SpectatorBytes

The digital media landscape continues to evolve at a significant pace, with new forces disrupting the market dynamics every 12 months. This is one of the reasons why digital media companies of all sizes continue to struggle to sustain revenue and profit growth long-term.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, digital businesses need to [...]

Upon learning of Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed, very few industry people (myself included) were surprised that Facebook needed to acquire a company to bring in talent to compete with Twitter. However, if one takes a step back, this news should have at least raised an eyebrow. Currently, Facebook is one of the hottest digital [...]

Recently, Techcrunch had an interesting article about the death of digital divisions inside major media companies. Techcrunch argued that the slowdown in M&A will mean that  most digital initiatives will now be led by the traditional divisions rather than by “digital” divisions.
While this may be the case in the short-term, I believe that major [...]

The much expected news of a Yahoo re-organization has gotten me thinking about what the ideal organization is for internet divisions/conglomerates to foster growth and innovation.
Since I believe interactive networks will primarily grow/scale through acquisitions of products and services over the next few years, they would benefit from designing an organizational structure to support [...]

A good friend of mine, who works in digital media, recently expressed its frustration with Web businesses: ” Why can these businesses be more simple; They are just not easy businesses.” Any digital media entrepreneur or executive is likely to agree with this statement. Building or operating businesses on the Web continue to be [...]

One of the initiatives early-stage companies should seriously consider during this economic slowdown is venture mergers. Joining companies within your ecosystem of services of user offerings may put the resulting combined enterprise in a safer long-term position.
Advances in Web infrastructure and technology development has made it possible for many entrepreneurs to start highly specialized [...]

Much has been written about the Hulu experience. Since last year, I increasingly have found myself using my laptop on weekends to catch up on my favorite TV shows both on Hulu as well as on the network sites. The experience is particularly enjoyable on Saturday afternoons when College sports dominate TV programming.
So, obviously [...]

This was a tough week for online advertising given Valueclick’s lower guidance for Q208 (see below), Google’s less than stellar performance and even eBay’s cautious outlook for Q3.

Valueclick’s Guidance - Fiscal Year 2008 Revenue by Segment

Year-Over-Year Growth

Affiliate Marketing2(excludes Search123)

+8%

Comparison Shopping and Search (includes Search123)

+19% pro-forma

Technology

+18%

Media, Total

-18%

Display advertising

Low single digit increase

Lead generation

High 20% decrease

While Valueclick’s [...]

Acquisitions have emerged as an essential capability for digital media players to build scale and drive product innovation. The digital media business has become hit-driven and increasingly hyper-competitive. As a result, building a successful Web business is increasingly hard for anyone but particularly for corporate media players. This is leading most media players [...]

Microsoft’s control over Yahoo has reminded me about the importance of “religion” to succeed in technology. I believe “religion” is one of the key underlying reasons why Yahoo’s management and board has resisted Microsoft’s overture.
Digital media companies are founded and scaled around a particular “set of beliefs.” These beliefs reflect a particular way [...]

Today’s major news headline is NewsCorp’s FIM sales reorganization (see here). While internal politics have been blamed for the changes in the blogosphere, in an strategic sense, I would expect the move to further help FIM built its brand advertising revenues. Here are some of the reasons why:
- Increases focus on creating “scalable” [...]

Much has been said about Web 1.0 companies struggling to adapt to the current dynamics of the Web. No need to call it Web 2.0. The Web has simply evolved and conditions changed. The list of changes is pretty evident:
- Broadband penetration has reached full scale
- Product development costs have fallen dramatically
- Infrastructure [...]

Traditional and digital media companies have begun to recognize the need to use M&A to build their business. Acquisitions are increasingly becoming a critical source of product innovation, specialist talent (see my previous post Product Development: Specialists Win), new audiences, new customers, etc. This is a trend that I expect to become more [...]

For quite some time, I have been really impressed with Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos. I believe Jeff has proven to be a true industry visionary. This came today after reading about Kindle sales (see Amazon gains after CFO remarks). I am not sure whether or not the Kindle will is a hit and [...]