News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) received $12.5 million in Flixster stock when it sold its Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews site to the startup last month, according to an SEC filing. We first reported about it on Twitter this morning, though the filing wasn’t clear enough on the mix of stock and equity. Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein, however, tells us not to read too much into the figure because “this was an all stock deal—so there actually was no specific market valuation for either Flixster or Rotten Tomatoes.” (In a follow-up, I asked Greenstein what the figure therefore meant and he explained that he wasn’t “exactly sure what formulas or benchmarks are used for SEC filings.”) Flixster has raised about $10 million in funding over two rounds. Two years ago, the site was reportedly looking to sell itself for $150 million but it’s unlikely that valuation still stands since there were no takers.
Archive for February 8th, 2010
News Corp. Got $12.5 Million In Flixster Stock For Rotten Tomatoes
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Foursquare Signing Mainstream Partnership Deals Left And Right
Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service’s Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they’ve reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals with even more partners, including HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.
The service has been on a roll lately. They’re now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find.
iPhone owner builds miniturized personal theater
This one iPhone owner managed to create a detailed masterpiece that literally looks like a miniaturized version of a theater filled with seats, curtains…
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The Value Of Online Buzz For The Top 20 Brands
Nowadays, buzz around brands on the news, blogs, tweets and other social media that spreads through product launches, PR campaigns, earnings reports are as valuable as traditional ad campaigns. But buzz and social dialogue on the web is tough to quantify. General Sentiment has released a report that calculates the dollar value of the buzz, content, and conversation taking place online. General Sentiment’s technology evaluates the volume of mentions and sentiment value regarding a brand, company or person. The algorithm combines this data with website traffic and online news readership figures to determine the purchase-equivalent dollar value of the brand exposure across more than 30 million sources by gauging sentiment, frequency, and exposure of news mentions and social dialogue.
Google topped the rankings, with value of its “buzz” itemized at $669.6 million. Google’s social media reach costs $402 million, with its Twitter reach alone valued at $22.8 million. On the other hand, Apple came in fourth with total buzz reaching $293.2 million; social media buzz valued at $223.7 million; and Twitter reach valued at $5.6 million.
The Long Tail Of Video Sites Capture Half Of All Viewing Minutes
YouTube might be streaming more than 13 billion videos a month, or nearly 40 percent of total individual streams, but when you measure by time spent YouTube only accounted for 26 percent of all viewing minutes on the Web last year. It is not surprising that it commands a smaller share of time spent watching videos than number of streams watched, since most YouTube videos are so short. But what is surprising is how fragmented the Web video landscape remains once you go out past the top 25 sites.
According to comScore’s 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, more than half of all time spent watching videos on the Web (52 percent) last year was on Long Tail video sites beyond the top 25. What you see is a real barbell distribution, with Youtube on one end and the Long Tail sites on the other. Total video views more than doubled between December, 2008 and December, 2009, from 14 billion to 33 billion streams. So there is hope yet for niche video producers.
