“There’s a crisis in the industry, and the Guardian is no more immune than anyone else, but it’s a myth that we’ve plouged lunatic sums into digital,” stated Guardian Media Group editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. The website Guardian.co.uk has lost £20 million ($32.7 million) since 2002 according to Rusbridger.
Rusbridger wrote the financial details about the Guardian in the form of a comment on an article written by Roy Greenslade titledMurdoch’s digital news cartel will not persuade people to pay for content.
Guardian News & Media Ltd. as a whole lost £26.4 ($43.2) million to £36.8 ($60.18) million between 2008 and 2009. In July 2008, Guardian News & Media agreed to buy out technology news blog paidContent for over $30 million.
1. Google gave us CADIE, upside down YouTube videos, and GMail autopilot.
2. TorrentFreak told us that Warner Brothers plans to acquire The Pirate Bay.
3. Arrington announced that he is looking for a date from readers and that General Mills has acquired CrunchGear.
4. CenterNetworks announced the CN51 Startup Conference.
5. SocialBlade claims they cracked the Digg algorithm.
6. The Guardian claims they are killing print version of their site and is going Twitter only.
7. Woot.com is selling a bag of crap for $3.00 and $1 million shipping.
8. Opera announced face-gestured web browsing.
9. Car and Driver is reporting that President Obama wants “a complete withdrawal from America’s premier racing series is expected to save more than $250 million between GM and Chrysler, a substantial amount considering the drastic measures being implemented elsewhere.”
10. Qualcomm stated that their convergence program has implemented tiny base stations into thousands of pigeons. They also stated that these are no ordinary pigeons but a hybrid wolfpigeon.
11. SlideShare told their users that they are Rockstars.
12. Funny or Die wrote that they have been acquired by Reba McEntire and is now called RebaOrDie.com.
13. AOL Radio was considering playing Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up all over AOLRadio.com.
14. Amazon.com launches brand new cloud computing service called Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE).
More to be added as they are discovered…
These were all good, but I think out of all them, Reddit had the best April Fools prank. They replaced their entire user interface to look just like Digg as you will notice in the above screen shot.
Today BusinessWeek and GigaOM formed a syndication partnership. BW will be featuring content from Om Malik’s blog network every Monday. After hearing about this, I realized that traditional media companies need blogs like us to keep them looking cool & hip.
This hypothesis is apparent when Guardian Media, a British media company acquired paidContent for over $30 million last week. Another example is that the Washington Post inked deals with paidContent and TechCrunch to syndicate their content. Video blogger, Loren Feldman produces videos for CNET (now owned by CBS) on a regular basis. And then The New York Times bought out the Freakonomics blog in August 2007.
Are traditional media companies having a hard time finding talented journalists and bloggers themselves to provide the same unique content as us? Blogging isn’t rocket science. I’m just blogging to make money to power my own startup ideas, pay the office rent, and learn more about the industry. What are your thoughts? Why does traditional media need us?
You know what keeps bloggers like me writing? Seeing other blogging companies succeed. Rafat Ali of paidContent writes like a madman everyday to give us the news that we like to read. And today his efforts have payed off. Guardian Media has acquired his company, ContentNext for over $30 million.
Through the acquisition, Guardian Media will have ownership of the following websites:
1.) paidContent.org
2.) mocoNews.net
3.) contentSutra.com
4.) paidContent.co.uk
The acquisition will be an earn-out assuming that the websites maintain certain performance.
paidContent started in 2002 and they have offices in Santa Monica, Calif. and Manhattan. Greycroft Partners invested an undisclosed amount in paidContent in 2006. ContentNext is known for hosting several conferences.
ContentNext Media will operate independently under Guardian News & Media.
“I have admired paidContent for years. Rafat and his team personify the values of editorial independence and integrity that are core to the Guardian. I’m very happy to welcome the company into the expanding Guardian Media Group,” stated Carolyn McCall, CEO of Guardian Media Group.
