And here is the press release from Whiskey on Screened:

Whiskey Media Debuts Screened for Passionate Fans of Film, TV and Online Video

Media company’s fifth web property delivers measureable brand engagement by combining original editorial content with social gaming mechanics

San Francisco CA, May 20, 2010–Social publisher Whiskey Media today announced the debut of its fifth property, Screened–a new online destination dedicated to video entertainment across all screened devices. Screened, created by former CNET executives, joins Whiskey’s four other category-leading properties–Anime Vice, Giant Bomb, Comic Vine and Tested–in combining original editorial content with social networking, game mechanics and wikis to create one of the most relevant and engaging film, TV and video destinations.

“We see our model as a new breed of media company, native to the Internet and not just an assimilation of content that many sites have done before. The Internet generation expects their media to be socialized and relevant to their lives,” says founder and CEO Shelby Bonnie. “Social publishing attracts highly loyal, knowledgeable and motivated audiences and provides brands the opportunity for even deeper integrated engagement than currently available elsewhere online.”

Screened is created by fans, for fans

Screened will simultaneously spark and settle debates, create and squash rumors, and stimulate engaging conversations. The site will also feature a comprehensive movie and TV database with detailed information about films, actors, directors and writers, as well as other content such as locations, characters, objects, clichés and more.

Screened is built for the savvy entertainment fan who will watch video content across multiple devices and different screens. For a generation who will consume video entertainment across phones, iPads and computers in addition to movie screens and TV screens, Screened will help people find the best in Hollywood blockbusters, independent and classic films, TV shows and online video entertainment that can be watched or streamed to screens both large and small.

“The beauty of Screened is that its content is governed by real people who are passionate about movies, TV and video, and want to share their enthusiasm and opinions with like-minded people,” said Alex Navarro, general editor, Screened. “We’re entertainment enthusiasts too, which is why we’re so excited to create a dynamic community that we believe will be worthy of a discriminating audience’s time.”

Screened entertains and rewards with Quests

Like Whiskey’s other properties, Screened will feature game mechanics, called Quests, incentivizing viewers to become active contributors and motivating communities to participate at the editorial-level of content creation. Quests incorporate features typical of online social games–badges, points and scavenger hunts–rewarding site users for creating new pages, starting a forum topic, cleaning up existing content or engaging with brand advertisers.

During a one-week preview of Screened for members of other Whiskey Media properties, the community completed more than 24,844 Quests that produced 20,000 movie entries, 200,000 actor and movie images and 1,500 genres. The average person who contributes content contributes 43 items to the community and spends more than 11 minutes on the Screened site.

Beyond Screened, the community across the other four Whiskey Media sites has started more than one million Quests that have produced more than 7,500 new product reviews and product description pages since launch. Quests have been shown to increase page views and time spent on the site by more than 53 percent, providing increased opportunities for brand marketers to interact with Whiskey’s loyal communities.

Quests work because they are a part of the community experience in each Whiskey Media brand. The ability to share and consume information about the topics people love creates a different type of online community where each member is rewarded more for their knowledge and contribution versus whom they know. Quests create a way to show their knowledge and passion to a like-minded community.

Because Quests are an integral part of the community experience and enjoyment, they also provide ways for brand marketers to reach an audience without disrupting the audience experience.

“Whiskey Media is in a unique position to deliver engagement for brands given its community-based approach and ability to integrate campaigns into its sites, enhancing the user experience, not disrupting it,” said Brian Monahan, SVP, global lead social media, Universal McCann.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100520/whiskey-medias-and-former-cnet-ceo-shelby-bonnie-talks-content-and-more/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100507/almost-famous-johnathan-tepper-of-demotix/ http://allthingsd.com/20100507/almost-famous-johnathan-tepper-of-demotix/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 11:05:05 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=24765 Never heard of Demotix? Don’t feel bad as that’s pretty typical, although the journalism start-up does operate in nearly every country in the world. We recently caught up with the nouveau photo wire service’s co-founder, Jonathan Tepper, to get the whole story on remaking media (and paying for it).

