Recovering value destroyed by “synergy”

June 20th, 2007 § Comments Off § permalink

McClatchy is thinking about selling its share in the online job site CareerBuilder. That’s an idea worth considering.
I’ve come to believe that more value has been destroyed in the pursuit of false synergies than any other boardroom fad of the last 20 years. Imagine for a moment that (1) McClatchy could bank the value of its stake in CareerBuilder, and (2) McClatchy’s newspapers were free to negotiate the best possible deal for employment classifieds. Monster and HotJobs are now eagerly negotiating deals with the newspapers. What would it be worth to CareerBuilder to keep McClatchy on board? How much value would that create?
It’s enough to make you wonder how much value was created by CareerBuilder and how much was simply transfered from McClatchy’s (and Gannett’s and Tribune’s) newspapers to CareerBuilder in the first place.
Intermediaries on the Web are going to be increasing their clout, and it’s time for everyone to reexamine all their cozy corporate distribution deals to see if they’re creating or destroying value.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.

There is no RSS market

June 13th, 2007 § Comments Off § permalink

Someone asked me the other day about how Google’s purchase of Feedburner would affect their share of the “RSS market”. There is no RSS market, any more than there is an HTML or an XML market. Or a TXT market, for that matter.
RSS is a file format. FeedBurner’s principal competition is the RSS support that is built into publishers’ content management sytems, whether they’re using WordPress or some monster custom job. FeedBurner competes with these perfectly fine, free features by tracking who’s using the feed and (if you wish) adding advertising.
For these reasons, Feedburner should integrate well with Google’s existing publishing tools, analytics and advertising network business.
FeedBurner is a small piece of a very big trend. Syndication is already an important part of any content producer’s toolkit. But it’s just one element of the new wave of intermediation that’s about to sweep the business. I’ve just released my report on syndication, and in a few weeks will release an in-depth report on how to thrive in the coming era of intermediation in the media business.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.