The Huffington Post co-founder, who sold his site to AOL a year ago, is working on another Web news start-up. But Lerer isn’t trying to replicate his old site. Instead, he’s trying to create a digital video news operation built to attract a generation of Web natives who watch Jon Stewart but not CNN or Fox News.

People who have heard Lerer pitch the start-up say he has been vague about the details but broad about his ambitions. Here’s what I know for now, which doesn’t include the project’s name:

• The site/service is a joint venture between Lerer’s Lerer Ventures and Bedrocket Media, the video start-up that Lerer invested in last year.
• Lerer is telling potential investors and employees that he’ll be actively involved in the project, along with former HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau and Bedrocket’s Brian Bedol.
• The service, which will launch this summer in advance of the U.S. presidential elections, will use a mix of livestreaming video and taped reports, and a mix of professionally produced segments along with contributions from amateurs.
• While Bedrocket has landed four YouTube “channel” deals for its programming, the new venture won’t be confined to any particular platform. Lerer and company have been promoting the idea that the service will rely heavily on social media like Facebook and Twitter for distribution.
• The site/service has started hiring production/back-end staff but hasn’t brought in “on air” talent yet. When it does, it will likely look for relatively unknown reporters, not established/expensive TV folks.

There are plenty of other folks trying to figure out how bring TV-style news to the Web, including the TV people themselves. And Web sites that have their roots in “print” journalism are diving into video news, too. That formula usually involves positioning a couple reporters in front of a newsroom camera to discuss the day’s events (if you’d like to see me talk, for instance, I’ll be on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” show at 1 pm ET today). Interesting to see if Lerer and company can figure out a new take.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Daboost)

Which is good, because here’s another one: BuzzFeed, the online publishing start-up that’s the toast of people who like to write about online publishing start-ups, is adding a tech section run by Gizmodo star Matt Buchanan.

This follows a now-familiar pattern we’ve seen from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti. Last month, Peretti brought on Politico star Ben Smith to start up the site’s political coverage and to run its overall editorial operations. A couple of weeks ago, he hired Doree Shafrir from Rolling Stone’s Web site to oversee “culture” coverage for the site.

Now Buchanan*, a five-year veteran of Gawker Media’s gadget-obsessed site, will start a new “vertical,” along with John Herrman from Popular Mechanics.

All of this hiring comes as Peretti is flush with cash courtesy of a $15 million funding round, and has reconnected with many of the people he used to work with at Huffington Post, which he co-founded.

Fellow HuffPo cofounder Ken Lerer is also a BuzzFeed co-founder, and former HuffPo ad boss Greg Coleman has come on as an advisor. Everyone who types about the media business likes writing about Peretti, but if you haven’t read any of this yet, I’d suggest starting with this New York Observer profile.

Buchanan and his crew will start publishing in mid-February, says Smith, who says the coverage will be something like what Buchanan did at Gizmodo, and also nothing like it. Think more “tech culture,” and less “stuff about gadgets.”

Well, maybe you should hold off on calling it “tech culture,” too, Smith says. “I guess I hesitate to call it tech culture, because I don’t think there’s a clear line between tech and culture anymore.”

Okay. So what’s next up in the BuzzFeed expansion plan? There’s got to be a bunch of cash left, right? “There will be more. Stay tuned.”

And now, a lightly edited version of a superfast exit interview I conducted via IM with Buchanan, who I gather is headed out for a couple of drinks as I type this.

Peter Kafka: Why’d you leave Gawker Media? I know lots of people have come to you in the past. Why go now?

Matt Buchanan: It’s an opportunity to build something completely new on a really exciting platform, which, even though the hallmark of Gizmodo is the immense freedom we all have, you know, the one thing I can never get here is the chance to do it all from scratch. And to do something that’s different from what a lot other tech sites are doing, I hope. I do love Gawker, and everybody here. I was from the generation that never got screwed over, so I only have good things to say about it.

Kafka: So should we be looking elsewhere for unboxing coverage, liveblogs of Android OS unveilings, and other blow-by-blow standards of tech coverage? Or will you leave all that behind?