Who: Jonathan Tepper

What: COO, co-founder

Why: Jonathan left the finance sector to start what he calls a “street newswire.” Demotix continues to grow as competitors like Associated Press and Getty Images face harder times. Maybe he’s on to something.

Where: Demotix.com (Web site); @demotix (Twitter); London (analog place)

Who Else: AP, Reuters, and Getty Images, to name a few.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: The hands-down worst was as a waiter at a Mexican restaurant in college. They pretty much hired me as a go-between for the pretty waitresses and the kitchen staff, who only spoke Spanish. A close second was when I spent a year making PowerPoints for Lehman Brothers after I graduated.

Not Your Typical Home Life: I grew up in Spain, where my parents ran one of the first drug rehab centers in that country. My best friends growing up were HIV-positive ex-criminals who were in our work programs.

Newshound: I probably read 70 to 80 economic blogs a day. I use Google Reader; you have to. I also read probably 10 or so papers. Mostly the European press. It all takes me about an hour.

Inspirations: Probably my father. He created an international drug rehab center from scratch. That’s a real entrepreneur.

Uber Geekery: I’ve been reading lots of Pascal recently. Something about being restless while being alone in a room with one’s self resonates with me.

---

Bio in 140 Characters

He repatriated to the United States from Spain for school at UNC Chapel Hill and then received a Rhodes Scholarship. He left finance to fix the news.

---

The Five Questions

So you and your co-founder, Turi Munthe, decided 2007 would be a good time to get into journalism. What were you thinking?

Well, for us it was really about free speech. User-generated news is one way to do that. We are both very committed to that around the world. Turi said he had an idea; I asked if he needed a partner. We raised about a million dollars from friends and family and got it started.

The idea was to build a street newswire, one where amateur and semi-professional content could come together and the people who produce it could benefit from it. The vast majority of our outreach has been Turi traveling and meeting people. Today, we have around 14,000 contributors, 3,000 of whom I’d characterize as “active.”

Is this just another journalism business that works because it doesn’t pay contributors a living wage?

I know what you mean. Our model is different because it assumes the contributor is an amateur. That said, we do the work of promoting the images to outlets and we split the fees 50/50. Many of our contributors also live in places where the economics are different, so what would not be a living wage for you and me could be a life-changing amount of money for them. The economics are pretty interesting.

What does the process look like?

Well, of our 3,000 active contributors, I’d say we have about 200 worldwide who are what you might call “staff,” in that they contribute every day. A typical submission is 12 to 14 images. We intake them though our Web site, and then there is an editorial process where we decide what they are, if they are authentic, good, useful, etc. Turnaround time is usually 15 to 30 minutes, but can be as long as an hour. Then, they go up on the site. Once they are up, we reach out to news outlets who might want to run them.

One of the things that makes us really different is our ability to operate places that other wire services can’t. Our reporters are locals, and so when a government kicks all the AP people out, we still get images.

We just rolled out a new Web site and have started dealing in video as well, so we are looking forward to the changes those bring.

At the end of the year though, you are trying to turn a profit. Has that happened yet?

No. We’ve already done another round of funding. Mostly back to friends and family. I anticipate we will be cash-flow-positive in the next 12 to 18 months, maximum.

The whole venture capital industry seems really weird to me. To be profitable, they have to put $100 to $200 million to work, and they want to sell things for 10 times the money and have minimum size of investment, which doesn’t really make sense for us. So the angel, friends and family sort of thing makes more sense at our scale.

Has locating away from the Silicon Valley venture hub been a help or a hindrance?

I think we get a lot less press and recognition because of it. There’s a community journalism funding start-up, Spot.us, that gets just a ton of coverage. I don’t want to make it appear as though I’m dissing him in any way. He does great work, but I think Spot.us funded like 50 stories last year, and we do that in a day, and he gets a ton of coverage. I suspect it’s because he’s located in San Francisco. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but it speaks to the coverage biases.

