The cheesier the New York Times headline ("Wanted"? Who thinks up this stuff?), the more doomed the company. The Times covers three startups that help users submit classified ads to "all the major listings services," for free or for a small fee, making money from showing ads to users.
Amazon's stock will hit $400, predicted analyst Henry Blodget in 1998. It didn't. The stock now trades at $32.14, but Blodget got attention and a job at Merrill Lynch. Never mind that he was a journalist by trade, with no analyst training. One dot-com bomb later, Merrill let him go, Eliot Spitzer charged him with securities fraud (he settled), and the "analyst" was banned from the securities industry for life.
Now that the New York Post (motto: "Who needs reputability when you've got CAPS?") pumped fresh helium into the YouTube valuation, saying the video company's founders now think it's worth $1.5 billion, bloggers are back to claiming that YouTube could really be worth that much, guys!
The New York Post's tech writer (last seen stalking a Google founder's girlfriend) has Hard! Hitting! News! about YouTube:
by Beth Gottfried
Pop quiz: What does a once-popular startup, top-heavy with philosophy and lacking direction, do when the one guy who started the whole thing quits?
By Beth Gottfried
You're still "post-modern"? Dude, that's so five ideologies ago. Don't worry, take this crash course in Silicon Valley cynicism and no one will know you're not a quasi-meta-pomo-pseudohipster just like the rest of us.
The second-surest sign of a doomed startup is how badly it gauges human behavior. (The first is how much BusinessWeek wrote about it.) The freshly launched ChaCha.com is about to prove this, five bucks at a time.
Most startup launches are embarrassing enough without details. When Thisisby.us announced it was starting "the first major Web 2.0 application to incentivize an entire blogging community," it looked like any other doomed little content-based site paying pennies for blog posts no one wanted to read anyway. (And we all know Gawker Media cornered that market years ago.)
When the little dot-coms blow up, says marketing/PR blogger Steve Rubel, the sites funded by their advertising will go under too. Rubel names social news site Digg as one potential victim. How does it stack up against other Web-2.0-supported sites? Above the fold, we analyze Digg and tech blog GigaOM. Below, GigaOM competitor TechCrunch sets off a red alert.
Stories are trickling in from last weekend's TechCrunch party — "so-and-so ripped the G off the sign for host August Capital," "what's-his-name streaked through in a Speedo," and so on. Two fellow attendees told me about a bewilderingly clueless set of startuppers:
In 1996, when the tech boom was still ramping up, Wired Ventures already proved that content outlets would miss out on the money. The company dropped its IPO plans after investors backed off. Wired, unable to pay its bills, had to sell itself off piecemeal. Lesson learned: Content may be king, but only in the sense that the Queen rules the UK.
The Internet went a-twitter last week when John Gotts (who made his millions selling anti-spyware software) bought the Wiki.com domain for $2.86 million. When users on Digg.com called this a sign of a tech bubble (how do you make a site about wikis earn millions?), Gotts defended his purchase by summing up his business plan:
TechCrunch, the popular tech blog and clearinghouse for dot-com news, today runs a 24-minute documentary on Web 2.0. TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington says Scott Milener had the idea. Milener, the CEO of a search startup called Browster, also speaks in the video.
Okay, BusinessWeek's cover story on Digg founder Kevin Rose was ludicrous — a throwback to the giddy 90s, with wild numbers being thrown about and startuppers treated as flyboys.
If there are only two companies making one kind of game, "space" might be a generous term. Just be glad they didn't call it an "online karaoke industry."
Did everyone else take crazy pills, or can I get an amen about the myth of the rooftop party event horizon?
