Joining Yahoo!
I am excited to announce that I am joining Yahoo! to run Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com) as Vice President and General Manager. Yahoo! is also acquiring BuzzTracker.com and related technologies as well as bringing on all Participate Media staff.
The decision to sell the business and move to Yahoo! was relatively simple. As anyone playing in the online space understands, online media is all about scale. The ability to garner real CPMs, the ability to sell ads directly, the ability to provide innovative solutions to advertisers, all depend on having tens of millions of unique visitors. As the Publisher of BuzzTracker.com and before that RealClearPolitics.com, that point has been drilled into my consciousness over the past two years. Yahoo! News is the leader in online news — the number one player according to both ComScore and HitWise, and I am extremely excited to come aboard as General Manager and have the opportunity to drive value from News, extend Yahoo!’s leadership position and contribute to their commitment to being more open by bringing the best content from across the web. I also get the opportunity, with my team, to bring BuzzTracker, the blogs we cover, and our thousands of granular topical content feeds to millions of users and thousands of advertisers.
Follow the discussion of the transaction at BuzzTracker.
RealClearPolitics
Yesterday (March 12, 2007) was our last day as Publisher for RealClearPolitics. As was reported in PaidContent a month ago, the investor group I led sold our stake in RealClearPolitics back to the founders earlier this year…and stepping down as Publisher is a natural consequence of that transaction. It was a great investment for us; and we are confident that RealClearPolitics has a very bright future ahead going into the 2008 Presidential Election.
John McIntyre and Tom Bevan have done a fantastic job building up RealClearPolitics, and we’re proud to have been a part of the success in the past year. Since we became involved in September of 2005:
– we launched a new, “micro-chunked” site built on Movable Type (Fred Wilson talked about it here)
– we executed distribution deals with Yahoo!, OpinionJournal, Forbes, FoxNews, and Time Inc.
– we developed key new technologies used by RealClearPolitics including BuzzTracker, ReaderArticles, and a myriad of Polling tools
– Page views and unique visitors more than doubled
– we signed up additional web sites to be repped by RealClearPolitics
– Revenue quintupled
(all posts on RealClearPolitics)
RealClearPolitics is well positioned as the leading independent political web site heading into what is certain to be a historic 18 months. The technology base and business model is in great shape, and I am looking forward to seeing the evolution of the site and the can’t-be-beat election coverage.
We wish John and Tom the best of luck moving forward — and we’ll still be powering the FoxNews/RealClearPolitics Buzztracker!
Sweet Home Chicago
It’s been a while since I posted - but I felt the need to chime in on all the discussion about Geography and how it relates to your startup — and to online media in general.
Ross Mayfield (bottom of the post) asks Dick Costolo of Feedburner:
So Dick, let me ask you one question that I think you are in a great position to answer, at least to keep you going. How does an Internet entrepreneur overcome not being in the Silicon Valley? I’ll bet it is more than being on a plane all the time.
I’ve been a tech entrepreneur in Chicago for over 10 years now and I get that question a lot. I didn’t understand the focus on it 10 years ago and I don’t understand it now. Don’t get me wrong, everyone sees the obvious in that there is more capital and talent and entrepeneurial energy in Silicon Valley than anywhere else — but that is far from saying you can’t start a business anywhere else. Especially now in this day and age.
What do you need to start a business? You need the idea — you need to be able to build a team — you need to acquire customers — you need to be able to establish partnerships — and you need to be able to attract capital. All of these are easily done and getting easier here in Chi-town. On the team side — thanks to web 1.0 we have a slew of internet veterans running around from companies such as Performics, Participate.com (my old business), Spirian, Tunes.com to name just a few — in addition to a ton of people who have worked in both advertising as well as media (think Tribune, SunTimes, Crain’s). Plus we have five world class universities in Chicago or Evanston.
On the customer side — Chicago is not lacking for either big customers or media partners either — and we have an incredibly supportive business climate here where Chicago based businesses want to help other folks from Chicago (yes, this is true).
