Poor Joost – a classic case study in bad timing, this online video platform is finally putting itself up for sale in what is clearly a last-resort move:

Joost is looking to sell itself and become an online video platform for cable or satellite operators, with Time Warner Cable supposedly interested, according to an anonymously sourced article at CNET. When asked about it, a Joost rep provided us with a “we don’t comment on rumors” email.

A blog post on Joost’s site comes with this gem from its CEO:

That’s just a partial list, because we’re not close to being done yet, and nothing, not brain-eating aliens, not cats on skateboards, and not rumors and speculation, will keep us from continuing on our mission to bring video to you over the internet. In the afterglow of the hype of our early days, we’ve had our fair share of critics, but we’re encouraged every day by the amount of feedback emails, tweets, Facebook comments and more that we receive from our fans. The team here continues to work hard, every day, to make Joost a success, and we thank you for your continued support.

Clearly, he’s in rumor non-denial denial mode, hedging bets and reassuring everyone it’s still a viable platform. I like the defiant, “we’ve had our fair share of critics” part, written as if some of those criticisms weren’t warranted.

Don’t get me wrong, Joost actually was game-changing technology when it first came out. It was the first platform where viewing a full-length TV show on your computer wasn’t an awful experience. The problem is, as everyone now knows, it was quickly outdone by Hulu’s better experience, and only its relaunch as a web-based platform (as opposed to a downloadable software) and an iPhone app have kept Joost alive – even if it’s on life-support.

But does this platform make sense for the likes of Time Warner Cable? Possibly – if they know something we don’t know. TWC already has a video download site, something that was intended to be their long-term solution for Video On Demand once their set-tops are Internet enabled. But where the interesting opportunities arise is if TWC uses Joost’s technology to develop a response to NetFlix’s video streaming service directly to the TV. The pay-per-download market is crowded and tough. Perhaps TWC (or whichever cable system purchases Joost) sees this as a way to hedge their bets with an unlimited stream model?

Will be fun to see how this shakes out.

Anyone else having late 90′s dot-com bubble flashbacks today upon hearing the news that Yahoo! is shutting down Geocities? Greg reminds me that it’s not so much that the name Geocities brings back memories, but the fact that Yahoo! bought it for $4.5 BILLION (!?!).

Those were the days. At least Yahoo! didn’t buy TheGlobe.com or FortuneCity.com.

On a related note, this excellent post points out Yahoo!’s move marks the death-knell of the free, ad-supported site-hosting era – and highlights niche sites that seem to be having some success in charging for premium, well-designed sites. The hook? They’re based around a specific subject matter.

Ultimately, in the era of blogs, social networks and tweets, it’s hard to imagine hosted site products moving far beyond small businesses or events such as weddings.

But look at the bright side: it will ease the strain on servers everywhere.

As a follow up to Dan’s post, reading all of the suggestions to save newspapers has given me a strong sense of déjà vu.

Near the end of the dot-com bubble, there was a moment when lots of ad-supported startups, upon realizing that the VC spigot was going dry and under pressure from investors to come up with an alternate revenue stream, seized upon e-commerce as their holy grail (others, meanwhile, tried to reposition themselves as B2B companies). My employer, an ad-supported gaming site, launched a “store” where users could buy .. well, I was never sure what, exactly, or why they would buy it from us. One of my coworkers posed the question directly to the CEO: Was there any evidence at all that our users wanted this store, or were we doing it for our own reasons? He got his answer a few months later when management shut down the store and laid off most of the people who had been working on it. There may have been a start-up somewhere that successfully grafted an e-commerce option onto an existing ad-supported business, but I’m not aware of it.

Lately, I’ve been getting the exact same vibe from the people proposing micropayments or cartel-enforced paywalls. It’s an idea born of desperation, focused on the needs of the business rather than of consumers.

Shirky nails it:

Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want. As a result, conversations about small payments take place entirely among content providers, never involving us, the people who will ostensibly be funding these transactions. The conversation about small payments is also not a normal part of the conversation among publishers. Instead, the word “micropayment” is a trope for desperation, entering the vernacular of a given media market only after threats to older models become visibly dire …

The invocation of micropayments involves a displaced fantasy that the publishers of digital content can re-assert control over we unruly users in a media environment with low barriers to entry for competition. News that this has been tried many times in the past and has not worked is unwelcome precisely because if small payment systems won’t save existing publishers in their current form, there might not be a way to save existing publishers in their current form (an outcome generally regarded as unthinkable by existing publishers.)

