Motley Fool just came out with a by-the-numbers piece on GOOG titled, "You Are So Wrong About Google." Apparently, GOOG was selected by readers as the worst stock for 2007 and one of Motley Fool’s longtime contributors, Rick Munarriz, took umbrage with the vote. Makes those readers (and folks like Barron’s) look somewhat foolish.
Archive for December, 2006
Just spoke to the mom-in-law who, on Vashon Island, bore the brunt of that recent storm that left something like one million folks without power in the Seattle area.
How bad was it? She has a five-foot outdoor table with a thick glass top which she tried to remove but it was wedged tightly into place. That didn’t stop the wind from lifting the glass top off the deck around 1am and shattering it into the side of her bedroom. Frightening!
I’m getting pinged by folks asking when I’m going to start writing about CAD — now that I’m part of IMSI/design, the #1 CAD company in retail.
Suffice it to say that we have some really great stuff up-our-sleeves but don’t want to tip our hand too soon.
So, only online advertising stuff for the time being.
But, can’t wait to share with you what we’re doing. Please stay tuned!
What does Wall Street think about Yahoo!’s reorg plan?
CNN.com’s first three lines summarize nicely:
Wall Street not yodeling for Yahoo
The struggling search company shook up its management team but investors don’t seem to like the moves.
It looks like the peanut butter has hit the fan at Yahoo!.
Missing in action here? A realization by the Y! board that technology companies need technologists at the top.
You can’t be the most optimistic guy in the world about online advertising without being a fan of YHOO.
But, with details breaking tonight about sweeping mangement changes at YHOO, I do have my worries.
I worry about a non-technologist running a technology company. (Just ask Apple and HP about this.)
I also worry — with YHOO recently setting 52-week lows while the rest of the industry is setting 52-week highs — if the comp committee is going to award the CEO yet another half a billion dollars simply for shuffling execs?
Finally, I hope these two worries don’t seem unreasonable… I hope other people are worried about this stuff, too.
While we’re piling on, here’s a piece that came out in the Financial Times today.
The headline says it all:
Newspapers forecast to lose ads to net
I so want to say, "duh"… but that’s not too constructive… so here are a few good numbers:
* Elaboration (and triangulation) what Ted Leonsis said below: That consumers in US, Japan, and UK spend 21.9% of media time online but only 6.8% of advertisers’ budgets go to that medium
* ZenithOptimedia forecasts internet advertising to grow 28.2% next year vs. 3.9% for the rest of the industry.
That’s the secular shift Barron’s doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge.
Regardless of the performance of AOL after the infamous Time Warner merger, Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitals and vice chairman of AOL, is a smart guy… and a gracious one, too, for those that know him.
Recently he summed up the online advertising phenomena this way:
"The momentum of ad dollars from the traditional world to the internet will probably continue for the rest of our business lifetimes.
So true.
He goes on the support this remark:
"Today, a person is consuming media on the internet between 18-22 percent of the day. But we’re only seeing 6 percent of ad dollars going to the internet. That will catch up. It will be a couple of billion dollars, and the incremental revenue is at 50 percent margin."
That’s what it’s all about, people.
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