A couple of years ago I asked “How much is NBC worth?”

Bear in mind, this was before the media market meltdown, before online began to eat away at TV’s might, but nonetheless, my valuation pegged NBC at $32 billion.

October 2009 will mark the two year anniversary of Google’s (GOOG) acquisition of YouTube. Before the deal even took place, I wrote that YouTube had the potential to print money. It wasn’t at the time, mainly because YouTube was growing like a weed and the company’s “meager” $11.5M in funding didn’t [somehow] allow it to build the kind of sales organization needed.

Former CNET CEO Shelby Bonnie authors a "Let’s Kill the CPM" post on Tech Crunch - incidentally, the blog that wants to kill CNET.

Definitions and Lingo

Kazaa/Skype/Joost - and I guess Joltid - founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are richer than God. Let’s get that out of the way.

Kazaa was a disruptive and destructive force in music that took the baton from Napster after the RIAA killed the popular file sharing software. But Kazaa’s fate was no different than Napster’s.

One of my hobbies is pointing out that VCs hurt entrepreneurs as much as they help them, but I disagree with 37 Signals CEO Jason F’s notion that VCs forced Aaron Patzer to sell Mint.com for $170M to Intuit (INTU).

After all, who in their right mind would reject an offer like that after three years of startup life? Apparently, I’m not alone.

I’ve always been suspicious of behavioral targeting (BT), but not for the reasons that the government is concerned (re: privacy). I have always doubted that publishers would randomly trust a third party with gathering and analyzing all of that data on their audience. This is why Tacoda sold to AOL; it makes sense for AOL to own that technology for its own sites and the additional reach on Advertising.com, but when I ran sales, I wasn’t rushing to embrace BT technologies.

I think while some VCs might make the argument that: “the government could make monetization even harder for online ad networks and publishers through limiting their ability to do behavioral targeting”, it is an overly-simplistic perspective. Trust me, what makes advertisers hesitate to spend money online isn’t a lack of data, it’s a lack of good content.

eBay (EBAY) makes it official: here is the press release, here are some thoughts on the deal.

Q&A

Goldman Sachs (GS) will have a piggy bank of more than $11 billion to dole out in bonuses at year’s end, and that is making the company sweat. I wonder why.

From the Daily Beast:

MySpace (NWS) is about to buy iLike to galvanize its leadership in music, and the deal, if it goes through, is a sign of the times for two reasons:

1 - At a rumored $20M price tag, the deal is anything but a hit, from TC:

It is astounding that eBay forked (EBAY) over $3B for Skype and didn’t actually buy Skype’s underlying technology.

It is amazing that they didn’t realize this and outright criminal that they didn’t get a fully-paid, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive (exclusive for the purposes of international calling) license.

James Altucher - who sold his StockPickr company to TheStreet.com (TSCM) less than a year after founding it - argues that investing in Internet stocks is a loser’s proposition, mainly because none of them really generate money:

Time Warner (TWC) would rather keep their legacy old-media businesses like People magazine than hold onto one of the biggest Internet companies out there, AOL. And News Corp. (NWS) is shaking up its MySpace business as it figures out its next steps. (News Corp. owns Dow Jones (DJ), publisher of this newswire.) Microsoft (MSFT) has spent billions on Internet strategy without a dime of profit. And even Google (GOOG) can’t seem to find any other business model other than the one they stumbled into when they bought Applied Semantics in 2001 that had a little piece of software called AdSense. And the new guys: Twitter and Facebook are still scrambling for profits despite blistering usage growth.

Back in Fall of 2007, I published something called Top 10 Best Web M&As of All Time. The YouTube acquisition had just closed, so I said we’ll reserve judgment. At the time, we put News Corp.’s (NWSA) acquisition of MySpace at #1 for the simple reason that Google’s (GOOG) $900M search deal made it a slam dunk for #1. On that note, today you can argue that MySpace is less sexy than it was then… but who cares, it’s still a very accretive deal for News Corp.

Today we hear mumblings that YouTube isn’t just generating $500M in revenues but will soon be profitable.

Both tech titans and media giants are gloomy these days, though for different reasons.

The truth is that media companies’ future have forever changed: the world is no longer an analog one and the shrinking media landscape that comes with the digital reality makes it hard for media companies to maintain their market capitalizations and revenues of days gone by. One industry - print newspapers - is essentially decimated and will never be the same. But across the board, things don’t look better for TV, either.

Some time ago, online media professional Dave Haber emailed me an article from MediaPost, titled “How Can Independent Video Producers Compete In The Super-Premium Era?”

The article was written by Lewis Rothkopf, who is vice president of network development at BrightRoll, one of the pre-roll networks out there. As a side note, I really admire Brightroll’s CEO Tod Sacerdoti. Unlike most of the pre-roll intermediaries who seem to be either in denial or out of touch about that the pre-roll format, Sacerdoti is realistic about the pros and cons of the format, not insulting people’s intelligence about why his firm focuses on the unit.

Apparently, Yahoo! (YHOO) is looking at making acquisitions in social media and video, says Tech Crunch. According to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz:

“We are very interested in social, and in video technology,” said Bartz. She was particularly bullish on Web video: “This is just the beginning. The whole video area is so exciting. Video advertising growing four times by 2011.”

And then came tumbling down:

found via CNET.

Google’s (GOOG) (and Craigslist’s) assault on the newspapers’ monopolistic revenue streams can be described as nothing less than a barrage of whacks by a multitude of sticks. Sure, it’s not that Google and Craigslist should be blamed for newspapers accelerated slide into obsolescence - they really only have themselves to blame for that - but the fact that Google and Craigslist have developed such profitable - and more efficient - ventures doesn’t help.

If that market assault represents the stick, then the lure that one day Google might buy newspapers - only to say it won’t - is no doubt the carrot, so to speak.

TV content companies have a very hard time justifying moving their libraries online. To quote NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker, why trade analog dollars for digital pennies. Sure, right now, the Web is offering media companies digital dimes, but we’re far away from a 1 for 1 swap.

Judging by the fact that TV remains a bigger advertising pie that online,

Time looks at some of the biggest failures in tech. It includes YouTube (GOOG). Now this struck me as odd because a mere two years ago, Time dubbed You the Person of the Year, and by You it meant You on YouTube.

In fact, the list is actually compiled by Douglas A. McIntyre 24/7 Wall Street, a site I don’t read enough but which always impresses me when I do.