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At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a six minute speech about how, starting sometime in the next five years, he expects his company to make billions and billions of dollars turning the TV, news, film, and music industries upside down.
The speech was nuanced and obviously pre-planned. It contained big revelations. But because it came in the middle of a wide-ranging, hour-long interview, hardly anybody noticed.
The gist: As has already happened in the gaming industry – where Zynga now has a larger market cap than Electronic Arts – Facebook expects insurgent entrepreneurs to "reform" the film, TV, news, e-commerce and music industries with the help of Facebook. Some of these companies will be incumbents. Some will unseat incumbents. Facebook will then – perhaps through credits or advertising, but also perhaps some other way – tax these companies in exchange for the value it has added.
Here's how Zuckergberg put it:
"Anything that involves content or specific expertise in an area – games, music, movies, TV, news, anything in media, anything e-commerce, any of this stuff.
Over the next five years, those verticals are going to be completely re-thought. There are going to be some really good businesses built.
Our view is that we should play a role in helping to re-form and re-think all those industries, and we'll get value proportional to what we put in. In gaming, we get some percentage of the value of those companies through ads and credits. But that's all because we're helping them.
If we're helpful to other industries in building out what would be a good solution then there will be some way we get value from that. "
In the next few days, we're going to publish a speculative story on how Facebook can "reform" those industries the way it has been able to funnel hundreds of millions of users into social gaming. We'll be talking about some of these issues at our Ignition conference next week too. We'd love to hear your thoughts, too. Comment below or email us at Nicholas@businessinsider.com.
In the meantime, we've embedded Zuckerberg's speech here:
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Whether you are an Apple fan or not, there's no denying the company's advertising style.
The now-dead "Get a Mac" campaign has been parodied everywhere. And before that came the "Switch" series of commercials.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that along with the parodies came serious ad campaigns attempting to copy Apple's style: the white background, schlubby competitor, folksy-hip music (think Feist), and sleek product demos.
Apple shouldn't feel too threatened. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery after all.
Click here to see 10 Apple copycat commercials >>Join the conversation about this story »
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Suddenly, Every Commercial Is An Apple Copycat (AAPL)
With the holiday shopping season in full swing, retailers are clamoring to publicize their sales, deals and more. Amazon issued a release today that customers can now give any of the 725,000 Kindle books to anyone with an email address. So a recipient doesn't need a Kindle to even receive an e-book. The normally data shy Amazon also revealed that the Kindle is the most gifted item in the company's history, and that "millions" of people are using the Kindle or Kindle apps to read books.
Of course, those without a Kindle can read their e-books on the Kindle App for the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices. Gifters can choose a book in the Kindle Store, and send give the e-book as a gift by simply inserting the recipient's email address. Recipients can redeem the gift in the Kindle Store to read on any Kindle or free Kindle app.
If you are a BlackBerry Facebook user I suggest you get over to App World and get the latest version. New to the update is places, a dedicated inbox, search and a new style friends page just for starters. I have not had a chance to test out Facebook Places yet and I am wondering if it could be an alternative to Foursquare or Gowalla? You clearly cant check in somewhere and post to Twitter...
Source : Tracy and Matt's Blog
Explore : BlackBerry, Facebook, Mobile Computing, Social Network
How many advertisements do you see every day? The average person reportedly is exposed to hundreds or even thousands of commercial messages daily.
But what about advertorials, sponsored content, or marketing campaigns that use content as their main tool?
Can you tell if what you're reading was created to sell you something?
As more and more companies adopt content as a selling point -- in the digital-deal corner, see Groupon and Thrillist, whose alternately savvy and tongue-in-cheek tone is expressly geared to open your wallet -- what we read will be shaped by what they have to sell. And it's a trend media companies are warming to, as well: witness Business Insider's launch of a flash-sale service, Pipeline.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social services have increased the ways brands create content that seems as though it is not an ad. But while marketers talk about "brand loyalty" and "engagement" as the new metrics, those are only in service of the old metric: cash. Companies hope that when we're finished playing their games, reading their helpful, friendly websites on specialty subjects, and participating in their social charity causes, we buy their stuff.
We're exploring the intersection of content and marketing at IGNITION, our conference on the Future of Media, taking place Dec. 2-3 in New York. For smart discussion on media business models, click right up and get your ticket. We've got some great speakers on this topic, including Federated Media's COO Deanna Brown, and Tina Sharkey, who heads up Johnson and Johnson-owned BabyCenter.
Their companies demonstrate how content marketing is not necessarily a disingenuous PR tool, but rather a strategy used in a variety of ways. Federated Media employs what it calls "conversational media" with the stated goal of supporting independent website authors. BabyCenter is a much-awarded website on all things infant. It highlights the blurring of the line between content and marketing.
Another way to parse the issue is to observe the convergence of media and e-commerce. Thrillist's Ben Lerer is speaking at IGNITION around this topic, as is LivingSocial's Tim O'Shaughnessy. In fact, the entire agenda is geared to exploring content. (Did I mention we're still selling tickets?)
Ultimately, if what you're reading is both content and advertising, do you even care? If it's entertaining and informative, does who wrote it and why matter to you?
Is this an article or an ad?
You're cordially invited to come and continue the discussion at IGNITION.
