I campaigned tirelessly to enlighten my fellow classmates at Copenhagen Business School about this injustice, about why they should get a Mac. I managed to convert my entire study group and a fair number of other people too. It was invigorating to be able to convince people of the fundamentals.

…

Still, financial results of the likes Apple delivered yesterday serve as an affirmation of all that energy spent telling their story. Believing in the underdog. Like your favorite home team who couldn’t get into premier league while growing up just won the Superbowl, the Stanley Cup, and the World Series all together for the 10th time in a row — and you were the only one to believe in them. It’s an immensely satisfying feeling.

…

I’m well aware that this level of gushing is somewhat unbefitting in public, and I normally wouldn’t indulge the impulse. I’m just so proud of Apple that I’m willing to look foolish saying so.

No other company has inspired me more when it comes to marketing, design, focus, and even capitalism than Apple. Make the best damn product out there, charge a profitable price, and win the world.

What triggered this gushing? Apple’s quarterly profit results. He was just so happy they had made so much money. Which makes no sense if all you do is buy their products, but it makes all the sense in the world if you own their stock.

I still don’t understand Apple, I guess.

*Everybody except me, perhaps. I really, really dislike iTunes.

1. These guys are fighting the perception that they’re just suckerfish on the Zuckerberg shark.  If they honestly think they’re the brains behind Facebook, they should use their brains to eclipse Facebook.  Why not start UConnect 2.0 on MySpace?
2. They’ve racketeered / extorted / won $65MM from Facebook.  Minus attorney fees which they maybe didn’t have to pay if their dad hooked them up, they’ve got the cash needed.  But they may have lacked the vision to pull in Timberlake and pull the trigger on the deal.
3. Supposedly they want to be media moguls — they want(ed?) to own / run / row Facebook, but they’re best known for dicking around in courthouses.  That’s not what moguls are know for.  If they want to be entrepreneurs, they should be doing entrepreneurial things.

That’s it.  Wish it would have happened.  Would have been wild.

photo credit: exfordy

I just can’t imagine the white iPhone was that difficult to build.  I imagine the exchange went something like this:

Steve Jobs: This new, white iPhone will be the greatest device ever created.  It will be elegant, intuitive … and exceptional.  It will combine the grace and simplicity of the iPhone 4 with a new boldness, a new panache, a new bravado.  It will be amazing.  Just incredible.

Engineer: So you want us to replace the black plastic bits with white ones?

SJ: The new, white iPhone won’t be covered in just any white, it’ll be white like the pure snow atop the Himalayas, like a whitecap forming on a cresting wave … a white too perfect, too pure, too incredible for the dressing gowns of angels.  The white iPhone will have the perfect shade of white that …

Engineer: How’s this?  I built it while you were talking?  It’s white.

SJ: Incredible.  But the world’s not ready for it yet.  Let’s tweak it for 10 months.  We need to nail this one.

Seriously, months … for white plastic bits.  It is incredible.

Meanwhile, another mythical creature has emerged — Obama’s birth certificate.  Like the white iPhone, it’s been the subject of a lot of distractionary debate for many, many months.  Forget the economy, forget the deficit, forget the wars … this guy is a foreigner.  And just like George Washington, he should be ineligible for office.

It’s amazing how much attention these absolutely trivial things get in today’s media landscape.  The white iPhone is exactly the same as the black iPhone except that it has white plastic bits instead of black bits.  The new Obama birth certificate is just like the old, shorter birth certificate — it shows he’s an American.  And none of these issues will matter in time — soon there will be an iPhone 5 … maybe it will be RED!  And after his second term, Obama will no longer be president … and Donald Trump will still be an asshole.

Now, rumor is that the paywall took $40 million to build.  That’s insane.  Especially when you consider my genius way to beat it: the stop button … also called le bouton d’arrêt.  Here’s what you do:

1. After hitting the paywall, refresh the page.
2. Let the main content load.
3. Push the browser ‘stop’ button.
4. Enjoy an ad-free and paywall-free reading experience.

Good try, NYT.  Goodbye, $40MM.

photo credit: mattyeo | Similar ROI; similar effectiveness

The more I think about it, the more I distill web design down to just this: Your website design has the power to be terrible, but it doesn’t have the power to be great.