Buchanan: Leaving almost all of that behind. I think technology deserves writing and criticism at the same level as any other aspect of culture, like film or music, because the reality of our world now is that it is just as important as those things. It is mainstream culture now. So we want to do tech for humans, as a main thing — but I also want hardcore tech readers to like what they see, too.

Like, we’ll talk about phones and gadgets to the extent that we find it interesting, and that other people might find it interesting, but no, this isn’t another gadget site. I would like to note that it is the first technology site powered entirely by ginger tears, which is what I’m most excited about.

Kafka: Curious about your take on your new employer. Seems to me that, while they’re uncomfortable saying this out loud, Jonah and crew are really setting out to build a new version of HuffPo: Build site by aggregating/curating, etc., other people’s content, then use that momentum/money to hire their own folks to build on that. The big obvious difference is that there isn’t a personality driving it from the get-go. And it’s tuned more to social than to search. Thoughts?

Buchanan: Yes! I think it’s too early to tell for some of that — even for me — but what I’m into is the fact that it’ll give John and I the freedom and flexibility to do the kind of tech writing and journalism that we want to do.

*Disclosure: I’ve met Matt a couple times, have chatted with him online a few more times, and I like him. He’s also an excellent resource if you’re planning a trip to Momofuku Ssäm (which you should definitely do, unless you’re a vegetarian) and need help with your ordering strategy.

Berry, who had been Huffpo’s chief technical officer, stepped back from day-to-day duties in November; at the time, the company said he’d be “working closely” with Arianna Huffington “on strategy and expansion priorities.”

Now Berry says he will be leaving in February — which happens to be a year after the AOL/Huffpo deal was announced. Berry will be working on Rebel Mouse, which he described to the New York Observer as a “social platform,” and will also work on a start-up incubator.

As the Observer notes, the move will reunite Berry with a good chunk of Huffpo’s senior team — co-founders Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti, former CEO Eric Hippeau and former ad chief Greg Coleman. Most of that group left Huffpo as soon as the AOL deal closed.

Peretti, who now runs Buzzfeed, a son-of-Huffpo aggregator/news site with a flair for social media, credited Berry with much of Huffpo’s success, via a Twitter blessing:

When Paul Berry joined HuffPost had 3M UVs, today the site has 120M million & he deserves LOTS of credit for that growth

— Jonah Peretti (@peretti) January 10, 2012

[Shutterstock/Kutlayev Dmitry]

But instead of moving movies and TV shows to the world’s biggest Web site, they’re trying something different: Google is handing out more than $100 million to dozens of partners to create new “channels.”

The idea is to make “professional” content that advertisers will pay a premium to be near, instead of the grab bag of videos that dominate the site and that often sell at very low prices.

This isn’t news, of course: YouTube reps have been holding meetings and auditions for most of the year, led by former Netflix executive Robert Kyncl. And we’ve known about the deal terms, and many of the partners, for some time.

But now the site is finally talking about them publicly and promising that it will start unveiling some of the new programming next month. Some of the channels — each of which will have a couple hours of original programming per week — will feature people you’ve heard of, like Madonna, Jay-Z,  Ashton Kutcher and “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara.

But the channels aren’t all premised around the idea of celebrities and Hollywood per se — just the idea that someone with some idea of how to make good stuff will start making stuff specifically for the site.

For instance, BedRocket Properties, the video start-up backed by the Huffington Post’s Ken Lerer and run by cable TV veteran Brian Bedol, will do four channels, including a soccer-themed channel in conjunction with Major League Soccer, and an action sports channel produced along with Wasserman Media Group.

Another example: IGN, the videogame Web site being spun off by News Corp., will produce a game-themed channel along with the Shine Group, the TV production house recently purchased by News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

It’s worth noting that some of the channels will be run by people who are well-versed in creating Web video — and video for YouTube in particular. Machinima, for instance, which also specializes in game-themed stuff, is already one of YouTube’s most prolific partners, and essentially runs a network within YouTube’s network.

Maker Studios, which is producing three channels, is another outfit that already specializes in YouTube. And Demand Media went public this year, in part because it had figured out the art of cranking out Web videos very, very, quickly, at very, very low prices.

