www.dpingram.com

Facebook is said to have turned down a confirmed $1bn bid this year, and came back with a very bullish statement that it was worth $8bn. I just find that hard to believe. The research that I did suggest that UGC and SN sites can get somewhere around, on average, $21.36 per registered user. OK, some get more, and some get less
- Youtube went for $47.14/registered user
- MySpace went for $5.18 a few years earlier
- Friends Reunited went at $20 dead
- and Bebo reportedly turned down an which equated to $25/head)

but Facebook is way out of the ballpark, here are the numbers…

Looking at it another way, assuming that Facebook has an extremely healthy profit margin of 24% (like Google for example), the company would have earned about $12 million in profit for the year. At that rate, Facebook is valued at 666 times its current earnings. … Facebook, was last estimated to have around 9 million users, so at that valuation, it would be worth a measly $52.2 million! At a $1 billion valuation, Facebook was looking for $111 per user. At $8 billion…well you can figure it out.

This is from David COlemans blog

This mirrors something I was discussing with colleagues a few months ago… the notion that the VoIP and PSTN/VoIP market is a tough one to make any money in because the margins are extremely low and shrinking.

Om Malik says…

VoIP business is no different than the long distance business. High costs of acquisition, and very low margins. In other words it is a sucker’s game. One IP Voice, learnt this the hard way, and had to file2 for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection as it tries restructures. Good luck! The company sells VoIP to small and medium sized businesses. Well good luck with the makeover, because selling VoIP to SMB is beset with precisely the same problems as the consumer market. Too many players, too little profit. We will see more of these press releases in 2007

The company in question incidentally is called “One IP Voice, inc.”

OA by Om Malik is here

BidNearby (www.bidnearby.com) lets you search for anything across all these sites, then displays results nearby in a Google map view. cool.

VodPod comes out of “private alpha” into beta mode today. It’s a social networking video sharing site and right about now you’re thinking, ‘Why do we need another YouTube?” Well, if YouTube becomes increasingly commercial, as it appears it will be, then user-generated video will need a new home.

VodPod is heavily designed around social networking. Have a thing for birds? Join the bird “pod” and you’ll have an instantaneous collection of birding videos. Like unicycling? Some kids from Australia have started a pod around that pastime too. Users can join multiple groups that cluster videos around various subjects that allows them to post and collect new videos that pertain to that topic. Although you don’t have to join a pod or even sign up with VodPod to search pod videos. Users can “lurk” within the pods anonymously without being socially networked.

Videos added to a pod don’t have to be original VodPod material. They can come from other sharing sites like YouTube using the embed code.

“Basically it allows you to build a video collection from videos you find on MySpace or YouTube or over 100 of these sites on the Internet, or you can put video of your own up on VodPod as the host, and then build a mixture of them.” said Mark Hall, one of the three founders of VodPod, in a phone briefing last Friday.

OA is here on Techcrunch

Wow, this is a concept I was talking over with Marc Lyne about a month ago. All these UGC sites work as silos of information, and if you wanna play in more than one you have to create multiple user profiles, repeating all the same old stuff about yourself, then you have to upload all your stuff multiple times (to eahc of their servers). Now Veoh soubds as though they let you upload once to them, then they share it with the others. Izimi should go one better, so you dont evert have to uplkoad your stuff at all if you dont want to. So you can create just a light profile (bare minimum) on the sites you want to play in, but then just make links back to your Izimi stuff which is sitting right there on your own box (so you never have to sit there and wait for uploads). Anyway, here is the Veoh story….

Online video startup Veoh is revving its product tonight, borrowing liberally from its competition. It’ll be hard to stand out from the crowd by becoming more like the crowd, but Veoh’s looking for a boost to take it out of the middle of the online video pack.

The Veoh service will now include a Brightcove2-style customizable player, 50-50 advertising splits for video publishers a la Revver3 (and others), and P2P feed-catching like the Democracy player4. The site will be down starting at 5 p.m. to push the new features.

