Reactions to story from Beet.TV

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  The quiet boom of paidContent, and its new chief executive

  http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/03/the_quiet...
  48 days ago in PDA: The Digital Content Blog | Guardian Unlimited · Authority: 594

  The quiet boom of paidContent, and its new chief executive Jemima Kiss / Blogging / Deals / Start-ups 12:51pm Rafat Ali's digital media empire has grown, again. I'll disclaim right away - I used to work for him and am in awe of what he has created since
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  News of the Week 4/6/08

  http://danblank.com/blog/2008/04/06/news-of-the-week-4608/
  38 days ago in Dan Blank: Publishing, Innovation & the Web · Authority: 73

  News of the Week 4/6/08 Apr 6th, 2008 by Dan Blank Traditional media team with niche sites to nab ad dollars "Looking to snare a larger share of Internet ad dollars, traditional media companies are launching "vertical ad networks" in which they sell ad bundles of space on their sites and on independent sites with complementary content." Passion fuels entrepreneurial journalism "The biggest challenge facing the journalism industry today is not declining readership, the economy or even the Internet – it is the increased competition that the Internet has made possible." The New Rules of Media "The Audience Knows More Than the Journalist; People Are in Cotnrol of Their Media Experience; Anyone Can Be a Media Creator or Remixer; Traditional Media Must Evolve or Die; Amateur and Professional Journalists Should Work Together; Journalists Need to Be Multi-Platform." Chasing rainclouds away with some positive attitude "Journalism is not newspapers. It’s bigger than that old tree-killing tradition, and sooner or later, someone’s going to figure out how to get it paid for." Citizen Huff: The Evolution of the Huffington Post "…this summer the site will take an ambitious step by introducing its version of a metropolitan section: local versions for major cities… The plan will put The Huffington Post into competition with existing newspapers and, arguably, ith companies like Yahoo, AOL and CNN.com." How to be an Authority Maven: 21 Tips for Keeping Up to Date in Your Niche "Here are 21 tips for a more productive approach to keeping up with all the crucial developments in your niche. They will work for feeds or Twitter in most cases but I have aimed mainly at RSS." Glam Makes Big Cuts In Publisher Payments - “Up To 80% Drop In Revenue” Advertising network Glam seems to be experiencing some growing pains. This blog entry and the ensuing comments offers an interesting look at how it affects publishers who use Glam. Social gaming picks up momentum "The combination of social networking and games, known as social gaming, is presenting online games to users who have never bothered to play or were turned off from their earlier experiences. It is also opening doors to new kinds of games, building on the Why Original Blog Thought is So Difficult "The question that begs to be asked is why does there seem to be so much me-too blogging as opposed to people contributing different perspectives?" Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later . . . The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain) "…what is a blog? It is a conversation with readers. And you don’t have to start a conversation knowing all the facts." Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal - New York Times "There was an innocent time, oh, about four years ago, when the idea of turning a blog into a book seemed novel, a fresh path for unknown writers to break into the big time." My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog "We used to have our social online presence very centralized, for me it was my blog. The current trend is very interesting, everything is decentralized and we only use the best services by type of media (text, photos, video, music, events etc)." If the news is important it will find me "We always talk about entertainment on the net and on tv as being different because TV is lean back, and internet is lean forward. It looks like information distribution has become delineated in the same way." A VC: Where My Traffic Comes From "This post should be called "the rise of the smart aggregators" because the new big sources of traffic to this blog are techmeme, reddit, twitter, and delicious." 20 Types of Pages that Every Blogger Should Consider "…today I thought I’d highlight a few ‘pages’ that I have here on ProBlogger as examples of pages that bloggers might want to develop to promote their blog to different groups of people." NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years "According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950." PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future “Our focus has been laserlike on the C-level executives in the industry. That’s why we get triple-digit CPMs. That’s nearly unheard of in the industry.” PaidContent Nabs Former Dow Jones Senior Exec as CEO, Expands Staff and Opens New York Office "Rafat [Ali] speaks about the growth of his company and the economic realities of the current digital media frenzy." Hothouse blogs "The other great example of the web as journalistic hothouse that I always point to is Brian Stelter, boy-blogger at CableNewser and now New York Times scribe… This from a young man who wouldn’t have stood a chance getting hired by The Times before the blog era." Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0? "A couple of years ago, The Times opened up my blog to comments, and the results have been spectacular. The quality of discussion on Pogue’s Posts is just astonishing." Posted in News of the Week
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  paidContent's Ali: We need new CEO to drive growth

