Eldr Media raising more money for its elderly-focused publications

ERIC ELDON | AUGUST 7TH, 2008

Eldr Media offers a print publication, Eldr Magazine, and a web property aimed at those over 60. The San Francisco company has raised $1.25 million in seed funding from the Keiretsu Forumand is working on a $4 million Series A round, according to VentureWire.

The Value of Near Death Businesses like Newspaper and Dial-up

Ed: I’m helping a friend to buy a mature, cashflow business that is past it’s peak; and will be worthless in 5 or more years. Like the AOL dial-up and newspaper businesses, both are mature, cashflow positive, but on a decline to certain death. 

What is the value of a declining business? Of course, the seller emphasizes the goodwill of the brand. It’s no fun to penny pinch costs for ten years just to milk cashflows. Is the true value the stepping stone of business relationships to build a new business?

Time Warner Ready To Unload AOL In Pieces. But At What Price?

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeldt

Time Warner is moving forward with its plans to sell off AOL in pieces, and is finally ready to formally separate the AOL portal and advertising business from its legacy dial-up access business. But how much can it hope to get for these parts? When Google invested $1 billion in AOL a few years ago for a 5 percent stake, that valued AOL at $20 billion (which some people thought was an inflated figure even back then). Today, even after breaking it up, Time Warner will be lucky to get more than $7 billion for the whole lot.

Although it wants $10 billion for just the advertising and content business, there are only two serious potential buyers: Yahoo and Microsoft. And Time Warner is not making any friends at Yahoo by interfering with the selection of one of its new board members. If Microsoft turns out to be the only bidder, it would have no reason to offer much more than the $4 billion that the market is valuing the business at today. And, of course, all bets are off if Microsoft ends up buying Yahoo instead. (The dial-up business also only has one serious buyer: Earthlink)…

Newspaper Slide: Even Worse Than We Thought?

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

Conventional wisdom on newspapers: Even though they’re in steep decline, they’re still useful cash-generators — for owners who aren’t choking on debt and who aren’t expecting preposterous returns. But newspaper observer Alan Mutter, taking stock of two proposed sales, says things may be changing. Even owners who don’t have to sell now want to dump their assets…

Top 10 TV Websites – June 2008

Ed: When compared to portals like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft – this performance is pathetic.

Note: The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.

Magazine Publishers Look to Online Ad Networks for Needed Scale

Ad Age: July 23, 2008

Produced by Hoag Levins 

Published: July 23, 2008

Ari Brandt explains why Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com is forced to buy ad network audience.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — As magazine publishers struggle to build out their website advertising capabilities on the massive scale demanded by big advertisers, they are turning to ad networks and exchanges to buy online audience. This is the second installment of a report from the Contextweb ADSDAQ panel discussion about the controversial world of the internet’s increasingly powerful audience brokers. 

Industry Moves: Glam; Revenue Science; Penton Media; Seeking Alpha; Etsy

from paidContent.org by Amanda Natividad

– Glam Media: Glam picks up another big-name company exec—Michael Adair, most recently head of sales finance for Google (NSDQ: GOOG) North America, joins as VP of corporate development and finance. In the position, a new one for Glam, Adair will be responsible for the evaluation and execution of the company’s strategic investments, corporate development and corporate finance; Glam is playing it up as part of its global and corp dev growth. Former Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) corp dev exec Bruce Jaffe joined the advisory board recently.

– Revenue Science: The ad solutions provider appointed Bill Ruckelshaus as COO. He will now serve dual roles in the company as he has been CFO for the past two years. Prior to joining Revenue Science, Ruckelshaus was SVP of strategy and planning at Expedia and he currently serves on the board of directors for Infospace. Release.

– Penton Media: Former Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) exec Jim L’Heureux has been tapped as SVP of eMedia, where he will lead the eMedia team and report directly to CEO John French. L’Heureux most recently served as VP of account management at Yahoo and previous held various management positions at AOL (NYSE: TWX). Release.

– Seeking Alpha: Tamar Yaniv has been hired as SVP of sales and marketing, founder David Jackson wrote today. Yaniv joins from PokerStars.com, where she served as European marketing director for three years. Earlier, she co-founded a women’s non-profit organization, DigitalEve Israel.

– Etsy: The oh-so-cool online handmade good retailer has named its newish COO Maria Thomas as its new CEO. Co-founder Rob Kalin will now be the Chief Creative Officer. Also the company hired away Chad Dickerson, the head of their Brickhouse special projects group at Yahoo…he will be the CTO at Etsy.

Sugar Inc Breaks Up With NBC, Brings Ad Sales In House

Fast growing women-focused blog network Sugar Inc announced that they’ve terminated their year-old ad sales relationship with NBC. All ad sales will now be via an in-house sales team, says the company.

There was speculation that NBC’s recent investment in Blogher, arguably a competitor to Sugar, was to blame. But Sugar CEO Brian Sugar (guess where the company name came from) says this was purely an economic decision. NBC’s cut of ad sales simply got too expensive.

Comscore says the Sugar sites have 4.6 million unique visitors and 24 million page views per month. We’ve heard the company will do around $15 million in revenue this year, with 2/3 of that from advertising. Assuming NBC takes 50% of sales, that’s $5 million Sugar is paying them every year. Bringing sales in-house certainly makes sense.

Sugar is also clearly gearing up to compete with Glam Media, a company that represents other women-focused sites for ad sales. To get there, though, Sugar needs to build up their own sales force. It looks like they’re doing exactly that…

Report: Video Ad Rates Pretty High, Going Higher

A new report from Diffusion Group confirms some of what we’ve been hearing about online video ad rates. Namely, rates are high for long form professionally-produced video, ie TV on the Web. User-generated video? Not so much, but better than than nothing.

This is very good news for Hulu.com and the TV networks’ efforts to make money online, and pretty good news for those producing short-form video for the Web. But we take them with a grain of salt: ad rates vary widely based on the amount of inventory available and numerous other factors. We’ve heard rates in the $45 – $65 CPM (the cost to reach 1,000 people) range for video on TV network players/sites, for example, and we’ve heard YouTube is having trouble getting even $15 for overlay ads on the few videos it can actually sell.

All this could change next year if advertisers embrace user-generated video or long form video ad rates go down a bit and become more comparable with TV. Still, these seem like reasonable benchmarks. What’s more speculative: Diffusion Group is projecting CPM growth in the future. Nevertheless, here’s the data, via TVWeek:

Today’s average:
Professional long form video: $40 CPM
Professional short-form: $30 CPM
User-generated video: $15 CPM

Projected for 2013:
Long form: $46 CPM
Short form: $34 CPM

User-gen: $17 CPM

Lazarus Plans to Step Down As Ogilvy CEO at Year End

BY SUZANNE VRANICA AND STEPHANIE KANG

Word Count: 317  |  Companies Featured in This Article: WPP Group

One of Madison Avenue’s highest-profile figures, Shelly Lazarus, is stepping down as chief executive of WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide at the end of the year.

Ms. Lazarus, 60 years old, will be succeeded by Miles Young, chairman of Ogilvy & Mather’s Asia Pacific region. Ms. Lazarus, one of the handful of women to hold the top job at a global advertising firm, …