Lest the comparison to its competitors be too subtle, Veoh is also adding the option to publish any video to YouTube, Google, and MySpace when it’s uploaded to Veoh. “Publishers are not ready to commit to any one service, so we’re giving them what they want,” said Veoh CEO Dmitry Shapiro in an interview today.

OS is here

Heres a great article about the use of UGC content by the big media companies. Especially when you consider all the stories about legal wrangles initiated by big media owners towards people allegedly using and distributing their content/media/music/video illegally (without the proper rights). The point is this article gets you thinking that maybe the boot is moving to the other foot, and perhaps as UGC becomes more common-place-everyday-bahaviour perhaps it will be the individuals attacking the big boys for the exact same behaviour. Read on…

Should citizen journalists be better rewarded , by Graham Holliday
The sight of old media freely milking the udders of UGC - “user generated content” - is now a common and seemingly unstoppable trend. News organisations want our pictures, our videos and our words.

The latest attempt at opening the gates of mainstream media to us citizen oiks and our cameraphones finds Yahoo! and Reuters joining forces to bring us their new - get down with the kids - news service, the appallingly titled You Witness News.

The idea is simple; those cuddly citizen journalists will file their right place at the right time snaps, their newsworthy videos and their sneak peaks of the great up to no good, to the You Witness News website.

From there, according to Journalism.co.uk,

“The best Reuters will edit and distribute to third party publications and run on its own website.
Yahoo News will run images submitted by the public as part of its news mix, along with images supplied by the major news agencies and broadcasters.”

The BBC, not to be out-clicked, are in on the act too. They recently announced Your News. The seemingly self-explanatory name is a pilot TV
channel created entirely from UGC and edited “by BBC professionals”.

Sky News does something similar. The Daily Telegraph, along with most other UK newspapers, requests readers to send in their snaps. We’re not talking flea pit bedroom outfits run by spotty teenagers here.

It’s mainstream, big bucks media and they very clearly want to get their hands on our media, but why exactly is big boy media so interested in our self-generated content?

Of course, the end game’s not about content at all, it’s about cash. Or, in the case of the users generating the content it’s about… err… no cash.

The New York Times has more from Chris Ahearn, the president of the Reuters media group.

“Users will not be paid for images displayed on the Yahoo and Reuters sites. But people whose photos or videos are selected for distribution to Reuters clients will receive a payment.”

Ahearn said the company had not yet figured out how to structure those payments. The basic payment may be relatively small, but he said Reuters was likely to pay more to people offering exclusive rights to images of major events.

For now, no money is changing hands between Yahoo and Reuters, but if Reuters is able to create a separate news service with the user-created material, it will split the revenue with Yahoo.

The thinking about the online world has long been that the money will eventually follow the eyeballs. There’ll be a tipping point, so the thinking goes, when the advertising loot will, one glorious morning, migrate in sum to the online world, deadwood publications will finally be snuffed out of their misery through this mass migration to digital dough.

In recent weeks and months we’ve learned about the launches and partnerships of Yahoo!/Reuters, Your News, Google/YouTube, Reuters/Pluck, yet not one of them has published a revenue model for the creators of the content they are so darned keen to get their mitts on.

Yes, we social web users love to share. Yes, we’re going to create and publish this stuff regardless of old media, not because of it. But, no, we don’t want to see old media profit from ‘our stuff’.

For the past 10 years British freelance journalism pay rates have remained more or less static. Will You Witness News apply even these stagnated freelance rates to the work of the crowd who would produce photos and videos anyway regardless of payment?

As it stands the citizen journalists, networked journalists or, as I prefer to call them, people, will garner little more than a hearty slap on the back from their big pals in old media as they watch their creations wheeled out to the world, no doubt surrounded by advertising and cash generating hyperlinks.

If it’s good enough for a hugely profitable company such as Reuters to use, then it’s good enough for Reuters to pay a Reuters rate to the person creating that content.

It’s all well and good old media bumbling into our media world, but don’t come cherry picking without being prepared to cough up the readies. Throw crumbs and you’ll find them spat back at you. And whatever you do, be straight up with us. If you have no intention of paying us, say so now. Procrastination only breeds suspicion.

