-emphasizing auctions. And even before then, since Donahoe was reacting to a slowdown in auctions.
@antnisP As it happened, I was talking with the owner of the local bookstore about this and he started on a long discourse about how he avoids any 3PL distributor, tries to use old-school distributors even though he knows their days are numbered. So I guess I stumbled on a way around it for now. But keep in mind. I didn't start by avoiding Amazon. I started by seeing my favorite bookstore close shop and saying, hmm, maybe I should buy from bookstores more often. It wasn't a terribly well-thought out act on my part.
@catfitz You don't have to get it. No one's asking you to get it. No one asked you to spend, I'm guessing, 20 minutes writing 400 words writing about something that clearly has no meaning for you. I will never understand why someone starts to read something they think is dumb, and keeps reading it, and wastes even more time saying they wasted their time reading it. How is that not senseless? Why not just move on?
I just wanted to give some belated thanks to everyone who commented on this post - even the guy who called me a narcissistic douche, a first for me (dude, turn your arrogance back on your own comment, that sized shoe fits a lot of feet).
Everything I've written for this site in the past few months has been backed up, to the best of my ability, by facts. But every once in a while Pandodaily prints personal observations, to great effect. Look at Nathaniel Mott's piece on technology failing his family, or Sarah Lacy's response to Yammer's downtime. They are only two recent examples of well-written pieces based on a single person's observation. One made me sad, the other made me angry. One small advantage that blogs have over older business-news publications is there's room for that kind of thinking, provided it's done right.
That raises the question over whether I did it right. I thought about writing this post a month ago, then let it go - for all the reasons outlined in the criticisms below. Believe me, whatever any dissenter said I thought about it first. But I kept coming back to it. And so I took a chance - people would either like it or hate it, but I was curious about which would happen. As it happened - judging from these comments and responses on Twitter - it was a mix of both. That made me think the idea has something to it.
I really don't want to tell people what to do, and I'm pro-Amazon. I sort of bent over backwards in the piece to make those points. I also made it clear I wrote it because I wanted to see if anyone else felt as I did, and some - but not all - do. I suspected it might be the beginning of a longer conversation. And so...
@AhmadKadhim Thanks for pointing that out. The story has been changed to reflect that this was a continuing rather than a special dividend.
@marcmichelvc I suspect Google is trying to goad the incumbents out of their slumber (clearly not working yet, they're still hoping it will just fade away). So getting the industry to shoulder the cost is part of it. And as loathe as many in the Valley are to bring in government support, there could be federal contributions or tax breaks to help speed things along. Again, the NBP was born amid the stimulus talks during the recession, and Google conceived of this plan as part of that plan - to offer a prototype of what industry could do should there be local or federal governments helping.
@MatthewMountford Thanks for sharing that link. It's pretty interesting.
@statspotting I think they're both. MySpace in 2005 was News Corp.'s effort to understand social media before it went mainstream as it did with Facebook. The Daily was the same in tablets. But both were dishonest experiments, because Murdoch was looking for a desired result. In that sense, they were bad business decisions. The two aren't mutually exclusive.
@BenKoo You could make that case, but I don't think you'd be right. ESPN is pretty far ahead in most respects.
@Nathanielmott, my heart goes out to you and your family. You've captured in words the pain that is unimaginable until you actually have to go through it. Technology fails, yes, but if we're lucky we have our loved ones to carry us through these times.
@AnoopSuri Let's not. What I wrote today is pretty consistent with what I wrote before and during the Groupon IPO.
http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2011/11/07/the-dreary-details-of-groupons-future/
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/06/does-mason-want-to-get-out-of-groupon/
@markrogo @Thomas Krafft It shouldn't be too much to ask. If Amazon or Apple did end up buying Netflix, streaming and buying alike could be options. The dream of accessing any movie or show, however, is likely to be more of a reality for pirates for some time.
@GROUPTHINKER Groupthink in a mind with multiple personalities is not necessarily a good thing.
You said: "$6.9bn of cash after the Alibaba taxes."
Yahoo says: "Net cash proceeds after taxes and fees from the first stage of the repurchase agreement total approximately $4.3 billion." http://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=707698
You said: "$3.9 bn after the buyback (not $650mm)."
Yahoo says: "Yahoo! will return approximately $3.65 billion in after-tax proceeds to shareholders, or 85 percent of the net cash proceeds from the initial sale of its shares in Alibaba. This amount includes $646 million the company has already returned to shareholders through share repurchases." (same link)
Your comparison of Yahoo to AOL is not unlike a comparison of yourself to Honey Boo Boo. Be gone, troll.
@RashadtheGod That is a pivot that could really turn things around. But how many years before 3D printers become a household item?