YouTube may not be releasing all of the channels and partners today, perhaps because it doesn’t actually have all of its deals signed yet. And at least one partner told me that some of the mechanics of the deals, like control of ad sales, had yet to be worked out.

That’s hard to imagine, given the amount of time that YouTube has been at this. But it’s also hard to imagine why you’d announce a big consumer-focused deal at the end of a Friday. So, who knows.

We do know the general outlines of the deals, though: Google will advance most of the creators up to $5 million, and in return will get commitments to produce a couple hours of programming a week for the channel. Once the programmers have earned back their advance from YouTube, they’ll split ad revenue with the site. The programming will be exclusive to YouTube for at least the first year of the three-year deals.

What we don’t know is how this stuff will actually work: $5 million won’t go very far if the partners use traditional TV and film budgets, so many of the partners are going to have to supplement that money with investments of their own — and they’re going to have to work on a tighter budget. And just because there’s a bit of Hollywood shine associated with this stuff doesn’t mean that people will actually watch — or, most crucially, that advertisers will pay up.

Google may also try other methods to get high-end video stuff. The company made a stab at Hulu when that video site was on the block. And it has indicated that it’s interested in licensing some content in international markets, where it thinks it can get more bang for its buck.

Start another digital media business!

Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer, who sold his company to AOL earlier his month, has his next project lined up: He’s a co-founder of Bedrocket Properties, a video studio/incubator.

Bedrocket plans on creating and investing in programming that could find a home on the Web or on traditional TV. But it’s really interested in all the new, content-hungry video outlets that sit somewhere between those two poles: Netflix, Apple and Google TV, Roku, mobile phones, tablets, etc.

“I think this is the next sweet spot,” Lerer says. “The distribution is all built out. It just needs to be filled with content. It’s absolutely identical to cable in the 80s.”

Joining Lerer are Brian Bedol, who built and sold two TV networks (Classic Sports Networks to Disney’s ESPN and College Sports Television to CBS), Patrick Keane, a former Google and CBS marketing executive who ran Associated Content for a year before selling it to Yahoo, and hedge fund manager Jim Pallotta.

Bedol will be Bedrocket’s CEO (his personal investment company is called Bedrock Ventures) and Keane will be president. Lerer will be chairman and says he “will be hands on for some period of time,” as he was in Huffington Post’s early years. He says Pallotta will be an “active investor.”

Bedol and Lerer aren’t ready to go into detail about their plans, other than that they intend to build slates of programming–you could call them “channels”, if you like–that they can sell to distributors. And that they likely won’t have programming in front of viewers until the end of the year. They won’t discuss the amount they’ve invested in Bedrocket.

But their basic premise makes sense: There’s a big–and growing–market for video, and it won’t be sated with TV reruns and dog-on-skateboard videos alone.

“We’re at the beginning of a new paradigm, and you’re going to see a generation of really valuable content properties come out of this,” Bedol says.

They’re not the first ones to think this, of course. But earlier incarnations of Web-only video studios have failed, in large part because Web advertising economics haven’t been able to support much in the way of new programming.

And networks like Keane’s former employer, who should be good at this stuff, haven’t done much more with new video beyond a few webisodes. That’s because they have a fundamental channel conflict: It’s hard for them to build up a real alternative to the broadcast and cable channels where they’re already making money.

But now Web ad dollars are getting big enough to support “real” programming–note that Google is out persuading Hollywood to build shows for YouTube. And subscription services like Netflix and Amazon are going to be in the market for new stuff to show their subscribers.

Lerer, who has been an active angel investor along with his son Ben, via their Lerer Ventures fund, still plans on raising a second fund this year. But he says BedRocket will be the startup that gets most of his time (Ben Lerer will also be working with Bedrocket in addition to Thrillist, his own newsletter startup).

“I know much more than I did 6 years ago,” he says. “I see this one much more clearly than I originally saw the Huffington Post. I think this one has a real business plan from day one.”

AOL CFO Artie Minson prepped investors for the call with a memo laying out expectations. Short version: AOL thinks HuffPo will earn about $10 million on revenue of $50 million this year (as long as you’re okay with using “adjusted OIBDA” as a proxy for “profit”). It also thinks the purchase will save it $20 million a year, but it’s going to spend around $20 million on restructuring charges when the deal goes through.

