How appropriate.  I am in San Francisco, the home of CNET.  In fact I walked by the CNET headquarters last night after having dinner with colleagues from Internet.com.   Seeing the CNET building made me think of my recent posts in which I suggested that Yahoo should buy CNET.   Interestingly I wrote that Yahoo should buy Dow Jones.  Dow Jones was sold soon after.  Now CNET.  I guess I can figure out who will be sold, but I have to work on the buyer part!?

I think this is a good purchase by CBS.  However is it not odd that a few years ago CBS sold Marketwatch to Dow Jones?  Think of the lineup CBS would have if they had retained Marketwatch, with Sportsline and CNET. This would be very powerful.  Too bad somebody blew the Marketwatch decision.  Perhaps the same person who now decided to buy CNET?

Quite a premium.  44% over the closing price of yesterday.  4x 2008 revenues and 22x 2008 EBITDA.  Based on where CNET has been headed and with the threat of a takeover, CNET has done well with this decision.  While the deal metrics are strong, I have long contended that content and traffic are extremely valuable.  These values are not always visible in the price of a stock.  It is nearly impossible to create a CNET today.  Therefore CBS wanted Internet girth and had to pay up.  Think of the recent Microsoft-Yahoo dance.

Microsoft would have to pay up too for Yahoo.  In order to get girth Microsoft should have paid the extra few dollars to Yahoo.  Microsoft cannot obtain that girth without a big payment.  Facebook has girth, but I still am a doubter that Facebook will ever be a money machine.  The other facet in the equation is the geometry of a deal.  In other words, does 2 plus 2 equal 6? 8? More?  The CBS + CNET deal yields 6.  The Microsoft + Yahoo deal yields 12.

I am now in Chicago on the eve of our ISPCON tradeshow.  ISPCON should be a solid and profitable show.  Many readers know we have been working on developing more tradeshows.  ISPCON goes back many years and is successful.  We have a bunch more coming this year and we are hopeful we will have some more winners.

After Chicago I visit our Tucson office.  Tucson is at the center of our many subscription offerings.  Then on to San Francisco to visit our west coast office for Internet.com.  Finally a day in Pasadena where we have a large image operation.

 

Great article on CNN today about the huge growth in the online pizza business.  The numbers are staggering.  Maybe Amazon should buy Papa John's!!?

The press continues to speculate on Yahoo's future.  Microsoft denies it will pursue Yahoo again.  Obviously I do not know about Microsoft's intentions but I would not be surprised if Microsoft returns to its pursuit of Yahoo.  Microsoft is way behind Google in the Internet wars.  Nothing else out there compares to Yahoo's scale.  If Microsoft is serious about competing with Google, it has to own Yahoo.

What about Yahoo's situation?  Jerry Yang likes being CEO of a company he founded many years ago.  He is extremely wealthy.  He is young.  What would he do without Yahoo?  While I am sure he could keep occupied, I doubt he could achieve the high he gets from running Yahoo.  His work is his life.  He does not care about his stockholders nor speculators.  He honestly believes he can make Yahoo bigger and better so to heck with what anyone thinks. 

I am not rooting against Jerry (and David Filo).  But if Yahoo is remaining independent, it needs to change its growth strategy.  18 months ago I suggested that Yahoo should purchase Dow Jones.  Yahoo needs to be the biggest and best media company.  It can never be the biggest and best search company.  The mere fact that Yahoo is working with Google to farm out its search shows the world that Yahoo knows it has lost the search wars.

Therefore Yahoo should make a big purchase.  And once it makes the big purchase it might very well be the best defense against Microsoft returning to the hunt.  Yahoo did not take me up on buying Dow Jones.  But now I suggest two acquistions.  Yahoo should purchase Cnet and follow that up with buying up all or most of IAC.  The cost would be many billions.  But Yahoo would then offer an astounding array of Internet content, services and ecommerce offerings.  Combined with Yahoo's enormous traffic, this combo would clearly be a winner.  And as stated, it would keep Microsoft away forever.

More importantly these acquisitions would make Yahoo the most interesting Internet company in the world.  I am not sure that Yahoo has the right management to pull this off.  Regardless, this plan should be considered.

The number one blog for the microstock industry had a neat review of our recent one-day gathering for Stockxpert in Moscow, Russia. 

When reading this review note the part where the writer mentions that Jupitermedia sent a few people over to the event.  Names are given and then he says "and a few other people."  I was one of the other people!  This actually make me happy that I was not mentioned.  In most endeavors in my career I have gotten top billing and in a few cases a fuss has been made about my being at an event.

Things were different in Moscow.  I was an observer.  I enjoyed watching attendees clamouring to get their photos taken with either Stockxpert founder Peter Hamza or super photographer Ron Chapple.  And most importantly I liked the last paragraph of the review.  We are getting across the idea that our microstock business and operations are very much a significant part of our entire image operations. 

 

 

I have been writing about my new Kindle.  Inadvertently I purchased a second Kindle by accident.  I had to return the extra Kindle and went to the Amazon site to arrange the return.  The experience was superb.

Amazon has a terrific interface for returns.  The best part of the process was how Amazon interacted with me on each stage of the return process.  First I got an email telling me the package was picked up by the delivery service.  Four days later I received an email that the return was received and that my payment was being processed.  And a day later the final email that the payment was sent to my credit card.

The lesson here is that Amazon won me over for future purchases.  The other lesson is how valuable customer service can be as a sales tool.  I am certainly going to tell this story over and over again to my colleagues at Jupitermedia.  We can all learn from Amazon.