Here’s why:

A poorly designed site will turn people away

That’s what happened with me and Gawker’s Lifehacker site.  I just don’t go anymore.  I read their stories in Google Reader (using Lifehacker’s full RSS feed).  Google Reader just does a better job providing Lifehacker content.  Gawker wasn’t able to make their site more convenient than an RSS feed.  That’s a huge failure.  I used to click-through periodically to get the full scope of the story — videos, galleries, comments — but I just don’t anymore.  The site sucks that much.  I consume less of Lifehacker now because it’s so much more inconvenient.  The content I do consume, I consume with 3rd-party tools like Google Reader and the awesome Pulse news app.  And I’m not the only one.

A totally tricked out site doesn’t bring people in

There are two great Google Chrome news ‘apps’ that I just love: the NY Times Chrome app and Huffington Post’s NewsGlide.  They’re both stunning.  They’re beautiful — just amazing.  But I still just don’t read that much from either source.  They’re just not my scene.  The New York Times is just too stuffy and old for me.  Huff Po is just too political.  I like stories from both — but I just don’t identify with them enough to read them daily.  They have great content, even better design, but I’m not addicted to them.  The design isn’t enough to win me over to the brand.

Think about it this way — nobody has every shared a story on Facebook because the page it was on was pretty.  That doesn’t happen.  Content counts; looks don’t; looks only interfere.  The converse of this is ‘printer-ready’ pages.  People love to share these and save their friends the bullshit of pagination.  They’re voting against the slick design of the site and voting for simple delivery of content.  Simple wins (like with craigslist).

The exception — BuzzFeed

As with all things, there are exceptions.  BuzzFeed is a site I visit regularly to see what’s happening on the interwebs.  The slightly chaotic design is perfect for their content — the site is a pile of random stuff and their pages are filled with random content.  I like visiting and bouncing around for a bit.  In the past, I’ve added them to Google Reader only to ignore the feed and visit the site.  BuzzFeed is doing a great job — they pass the better-than-RSS test.

But it’s one thing to be chaotic and another to be stupid.  Gawker’s double (and hidden, no less) scroll and clunky interface just sucks.

Anyway, this got me thinking.  Is $315,000,000 a good deal?  What are other sites worth?  Should Huff Po morph into a Groupon competitor?

TechCrunch reports that the $315MM number is basically 5x the projected revenue for next year — so next year’s revenue is expected to be around $63MM.  If Quantcast is to be believed, they’ve never done more than 600MM pageviews in a month.  If that’s what they are expecting to average for 2011, they’re forecasting about a $9 RPM.  That’s impressive … and aggressive.

Which brings me to Salon.com.  Quantcast thinks they’ve never done much more than 45MM pageviews in a month.  Forecast that 45MM out a year and give them the Huff Po RPM and they could make $4.7MM next year.  With the 5x valuation multiplier, that would put their worth at just under $25MM.  Damn!

But … Salon Media Group is a publicly traded company.  You can buy their shares today for $0.11 each.  There are 3.28MM shares available, so for $0.11 per share, you could own Salon.com for the price of a nice Chicago condo — about $360,000.  For a site that’s just under 10% as big, it’s got 0.1% the valuation.  That seems like a much better deal.

And then there’s Newsweek.  Newsweek is a dying company not worth the overhead it requires.  Yes, it makes some money, but it costs too damn much.  Newsweek was purchased last year for $1.  Maybe that’s all any second-tier media company is worth, and $360,000 for Salon.com is a rip-off.

According to this blog, “StatCounter is measuring the share of traffic sent out from seven major social media outlets …”  Which is fine until you start thinking about it.  Here’s why it’s misleading at best:

• That last data point is for January, 2011.  It’s currently the morning of the 4th.  Best case, they have 3 days of data for January.
• StumbleUpon is likely counting traffic sent via their URL shortening service Su.pr as “StumbleUpon” traffic even when those links are shared on Twitter and Facebook.  (Check it out, blogger/author Tim Ferriss uses Su.pr links on his @tferriss Twitter account.)  Su.pr allows you to tweet an RSS feed, so a lot of bloggers use it.
• Twitter traffic is notoriously hard to track.  Apps like TweetDeck make Twitter traffic appear as direct traffic even when it’s really Twitter referral traffic.