---

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100507/almost-famous-johnathan-tepper-of-demotix/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100504/lets-go-to-the-videotape-sb-nations-jim-bankoff-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20100504/lets-go-to-the-videotape-sb-nations-jim-bankoff-speaks/#comments Tue, 04 May 2010 15:30:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=27973 While in Washington, D.C., recently, I paid a visit to Jim Bankoff, who is now helming a fascinating start-up called SB Nation, a fast-growing sports blog and news platform.

With over 200 individual communities, it’s a mix of professional and user-generated content aimed at engaging passionate fans.

A former AOL (AOL) exec, Bankoff (pictured here) has worked on such products as TMZ.com, Moviefone, MapQuest and Netscape, as well as its AIM and ICQ messaging offerings.

After that, he became a senior adviser to Providence Equity Partners.

SB Nation has raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company, Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

People familiar with the situation said SB Nation’s post-investment valuation, after its most recent round last summer, is about $30 million.

SB Nation has used its funding to grow like gangbusters, especially since Bankoff arrived in late 2008 as chairman and CEO.

While it has been around since 2003, founded by DailyKos’s Markos Moulitsas and others, the start-up has been aiming more at the sweet spot of local sports pages, especially as newspapers have become weaker.

Here’s the video of my interview with Bankoff, as well as a tour of its D.C. HQ:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100504/lets-go-to-the-videotape-sb-nations-jim-bankoff-speaks/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100305/want-to-chatter-about-chatter-about-the-oscars/ http://allthingsd.com/20100305/want-to-chatter-about-chatter-about-the-oscars/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:06:19 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17065 Who’s going to clean up at the Oscars on Sunday? If you’re the kind of person who is frantic with anticipation…you’re probably not reading this.

But you may still end up watching the awards or find yourself in conversation with someone who cares about them. Or just making small talk, or whatever.

So here are a couple of data points you can bruit about, if you’d like. They come via Nielsen, which is trying to measure online “buzz” about the films and actors up for awards.

What is “buzz”? In this case, Nielsen is monitoring user-generated chatter about the Oscars over the last month. Whether it’s Twitter, blog comments, discussion boards, etc. Note that Nielsen is just reporting on volume here, not sentiment. So it’s possible that many of the people talking about “Avatar” hate it.

But they are talking about it, more than anything else (see chart below; click to enlarge).

Go ahead and draw your own conclusions. Mine: Not at all interesting that “Avatar” is generating chatter since it’s the most popular–or at least the highest-grossing–movie of all time. But barely anyone has seen “The Hurt Locker”–at least compared with, say, “The Blind Side.” So that’s interesting. Right?

And here’s Nielsen’s assessment of the Best Actor and Best Actress categories:

Again, many more people saw George Clooney saunter in and out of airports than saw Jeff Bridges getting drunk, so that means…I don’t know. Maybe they’re talking about Jeff Bridges because all the Oscar TV shows and articles are predicting a win for Jeff Bridges. That would make sense, right?

Meanwhile, an update on the three million New York-area TV watchers who may not be able to watch the Oscars on ABC if Disney (DIS) and Cablevision (CVC) can’t work out their spat: There is no update.

At the moment the two companies are still sending out press releases that are supposed to be incendiary. But they are, in fact, very dull.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100305/want-to-chatter-about-chatter-about-the-oscars/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100301/whats-more-embarrassing-to-italian-americans-than-jersey-shore-um-that-would-be-italy-and-its-google-ruling/ http://allthingsd.com/20100301/whats-more-embarrassing-to-italian-americans-than-jersey-shore-um-that-would-be-italy-and-its-google-ruling/#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:15:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24858 Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Oh, there’s no question in the often paranoid mind of BoomTown that Google is one scary company, mostly due to its huge market share in search across the globe.

Check out this eye-popping chart below from a story in The Wall Street Journal today on this very subject, for example, if you care to share my wariness.

Thus, there is no doubt that the preliminary scrutiny over antitrust complaints the company is getting from the European Commission, which Google (GOOG) has forcefully denied, is not untoward, even if those complaints have been leveled by companies affiliated with archrival Microsoft (MSFT).

There will be more to come, of course, as Google’s growing power is targeted by those interested in stopping its growth–both those with pure motives and not-so-pure.