The area where we definitely were lacking in before was the whole networking game - 10 years ago you flew to the Valley at least once if not twice a month — plus you attended 5 or 6 tech conferences a year. But nowadays, with all the new collaborative technology out there — i can see what VCs in the Valley are thinking by reading their blogs and reading BuzzTracker Venture Capital — I can track the technology news by going to BuzzTracer Technology. And by commenting on these blogs and using new services like MyBlogLog you can really start to develop new relationships online.
As Ross himself said in a later post:
You can’t argue that the interpersonal Silicon Valley cross pollinates within a culture of sharing, and the result is fantacular. But half of what makes this work is our ability to collaborate in creating something new, but the other is how we can bring it to the world as an edge that cuts across. Look, we kick the world’s ass in marketing technology, so much so you expect it. If it comes from here, odds are you will be a fan. Until favor tips to a new marketing engine the valley will remain.
But innovations brought to market really could happen everywhere and nowhere.
The point is it easier than ever to start a business somewhere else. And in Chicago — while it is undoubtedly more difficult to attract Valley VCs — there are plenty of top tier VCs who will invest in a business here. Plus — the Angel environment is outstanding with a ton of available capital from very successful business people.
My question is never why Chicago? But why not? Why not start a business where YOU want to start a business? And if you do want to be in online media — we have a pretty fantastic confluence of journalists, advertising, and new media execs.
What do you think?
RealClearPolitics Partners With Washington Post
Yesterday, the Washington Post Announced a Partnership with RealClearPolitics to:
“provide washingtonpost.com with a daily feed of its “Best of the Web” series, including top recommended news articles and opinion pieces, to be featured in washingtonpost.com’s “Politics News & Analysis” e-mail newsletter and on the front page of the site’s well-regarded “Politics” section.”
More can be found here.We’re extremely excited to begin work together, and especially look forward to collaborating on new features for Election 2008.
This announcement comes on the heels of 2006 announcements with Yahoo!, FoxNews, Forbes, Time, and Opinion Journal — we’ve always felt the key to long term success was to cut distribution deals that would both build and establish our brand while also growing traffic to provide our value-add to a larger audience. Congratulations to John McIntyre and Tom Bevan, founders of RealClearPolitics for a job well done!
Why We Love MyBlogLog And Why You Should Too!
Our new BuzzTracker design, here at http://www.buzztracker.com, incorporates MyBlogLog communities very prominently above the fold on almost every page. We’ve been getting lots of questions of why this is, why did we do it, etc., so I thought I’d write this post to try to give a little insight into our thinking.
Let me start by saying that the principals of Participate Media have been thinking about and implementing online communities for over 10 years now — we worked together at Participate.com (sold to Outstart in November 04) from 96-04 — and we remain more convinced than ever at the power of online communities and social media to build brands, create loyalty, create value-added services, and help fuel explosive growth. We even wrote a series of whitepapers on Online Community, Return on Participation, and other topics relevant to the success of making this social media work. I posted about the Return on Participation whitepaper, and MyBlogLog here (whitepaper is available).
One of the largest values we believe a Publisher can deliver its readers is recognition — showing people off and rewarding them for their participation. MyBlogLog is the ultimate recognition engine — and even better — it rewards people for reading our site, and gives them a very quick way to find out who else is reading and enjoying the web site. For a newer site just building their first critical mass, MyBlogLog allows us to deliver this terrific feature NOW by leveraging the critical mass across the MBL network.
Now the other key benefit that you have to provide to readers is the ability to interact; to comment; to discuss. You must allow your readers to become part of your brand and to define your brand. We’ve gotten a lot of questions on — “where can I comment?” and we will be launching this shortly. We expect to work with MyBlogLog as well on this feature — as we will instantly have thousands of people registered to comment on our site.
Finally — we’re also very excited by what we expect to be a furious roll out of new features allowing publishers to show off most frequent readers, new readers, etc to the site — essentialy this should become a great platform for us to deliver more value to our user base.
What do you think?
