When I read the news on TechCrunch that Valleywag’s longtime editor, Owen Thomas, was leaving the gossip site, I wondered whether there was a bit of schadenfreude in this reporting.
The news that Google is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business! Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. Good on them!
Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.
Already, computers are more intelligent than most people you watch on television. But what will happen when they are smarter than everyone? Google is starting a new institution, the Singularity University, to ponder that question.
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. After hackers took down SoapBlox, a one-man blog-hosting company which runs local political Web sites, a silenced liberal commentariat found out how true that was.
Groans are issuing from the Googleplex over this year’s holiday bonus. In the past, the search engine paid cash–as much as $20,000 or $30,000 per Googler, we hear. This year? A cellphone.
Google has shut down Lively, a service where people log on to chat and explore 3D virtual spaces, after a few short months. The MBAs of Silicon Valley have a pat phrase for the arrival of a competitor on the scene: They say it “validates their space.” What does it say, then, that Lively is gone? It means that Second Life, the best known of these unreal universes, is doomed, too.
Is YouTube making Google a political player? The video-sharing site, with its stratospheric bandwidth bills and questionable new ad formats, may never pay Larry and Sergey back in cash for the $1.65 billion they shelled out to buy it in 2006. But it doesn’t have to. YouTube, having conquered online video, is taking over political broadcasting.
It’s more than a rumor: The great Silicon Valley gossip rag experiment has come to a humbling conclusion.
Two and a half years after launching Valleywag, blog magnate Nick Denton has decided to fold the site into Gawker, which covers the media business. For the past month, Denton has been saying to everyone who will listen that online advertising is undergoing a sharp slowdown as the economy continues to tank, and Web publishers are going to get nailed.
Why is Kevin Rose on a publicity binge? In the past two months, the founder of headline-voting site Digg has garnered two magazine covers. There he is with a smoldering leer on local San Francisco magazine 7×7.
Here are all the talking points you’ll hear about Kevin Johnson’s departure as the chief of Microsoft’s sprawling Platform and Services Division–and what to say about them. The failed Yahoo bid killed his prospects of becoming Microsoft’s CEO. Perhaps, but Steve Ballmer, who is more to blame for the Yahoo debacle, wasn’t going anywhere, and [...]
Why so gloomy, VMware investors? The company’s stock drop, while likely driven more by the virtualization software maker’s newly slenderized forecasts and the resignation of its founder, seems like a slap in the face to incoming CEO Paul Maritz. And that would be a shame, since VMware is now getting one of the princes of the software world as its boss — and just in time, as it’s facing tough competition from Microsoft, where Maritz used to work.
Prices in the online advertising’s world bargain bin are cratering. PubMatic, a consultancy which helps Web-site owners shop for the highest-paying ads, says that average rates for its largest publishers have dropped from $0.38 per thousand page views to $0.18. Some fret that this is the sign of an economic slowdown. I doubt it. More likely, it’s a reflection of the glut of inventory available, and the failure of an ad-selling business model.
Jerry Yang’s spin campaign about why the Microsoft bid fell through is transparent. He’s not trying to cajole Steve Ballmer back to the negotiating table; he’s trying to cover his rear and appease indignant shareholders. The only reason he’s so open about accepting a new bid from Microsoft, I think, is that he’s not expecting another one to come.
Google’s top executives desperately want to convince Wall Street that it’s on the verge of cracking the $70 billion television-advertising business–automating it, rationalizing it and ruling it, as it has done with the considerably smaller search-advertising market. They’ve even hired an NBC executive, Michael Steib, to sell broadcasters on the idea. The only problem: It will never work, as Google’s own documentation shows. Google’s triumph in search is a product of its skillful use of data. By analyzing what Web searchers click on and what advertisers say they’ll pay, it’s able to continuously refine the ads it displays to yield the most clicks for advertisers and the most profits for itself.
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