Podango Opens Up Bidding to the Public

I was just pinged by former CEO of Podango, Lee Gibbons, regarding the sale of the company.

If you recall, we talked about the demise of the company a few weeks ago, with where and how it’ll eventually end up. The word at the time was that they expected to relaunch at some point during January:

Just last week we found out that a planned investment was delayed putting us in a financial situation where we will need to restructure through various strategic opportunities that are evolving. We expect at some point within the next month or so to relaunch under a different structure and possibly with a new owner.

Obviously, that didn’t exactly happen, although they haven’t been sitting on their laurels this whole time making no progress towards that goal.

Lee told me in December that a number of things were in the works to try to revive the company under different banners:

Lee also gave me some clues as to the eventual future for Podango.  Doug Smith is currently heading up the acquisition plans, but given the variety of asset types the company has in it’s arsenal, it’s very likely that they’ll be parted out to a number of different new organizations.

An update from Doug Smith via Lee Gibbons today sheds more light on how that’s going:

After seeking funding from both traditional and nontraditional sources for over a year, the founders of Podango have elected to sell. We have a handful of suiters, but we don't want to sell quietly with people later saying, as they did with Odeo and Podtech, "gee, if I had known I would have..."

We are going to close the bidding pool on the 10th and move quickly to bidding, then closing.

As I outlined in December, there are still a number of very valuable assets that sit underneath the banner of Podango, despite their current bout of insolvency, definitely meriting attention.

If you’re one of those “gee, I wish I could get in on that” types, you should contact Doug Smith (doug@Podango.com).

Tumblr’s David Karp Discusses Going Pro [video]

Tumblr has always been one of my favorite microblogging services. They’ve got a unique culture, and from the very beginning have been very useful for a wide number of applications.  Most people either tend to use it as a linkblogging service or as a sort of Internet scratchpad to copy and paste cool videos, quotes, chat logs and such, but my earliest use was as a shownotes system for my daily podcast.

David Karp explains Tumblr's revenue plans.

The ability to automatically post articles from an RSS list allowed me to hook a tag from Google Reader into my tumblog, and then simply refer to a subdomain in my podcast to find the shownotes for that particular episode.

As more and more folks get into using Tumblr for their unique purposes, CEO David Karp explains how they’ll plan on making money over the next indeterminate amount of time.

The idea is, not surprisingly, a freemium model.  You can tell by his responses that the Mullenweg method plays pretty highly in his expectations for the service, but before that they plan on rolling out future features and asking the users to pay between $5 a month to $10 a year.

Will it work?  If it were any other platform, I’d probably say no.  Tumblr users are a special breed, and particularly dedicated to the content management system (in a way, like WordPress users are).

It should be interesting to watch unfold.

Walmart Discontinues Blog Advertising [Dear John Letters]

It’s not uncommon at all to hear that companies are cutting back on advertising, in this current economic climate at least.  I’ve had three conversations today with different business partners and clients that centered primarily around the difficulty in getting major corporations to loosen their purse-strings for sponsorship and advertising.

There is new news in this regard, and I’m seeing some very creative sales strategies emerge that are working, but once in a while amidst all the closure, layoff and cut-back announcements, you see one that makes you scratch your head.

My buddy Sean P. Aune sent over a terse notice he got from Walmart a few minutes ago announcing the closure of their blog partnership program:

Dear Affiliate,

Walmart.com has made a business decision to discontinue partnering with blog sites at this time. Commissions will be paid on all sales referred prior to the discontinuation date of February 5, 2009. We at Walmart.com would like to thank you for your partnership and wish you success in all business endeavors.
Regards,

The Walmart.com Affiliate Team

What makes this particularly odd is the fact that this isn’t a system that’s presumably costing Walmart any money to speak of.  An affiliate system generally can run itself with very little oversight, and there are no paid minimums to content with for the advertiser.

In fact, Walmart only pays out whenever a sale is made, and then only once a certain dollar amount threshold is reached.

In this sort of economy, this is the last type of advertising cutback I’d expect to see.

It’s Not Too Late to Start a Web Series [Star Trek Meets The Office]

1Tim Street profiled a new bit of sci-fi entering the web video space under the auspices of wondering aloud whether or not it’s too late to launch a web series given the very serious economic climate.

I don’t mind, since the series looks pretty cool and very original.  As the title indicates, it’s a sort of cross between The Office and Star Trek, called The Crew.

As to the question Tim asks, I think the answer is clear, particularly in light of a couple bits of news that have popped across the wire today.

Firstly, taking a look at some stats today released by most online portfolio companies and online publishers show an incredible increase in online revenues. Techcrunch has the profile and the telling bar graphs to go along with it.

More interestingly, though, are the stats that Elisabeth Lewin discussed yesterday over at Podcasting News. December set a record for video viewership (as most months do). Comscore recorded increases from Google, Fox, Yahoo, Viacom and Hulu.

From the post:

• 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
• 98.9 million viewers watched 5.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (59.2 videos per viewer).
• 48.7 million viewers watched 367 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes.
• The duration of the average online video viewed at Hulu was 10.1 minutes, higher than any other video property in the top ten.

In terms of viewership, now is the time to be launching a new series.  The media landscape continues to expand in terms of well traveled destination sites and channels for distribution. Many of those sites are looking to license content for their site, and certainly the online world is seeing a bounce-back in terms of the return of their sponsors (something I’ve verified with a number of large-volume publishers including the recently repositioned Federated Media).

I don’t want to go so far as to say we’ve hit the bottom and started to return upward because my narrow field of vision doesn’t necessarily reflect the economy at large.  Within my narrow field of vision, though, a lot of indicators are starting to show signs of rebound for content producers.

Introducing the Latest Twitter Service, TweetSandwich

@rstevens is the man. Read more here.

FriendFeed Updates Their Search Functionality

FriendFeed has done some work that rolled out today on their search functionality. Prior to the work they’ve done, FriendFeed’s search functionality has already proven to be a useful service for me, almost as powerful as Google’s search, but able to really dig into what conversations and news items that are capturing attention at the moment.

With the new search functions, you’re able to get a bit closer to Google like functionality with search queries like:

• Search for words only in entry titles or in comments
  [intitle:superbowl] - entries that mention "Superbowl" in the title
• Search for only entries that were liked or commented on by specific friends
  [like:bret football] - entries about football that Bret has liked
• Search for entries with a minimum number of likes or comments
  [comments:5 friendfeed] - entries that mention FriendFeed with at least 5 comments
• Exclude terms from your search
  [jobs -steve] - entries about the job market, not the CEO of Apple

Despite the fact that I think it’s a cool idea, we all know Scoble’s just about settled back in from his Davos trip, so we can expect the gushing about the power of the live-web in 3 … 2 … 1.

Update: Too late, apparently.

PajamasMedia: WTF, Over?

If you watched the tech news over the weekend, you probably read a bit about the death of the PajamasMedia blog advertising network.

I’m simply baffled by the inability to monetize blogs in the political blogosphere, and the sad state of affairs is that lib-bloggers are able to do it better than the conservative networks like PajamasMedia (though not by a whole lot – HuffPo just got into the black not long ago, and not by much).

My buddy Art sat down with me Monday to talk about this whole thing as we pointed out some of the inconsistencies in the rhetoric coming from Pajamas, and what we think their hurdles will be moving forward.

Look for more podcasts from me soon by subscribing here.