But no matter how you slice the monopolistic pie, Google most certainly did not deserve, nor should anyone tolerate, the conviction in Italy of three of its execs on privacy violations.

A judge in Milan said the trio had not complied with Italian law because they allowed a disparaging video of a boy with Down Syndrome being harassed by other teens to be posted on the company’s former Google Video site, even though it was quickly yanked,

An appeal is already in the works, which is a good thing since it’s hard to imagine how such a ruling will stand and how any company can police itself so stringently given the mass of user-generated content.

While every online company must have strict rules to prevent such abuses, this case is a little like blaming the telephone company if one gets an abusive call.

And while Google most certainly deserves some of the legal attention it is getting, this ruling should make every U.S. Internet firm–including Microsoft–scared not of Google’s frighteningly powerful search algorithm, but of Italy’s horrifyingly idiotic legal system.

Italian-Americans–of which I am one–or anyone else can gripe all they want about “The Situation.”

But–make no mistake–this is the real situation.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100301/whats-more-embarrassing-to-italian-americans-than-jersey-shore-um-that-would-be-italy-and-its-google-ruling/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100218/hunchs-fake-and-dixon-speak-and-theyve-got-a-hunch-you-might-not-get-exactly-what-it-is-yet/ http://allthingsd.com/20100218/hunchs-fake-and-dixon-speak-and-theyve-got-a-hunch-you-might-not-get-exactly-what-it-is-yet/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:42:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24560

When Aardvark was sold to Google (GOOG) for $50 million last week, a lot of folks wondered about the fate of Hunch, another hot start-up in the space.

Except, as correctly noted by two of its four co-founders, Caterina Fake and Chris Dixon, in a chat BoomTown had yesterday, Hunch is quite different–more of an algorithmically hopped up recommendation service that makes use of a mass of data from user-generated questions and answers than a simpler social search site.

That doesn’t make Hunch into either a Yahoo Answers or a Wikipedia with more charm or allow for annoyingly querying your friends on Facebook or the masses on Twitter.

Personally, Hunch reminds me of a crowd-sourced decision-making mosh pit without the sharp elbows, making all kinds of cool, if odd, connections.

This mass of varied data is what Dixon and Fake think is key to making better decisions.

Got it?

The New York-based Hunch launched about last June to a lot of hype–somewhat due to Fake’s success with her last start-up, Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site Yahoo (YHOO) bought in 2005.

And so far, Hunch has been growing decently, with 1.2 million unique monthly visitors now and tens of millions of questions asked and answered.

(Its other founders are Tom Pinckney and Matt Gattis.)

With $6 million in funding, where Hunch goes from here will be interesting to watch, as it adds perhaps more profiling features, both fun and helpful.

The business goal said Fake: Basic lead generation, for which Hunch will presumably be paid by all kinds of vendors.

Listen in on all this and more in my video interview with Fake, who works on product design at Hunch, and CEO Dixon, who has had his own serial entrepreneurial success selling security start-up SiteAdvisor to McAfee (MFE) in 2006:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100218/hunchs-fake-and-dixon-speak-and-theyve-got-a-hunch-you-might-not-get-exactly-what-it-is-yet/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20091214/exclusive-myspace-eyes-flixster-for-acquisition/ http://allthingsd.com/20091214/exclusive-myspace-eyes-flixster-for-acquisition/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:12:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21949

[UPDATED]

Now that the digital equivalent of a super-vac, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, has sucked up some decent music start-ups–Imeem and iLike–for a song, to bolster the social networking site’s efforts to expand into an entertainment portal, what’s next?

According to several sources, the News Corp. (NWS) unit has turned its omnivorous attentions to Flixster, the popular social networking site for movies.

Whether this is an acquisition or more of a larger partnership deal with News Corp. digital entertainment sites is unclear. Several sources said a purchase was a possibility, while others talked about a more complex deal that did not necessarily mean a purchase.

Sources said any such deal is not imminent, but that News Corp. itself has been conducting extensive due diligence on the San Francisco-based Flixster, part of a plan to combine it with Rotten Tomatoes, another News Corp.-owned site run by its IGN Entertainment division.

