Silicon Alley Insider ventures into the vaguely icky territory of sponsored-post advertising. It's one thing to thank one's sponsors by name, as is Valleywag's practice. Quite another to pen a gushing blog infomercial, in this case for a service called Vintage Filings, that looks like regular content. Surely Henry Blodget doesn't need the money badly enough to risk adding "disgraced tech blogger" to his list of unseemly epithets. [Innonate]
I noted yesterday how stock analyst turned blogger Henry Blodget was deftly yanking the chains of tech bloggers everywhere by merely asking, playfully, whether TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. Asking, mind you — he never once, in his original post, suggested he actually thought it was worth that much. In a followup post that's sure to engender more misplaced outrage, Blodget dives deeper into the numbers and suggests that yes, maybe some day in the future — by no means today — TechCrunch could, conceivably be worth $100 million. Conceivably. In the future. Then again, he's functioning under the delusion that the TechCrunch40 conference was a "major hit" instead of a rolling disaster, so who knows? On that line, at least, one hopes he was kidding, yet again. (Photo by Getty Images)
Henry Blodget is having raucous fun. On his blog, Silicon Alley Insider, the "disgraced stock analyst" — a seemingly requisite epithet whenever Blodget is mentioned — is driving people crazy. How? By, say, actually running the numbers on how Google might one day be worth $2,000. Or riffing off a ludicrously sketchy thumbsucker about what blogs are worth, in which he questions whether TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. Even the tech blog's editor, Michael Arrington, linked to it, laughing all the while. Unfortunately, no one let Light Reading's Scott Raynovich in on the joke. Raynovich stoutly debunks the notion that TechCrunch might be worth $100 million. An effort, of course, which I'd applaud, if I thought anyone, Blodget included, believed the notion in the first place. (Photo by Getty Images)
Bruce Judson, the Internet pioneer, is taking a turn at pretending to be a Web 2.0 expert, blogging on Henry Blodget's Silicon Alley Insider. Yes, the very same Bruce Judson, Time Warner Internet vet turned hawker of free crap we wrote about a week ago, who's pawning his reputation as a marketer and business leader from the first Web boom to pitch his new venture, Free for Today. Why, oh, why, is Blodget handing Judson a megaphone? The fallen star's ruminations on Web 2.0 are obvious and boring, and a thinly veiled pitch for his free-crap website. Ah, yes, this is the real Web 2.0: Garnering attention through self-promotion, no matter how spurious your ideas or transparent your motives. Maybe Judson gets it after all.
Tim Armstrong, left, the Google sales chief ridden with conflicts of interest, is drawing unconflicted interest from junior staffers. Apparently the hunky executive is being tracked via Twitter, so ga-ga Googlers can maximize their eyefuls of Armstrong. Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, whom we hadn't previously thought as a connoisseur of manflesh, also recommends Google's Tom Phillips, right, a cofounder of Spy, as a target for Twitter stalking. So, readers, any other denizens of Google's Chelsea office handsome enough to deserve such excess SMS interest? Leave a comment or send in a tip, and we'll run a poll later.
Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker has been caught in an embarrassingly basic math mistake — by Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, a former analyst (who, to be fair, made some mistakes of his own in the last boom). Meeker's estimate of the impact of YouTube's new "overlay" ads? She says they could boost Google's gross revenues by $4.8 billion next year. But her math, Blodget discovered, was off by a factor of a thousand. The error apparently stemmed from forgetting the meaning of CPM, or "cost per thousand," a commonly used term in advertising rate cards. Given Meeker's assumptions, the actual impact of YouTube's ads? A mere $4.8 million in gross revenue, and $720,000 in net revenue. In other words, a drop in the bucket, and nothing that comes close to justifying YouTube's $1.65 billion purchase price.
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.
Henry Blodget, the 36-year-old analyst who managed to out-ra even the most ra-ra of internet boosters, is facing his reckoning. He left Merrill Lynch in late 2001, saying he wanted to work on a book on his experiences. The bad news is that the US securities regulators intend to make an example of Blodget, who was made one major mistake: quotable disdain for companies he promoted externally. The good news is that the NASD is doing all the background research, and Blodget ought to be able to reuse the material in his book. By the way, TheStreet.com should update its profiles. On a page that hasn't been updated since 2000, Blodget is listed as the top-ranked internet analyst. His recommendation: AOL.
Wall Street Star May Face Suit by Regulators [NYT]
Report Card [TheStreet.com]
