Bronte Media

I am off to Antigua for the quarter final stage of the cricket world cup for the next two weeks. And so, no beloved postings from me in the next little while. But really, this is just a self-indulgent post to convey my excitement.

Having gone to the soccer world cup last year in Germany, I can’t wait to kick back with my mates and enjoy Australia dominate the rest of the world.

Eliminating costs from online video is a lot more interesting than growing revenue at this point in time.

With that in mind, venture capitalist Will Price has an interesting update on one of his portfolio companies, Move Networks, that aim to commoditize Flash delivery (i.e. commodity protocol - HTTP - and presumably commodity server versus where Adobe make their money).

Set aside the minuscule probabilities of success in trying to create a Youtube-killer with a joint venture with five of the largest media organizations of the world.

And concentrate on this: “News Corp. and NBC Universal want to control how their shows are watched online and to hold onto advertising dollars migrating to the Web.”

“News Corp. President Peter Chernin and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker have made the initiative a top priority, and the talks heated up this week.”

Does Peter Chernin know that the company owns MySpace, which offers MySpace video and hosts a significant chunk of YouTube’s instream plays, thereby partially controlling (with the option to disable) that traffic.

MySpace video is a lot more popular than people think and is a very strong number 2 to Youtube.

So why the hell launch a JV with folks who have failed (save for Yahoo) to grasp the Internet since its inception?

Maybe it’s just a seat at the table to watch the train wreck while they really concentrate on Myspace video. My Murdoch-loving genetics have to believe that.

Following on from reading Charlie’s post about fellow NextNY member Noel Hidalgo’s quest to travel (and video blog whilst doing) the world. I decided to help him out too. The name: Lucky 7. The goal: $11.11 from 700 people for $7,777, leaving on 7/7/07.

Check it out and donate for yourself.

Forums are the forgotten child of web 2.0. They hold nearly all the same attributes as blogs, social networking and the like but none of the modern valley pixie dust.

One area that got me back into (reading at least) forums was affiliate marketing, where there are many great examples (sitepoint and earners forum are two good ones).

In both are marketplace sections that function as a clearing house for anything from domain names to thriving niche communities and often poorly executed projects in need of a little tender loving care.

Lee Dodd is a guy who buys, develops and sells sites such as those and here is a great post on how he thinks about online communities and forums.

One byproduct of Zillow showing the usage statistics on how many people view a particular property in any given month as well as properties in the same state and in the US, is that you can get a rough view on their monthly page views.

For instance, in March it looks like they are on track for about 52 million page views (would be a low estimate as pages on their wiki, search page and front page etc. wouldn’t be counted in that figure).

If you assume a generous eCPM of $20 (bankrate as a comparable has $100 eCPM but they have been around, have a productive sales force and operate in more valuable parts of financial services than real estate), you get a monthly revenue figure of about $1m.

I had heard estimates from a fairly reliable source that they are doing more than that, so I would take the above as a minimum.

Either way, they have about 120 people. If you assume an average of $10k per head per month in costs (salary, office, tech etc.), they are roughly at break even.

To go public in this climate you need about $40m/year in revenue run rate and at least be break even. That is of course if you wanted to go public. They are venture backed and also PAR Capital, a hedge fund, has a significant stake so they by definition have a built in shareholder base that does want to go public.

If they continue to execute like they have been doing and keep doing a great job it is not in the realm of possibility that they would go public sometime early next year on a purely operational finance perspective (i.e. non-management preference, non-market factors).

UPDATE: As if reading my mind, Seth Godin posts stats on Squidoo, the ultimate in organic search referrals.

Rich Skrenta of Topix has a fantastic post that provides more insight into their thinking around buying the topix.com domain name and the consequent nervousness around shifting the millions of pages they have indexed in Google under topix.net to the new domain.

He is a little defensive on the reaction around how dependent the site is on organic search referrals but does provide a well thought through point of view:

“To say that a content site should not rely on search engine traffic — most of which comes from Google — is naive. The web is 10 billion pages now, with a single point of entry. That’s the web the way works. If you want to have a web business, you have to acknowledge this reality.

Sites such as Wikipedia, Answers.com, About.com and TripAdvisor receive massive amounts of traffic from search engines. I would think that 50% would be a low guess. About, Answers.com and TripAdvisor are big businesses, and they would be completely clobbered if users stopped being able to find them from Google. This is not unusual; it is the norm. Barry Diller talked about the importance of SEO to his sites in his keynote at a recent conference. ”

He is right. Everywhere you look from Citysearch to Yelp to Insiderpages to Judys Book to Trulia to even Homethinking, most of the new user acquisition is through organic search. That’s just the way of life.

Err OK. Maybe Viacom can do something right.

Cool cross-media Digg-style micro TV series for wannabe TV producer amateurs:

Which I actually found out as they were recruiting kids from the NY Film Academy which is right near where I live.

Thanks to Mike for sending this excellent summary of a SXSW panel on the costs to build and maintain a web app.

The most relevant (to me):

# Maya’s Mom: Build $70,000 / Monthly $30,000
# Mobissimo: Build $60,000 / Monthly $150,000

Homethinking is probably most like Maya’s Mom. We launched the initial site with coverage of California with a little more capital but out monthly costs are slightly lower (at least at the moment). All figures obviously don’t count sweat equity which is a large part of the efforts at the early stages as well.

Last October Tom Freston was fired by Sumner for not moving quick enough to acquire Youtube, a prized asset.

And now:

“Viacom, owner of MTV Networks, said yesterday it is seeking $1 billion in damages for almost 160,000 clips it said were posted to YouTube without permission.”

Clearly the tell-tale signs of a coherent online strategy in place.