Rotten Tomatoes features mostly premium content, including professional reviews, trailer videos and news. It has community feature that is just in beta, so it would be a nice fit with Flixster.

A MySpace spokeswoman declined to comment at the moment.

In 2007, the start-up was close to being acquired by IAC/InteractiveCorp (IACI) for $100 million, several sources said. But the deal went south when CEO Barry Diller changed his mind at the last minute.

Founded in 2006 by CEO Joe Greenstein and CTO Saran Chari, Flixster has raised $7 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures, as well as garnering an angel investment from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

Flixster has attracted a huge audience–upward of 50 million–who trade all kinds of recommendations, ratings, news and even post user-generated movie reviews on its Web site and via widgets on social networking sites, mostly on Facebook.

While Amazon (AMZN) unit IMDb (Internet Movie Database) is still larger in terms of traffic, the more innovative Flixster has been growing much faster and is more social, which makes it attractive to MySpace, sources said.

More important is the mobile growth. Flixster is the No. 1 movie app on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and leads on other smartphones too.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091214/exclusive-myspace-eyes-flixster-for-acquisition/feed/ 11 http://allthingsd.com/20090812/youtubes-most-popular-clips-still-mostly-ad-free/ http://allthingsd.com/20090812/youtubes-most-popular-clips-still-mostly-ad-free/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:23:41 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9855 Kara Swisher isn’t the only blogger who likes charts*: I love ’em, too! Especially when I can tie them to a news story–in this case, Google’s boasting that big profits are just around the corner at YouTube, once considered to be a bottomless money pit.

This chart, from video-tracking service TubeMogul, doesn’t prove or disprove YouTube’s claim. But it does give you a good sense of where the “short tail” of YouTube’s videos–its most popular stuff–comes from.

To tease it out further, I asked the TubeMogul folks what percent of YouTube’s top videos actually had ads, of any sort, on them. The answer: All of the YouTube “partner/professional” clips–which makes sense. And then another 1.79 percent of the user-generated videos. In other words, 63.28 percent of YouTube’s top videos are entirely ad-free.

Better than the old days, when the site had no ads at all. But it might explain why even though Google (GOOG) is optimistic about YouTube’s chances, the search engine has “yet to realize significant revenue benefits,” as the company pointed out in its most recent quarterly filing.

Here’s a video from YouTube’s most popular offerings that remains unmonetized. Though it seems it would be no problem to get an insurance company to sign on for this one.

*Always good when you get to praise the boss’s idea in public. Even better when you mean it, as in this case.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090812/youtubes-most-popular-clips-still-mostly-ad-free/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090810/heres-some-tasty-reader-submissions-for-the-boomtown-apple-tablet-naming-contest/ http://allthingsd.com/20090810/heres-some-tasty-reader-submissions-for-the-boomtown-apple-tablet-naming-contest/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:50:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17222

BoomTown has already gotten some very good submissions from readers for a contest to come up with a good moniker for a tablet device Apple is allegedly working on.

While no one knows when such an innovative product will be coming out–rumors are all over the place, as per usual with Apple (AAPL)–I just decided to move forward with the naming ceremony.

In a post earlier today, some of my ideas included: iTablet, iPad, iAmnotanetbook and iAmakindlekiller.

And here are some of the user-generated ideas, via Twitter mostly, and my Paula Abdul-inspired comments on each of them:

Mike Boylan: They’ll be calling the tablet simply: MacBook. That explains the pro transition a few months ago.

BoomTown: Then what will I call my old MacBook? Phyllis?

Pete Blackshaw: My bets: iScroll, Touchbook, iScript, iScribe.

BT: iScroll is good, but is a little too ancient Greekish, while iScribe is monkish and iScript Hollywoodish. Touchbook sounds unusually naughty, which rules it in!

Paul Marcum: It should be the iLive! But will be the MacBook Slate.

BT: Hmm, iLive sounds too much like iLiver–so no, for obvious reasons. I love the Slate idea, but what about iSlate? Very retro!