I’ll liveblog the call below:

8:02 am: Greetings! About to start now.

8:03 am: On the call: Tim Armstrong, Arianna Huffington, Artie Minson.

8:03 am: Armstrong makes a Super Bowl joke that I can’t quite follow, and I like football. But now praising Arianna, co-founder Kenny Lerer and outgoing AOL CEO Eric Hippeau.

“The Huffington Post is one of the best properties on the Internet.” Armstrong, Huffington and Minson are all BlackBerry users.

8:06 am: On revenue: This gives an opportunity to serve more brand marketers, who are “very interested” in the scale this gives us.

8:07 am: Spending next 30 days on integration. “Really synergies to be had.”

Next steps: Next 72 hours communicating with employees, talking to partners. 1,500 AOL workers on the phone this morning explaining deal to others.

“This may be the smallest disruption” internally of any deal I’ve worked on. Majority of integration done within 35 to 40 days.

8:09 am: We’ve looked at a bunch of companies, though we’re mainly going to concentrate on organic growth. But Arianna is great [many superlatives] and she “also happens to be a woman.”

8:10 am: Here’s Arianna.

8:11 am: “Amazing” how aligned two orgs are.

8:11 am: HuffPo was profitable last year. We were thinking about bringing in additional investors last year, and an IPO down the line. But this made perfect sense.

8:12 am: This deal provides a “dramatic acceleration” for the plans we already had.

8:13 am: Some praise for Patch, AOL’s local strategy.

8:14 am: Can’t wait to start!

8:14 am: Alrighty, then. Here’s Artie Minson with some nuts and bolts.

Actually, it’s some color on the deal. But a lot of it is in the prepared remarks he put out earlier this morning.

8:15 am: Again, $20 million in cost savings here. And again, we’ll have to pay up for restructuring: $20 million for cuts, and $10 million for purchase price.

8:17 am: Still basically reading from prepared remarks. Some bookkeeping talk re: compensation accounting.

8:18 am: Remember, display ad growth coming will finally start showing up second half of this year.

8:19 am: Q&A:

Q: Talk about content strategy. Does HuffPo become hub for content going forward? Does it replace Seed? And how long is Arianna’s contract?

A: “The press” has been talking about our content strategy, so let me be clear–we’re focusing on premium content. Things like Seed and StudioNow are platforms–you can do whatever you want with them, different quality levels, at different types of scale.

And then the other thing that is important about those platforms is the ability they give us to work with advertisers.

One of our main interests in HuffPo is their technology and publishing system. So now we have multiple systems [which he is saying is a good thing]. “Our content strategy hasn’t changed.” The “stuff that was out in the press about the AOL Way” was just one way of doing things. [This is not very convincing]

Arianna, tell us how long you’re going to stay.

8:24 am: Arianna: “I’ve told Tim I want to stay here forever. I want this to be the last act of my life.” Anything I want to do I can do here.

[Sorry, missed next part but it was a defense/explanation of content strategy.]

8:26 am: Armstrong: Arianna has a multiyear contract, but it’s open-ended.

8:27 am: Arianna: By the way, we’re going to bring back commenting to AOL stories, and socialize them.

8:28 am: Q: Why buy instead of partnering? Were there other bidders? Also, how will HuffPo politics affect AOL?

8:28 am: Armstrong: We do partnerships where there is “limited upside to those arrangements” so ” we can really spend time on the areas we want to win”–i.e., we don’t care about sports, we do care about women.

“Arianna is somebody we’d rather have inside our building than outside our building.”

“If there were or weren’t bidders on the other side,” I think we got the right price.

8:30 am: Arianna. “As we’ve said, again and again, Huffington Post was not for sale….Nobody was in a hurry to cash out, everybody believed that we could do an IPO down the road.” It’s just that Tim gave us a great offer. [hrrrm.]

On politics–we used to be all about politics, now we’re not. Just 15 percent of our traffic. We have a divorce section now.

Talking up AOL’s “college” section.

8:33 am: Q: For Arianna: More on Patch, please. What do think about what AOL’s done with it, and what you can do with it?

