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mythbusting
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mythbusting
mythbusting
Why online video hasn't reinvented Hollywood
LOS ANGELES — I'm the first to admit that I wanted to see the Web kill Hollywood. It just ain't happening. It's finally dawned on the studios that you can now pay artists even less to produce content, and pay YouTube absolutely nothing to distribute it. The problem is you have to sell your own ads — but the studios and networks, unlike indie content creators and Valley startups, have armies of ad sales people still at their command. And it's still a hits-based business. So while it's great to have all the creative freedom in the world, you're still going to have to wait tables and get coffee for producers while working, unpaid, on your own projects and pray to the ghost of Mae West that something ends up with mass appeal. What does success look like in the wake of the online video revolution? More »
8:00 AM on Fri Apr 11 2008
By Jackson West
7,131 views,
21 comments
Latest by n/a: you have to dig a little deeper to get a better sense of what's going on. Hollywood's basic business model is to monetize "windows" of opportunity to view its catalog. This only works in a world where distribution can be controlled(think more »
mythbusting
Digg's "auto-bury list" is a myth
"For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever. These sites often get submitted to Digg and then are invariably buried after a certain amount of time." So claims an open letter posted to Valleywag yesterday. The mythical Digg auto-bury list is one of those Internet legends that everyone who's anyone knows about, but no one can produce. Several bloggers have published lists, but none of them have also published a reproducible methodology for determining that list. The score: Gossip 1, Scientific Method 0. Unless the four self-styled "most powerful users in the community" present their own list of banned sites — not one or two URLs, but "dozens" to quantify their claim, along with instructions for obtaining that list yourself — they're even worse rumormongers than we are.
mythbusting
YouTube founder Steve Chen, on the Oprah show, recites the same old tale he and Chad Hurley have been trained to give about how YouTube got his start: Chen threw a dinner party, friends filmed each other with videocameras, and then realized the videos were hard to share. What the two didn't tell Oprah: YouTube's third cofounder, Jawed Karim, claims the dinner party never happened, and he came up with the idea for a video-sharing site.
YouTube founders tell famous fib to Oprah
YouTube founder Steve Chen, on the Oprah show, recites the same old tale he and Chad Hurley have been trained to give about how YouTube got his start: Chen threw a dinner party, friends filmed each other with videocameras, and then realized the videos were hard to share. What the two didn't tell Oprah: YouTube's third cofounder, Jawed Karim, claims the dinner party never happened, and he came up with the idea for a video-sharing site.
google
Marissa Mayer takes credit for not killing AdSense
Success has a thousand fathers, and failure is an orphan — unless you can somehow spin an adoption tale into the mix. That seems to be what Marissa Mayer is trying to do. In a recent interview, Marissa Mayer tries to take credit for both Google's Gmail email service, as well as AdSense, the immensely profitable system which places Google-sold ads on blogs and other independent websites based on their content. Her claim over AdSense? She didn't kill the product outright, despite her fears that it would be "creepy." But she also reveals that Paul Buchheit, the Googler who burdened the company with "don't be evil" as an unsheddable corporate motto, is the true inventer of a system that matched ads to a Web page's content — whether that content is a blog post, an email message, or anything else. More »
mythbusting
Why Microsoft and Google's health plans are sick
Microsoft and Google are getting into the healthcare business, according to Steve Lohr, the New York Times' most reliable transcriptionist of big tech companies' plans. Both tech giants want to put patients' health records online and help them search for medical information on the Web. But Lohr entirely misses the point. Tech and healthcare have a long, parlous history, intertwined with the industry's laborious regulations. If change in the industry comes about, it's going to emerge from hospital halls and the lobbies of Congress, not from Silicon Valley. So why are Microsoft and Google putting some of their biggest brains on the project? More »
mythbusting
Craig Newmark, filthy rich on eBay's millions
Everything you know about Craig Newmark is wrong. The tale that Craigslist's founder and CEO Jim Buckmaster like to tell about how eBay got a stake in their company goes like this: Newmark, the clueless business naif, issued shares to an employee, never thinking they'd be cashed in. That employee turned around and sold the shares right under Newmark's nose to rapacious auctions giant eBay back in 2004. It's a good story. But it's nothing like the truth, according to sources close to the transaction. And the truth? That Newmark and Buckmaster, who love to portray themselves as unpretentious types who care nothing for money, can be bought. For a mere $16 million. More »
mythbusting
Wall Street's iPhone expectations game
Apple shares are down more than 4 percent to $139.53 right now. And why? Because AT&T has revealed that it only activated 146,000 iPhones in the last two days of the second quarter. Analysts, ludicrously, had expected 500,000, a number seemingly plucked out of thin air. Consider that Apple only has 160 U.S. stores, and consider that, while flagship stores like Apple's Stockton Street palace in San Francisco got as many as 750 iPhones for the Friday, June 29, launch, smaller stores got a much smaller supply. Consider that some of AT&T's 1,800 U.S. stores got as few as 15 iPhones. Even selling their entire stock as fast as they could, could Apple and AT&T's retail outlets really have moved many more phones than they had? (Photo by Dan_H)
mythbusting
Everyone's still talking about Henry Blodget's facile guess on his Internet Outsider blog that Microsoft might offer $6 billion for Facebook, the social network of the moment. And Facebook investor Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners venture capitalist who's on Facebook's board, tried to stoke hopes for such an outsized valuation by casually mentioning at Fortune's iMeme conference that Facebook was on track to do $100 million in revenues and turn an operating profit, by some financial measures, this year. But you shouldn't buy Blodget's musings, or Breyer's shilling, for a moment. Here's why. More »
Facebook's fake revenues
Everyone's still talking about Henry Blodget's facile guess on his Internet Outsider blog that Microsoft might offer $6 billion for Facebook, the social network of the moment. And Facebook investor Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners venture capitalist who's on Facebook's board, tried to stoke hopes for such an outsized valuation by casually mentioning at Fortune's iMeme conference that Facebook was on track to do $100 million in revenues and turn an operating profit, by some financial measures, this year. But you shouldn't buy Blodget's musings, or Breyer's shilling, for a moment. Here's why. More »
mythbusting
Why Facebook isn't the reincarnation of Google
(Valleywag Emeritus Nick Denton took a break from playing with his iPhone to pen this screed. Enjoy! - Ed.)NICK DENTON — People assume that Facebook will find some way to make money besides traditional advertising, which is clearly not working. And why do they assume that? Simply because Google was equally clueless about its business model, and look at the company now. But they're drawing the wrong lesson. Just because a company has no idea how it will make money, doesn't mean that there is always an answer. Even for a site as hugely popular as Facebook. Google's discovery of its search goldmine should be seen as an anomaly, not an endless source of hope for popular Internet sites.