Not only does it not offer consumers anything they want, it cripples a key functionality of the Internet: the ability to share, link to or blog about news stories. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve long argued that this recession is a perfect time to invest in digital marketing, and it looks like that trend may actually start happening. According to a new eMarketer report, web’s cut of ad dollars is going to pass 15% by 2013, and it should hit 10% by the end of this year:

Ironically, that rate of growth should accelerate because of the ongoing recession, which is causing many brands to reevaluate all of their ad and marketing budgets, according to the report. That optimistic assessment comes just after eMarketer revised its 2009 online ad spending forecast, dropping an earlier prediction of 8.9 percent growth to 4.5 percent.

And why will the share grow? Well, in a great example of stating the obvious:

“Digital marketing offers compelling benefits, especially for cash-conscious companies,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst . “Marketers can more readily measure the results of Internet advertising than with most traditional media.

This produces more efficient advertising and higher ROI, which in turn pushes traditional media to compete with lower pricing.”

What this article leaves out is the notion that – while the share of the pie that goes to web will grow, the overall pie will likely shrink due to the recession. Still, a percentage or two shift to the web may not seem like much on the surface, but for digital agencies, this would represent a flood of new money.

Yet, amazingly, there are still agencies out there without a strong digital service and with clients demanding one.

I’ve said it before and will say it again: the time to invest in digital is now.

Jeff Jarvis posted a pretty biting rant against the newspaper owners in the Huffington Post entitled “You Blew It.” Clearly it was sparked by the the angry and often self-righteous-to-the-point-of-ridiculous tirades of newspaper executives this week at the Newspaper Association of America’s meeting (which included, almost unfathomably, coordinated attacks on Google News for aggregating links to newspaper sites).

Jarvis’ post can be best classified as a “J’accuse!” essay in which he shakes his head at the inability of newspaper execs to grasp a positive business model on the Internet after two DECADES of opportunity. And, of course, he’s right. But here’s the part that made me gulp (as a fan of reading my morning papers):

So what can you do? Two years, even a year ago, I would have said that you had time to build the networks and frameworks and platforms that would support the ecosystem of news that will come next. I would have said you could retrain your staff to take on new responsibilities: organizing and supporting that ecosystem, curating the best, training people to be the best. I would have advised you to offer your staff members the opportunity to join that ecosystem, setting them up in business. I would have told you to take advantage of the efficiencies the web allows (do what you do best, link to the rest, I used to say). I would have argued that we need to invent new forms of marketing help for an entire new population of businesses-formerly-known-as-advertisers. I did say that. But the financial crisis only accelerated your fall. It didn’t cause the fall, it accelerated it. So now, for many of you, there isn’t time. It’s simply too late.

Is he right?

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Much of the chatter surrounding Mark Bowden’s Vanity Fair piece on the New York Times has focused on the anonymous quotes slagging publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. But what I found the most fascinating was the passage dissecting Sulzberger’s invocation of the phrase “platform agnostic”:

When the motion-picture camera was invented, many early filmmakers simply recorded stage plays, as if the camera’s value was just to preserve the theatrical performance and enlarge its audience. To be sure, this alone was a significant change. But the true pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It freed them from the confines of a theater. Audiences could be transported anywhere. To tell stories with pictures, and then with sound, directors developed a whole new language, using lighting and camera angles, close-ups and panoramas, to heighten drama and suspense. They could make an audience laugh by speeding up the action, or make it cry or quake by slowing it down. In short, the motion-picture camera was an entirely new tool for storytelling. To be platform agnostic is the equivalent of recording stage plays.

I had a similar thought last week when, after months of reading about it and stealing envious glances at it on the subway, I  had a chance to play around with the Amazon Kindle. It’s a pretty cool product, though it’s clearly still early in the product life cycle; I’d guess it’s roughly analogous to where the iPod was six or seven years ago. But I also realized that in terms of societal impact, we’re even earlier in the process. So far, the Kindle has made the tiniest dent in terms of how books are distributed. In the coming years, it will change how they’re promoted. And one day in the not-too-distant future, it will begin to transform our entire notion of what a book is.
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