Nov 7th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
A great rumour from Valleywag, and one that actually makes some sense to me: Owen Thomas says he has heard that Digg is close to a deal to be acquired for about $300-million, but not by Google or Yahoo or one of the usual Web suspects — by a traditional media entity like the New York Times or the Washington Post. Implausible? I’m not so sure.
As Owen notes, Digg recently signed a multi-year advertising deal with Microsoft for $100-million, and is likely worth close to $300-million on that basis alone (albeit at pretty nosebleed multiples of revenue, but hey — it’s no Facebook). But probably not to Google or Yahoo. How much traffic does it drive to those sites? Little or nothing.
To the New York Times or the Post, however, Digg could make a lot of sense. Maybe not $300-million worth of sense, you might argue — but still a lot. To a large number of younger, Web-savvy users, Digg is their front page. And yes, it’s still largely focused on technology, but so what? The NYT has already shown that it’s willing to get more “social media”-friendly with its BlogRunner purchase and integration.
As a commenter on the Valleywag post notes, Digg competitor Reddit was bought by Conde Nast last year and it has apparently continued to thrive — in fact, it drives several times more traffic to my blog than Digg does.
Oct 10th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Dotspotter. Ever heard of it? Me neither — and I make it my business to keep track of as many Web 2.0-type new media sites as I can. Unheard of or not, the site has reportedly been acquired by CBS for $10-million (PaidContent has apparently confirmed this as well). How long has the site been around? Less than a year.
So, Dotspotter — which appears to be a kind of Digg for celebrity stories, with a user interface and site design that seems to have been designed by colour-blind gerbils — is worth $1-million for every month it has been alive. By that measure, a site like TMZ.com or PerezHilton (or Gabe Rivera’s WeSmirch.com) should be worth about $100-million — which, of course, would be insane (no offense, Gabe). And what kind of name is Dotspotter anyway?
According to the PaidContent piece, a source said the acquisition price wasn’t so much for the actual site but for the team, which includes a former Yahoo vice-president named Anthony Soohoo. So all of a sudden a crap idea is worth $10-million just because some Yahoo VP was involved? That’s genius. Maybe there’s hope for Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors.com after all.
Sep 12th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
If there’s one thing that really drives me around the bend, it’s when people misinterpret academic or quasi-academic studies and draw all kinds of ludicrous and sweeping conclusions. It’s something the traditional media love to do with opinion surveys (most of which are completely unreliable), and the blogosphere has a tendency to do it as well. And we can see a prime example with a recent study by The Project for Excellence in Journalism.
I have no problem with the PEJ looking at the headlines on Digg.com and Reddit.com and del.icio.us and comparing those with the stories that appeared either on television or in mainstream media outlets. The project looked at stories over a period of seven days at the end of June. Not surprisingly — at least for anyone who has ever been to any of those sites — there was very little overlap with the stories that traditional media found important.
And what are we to gather from this research? Well, according to people like Nick Carr, it apparently shows that the “people formerly known as the audience” are thick-headed numbskulls and mouth-breathers who are only interested in a narrow slice of tech or other stories, and don’t care about the issues of state or the other topics that right-thinking people pay attention to. In classic Carr fashion, he concludes:
“When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels.
The people formerly known as the audience may be more accurately termed the people formerly known as informed.”
The first problem with Nick’s approach is that it uses Digg and del.icio.us as representative of the entire phenomenon known as “social media” or “citizen journalism,” which is like watching two television shows and reporting that the entire landscape of TV as we know it is an insipid swamp (an argument that would actually be a lot easier to win — but I digress).
As James Robertson notes on his blog, one of the reasons why sites like Digg and Reddit aren’t filled with the top-most important and newsworthy stories on Iraq or the flooding of Texas is that every other news site was filled with those things. To me, one of the main things that makes Digg and Reddit valuable is that they allow people to promote stories and links that aren’t getting enough attention — not the ones that are.
Danny Sullivan notes that “to draw any definitive conclusions about the future of news would be premature and foolish given the limitations and short duration of the study.” But people like Nick are happy to do so anyway. Dan Gillmor has some brief thoughts on the topic here, and there’s a good look at the study at SFGate as well. My friend Scott Karp has his take at Publish2.0.
Sep 11th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
My friend Muhammad Saleem — a top Netscape submitter — just dropped me a note to say that the former Digg-style Netscape social-news site will be reborn at some future date at a site called Propeller.com. Tom Drapeau has a somewhat lacklustre post on the move over at the Netscape blog (at least Jason Calacanis knew how to market something with a little energy).
Muhammad — who was more than a little ticked at Mike Arrington and others for what he saw as an overreaction to the news that Netscape was changing — says he likes the branding. I’m okay with it, for what it’s worth, but I’m not clear on what Propeller is supposed to convey really. There’s also no timeline on when the site will go live, which kind of makes me wonder why they bothered. Why not wait until it’s ready to go?
I know Muhammad thinks people rang the death knell for Netscape too early, but I still wonder how many people are going to switch over to the new site. For whatever reason, I think the name Netscape had a certain drawing power, and it got lots of traffic in part because it used to be a portal. To start over with a new site and name is going to be an uphill climb, I think.
Sep 7th, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Although we had some advance warning that this might be happening — courtesy of a post from Mike Arrington at TechCrunch that was denied by Netscape at the time — it’s still kind of sad that AOL is pulling the plug on its social-news experiment at Netscape.com.
The note at the Netscape site says that the Digg-style interface is merely moving to another location (Mike said he heard reports that it would be wow.com, another AOL-owned site). But it seems obvious that interest in the idea is waning, and the focus has shifted back to making Netscape into the news portal it used to be, primarily for the ad dollars. According to the site:
“We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.”
I know there will be a lot of gloating over this move — particularly from those who don’t like Jason Calacanis — but I think it’s unfortunate. Even if it was in essence a “Digg-clone,” I still think (as I have said from the beginning) that Netscape introduced some useful features to the social media model, including the use of editors to promote and add to stories, and the somewhat controversial decision to pay top submitters.
For whatever reason, Netscape just never seemed to be able to get much traction, so we will never know if any of those features makes sense for a social news site — and that’s a shame.
Update:
Muhammad Saleem, a Netscape “scout,” says in his post on the announcement that he’s shocked at how some blogs have mis-reported the news as the closure of Netscape — and he has a point. But I think even if the site remains at a different location, it seems obvious that its star has dimmed somewhat in the AOL universe, as HMTKSteve notes in his comment at Muhammad’s blog.
