70% of Whatever is Whatever - Media Dealmakers Summit
Tony Perkins, founder and CEO of AlwaysOn, Silicon Valley emcee and past overlord of the Red Herring in the days when it was telephone-book thick, went on a Google riff yesterday during the DeSilva + Phillips Media Dealmakers Summit at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. Bringing up the undisclosed revenue sharing / “don’t you worry” stance of Google Adsense to its hundreds of thousands of web publishers, Tony asked “what’s that all about?”
Tony’s panelists included ContextWeb’s own Anand Subramanian who took the bait. Anand took things further, poking fun at ad networks generally and their revenue sharing models for web publishers: “70% of Whatever is whatever”.
The conference hallways were buzzing with Sarah Phillips (wife of Reed Phillips) talking up her baking911.com site, a labor of love that now has 500,000 monthly uniques; Patrick Spain, who is working on a hyper secret extension of his HighBeam Research service with a hyper secret partner; Elisabeth DeMarse, the past Bankrate.com CEO now running CreditCards.com and Alan Warms, CEO of Participate Media and participant in the ContextWeb publisher network, who was talking about his new BuzzTracker.com service.
Finally, Jeff Dearth presented the top 10 digital media deals of 2006 according to DeSilva + Phillips and here they are:
- #10
- All Star Directories sold to Austin Ventures
- Price: $80 -100 million
- Story: Lead generation in education space
- #9
- dMarc sold to Google
- Price: $102 million
- Story: Radio advertising, self-service style
- #8
- Xfire sold to Viacom
- Price: $102 million
- Story: online gaming
- #7
- CreditCards.com sold to Austin Ventures
- Price $125 - $150 million
- Story: lead generation of consumer credit card issuers
- #6
- Traffic.com sold to NAVTEQ
- Price: $179 million
- Story: Online traffic (auto traffic, not web traffic) info services
- #5
- Jamba sold to NewsCorp
- Price: $188 million
- Story: 51% stake in mobile ring tone and wallpaper company
- #4
- uSwitch sold top E.W. Scripps
- Price: $366 million
- Story: UK consumer lead generation for switching utilities and other services
- #3
- iVillage sold to NBC Universal
- Price: $600 million
- Story: women, women, women
- #2
- AOL sold stake to Google
- Price: $1 Billion
- Story: 5% stake (in the heart)
- #1
- YouTube sold to Google
- Price: $1.65 Billion
- Story: user generated videos
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