Posts tagged business models

Is Yahoo Trying to Acquire Tumblr?

All Things D reports that Yahoo is trying to get its cool on with a potential Tumblr acquisition:

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.” …According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Adweek follows up saying a deal could be done by this weekend, adding:

Such an acquisition could be just what CEO [Marissa] Mayer has been looking for to turn around Yahoo’s momentum; Tumblr has the potential to excite the engineering/Silicon Valley community (even though it’s based in New York) while recapturing the imagination of advertisers, who have grown to view Yahoo as big but stale.

While its revenue is modest, Tumblr has positioned itself as one of the few players in the digital ad world that is well suited for brand advertising. And Tumblr is also the domain of the young, cool and creative crowd—not currently a Yahoo sweet spot.

From Tumblr’s point of view, the deal also would seem to make a lot of sense. The company has been looking to make a big exit to justify its huge valuation.

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik suggests Facebook might try to swoop in on a deal.:

We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt [Mark] Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. [Tumblr’s David] Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Word of warning via 37signals: What happens after Yahoo acquires you:

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Sweet.

Selling Data, Taking Things in Your Hands Edition

A common truism says that if it’s free and on the Web, you’re not the customer but the product being sold. Also common is the following reaction: what can I do about that. The less common reaction: How can I get in on that?

Try this one on as a thought experiment.

Via Slate:

In a world of privacy-invading smartphone apps and government-grade spyware, keeping personal data personal online can seem like a difficult task. But could you make money by choosing to give away logs of your most intimate data?

Federico Zannier is trying to find out. Emails, chat logs, location data, browser history, screenshots—you name it, the New York-based software developer is selling it all.With a Kickstarter campaign launched earlier this month, Zannier, a 28-year-old Italian-born master’s student at NYU, is offering to hand over a day’s digital footprint for a measly $2. He says he “violated his own privacy” starting back in February for about 50 days straight, recording screenshots and webcam snaps of himself every 30 seconds and tracking his every footstep using GPS technology. He logged the address of each Web page he visited—storing some 3 million lines of text—and accumulated a massive trove of 21,124 webcam photos and 19,920 screen shots.

Zannier’s aim, somewhat paradoxically, is to take ownership of his own data by selling it. He points out that we often hand over our private data unwittingly, given that few people take the time to read the terms and conditions of apps and online services. Companies rake in millions of dollars selling our information to marketing firms while we receive little in return. But Zannier’s Kickstarter is not just out to make a statement about online privacy—he plans to use the funds to create a browser extension and a smartphone app that he says will help others sell their own data. “If more people do the same, I’m thinking marketers could just pay us directly for our data,” he writes on his Kickstarter page. “It might sound crazy, but so is giving all our data away for free.”

So, just as the Web often disrupts, let’s cut out the middle man.

Image: It’s Free, But They Sell Your Information, via Telco 2.0.

Newspaper Advertising

bostonreview:

Why the Washington Post and other newspapers need pay walls. (Via The Atlantic)

FJP: Interesting to see since we we were just having a conversation about it.

Blogs Rule, But Brands are Ignoring Them

Technorati’s Media’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report is an important read for brand and marketing folk. In it, the authors write that consumers trust blogs more than social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

The disconnect here is that brand marketers spend more time and resources on social networks, and vastly more dollars on display advertising, search and video.

Via Technorati (PDF):

Currently, the bulk of brands’ overall digital spend goes to display advertising, search and video, with spending on social, including influencer outreach, making up only 10 percent of their total digital spend. Within their social budget, more than half goes to Facebook, followed by YouTube and Twitter, with the remaining 11 percent of their social spend going to blogs and influencers…

…In short, where brands are spending is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value and being influenced. This has much to do with an essential hurdle faced by most content creators: a lack of metrics and the fragmentation that leads to their complexity as a purchasable medium.

The report’s authors argue that brands need to refocus their earned media strategies on direct engagement with influencers.

Image: Detail of digital and social budgets from Technorati’s 2013 Digital Influencer Report (PDF).

How Much Should a Writer Be Paid, If Anything

There’s a fantastic thread going on over at Branch about how — and how much — different publications pay freelancers and contributors. 

For example, The Awl’s Choire Sicha writes:

Okay. I will lay some cards on the table on the currently argument-inducing arena of writer pay. At The Awl, essentially what we pay in total for freelance pieces is 10% of *gross* site revenue. Overall it might be more than 10%. (And I do not mean 10% of net revenue, mind you, which is a radically different number than gross.) I do not know if this is fair or right. I do not know if it scales appropriately for either side, ours or the writers. (That’s actually an important consideration, not an idle one; if it scales too poorly for our side, guess what, The End.) But still I find it dissatisfying.

Editors from various publications (Boing Boing, Outside Magazine, Washington City Paper, etc) chime in about the budgets they have and how they work with contributors. So too people like Reuters’ Felix Salmon who recently wrote about how the concept of a ‘writer’ is becoming outdated.

All this is in response to a post by the investigative journalist Nate Thayer that broke the internet yesterday. In it, he shares his conversation with an Atlantic editor who was hoping he would rework an article he wrote about “basketball diplomacy” and efforts to get a 7’9” North Korean basketball player into the NBA.

Thayer was asked whittle his original down to 1,200 words for free. 

So if you’re a freelancer, thinking about becoming a freelancer or just getting started in journalism, read the Branch thread. It’s an invaluable look behind the curtain of this industry.