journalist math
Blockbuster has abandoned advertising TotalAccess, its also-ran DVD-by-mail competitor to Netflix. CEO Jim Keyes would like you to think his company's still a contender, though, and PaidContent's Rafat Ali is
happy to oblige in a softball interview. Ali's far-from-knockout closer: "This is a hypothetical one. Would you be ever interested in buying Netflix?" We won't bother giving you Keyes's pat response about how he doesn't need Netflix. Instead, we'll just point you to PaidContent's handy financial summary included in the post. Blockbuster is worth $312 million. At $1.93 billion, Netflix is worth six times as much as Keyes's company.
paidcontent.org
Is blogging the future of the media business? If so, it's in a very small way. That's what I gather from the purchase by Guardian Media Group, a British ink-on-dead-trees concern, of
PaidContent.org for $30 million or so. It's a satisfying outcome for Rafat Ali, PaidContent's founder; he now has bragging rights to a bigger blog deal than the sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25 million by Jason Calacanis, his former boss.
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blogging for dollars
ContentNext, the parent of media technology blog PaidContent,
was purchased by the UK's Guardian Media for $30 million, pending the site meeting performance expectations in the coming months. The company will continue to report independently in the meantime under
new CEO Nathan Richardson and the editorial direction of founders Rafat Ali. It's certainly more than the $15 million deal blog prospector Michael Arrington thought would only afford Ali, Kramer and Co. "
spending money," and it's in line with other recent deals such as MediaBistro's $25 million sale to Jupiter and ArsTechnica's $25-30 million sale to Condé Nast. So, which tech news entrepreneur might follow?
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nerdfight
It takes a brave man to get in the middle of TechCrunch's bloggin' VC Michael Arrington and PaidContent founding editor Rafat Ali as they duke it out over the future of their micromedia empires. Timesman Saul Hansell
is nothing but brave. In a Bits blog post, he quotes Rafat Ali's new hired hand Nathan Richardson saying that PaidContent differentiates itself from TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider and our own Valleywag because it "has not gone down the road of following personal foibles." Then, towards the end of the piece, Ali himself suggeests that Arrington is thinking too small by gunning for CNET:
The big market for us is the trade media. Companies like Reed Elsevier, Nielsen, Incisive and Informa play in this market, not these blogs.
But are these publishers so evenhanded? Trade publications have a history of being self-interested boosters for the markets they cover.
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hires
Confirming
early reports, Rafat Ali posted
the details of ContentNext Media's new hires, including the promotion of employee number two Staci D. Kramer (pictured, right) to co-editor and EVP and plans to lease space in downtown Manhattan, expanding the company's geographic footprint to the other coast from its current space in Santa Monica. Patrick Dignan (pictured, left) from Forbes will join new CEO Nathan Richardson in New York, and Charlie Koones (pictured, center), former president and publisher of entertainment trade Variety joins the board. Seems more and more execs are buying into Ali's belief that "in the near future, all media will be digital media."
blogging for dollars
What is Michael Arrington smoking? His
self-indulgent fantasy: All the bloggers should band together into a "dream team," owning equity in the joint venture. "Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business," he writes. That existing blog he has in mind is obviously TechCrunch, though he never comes out and says it. What pushed him into this delusion? A rumor that Silicon Alley Insider is raising a $3 million to $5 million round and that PaidContent is also seeking more financing, a charge founder Rafat Ali
doesn't exactly deny. Arrington doesn't want his competitors to raise money, because that will screw his ambitions for a big blog rollup.
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scams
Phony press releases have become the grist for the newest Internet profit mills. If you're
like Chris Anderson and us, you don't read press releases. But several tech blogs were taken in by a dubious press release issued by a nonexistent company allegedly backed by real investors who may or may not have invested in several fake companies. Huh? Exactly. How the scam was uncovered, how it works, and how to avoid falling victim after the jump.
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Valleywag
hires
PaidContent runs a fake press release claiming that IAC, Barry Diller's publicly traded Web empire, was buying back shares. Um, no. [PaidContent.org]