  http://www.techconfidential.com/money-out/blog/money-out/why...
  48 days ago in Tech Confidential - Money Out Blog · Authority: 90

  My colleague Mary Kathleen Flynn and I spoke Thursday afternoon with paidContent.org founder Rafat Ali and with Nathan Richardson, who Thursday was announced as the new CEO of ContentNext Media Inc., the parent company of paidContent and sister blogs paidContent:UK, mocoNews.net and contentSutra. Richardson, formerly head of Dow Jones Online and, previously, Yahoo! Finance, will succeed Ali, who will retain his title as publisher and co-editor at the company. Also coming aboard at ContentNext are Patrick Dignan, formerly the director of East Coast sales for Forbes.com, as chief sales officer, and Charlie Koones, who recently left Variety after serving as president and publisher and who will join the company's board of directors. In our discussion Ali and Richardson speak at length about ContentNext's growth plans, how they connected and the role of Greycroft Partners LLC founder Alan Patricof, who in 2006 invested in the online media company, in bringing in a new chief executive. - Alain Sherter Why did you decide the time was right for this management change at ContentNext? Rafat Ali: Change is a strong word for it -- addition is more like it. I've been the reluctant CEO for the longest time. When I started the site five and a half years ago, it wasn't meant to be a commercial company, and it just turned into one. From the editor I became the publisher, and then when we took funding I went from publisher to become the CEO by default. About six or eight months ago I started thinking about it. We've grown the revenues more than double every year over the last two years, we've been profitable and we've grown from one Web site to four sites. After starting events in 2005 we added a few more in 2006, and in 2007 we added conferences and seminars. We've become the hub for senior executives in the media, entertainment and digital information industry. The question now is how do we scale what we have? As we're thinking of that, management was one of the first things we had to fill. After we started thinking about it, Nathan and Patrick appeared on our radar. This all happened within the last month and a half. What spurred you to recruit a CEO? As I mentioned the key for us is to scale. I was a journalist before, I'm still a journalist, I'll always be a journalist. So when I started the site, it's not as if I knew anything about sales, strategy or business plans, or even how to do a financial balance sheet. All of that I learned on the job. As the company grew, we brought in professional management. When the Greycroft funding happened, we brought in a CFO, and then we brought in a COO. Their role was to pull the company out of my bedroom and make into a real company. We've done that to a large extent over the last two years with the funding and with operational revenues, as well as with how we've expanded into other verticals. We opened an office in Santa Monica, and now we're going to open one in New York. We have journalists and business people in the U.S., U.K., India and other places. So operational stuff had happened, but the question remained how we go about things on the business strategy and scaling side. It can't all be me. We've achieved the scaling part to a large extent on the editorial side, because we've brought in journalists and added other sites to our portfolio. On the business side we've been successful in scaling revenues, but beyond that how do you go on from here? We cover this specific area of digital information pretty well, but how do we add more data business, more information, context? How do we add more seminars, conferences or research in areas that make sense in the market? I was the one who came up with the idea to tell the board we should bring in a CEO. When did you do that? I started thinking about it six months ago. Everybody thought it was a good idea. What I'm trying to stress is that it's not like we went out on a search. It all came together pretty organically and nicely. What was Alan Patricof's role in bringing in Nathan as CEO? Alan introduced me to Nathan. The good thing about Alan is that he can be as hands on as you want him to be or as hands off. He'll make 50 calls if you ask him to, and if necessary will even do sales calls. Not that he's done that, of course, but he would if you needed him to. That's his value--to make introductions of all the people in his Rolodex. For our events he's helped us get big-name speakers, whom he knows personally. Were you actively looking for executives when Nathan and Patrick came to your attention? We were very lucky. Both of them fell into our laps. We had just started thinking about it and were ready to