8:33 am: [Every time Arianna says "local level" I think she's saying "locker level." It's happened at least twice, maybe more, on this call.]

There’s a “greatest person of the day” feature we have, and I think Patch should use that. [Or maybe vice-versa, sorry.] I also like their five percent “giving back” rule, cause marketing, etc.

8:35 am: Armstrong: Again, we can do national and local. That’s important. NFL rights are important, and so are local news stories.

8:36 am: Q: Who’s going to sell what? And can you talk about pricing disparity between AOL and HuffPo?

8:37 am: Armstrong: “We would like to maintain all the people from both sales forces [except for Greg Coleman!]. I think we will end up with a large-scale, large-property organization–I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like, though.

On sell-through rate: Slightly lower at HuffPo, because they’ve been ramping up traffic, and sales force. On CPM, same story. So we can bring up sell-through rate and CPM, and have a larger sales force. [This is pretty much the best argument for the deal that Armstrong can make.]

[BTW: Good back-channel discussion on Twitter right now about AOL's SEO skills, and the people behind it. None of that coming up during this call right now.]

[Sorry, I meant HuffPo's SEO skills, much of which stem from blueprint BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti set out.]

Q: Why not use equity for this deal?

A: Because our equity is priced too low, essentially. But HuffPo employees did roll over 25 percent of deal consideration into AOL options. So as that equity gets more valuable, they’ll get upside.

8:45 am: Q: In your statement, you talked about OIBDA growth in 2013. More on that please.

Minson–probably going to stick to my prepared remarks on that one.

8:46 am: Last Q: Your acqusitions have been about toolsets or content. As you think about others going forward, what else do you want?

Armstrong: We have long-term vision. On plumbing: We’ve wanted to get platforms and plumbing straightened out, and we’re doing that now. Think about the bones or foundation of a very large property. That’s why we’ve been doing infrastructure, like with video–5Min and GoViral and StudioNow.

Going forward, we’ll be doing infrastructure. And we’ll continue to look at “media properties and media brands” that fit our strategy. [Remember, Web site owners: HuffPo just got 10x revenue.

8:50 am: Minson: But we're very price sensitive and we've walked away from deals.

8:50 am: Arianna: And we like women!

8:51 am: Armstrong sums up: Success "in the Internet space" requires vision and execution. That's this deal. And remember, content and brands become more valuable as tech gets faster, more advanced. And "expect us to stay on strategy and on point" going forward. "We're going to overcommunicate" with both sets of employees as we integrate. [You've been warned!]

And we’re done. Thanks for reading.

[Photo credit: Arianna Huffington]

Try Betaworks instead. That’s my translation of the holding company’s pitch, which seems to be effective. Yesterday, it announced that it had raised another $20 million in funding led by RRE Ventures and Intel (INTC); other new investors include AOL (AOL) and the New York Times (NYT).

Betaworks previously raised about $8 million from the likes of the Pilot Group, Ron Conway, Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who bought in when he was still selling ads for Google (GOOG).

Betaworks is essentially a bet on “real time” companies in general and Twitter specifically. The New York-based outfit has invested in or built a couple dozen companies, almost all of which have something to do with social media. And many of them have direct links to Twitter.

The biggest Betaworks hit to date is an investment in Twitter itself: The company helped fund Summize, a real-time search engine Twitter bought in July 2008, back when the microblogging service was valued at a mere $100 million. Betaworks took its payment in Twitter equity, and that decision has worked out very nicely so far.

Other prominent Betaworks projects are Twitter plays as well. Twitter uses Bit.ly, the URL shortener Betaworks built and then spun off. And Betaworks funded TweetDeck, the most popular Twitter client, which also uses Bit.ly as its default URL shortener.

The risk, of course, is that there isn’t enough there there to support all these companies, which are very much in the Web 2.0 “users first, revenue later” model. As CEO John Borthwick puts it: “We’re either building a mountain or digging a hole.”

