Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Ouch ...

... Digg This, HuffPo: What's $200 Million Divided by 2009 Reality? (Hat tip, Ed Champion.)
I like this:
Now maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them -- for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle of the Great Arianna, of course. As for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech staff? Those jobs could be offshored to, I dunno, Third World child labor. If HuffPo takes such steps, I could see the site being worth maybe $4 mil. (Then again, there's always the karma risk of exploiting workers. If a disgruntled work-for-free blogger or a slave-driving HuffPo middle manager ended up, say, inserting ground-up melamine into HuffPo blog posts in an attempt to trick people into thinking the content was more substantive than it really is, that might save Arianna some money in the short term. But what if a reader or commenter got poisoned?)

And this (especially that "people in the know" phrase, it's so contemporary journalism):
What's amazing about BusinessWeek's story is that it amounted to BusinessWeek calling bullshit on ... BusinessWeek. Back in 2006, the publication put scruffy, baseball-cap-wearing Digg founder Kevin Rose on its cover with the headline "How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 months" -- a wild guesstimate based on Rose's presumed 30% stake in his company. "People in the know," BusinessWeek declared back then, "say Digg is easily worth $200 million."

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous4:31 PM

    Obviously if anyone connected to the H.P. was poisoned, they would claim it was mercury in a vaccination and sue for risk of autism. The H.P. is shockingly irresponsible in this regard (vaccination) and I am completely disappointed in Joseph Kennedy for his fact-free articles on the topic in said organ.

    ReplyDelete