do a formal executive search with an agency. But we didn't have to do that. We were speaking to two other people, but it never got serious. ValleyWag has suggested that the move to recruit a CEO was prompted in part by a flattening of paidContent's traffic and being eclipsed by other tech blogs. How do you respond? Nathan Richardson: One thing that's a little bit misleading is the concentration of the audience--and if you talk to people in the media industry they'll tell you that this is one of their first stops. Two, traffic doesn't reflect our RSS feeds and newsletters, and those are two ways our audience tends to want their information. Ali: Also, there are four sites. People only look at paidContent--they don't look at MocoNews, contentSutra or paidContent:UK, all of them very strong. And as Nathan says, a lot of CEOs and other senior execs I speak to, the first thing they say to me is, "You're the one I wake up to every day." Which is great because they read it on their Blackberry, by email or RSS. We're also not a consumer brand--we never will be. We're not out there to get links from people. We're not link-baiting or indulging in gossip. Our laser-like focus is senior industry executives. Does that mean you're satisfied with ContentNext's growth? No, I'm not. That's why Nathan is in there. Richardson: Rafat underestimates himself. The company is doing fine. It's not like it's not making money or isn't break-even. It's more that there's a larger opportunity, and Rafat has realized that. The company has gone from being a blog that he was doing to a business that has transformed from a small site into a must-read B2B publication in the digital media and entertainment field. The thing that's really important to distinguish, as you're quoting from blog posts, is the journalistic integrity on ContentNext sites. It's not the gossip of tech media and digital entertainment--it's the company events, mergers and acquisitions and people movements presented in a way that's noise-free and that represents the round-up of what's happening, as well as breaking stories that we might have come upon. Which of ContentNext's sites are doing best, and where do you want to see improvement? Ali: PaidContent, the main site, is still growing the fastest in terms of traffic and revenues. ContentSutra, our India site, has a smaller base but is growing very fast. At this point it's probably the top technology blog in India. We haven't made too much of a business effort there yet, because it was still early days, so there's a lot of opportunity. On MocoNews, I think it probably has a lock on the industry in terms of mobile content and applications. If you go to the CTIA Wireless conference next week in Las Vegas and shout out the word "Moco" in any of the hallways, 90% of the hands will go up and people will say that they read it and love it. Mobile is a huge growth area. What's interesting is that we're covering all the changes in the industry, and yet we're part of the story as well. With MocoNews, specifically, because of all the changes with open networks, iPhone, the spectrum auction and everything else that's happening, what we're covering is way ahead in terms of how this will affect the media and content industry, and that's being reflected in the growth of our audience. I would like to see us do more events and research in that sector. PaidContent:UK, which was launched five months ago, is the smallest. I think the opportunity for us there is more face-to-face than online. The market there is smaller. The industry there--I hate to say this because technically speaking I'm a British citizen--they're still behind the U.S. in terms of advertisers moving online. Richardson: It will be partly opportunistic and partly around what's happening in the business, but this is a prioritization exercise for us as a company to figure out which markets are under-served, which ones have the most financial upside and where we see ourselves strategically differentiated. Tell us more about ContentNext's business strategy as the company evolves. Ali: The vision is to scale. How we do that in tactical terms is something we can't really talk about. But as Nathan said the opportunity is to scale more in sectors that we're covering. We may add allied verticals to what we're covering. It's safe to say that we'll scale in terms of our coverage areas, and we'll also go deeper into some of those areas. We'll certainly be adding more journalists to our roster and adding businesspeople, as well. We'll be adding to the events we do, looking at which areas and events make sense--we want to be very focused on the event side. We're also looking seriously at how we build on our data assets. We've been covering this industry for six years and have all this data. We