But Borthwick has an excellent pitch–the accent helps–which I got to hear when I dropped by his office yesterday. Co-founder Andy Weissman, alas, was AWOL. But if you want to hear his take, he maintains an excellent Tumblr (another Betaworks investment).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100312/is-betaworks-building-a-mountain-or-digging-a-hole/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100202/a-father-and-son-team-that-founds-web-startups-wants-to-finance-them-too-ken-and-ben-lerer-get-their-own-fund/ http://allthingsd.com/20100202/a-father-and-son-team-that-founds-web-startups-wants-to-finance-them-too-ken-and-ben-lerer-get-their-own-fund/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:30:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15751 Are you cobbling together a start-up in New York City and looking for cash? Good news: A lot of wealthy and wired people want to write you a check.

Meet the newest batch: Lerer Media Ventures, a new fund run by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son, Thrillist co-founder Ben Lerer.

The two men say they’re closing the fund’s first round in the next few days. When they’re done, they will have around $7 million to put into angel/early-stage investments–primarily in New York tech/media companies, though they intend to play on the West Coast too.

If you want a sense of what the Lerers are looking for, check out deals they’ve already done, like Hot Potato, Paperless Post, and GDGT.

Their investors include a number of bold-faced names, at least by tech/media standards. Among them: Pilot Group’s Bob Pittman, ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick, SoftBank Capital partner Mike Perlis, Hunch co-founder (and prolific blogger) Chris Dixon, uber-angel investor Ron Conway and Lerer’s Huffington Post co-founder, Arianna Huffington.

The Lerers join the ranks of other investors interested in New York start-ups, including early-stage venture capital shops Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and First Round Capital, and a set of smaller funds like IA Capital Partners, Betaworks and Founder Collective.

The fact that the last two funds are directly connected to the Lerers–Ken is an investor in Betaworks (and shares office space with it), and Chris Dixon is an investor in Founder Collective–shows just how interlinked the New York start-up scene is. The same players seem to invest in the same deals, and now they’re investing in one another.

For instance: Check out the investor list for Brooklyn-based Hot Potato, which looks a lot like the Lerers’ group.

Or consider the fact that Pittman once worked with Ken Lerer at AOL (AOL) and now funds Ben Lerer’s newsletter company. Or the fact that Perlis, via SoftBank, is a Huffington Post investor and that former SoftBank partner and current Huffpo CEO Eric Hippeau will be an adviser to the new fund. Etc.

If you’re a cynic, you might call such familiarity overly cozy. And you might worry about the chances for a start-up that doesn’t find favor with the collective. If you’re an optimist, you’d say there’s nothing wrong with like-minded investors who like to collaborate.

No surprise what side Ken Lerer is on. And what about the growing number of people who want to invest in Web start-ups again? Not a problem, either.

“In angel investing, you don’t really have competitors. You go ahead and do your thing,” Lerer insists. “I don’t look at Internet or Internet investing as competitive, generally.”

Fair enough. If anyone feels otherwise, sound off in the comments below.

And in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll note that even I have the faintest of links to this group, though it’s mainly aspirational. Ken Lerer was an early backer of my former employer, Silicon Alley Insider, and I have the tiniest of investments in that company, too.

[Image credit: Tony the Misfit]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100202/a-father-and-son-team-that-founds-web-startups-wants-to-finance-them-too-ken-and-ben-lerer-get-their-own-fund/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091125/hot-potato-is-ready-to-eat-do-twitter-facebook-users-want-another-realtime-chatter-service/ http://allthingsd.com/20091125/hot-potato-is-ready-to-eat-do-twitter-facebook-users-want-another-realtime-chatter-service/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:25:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=13280 Last month I told you about Hot Potato, one of the buzziest start-ups in the very buzzy “real time” sector. Now you can check out the service yourself. But not really.

The New York-based service opened its doors last week, but it won’t really kick into gear until Apple (AAPL) signs off on its iPhone app, and that’s taking a bit longer than the company expected. Founder Justin Shaffer still thinks he’ll be up and running on Apple’s platform in a few days, but until then, you can check out this video interview I shot with him yesterday, where you can get a sense of how the app will work.

Or if you’re impatient, here it is in a nutshell: The service is supposed to let users converse in real-time about “events”–whether a football game, business conference or maybe even a really good house party.