So I don’t buy it.  SU is a great source of traffic, but this comparison isn’t accurate.  Twitter will always be under reported, plus SU is siphoning off traffic referrals from other sources (like Facebook and Twitter), and it’s barely January.  Let’s not jump to conclusions.

Great content

TechCrunch publishes great content.  They are the go-to spot for breaking tech news.  Compete.com pegs them at 2.5 million unique visitors per month.  That’s impressive.  Owning this content gives AOL a great new revenue stream, especially if AOL can monetize it more efficiently than TechCrunch could previously.

The king of the niche

Consistently publishing great content has made them the owner of the tech news niche.  Every other tech site lines up behind TechCrunch, including AOL’s Gizmodo.  With the acquisition of TechCrunch, AOL will be the undisputed king.

photo credit: xlibber

So that’s it — revenue and brand.  Maybe there’s a 3rd reason, but I’d wager these two drove the decision.  Here’s what AOL didn’t buy:

Overhead

AOL didn’t buy a lot of overhead.  Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder and editor, still is one of the site’s main contributors.  He’s not sitting pool-side letting the underlings run the show; he’s in the trenches keeping the organization lean.

Technology

TechCrunch is a news sites.  Its RSS feeds are hosted by FeedBurner.  Its comments are hosted by Disqus.  It hasn’t invested heavily in technology because news sites simply don’t have to.  Hell, AOL probably doesn’t even care about their CMS.  TechCrunch will likely migrate their content to the AOL system to save maintenance costs.

For now, it looks like this acquisition continues to support my micro-brew interpretation of the media industry, but the true details of the deal will probably leak out over the next weeks.  Until then, cheers to the wave of speculation.

Best of luck, TechCrunch.

UPDATE: Michael Arrington posted this shortly after my post: “Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It’s certainly not an engineering driven company.”

photo credit: Andrew Aliferis

Update, hilarious update: Jack Shepard over at BuzzFeed pointed this out:

Glenn Beck has clearly hired the best editors on the internets.

]]> http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/2010/welcome-to-wordpress-glenn-beck/feed/ 0 http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/2010/10-reasons-we-all-want-brad-pitt-and-angelina-jolie-to-break-up/ http://www.pauldavidolson.com/blog/2010/10-reasons-we-all-want-brad-pitt-and-angelina-jolie-to-break-up/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:08:13 +0000 pdo http://40hourstokill.com/?p=71 While Ian Undercover keeps us updated on the latest Brad/Angelina gossip, I’ll dive into the deeper psychological motivations we all have when evaluating the relationship.  Or I’ll make some jokes.

1. Secretly, we have a crush on Brad, right?  For some, maybe it’s a man-crush.  Others, it’s a crush-crush.  We think he’d be a fun guy to hang out with (man-crush).  Or we (I’m looking at you ladies now) want to have sex with him.  Even Angie can’t resist him, right?
2. Publicly, we (I think I speak for every man) definitely have a crush on Angelina Jolie.  Ever since Hackers, man.  She’s a babe.  We would adopt any number of foreign babies to make her love us … which is maybe the angle Sandra Bullock is taking.  That would be sexy.
3. We hate that they’re so lucky.  Seriously — wealthy, attractive movie stars that go to cool award shows, travel the world, and get to sext each other.  That’s just not fair.
4. We wish there was more news coverage of their relationship.  They’re the hottest couple around, why can’t we get a daily dose?  Sometimes two days pass before we get an update.  That’s just lazy, CNN.
5. But what’s the deal with all the babies?  Those kids are going to be so messed up.  They need to break up … for the children.
6. Honestly, though, did you see Brad in Snatch?  He’s badass.
7. God, and Gia.  More like goddess.  Holy cow.
8. Then there’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith.  That part with the gun fight.  Damn.
9. Tomb Raider.  Man, she’s a babe.  Total babe.
10. Meet Joe Black.  Am I right, ladies?  You want him.

photo credit: Gage Skidmore