Above the Crowd

I have been intrigued by the back and forth between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and Mark Cuban on the topic of “Free” as a strategy and business model. For those that haven’t read the articles and posts, I highly reccomend them all. Here they are in a list: 1) Back in February of 2008, Chris Anderson wrote the original cover story for Wired Magazine, title “ Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business. ” Recently he has expanded this into an  entire book . I have felt for the  past year or so, that Chris’ first article is quintessential reading for the entrepreneurial set.  More on why later. 2) In the July 6, 2009 edition […]

I recently spoke at AlwaysOn’s OnHollywood conference on the subject of today’s extremely dynamic online/Internet video world. Things are moving so amazingly fast that its extremely hard to predict specific outcomes. That said, I believe there are a number of critical issues to understand as we watch this market unfold over the next  few years.  Here is the video of the event:   And here are the slides: I wish they were synchronized, but alas after well over an hour of work, I gave up.  I believe that Google bought a company that will allow this, but they haven’t released the functionality yet on YouTube. […]

“Little Joe never once gave it away Everybody had to pay and pay”                   — Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side The consensus seems to be that social networks have a monetization problem.  On this topic, both the leading technology industry blogs  and the world’s top news organizations  agree.  The problem is not that these sites have no revenue.   I “guesstimate” that MySpace and Facebook have annual revenue run-rates of approximately $650mm and $450mm respectively – highly reputable numbers.  The perceived problem relates directly to revenue per user or page view, as these are two of the most heavily trafficked sites on the […]

Many companies and visionaries have pontificated about the future of video ads and different techniques for monetizing online videos.  A big part of this is driven by the fact that while YouTube is a huge user success, its a less proven monetization success.  On a recent trip to NYC, an idea came up which I can’t get out of my head, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that it is the Holy Grail for the future of online advertising.  But before I disclose the big “ah-ha,” a few caveats: 1) No one will ever monetize commodity content well.  If the same […]