Spark's Koyfman Looking For The Next Winner In Advertising Monetization

Spark's New VC Koyfman, Like Everyone Else, Looking For The Next Winner In Advertising

Boston-based VC firm Spark Capital has already made plenty of bets on tech and media companies that plan to use advertising for some or all of their revenue, including Veoh, KickApps, I'minlikewithyou, 5min, Twitter, and Tumblr. One problem: The advertising business hasn't caught up to many of the startups, who find themselves light on revenue or unburdened by it altogether.

Enter Spark's newest partner, former IAC exec Moshe "Mo" Koyfman, who says he's on the hunt for interesting companies that can help move the online ad business beyond Google.

"There's been lots of innovation on the content and media side," he says, "but we've yet to see some of the innovation required to monetize appropriately."

Web video is one of the fields that could desperately use better revenue generators, and no one knows that better than Koyfman, whose last job was running IAC's (IACI) Connected Ventures, including video sharing site Vimeo.

Koyfman says at Spark, he'll be looking for companies that have a unique or scalable approach to making ad money better "in a market that has shown dramatically how to lower costs of creation, but not monetization."

Murdoch on the future of newspapers

US: Wall Street Journal to launch new website Tuesday

The Wall Street Journal is set to launch their new website on Tuesday morning according to the New York Times.

The new website is similar to the old one, however, it will have a new look with less ads and no more navigation buttons on the left side of the homepage.  

Non-subscribers will still not have access to most of The Journal's business news articles.  However, subscribers will now be able to comment on every story by creating their own personal profiles.  

Executive editor for online news at the WSJ, Alan Murray, expects this new system to be "very powerful." Plans to eventually allow non-subscribers to create accounts is also in the works, as long as their identities can be verified before they create an account.

If successful, the WSJ.com could become a hub for business conversation.  On the downside, it risks becoming too exclusive to lure new readers.

US: Murdoch on the future of newspapers

Posted by Lauren Drablier on September 15, 2008 at 12:08 PM

Rupert Murdoch, who was recently nominated as one of Esquire's 75 most influential people, has lifted the lid on his views about the newspaper industry and future of newspapers in an interview with the magazine.

The future of newspapers

"I don't know the future. Is knowledge in this world going to be more valuable, more important than it has ever been? Absolutely. We're clearly going through a period of real change, where the business models of the old newspapers are challenged. That will be even more so in the future. If you look at the readership of newspapers -- both the age of their readership and the numbers -- it's worrying. But if you then look at the number of people who go to the Internet, it's tremendous."

"You have to have a brand that is totally trusted. Now, there are a huge number of people in this country who don't trust The New York Times. There are a huge number that trust The Wall Street Journal and have, in varying degrees, loyalties to their local newspapers. They enjoy them, or they find that it's useful information. They go on the Web and use it. That's the job of a newspaper, to be able to keep people, to stay with them, and to make them satisfied with what they get from one place as much as possible. That's the challenge."

"All I know is that the innovations that are going to affect us, whatever they are, are going to come at us faster than ever."

"I love competition. And I want to win."...

Newspapers Worldwide (Minus U.S.) Oppose Google-Yahoo Deal

Newspapers Worldwide (Minus U.S.) Oppose Google-Yahoo Deal

By MIGUEL HELFT

In the early hours of Monday morning, the World Association of Newspapers posted a lengthy communique on its Web site calling the Google-Yahoo advertising partnership anti-competitive and urging regulators to block the deal. According to its Web site, the World Association of Newspapers represents 76 national newspaper associations and more than 18,000 publications in five continents. Its communique led to flurry of headlines that essentially said “Newspapers Around World Oppose Yahoo-Google Ad Deal.”

But hours later, the U.S.-based Newspaper Association of America, a member of the World Association of Newspapers, issued a communique of its own (they called it a press release). In it, John F. Sturm, president of the association said: “While NAA is a member of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), I would like to clarify that the NAA Board of Directors has taken no position on the proposed advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo.” The association represents more than 2000 newspapers in the United States and Canada. Its members account for 90 percent of the daily circulation of newspapers in the United States.

The NAA’s views are important here because the Google-Yahoo partnership is limited to the United States and Canada. The views of U.S.-based newspapers are likely to be given special weight by regulators, as they are the publishers who will be most affected by the deal.

That said, there are no guarantees that the probe of the Google-Yahoo deal will be limited to the United States. On Monday, antitrust regulators in Europe said they were conducting a “preliminary investigation” into the partnership. That’s not good news for either Google or Yahoo and it comes just days after news that the Justice Department hired a prominent antitrust lawyer to examine, and perhaps challenge, the deal.

Perhaps what was most striking, and what may be most worrisome to Google in the long term, was the harsh tone of the World Association of Newspapers communique, and what it said about the hostility that many in industry feel toward the Internet search giant:

Most publishers are acutely aware that Google’s ever-tightening grip on internet traffic, its unbridled use of online content, and its dominance in online advertising poses a very real threat to the continued viability of the independent content generation industry.
[...]
Perhaps never in the history of newspaper publishing has a single, commercial entity threatened to exert this much control over the destiny of the press.
It is particularly worrisome that this consolidation of power is occurring at the same time that Google increasingly takes positions that are adverse to newspapers and other content creators. Google already owns several content sites that directly compete with content developed by newspapers and other creators - often by simply copying others’ content without authorization. Usually, Google alone profits from this misappropriation. Take, for example, the case of Google News, which a Google senior executive recently admitted drives $100 million in advertising revenue to Google itself yet provides nothing - not a penny - to the newspaper companies whose works appear on those pages.

While the WAN acknowledges that many of its members are Google customers, those are not the words of happy customers. And regardless of whether regulators do or do not attempt to block the Google-Yahoo deal, as Google’s power in online advertising grows, this kind of sentiment could well herald new regulatory headaches for Google down the road.