Media Companies

Evolve​ ​Law​ ​will​ ​join​ ​Above​ ​the​ ​Law​ ​in​ ​Spring​ ​2018

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Since 2014, Evolve Law has built the largest community of legal tech startups and innovators in the world with 150+ member companies. In 2017, Evolve Law partnered with Above the Law to significantly member benefits and reach, and in 2018, Evolve Law will merge into Above the Law.

Evolve Law CEO Mary Juetten commented, “I have enjoyed developing our strategic partnership with Above the Law and the plan to merge Evolve Law’s legal tech toolkit into Above the Law’s Innovation Center: Evolve the Law. Above the Law is a natural home for the Evolve Law members and this transition will allow me to focus on Traklight and my writing.”

Above the Law will oversee day-to-day operations while Juetten will collaborate on the strategic vision, support and attend many signature events, and contribute regularly to Above the Law as a columnist. Juetten added, “I am looking forward to seeing Above the Law build on Evolve Law’s community, particularly as we open up membership to public interest companies, legal departments, and law schools.”

“As the largest community for lawyers in the US, we are excited to fully integrate the Evolve Law community into the Above the Law brand” stated Hsiaolei Miller, Group Publisher of Above the Law. Above the Law now reaches 1.58 million members of the legal community monthly across its media platforms. All Evolve Law members will receive special access to this community as part of the merger.

This merger is the foundation to many new developments at Above the Law, including:

  • Launch of Evolve the Law, ATL’s Legal Innovation Center (ETL), and upcoming legal tech directory
  • Expanding access to Evolve Law Signature Events to reach a larger audience
  • Focus on innovation across industries in health,IT, Fintech, RegTech, and legaltech

The first ATL | EL signature event is in NYC on Jan 30 th , 2018 and Darwin Challenge applications are now open. For more information email elmembers@abovethelaw.com.

How Many Insiders Are There In Business?

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Digiday published “Who’s winning at business news on the web” which details traffic, demographics, and ad rates of the five biggest business sites (in ascending order): The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business, Forbes, Business Insider, and Yahoo Finance. Business Insider made the largest jump, growing 80% traffic in one year to 40.8 million unique visitors per month. I’m in awe. And a little concerned. If BI were to grow another 80% this year, they would reach 73.44 million unique visitors per month.  Are there that many “insiders” in business?

Let’s look at the demographics and make one very broad – and non controversial – assumption: B2B marketers want senior-level buyers with a minimum $100K household income. None of the Top 5 business sites has a majority of readers over that threshold. BI’s audience had the lowest percentage at 37.4%. This means that 62.6%, or 25.5 million BI readers, fall outside of the sought-after B2B audience demographic.

$100K+ HHI Percent Site

Breaking Media runs independent brands exclusively focused in seven industry verticals. Our growth targets are tied to market penetration, not total uniques. The result is a smaller audience, but one that closely aligns with the community it serves.  Dealbreaker, Breaking Media’s financial site, is for investment bankers and hedge fund managers. Therefore the 73% of the audience is over $100K. In fact, 38% of the audience have a HHI over $250K.

We believe this niche media strategy best serves our advertisers.

Hsiaolei (pronounced “Chalet”) develops business and can be reached here.

Is the FCC’s Consideration of Media Ownership Laws a Waste of Time?

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When I first started writing about media seven years ago, the biggest public-policy question was this: How many media outlets should one company be allowed to own in a given market? In those pre-Google IPO, pre-Facebook days, there was a very real concern that big, publicly-owned media companies, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. or Clear Channel with thousands of outlets were wielding too much influence over the minds of Americans. Hence, the then-Republican-led FCC’s attempts to relax rules governing media concentration was met with legal opposition persistent enough that it’s still raging today, even as the FCC once again considers those laws.

Today things on the media scene couldn’t be more different. We might still fear the craggy visage of Rupert Murdoch using his newspaper and TV empire to spread his conservative agenda, but there’s probably more reason to worry about the babyfaced Mark Zuckerberg and what he’ll do with your data. If past worries were founded on the idea that a town’s media could essentially be owned by one family, now it’s that all the information you share online will be used in some way you don’t want. For big, old media companies, the period of geography-based expansion — the snapping up of local newspapers and TV and radio stations — is over. Now it’s all about who owns what digital platform.

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Some Suggested Taglines for MySpace’s New Ad Campaign

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Tom Anderson MySpaceAd Age has the scoop that MySpace is poking — hahahaha- wrong network — around for an ad agency to do a branding blitz in support of it oh-so-hotly anticipated relaunch. The News Corp.-owned property has been getting pounded by Facebook, even with its big-time PR screw-ups. Global users, according to Ad Age, has dropped from 127 million to 111 million between April 2009 and April 2010. Facebook has about half a billion.