need to add that data set because it's increasingly important for offering context for busy industry executives. The whole point is to say to senior execs who don't have enough time in the day, we'll tell you what's important and why in your specific industry. That's our philosophy. As part of that, we'll add tools and all kinds of search stuff to our databases as we grow. People who want to do more research and get a more in-depth view of the sector that they're interested in, they'll be able to get it through our site and other venues. What other sectors do you plan to focus on? Richardson: The easy way to think about is that our universe is digital media, entertainment and technology. You start to realize that there are blossoming sub-sectors in each of those areas, whether online creative, music, TV or the convergence of all these products. There's a lot of room for us to build out in each of these areas. Ali: Entertainment is an interesting one. I'm sitting here in Los Angeles, and the two main trades here, Variety and Hollywood Reporter, are completely reeling from all the changes that are happening. So much so that the companies that own them want to get rid of them. It's an interesting position for us to be in. We've been covering digital entertainment, so you can extrapolate and figure out how we can increase our coverage in that area. That's one opportunity for us. That's precisely why we're bringing someone in like Charlie [Koones], who of course has done a lot at Variety. What role will partnerships and acquisitions play in your growth plans? About six or eight months ago we started doing syndication deals, which is just one part of our partnership strategy. We're now syndicated with all the top sites--Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, HuffingtonPost, Reuters, CBS, Washington Post, New York Times--and we'll do a lot more of those deals. Another aspect of our partnership strategy is that we're doing the Economics of Social Media conference next month, and Fast Company is our co-host for that event. Richardson: There are many reasons to believe that we should be actively looking at build-buy-partner opportunities wherever we can. We're nimble and small enough so we can do things like that. There are lots of backers who can help us do that because they believe in our platform. We're going to be opportunistic in that regard. There's also reason to believe that, to the extent we can scale our existing platform, we would go it alone and do it through partnerships and building. But if there are people looking to get out of their business and sell their assets, then we'd certainly looking at buying. Yahoo! Finance, where I was before, had 10 partners when I started--when I left five and a half years later it had 220. We went from having 100 stories a day to having 2,000 stories a day on the site. So there's a lot to be said for partnerships in the new age of digital media. ContentNext raised some venture capital in 2006, the company's only outside funding to date. Any plans to return to the well for more funding? Richardson: We're small and nimble, and our options are wide open as far as how we'll grow. We'll work with our board and shareholders to make sure we're choosing the right option to move forward, grow the fastest and optimize the returns for shareholders. Rafat, I can see why you hired this guy. He has exquisite footwork. Richardson: Are you telling us you have a blog you want us to buy? Let's talk. First we'd like to see you do more online video. Ali: Actually, that's one of the areas that we'll grow quite a bit. We've been doing audio interviews for a long time, before things like podcasting even existed. We started doing video last year with our conferences. And I've started doing some video interviews, although they're not very professional. From now on our thought is to add more video, but how we go about it we're still trying to figure out. Regarding the Greycroft funding, what has the money allowed you to over the last couple of years that you couldn't have accomplished without it? The funding was pretty small. Even when it came out we didn't disclose the size. But what I've been saying, because journalists like you have been on my back on this issue, is that it was much less than $1 million. It was a good cushion, but it wasn't a huge amount. But it gives us enough leverage if we needed to, down the line, raise more funding. The money was a good way to get someone like Alan involved. That was the role of the money. We've been funded from cash flow--surprise, surpise--for the last five and a half years. See March 27 post from paidContent See March 27 post from Tech Confidential See video interview with Ali from Beet.TV

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