Wolfgang Wiedenroth: Easy and simple–just iTap.

BT: I knew a man Bojangles and he’d dance for you, in worn-out shoes….

Park Nunya: I’d call it an iNOTBOOK, as opposed to NETBOOK.

BT: I like it! More subtle than mine.

Eric Welch: iWant.

BT: iPerfect iName. iLoveit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/heres-some-tasty-reader-submissions-for-the-boomtown-apple-tablet-naming-contest/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090807/family-guy-beating-skateboarding-bulldogs-for-now/ http://allthingsd.com/20090807/family-guy-beating-skateboarding-bulldogs-for-now/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:25:58 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14196 While the occasional wedding-dance entrance, skateboarding bulldog or Novocained kid makes a YouTube splash, most Internet users are still watching standard television when they go online, a new survey says.

In a Sanford Bernstein survey, conducted in April, more than half (58 percent) of the 384 respondents said that they watched professionally produced regular TV programs when asked what they viewed online. A quarter (24 percent) said they sought out amateur or user-generated clips, and 18 percent watched professionally produced movies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090807/family-guy-beating-skateboarding-bulldogs-for-now/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090723/another-bet-on-video-how-to-startup-5min-raises-75-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20090723/another-bet-on-video-how-to-startup-5min-raises-75-million/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:43:19 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9617 Web video companies that wanted to take on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube are having a very hard time. But Web video isn’t going away, either, and there has to be some way to make it work for users, publishers and investors. Right?

Hence, another round of funding for 5min, a video start-up that just raised a $7.5 million B round. New investor Globespan Capital Partners led the round, and Spark Capital, the VC shop that has made several video bets (along with a big one in Twitter) made a second investment.

5min has now raised $12.5 million since 2007. Co-founder Ran Harnevo won’t discuss valuation, though I’m told it’s up from its A round, which is an accomplishment in and of itself.

“People do understand that video is the next thing. They just don’t see reasonable business models,” Harnevo says. “That’s the next thing that you have to do. You have to go into VCs and say, “I know how to do this.”

The company, which is based in New York City but has its roots in Israel, takes a different tack toward video than the would-be YouTubes: Rather than serving as a portal for user-generated clips or movies and TV shows, it cobbles together a library of how-to videos and distributes them to sites that don’t have any videos of their own. It now claims to reach 14 million video views across 200 sites.

There’s plenty of competition for how-to sites and videos, too, of course. But Harnevo claims that he’s been able to sell all of his inventory so far, and predicts he’ll be profitable in the next 18 months.

He was similarly optimistic six months ago, when he let me try my hand at conducting an interview with a Flip Mino. I never ended up publishing the clip, but now seems like a good time to do so–as long as you’re willing to put up with crummy sound, shaky camerawork and a stretched image. As I said, I was trying this stuff out.

Just about every thing we discussed in this interview still holds up, except that 5min now boasts 100,000 videos, up from 50,000 in December.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090723/another-bet-on-video-how-to-startup-5min-raises-75-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090617/microsoft-ready-to-give-up-on-its-would-be-youtube-too/ http://allthingsd.com/20090617/microsoft-ready-to-give-up-on-its-would-be-youtube-too/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:27:11 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8259

Microsoft is willing to burn lots of cash as it stubbornly pursues its Internet strategy–it lost a staggering $575 million on its online business in the last quarter alone–but even Redmond has its limits. The company is finally confessing that Soapbox, the would-be YouTube it launched in 2006, is no YouTube. And it doesn’t sound that enthusiastic about keeping it going.

Microsoft (MSFT) Vice President Erik Jorgensen tells CNET that it is already going to scale back the site’s ambitions: Rather than let users upload whatever video they want, Soapbox is limiting user-gen uploads to specific categories it thinks it might be able to sell ads against–entertainment, finance, etc.

And the company is not even promising to keep that option open. “We haven’t decided whether you just continue to support it or whether it is too expensive and out of our focus to do,” Jorgensen tells Ina Fried.