If you want to get hip with the kids, link out by all means. Like everybody else. But don’t use us and abuse us, pay us peanuts, or worse, pay us nowt.

That way is not only unethical, but will lead you to links from hell, which so often in the online world leads to death or at least to a rather unpleasant and very public rogering.

OA is here

Global growth is on track for 50.5 million subscribers by 2010 with revenues topping $12.2 billion

Watching TV in the living room is about to get a whole lot more interesting with the improved experience offered by IPTV slowly becoming a reality in the U.S. If you’re in Europe or Asia, you’re much more likely to be enjoying those benefits now, as those markets are much further along in deployments and subscribers.

Regardless, the worldwide IPTV market is growing at a rapid pace, and telcos and cable operators that don’t overcome the challenges involved in deploying IPTV will soon be left behind.

We believe the global IPTV market will reach approx. 50.5 million subscribers in 2010

said Gary Schultz, principal analyst at Multimedia Research Group. The drive by telcos everywhere to increase their revenue base, plus innovative service provisioning, plus better overall quality of service and user choice will drive the markets. Europe and Asia will still be ahead, with 41 percent and 32 percent share of market (in their respective telco markets). North America should grow to about 23 percent share of market, up from its current level of about 15 percent.

There is much more in this report which is here

In product terms a ‘mashup’ is a website, or more usually a web-based application, comprised of two or more components from different sources, but presented to the user as a single, seamless ‘experience’ or application. Today, most developers experimenting with mashups are using consumer-centric content from the likes of eBay, Amazon, Google, and others. However, in the future, corporate developers may well combine Web service elements from a range of vendor solutions with bespoke, in-house line-of-business applications to present business users with their very own “Enterprise Mashups.”

Advantages: speed of getting an offering to market, while one team is tucked away coding it all themselves, another bunhc in another garage are cobbling it together from pre-available and open components. Speed to market has never been more important, because if you miss the wave you probably loose out to a more agile, faster competitor.

The wikipedia definition is here

Comcast and Endemol are working together to turn user-generated content into a real television show.

Story continues below…

The companies on Tuesday launched “Ten Day Take,” a new contest that requires users to submit a program idea to Comcast’s Ziddio user-generated video site.

The winner will have a chance to work with Endemol to produce a pilot in 10 days with a $50,000 budget. The pilot and a reality-style show following its production will both be available on Ziddio and on Comcast’s on-demand service.

“We recognize the increasing demand for user-generated content and its growing place in the entertainment industry,” said Liz Schimel, senior VP of entertainment for Comcast Interactive Media. “Ziddio is leveraging Comcast’s content relationships and multiplatform reach to provide amateur creators great opportunities to showcase their content, including real-world, professional outlets for their creative talent.”

OA is here

Azureus Announces Content Agreement with BBC Worldwide

A press release from Zudeo unveils its first content partnership. It’s BBC Worldwide, and this is the first ever peer-to-peer distribution partnership for the network.

The partnership means that Azureus will offer popular, high-resolution British comedies and dramas from BBC Worldwide on Zudeo. Under the terms of the agreement, BBC Worldwide will license international hit television series to U.S. users of the service, including Red Dwarf, Strange and Invasion Earth, debuting via broadband for the first time in the U.S.

Azureus CEO, Gilles BianRosa, says

BBC Worldwide understands our commitment to providing consumers with a rich entertainment experience and our desire to offer quality content to our diverse global audience. We are thrilled to offer programming that encompasses such a robust fan base, as well as the opportunity to expose a new generation to cult favorites from BBC Worldwide catalogue via our new entertainment platform.

Beth Clearfield, BBC Vice President says it is a

“revolutionary distribution model”

.

About Zudeo
Zudeo enables content providers to easily publish, showcase, and distribute high resolution, long form content, including video and games in high definition or DVD quality over the Internet, at no cost. And BBC Worldwide is the first content provider to benefit from this opportunity. BBC content, along with other premium partners will be available on Zudeo early next year.

Next year Zudeo aims to add more premium quality content suppliers to the fold.

OA is here