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We ran this post a couple of weeks ago. In light of the latest report that AOL just hired advisors to help it figure out how to grow faster and merge with Yahoo, it seemed to make sense to run it again...
The two struggling Internet giants of the 1990s, Yahoo and AOL, should merge.
Immediately.
(In fact, it's ridiculous that they haven't already).
This idea isn't new--we've been calling for it for three years, and, according to Kara Swisher, "big investors" are now calling for it, too.
"Big investors" want Yahoo and AOL to merge, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to become CEO of the combined company, and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to become Chairman (which would be in keeping with what Yahoo's board is discussing anyway). We would certainly be open to that idea--assuming Tim can persuade us that he is tough enough to quickly and efficiently make the big restructuring moves (and cuts) that the combination would require.
But the management structure isn't as important as the combination itself.
Here's why the companies should merge:
Yahoo and AOL are both in the same business, and it is a business that benefits greatly from scale. Yahoo and AOL are both basically media companies. They both use technology extensively, but their core competency is producing content to attract an audience and then selling display ads against that audience. They also both operate duplicative mail, instant-messaging, sports, finance, news, maps, and other services, all of which currently compete with each other. That is senseless. By combining, Yahoo and AOL would achieve greater scale and reduce duplication.
There is huge and needless duplication of services at AOL and Yahoo: "Portal" page, finance, sports, entertainment, celebrity gossip, games, mail, instant-messaging, ad network, search window (outsourced), chat, etc. There is no reason for these services to be duplicated. And by splitting the market, Yahoo and AOL are splitting the market and thus losing more ground to their competitors. Take "mail," for example. Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail are critical traffic drivers to both company's content empires. They keep users coming back many times a day. But both Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail have lost ground to Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, and Microsoft Outlook is still a major competitor. Left on its own, AOL Mail will die: AOL just doesn't have the resources to keep it competitive with the offerings of far-richer companies like Microsoft and Google. Yahoo Mail may survive, but it would have a better chance with the added scale and resources of being combined with AOL Mail. And the same can be said for instant-messaging, voice-chat, and all of the other areas above.
AOL is affordable, even for Yahoo. AOL's enterprise value is about $2.4 billion. Yahoo's is $16 billion. Yahoo could probably get AOL for $3 billion, maybe $3.5 billion. That's only 20% dilution. And if Yahoo didn't want to take the dilution, it could always buy AOL for cash. Yahoo doesn't know what to do with its cash anyway. (It might have to borrow a bit of money to pay cash, but money is free right now. Alternately, it could sell off its Alibaba stake and raise the cash that way. The stake adds no strategic value whatsoever.)
The combination would be instantly accretive for shareholders. In combining, Yahoo and AOL could not only boost revenues, but cut hundreds of millions of dollars of costs. Both companies are already gushing cash, so the combination would immediately goose cash flow.
The combination will eliminate a major competitor for both companies--both in display advertising and, importantly, in the consolidation of the burgeoning online content industry. AOL just bought TechCrunch for ~$40 million. Yahoo should also have bought TechCrunch--and we suspect that AOL's move might just wake Yahoo's M&A team up. In future sales, therefore, AOL and Yahoo might be competing with each other for companies like TechCrunch. That will drive prices up...unless they're working together.
Combining AOL and Yahoo would make the combined platform a "must buy" for any display advertiser. The display market isn't growing as fast as the search market, but it's still a huge and fast-growing market. Right now, the two companies' sales forces are duplicated. They needn't be. And the combination would offer advertisers even greater reach, inventory, and targetability. This, in turn, would reduce content production costs as a percentage of revenue.
The combined search businesses would have (slightly) more leverage to get better terms with Google or Microsoft. AOL only owns 3 percent of the US search market, but that 3% is still worth ~$500 million a year. Search is an economy-of-scale business, so the added scale would likely allow the combined company to squeeze better terms out of Microsoft or Google.
The combined distribution business would have more leverage with Hollywood, the music industry, and other content creators. Why is the cable industry so powerful? Scale. Once again, the more people you reach, the more valuable you are as a distribution platform. This combination would bring more distribution scale.
AOL's New York media headquarters would give Yahoo an even stronger beachhead in the media and advertising capital of the world. New York still matters, especially in this industry.
Yes, putting the two companies together would be challenging and require painful cuts. But it's not rocket-science. And it also wouldn't involve combining enormously different cultures and businesses, the way, say, the disastrous AOL Time Warner merger did. These two companies are essentially in the same business. As long as management took a disciplined approach to the integration, the merger would stand a good chance of being very successful.
Unless it radically refines and focuses its business, AOL must combine with someone--Yahoo or Microsoft. There is no way it can survive as a generalist all-things-to-all-people brand when it is so much smaller than everyone else in the business.
Yahoo has less need to do this deal--Yahoo already has enough scale--but the combination would help Yahoo. And, as discussed, it would also eliminate a major competitor.
Merging Yahoo and AOL is not "the answer" to both companies' woes. Once they combine, they'll still have to execute. But it's a good step toward for both companies.
They should do it immediately.
See Also:
Well, AOL, We Love That You're Playing Offense Again--But We Still Don't Know What You're Doing
Yahoo's Board And Partners Are Getting Sick Of Carol Bartz's Mouth
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