My guess is the latter. Soapbox still exists, but I only know this because Ina says so. A Google search for Soapbox gets you to the main MSN video page. I had to resort to a Bing search to find the Soapbox section.

It’s an amazing turnabout, really. When Google (GOOG) bought YouTube for $1.6 billion in 2006, conventional wisdom was that user-generated video was the future, and that the age of “professional” video content was just about over. Three years later, those still in the Web video business–a pool that is shrinking daily–are doing their best to highlight how much stuff they have from grownup pros.

So treasure videos like this “funny dog” clip while you can.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090617/microsoft-ready-to-give-up-on-its-would-be-youtube-too/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081008/if-this-monetization-plan-doesnt-work-out-theres-always-the-amazon-tip-jar/ http://allthingsd.com/20081008/if-this-monetization-plan-doesnt-work-out-theres-always-the-amazon-tip-jar/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:34:05 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6408

Eventually we’d like to make money out of it.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt on YouTube

It’s been two years since the $1.65 billion acquisition and Google (GOOG) has yet to truly monetize YouTube. And while Google CEO Eric Schmidt insists the company has the “luxury of time” as it searches for ways to recoup its investment in the popular video site, it’s clear the issue is gradually becoming more pressing. “We’re waiting for the innovations,” Schmidt said recently. “The innovation will come. We know it will come. We know it’s there.”

Could the “it” to which Schmidt refers be the new e-commerce platform YouTube is launching? Perhaps. Beginning this week, YouTube is embedding “click-to-buy” links in certain videos on its site, which refer users to affiliate services selling the music featured in them. “Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features,” YouTube explained in a post to the Official Google Blog. “Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products–like songs and video games–related to the content they’re watching on the site.”

An interesting idea. And should it prove successful, it could begin to justify YouTube’s jaw-dropping $1.65 billion purchase price. “This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube,” the company explained. “Our vision is to help partners across all industries–from music, to film, to print, to TV–offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted, audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081008/if-this-monetization-plan-doesnt-work-out-theres-always-the-amazon-tip-jar/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081008/if-this-monetization-plan-doesnt-work-out-theres-always-the-amazon-tip-jar-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081008/if-this-monetization-plan-doesnt-work-out-theres-always-the-amazon-tip-jar-2/#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:34:05 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=6408

Eventually we’d like to make money out of it.”

Google CEO Eric Schmidt on YouTube

It’s been two years since the $1.65 billion acquisition and Google (GOOG) has yet to truly monetize YouTube. And while Google CEO Eric Schmidt insists the company has the “luxury of time” as it searches for ways to recoup its investment in the popular video site, it’s clear the issue is gradually becoming more pressing. “We’re waiting for the innovations,” Schmidt said recently. “The innovation will come. We know it will come. We know it’s there.”

Could the “it” to which Schmidt refers be the new e-commerce platform YouTube is launching? Perhaps. Beginning this week, YouTube is embedding “click-to-buy” links in certain videos on its site, which refer users to affiliate services selling the music featured in them. “Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features,” YouTube explained in a post to the Official Google Blog. “Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products–like songs and video games–related to the content they’re watching on the site.”

An interesting idea. And should it prove successful, it could begin to justify YouTube’s jaw-dropping $1.65 billion purchase price. “This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube,” the company explained. “Our vision is to help partners across all industries–from music, to film, to print, to TV–offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted, audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081008/if-this-monetization-plan-doesnt-work-out-theres-always-the-amazon-tip-jar-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080310/the-dirty-job-of-digging-for-accurate-information/ http://allthingsd.com/20080310/the-dirty-job-of-digging-for-accurate-information/#comments Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:02:03 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080310/the-dirty-job-of-digging-for-accurate-information/ “Completely inaccurate” does not even begin to get to the heart of the problem, but we’ll get to that later.

First, let’s see if we can sort this latest rumor about the acquisition fever wafting around the popular Digg news site, published by TechCrunch last week.

Its take: That Digg has been pitching itself for sale using bankers from Allen & Co. and was poised to receive high-priced bids from archrivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), and also had interest from two unnamed major media companies (a good guess here would be CBS and News Corp., owner of Dow Jones, which owns this site).