You can already do that on Twitter and Facebook, but the pitch is that Hot Potato will help “curate” the chatter, so you will end up talking to both your friends and interesting people you don’t know–and that’s something Twitter and Facebook don’t do well right now.

If it works, there are some obvious advertising/sponsorship opportunities available for the service: The NFL could sponsor chatter about its games, for instance. Or someone who isn’t related to the football league could sponsor chatter about the games–since this is user-generated content in its purest form, Hot Potato isn’t required to get the go-ahead from anyone before it creates a conversational stream.

In any case, Hot Potato now has a pile of money to help it figure this stuff out. Last week, the company closed its first funding round of $1.4 million (I had originally reported that it was raising “about $1 million”), and in addition to VC backers First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, the start-up has an array of high-profile angel investors who have pitched in.

Here’s the roster: Super-angel investor Ron Conway; real-time start-up incubator Betaworks; Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and his son Ben Lerer, who runs Thrillist; New York Observer owner Jared Kushner and his brother, Josh Kushner; ZelnickMedia’s Strauss Zelnick; Hunch and Founder Collective co-founder Chris Dixon; About.com co-founder Scott Kurnit; Facebook executive (and Apple vet) Dave Morin; Boxee’s Zach Klein; angel investor Allen Morgan; and entrepreneurs and investors Scott and Cyan Banister.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091125/hot-potato-is-ready-to-eat-do-twitter-facebook-users-want-another-realtime-chatter-service/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081121/huffington-post-raising-more-money-for-post-election-run/ http://allthingsd.com/20081121/huffington-post-raising-more-money-for-post-election-run/#comments Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:44:31 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1332 A nice corrective to the stories about venture capital drying up: Investors are still willing to write checks for digital ventures–particularly if they’re for media companies with hockey stick growth charts. The Times UK and PaidContent say that the Huffington Post has raised another $15 million at a $100 million valuation. Oak Investment Partners reportedly led the round.

I’ll update if I get any more info, or any kind of response from founder Arianna Huffington or her people. A source “close to the company” informs Silicon Alley Insider that the reports are “stupid and false” and “wrong across the board”; Huffpo cofounder Ken Lerer is an investor in SAI (see lengthy disclosure below).

That said, the size of the round and the valuation both sound plausible. And they reflect the rocket ride the site has been on for the past year or so (someone who should know better allowed the New York Times to float a $200 million estimate earlier this year, but no one takes that seriously).

ComScore pegged the site’s traffic at 4.5 million unique visitors in September 2008, up from 800,000 the year before. Meanwhile the DrudgeReport, the site’s conservative counterpart/model, was at two million. Both sites will claim their traffic is much higher, because that’s what every Web publisher says when confronted with outside numbers (this one included). But by any count, it has gotten very big very quickly.

The big question is whether Huffpo can sustain even a fraction of that growth rate in the aftermath of the election (and sell ads, too, though that’s another matter). Huffpo’s standard answer to that question is that that only 50 percent of its traffic comes from political stories. And indeed, there is plenty of real estate dedicated to topics like Lindsay Lohan’s love troubles, and those of Madonna, as well. And here’s a page called “Sex.” Guess what it’s about?

But there are lots of sites that can tell you about those topics–and indeed, Huffpo is primarily in the business of aggregating that stuff in an eye-catching way, not creating original content. And while the Huffpo people are absolute wizards at optimizing the site for search engines, and maniacally focused about tweaking the site in real time for optimal click-throughs, it really will be hard to sustain growth without political fervor.

If you had to bet on political Web sites that will grow for the next four years, you’d be better off placing a wager on sites that cater to conservatives/Republicans/etc. for the same reason that nonprofits of that ilk will raise more money during the same time–anger and frustration are great animators. Recall that conservative talk radio really exploded once Bill Clinton took office–and yes, this augurs well for Fox News, owned by News Corp. (NWS), which owns this Web site. (And while we’re at it, I most recently worked at Silicon Alley Insider, which has a loose distribution relationship with HuffPo. Phew.)

One hopeful note: New politics/stats/forecasting site 538.com, using an admittedly crude measurement, says both HuffPo and Drudge have been able to keep their post-election audiences.

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