How exciting! How dramatic! How gripping!

And: How untrue!

That’s because once you actually take time to do actual reporting, you find the story is quite a bit less exciting and dramatic and gripping–pretty much nothing more than part of the typical sniffing and circling that goes on constantly in Silicon Valley.

Here’s what my many and varied sources close to all the companies involved told me, related specifically to the TechCrunch report: Digg is not going around hawking itself, but using bankers to handle interest it receives fairly regularly; and neither Google nor Microsoft is poised to make a bid hovering around $200 million (in fact, most every possible acquirer I spoke to said $60 million to $80 million was a more likely price if Digg were ever sold).

This is not to say that Digg could not suddenly get an amazing offer too good to refuse, from any of the parties and others, as any company could.

And Google is a natural bidder and has to be interested in Digg, of course, given that it needs to add more to its Google News product and likes highly distributed plays like Digg.

In addition, given that it did a guaranteed ad deal with Digg last year and might have to have alternatives if its Yahoo bid fails, Microsoft is the other obvious candidate to own a site like Digg.

But, once again (these Digg sale rumors surface with wearying regularity, much like the colds I get from my kids), Digg is not embroiled in this fantastic kind of Spy-vs.-Spy battle between Google and Microsoft, news of which rocketed around the Web and took on a life of its own.

In other words: While Digg has been to visit the Googleplex and Microsoft to discuss all sorts of linkups, including recently, along with several others over the last two years (Yahoo, for example), from partnerships to traffic deals that could–of course–all lead to a possible acquisition, its executives have not been waiting by the fax machine for offer bids to start rolling in of late.

Here’s the duller truth, in contrast to sexier rumormongering: Of course, larger companies are interested in high-growth Internet phenoms like Digg, whose massive distribution on the Web via Digg buttons and a motivated audience is impressive.

The user-generated news-discovery site that has grown quickly to 27 million unique monthly visitors and 250 million page views is poised to be profitable this year.

While some debate its helpfulness at generating monetizable traffic, when Digg points to a story, huge audience spikes quickly follow.

That’s attracted attention from larger companies, from both the Web and media worlds, all of whom have been calling the still-small start-up (50 employees) for a getting-to-know-you chat.

“Everyone is looking to see if they can copy Digg, partner with Digg, acquire Digg,” said one person familiar with the company.

That has been both a blessing and a distraction to the company, I would imagine, as it takes the eye off the ball of actual executing on a day-to-day basis. As I have seen with a lot of companies I have covered, acquisition interest can be a heady experience and not always in a good way.

And there have been some actual offers to buy Digg over time, although not recently, and none has reached even close to the kind of fire-alarm state that TechCrunch loudly rang last week.

The report was so over the top that it prompted Digg CEO Jay Adelson to refute it on the company’s blog.

He wrote: “Normally our policy is to not comment about things like this, but this morning’s rumors about a bidding war involving Google and Microsoft have created such a stir we feel compelled to tell you all directly that they are completely inaccurate.

“Sorry to burst any drama theories, but they aren’t true. We remain focused on improving Digg and rolling out great features.”

Of course, that was not enough of a denial for TechCrunch, which stood by its source, and then spun a somewhat convoluted conspiracy theory about Adelson’s post: “Digg may have had an angry Microsoft and Google on its hands this morning after this post, leading Jay to comment on this where they usually wouldn’t. Jay certainly wouldn’t say anything untrue in his post, but there’s a lot he isn’t saying in that post, too.”

But that’s kind of like trotting out the old when-did-you-stop- beating-your-wife courtroom ploy. Quick, Della, parachute in Perry Mason to get Adelson to confess to his alleged crime!

Sure, Adelson could have been even more specific, denying Digg was for sale completely and once and for all, I guess. But no public or private company would ever do such a imbecilic thing, as everyone is ultimately for sale, and saying otherwise would have also been completely inaccurate.

And, it goes without saying, no one wants to be completely inaccurate, do they?

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. ]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080310/the-dirty-job-of-digging-for-accurate-information/feed/ 4