As a way to stop the bleeding, MySpace is getting its functionality changed out to become more friendly to content producers, musicians, gamers, advertisers… in other words, everyone because… the user experience is horrifying. With it, comes a brand overhaul. Write Rupal Parekh and Michael Learmonth, “Industry executives say the News Corp.-owned company recently put out a request for proposals to several creative shops, asking them to help MySpace get the word out about the relaunch, which will include new features to be introduced in stages starting this summer and a revamped site and logo in the fall.”

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  • 04 Jun 2010 at 2:06 PM

What Would William Randolph Hearst Say About the iCrossing Deal?

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When William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, television was only just beginning to firm its grip on American culture and newspapers still set the agenda. The Internet hadn’t even been imagined. Yet, I believe, it’s safe to say that if Hearst the man could weigh in on Hearst the company’s latest acquisition — not a newspaper, a magazine or even a website, but a company specializing in buying search keywords and performing social media — he’d like it.

Hearst, after all, was the guy who uttered this immortal line: “Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark — well-intentioned, but ineffective.”

It’s a sentiment that might be well-over a half-century old but one many publishers still struggle to understand. Hearst knew it wasn’t enough to just produce news stories, how ever well-reported or beautifully-written, and hope that readers would come. Even in the primitive tech environment of Hearst’s time, news media suffered from fragmentation, with multiple broadsheets and tabloids competing for reader’s interest in any given city or town.

Hearst knew that to succeed in that cluttered environment a publisher had to be a bit P.T. Barnum. And, as a result, the Hearst name will forever be associated with yellow journalism techniques that led to a war and mainstream acceptance of all kinds of crazy psuedoscience.

The point here is not that audience development should come at the expense of truth, but that you can’t ignore the environment in which your content lives. If you do, it won’t live for long. That’s as true now as it was then. The difference today is rather than be part Barnum, it’s best to be part Ballmer.

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The Media Business Might Need a Savior, but Steve Jobs Isn’t It

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When Steve Jobs speaks, people listen. Not only do they listen, but their jaws drop slack, a droplet of saliva drools to the chin to dry and the head nods in happy obedience.

Steve Jobs ImageThat’s all well and good when you’re talking about hordes of mindless fanboys who have given over their souls to the Apple CEO and his product line, but it’s a bit disconcerting when you consider how well Jobs’ spiel plays in a media business desperate for new ideas on how to preserve itself. As we plow deeper into our Age of Non-Monetization, it’s easy to see the attraction to Jobs’ sales pitches, like the one he gave at the AllThingsD conference last night. There he once again struck his Jesus Christ pose, a would-be savior replete with the increasingly gaunt, almost ascetic visage that is so easy to submit to. It helps that he’s got the hardware, the closed-off ecosystems so difficult to disrupt, and the swelling market capitalization to boot.

He’s also got a great line that underlies his media-oriented addresses, even if he never quite drops it literally: I saved the music industry and, dear news providers, I can save you, too.

Too bad it isn’t true.

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  • 24 May 2010 at 5:14 PM

What Yahoo’s Deal for Associated Content Means

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Last week Yahoo agreed to spend $90 million on Associated Content. While we sniffed at the quality of Associated’s two million-plus consumer-written articles, the deal has serious implications for the media business. Here’s how it impacts four different constituents.

For Yahoo
I think we can safely say that it depends on post-deal execution, as it usually does with these things. On the one hand that $90 million could prove to be a big ol’ waste of money: Associated’s content isn’t high-value stuff, CPM’s for lower-value inventory will inevitably keep being driven drown by the proliferation of supply and the reduction of friction in the buying process, and both Associated’s network of Joe and Jane Doe contributors and its technology platform could’ve been replicated by a company with Yahoo’s resources for a lot less than $90 million.

On the other hand if it can focus this army on providing the types of content demanded by advertisers — particularly local and niche advertisers who’ve yet to be effectively mined as a source of display revenue but could be extremely lucrative — while finding better ways of vetting the content for quality and building greater demand for brand advertising online, that $90 million could end up looking like a small price to have paid.

For media dealmakers
Dealmakers will read this as another positive indication that the media M&A market is coming back. I’ve only spoken to one lawyer and one banker on the topic, but both seemed confident this was good news for them. We’ve already seen an acceleration of the pace of dealmaking in the technology sector and the banker’s theory was that this deal would trigger more activity in the digital content space.

Obviously if you’re an entrepreneur looking for crazy multiples, you’d still rather you had invented some instantly scalable, must-have mobile software, but the fact that Yahoo — which has at times tried to distance itself from the media business — is snapping up content and talking about why it wants to be a media company must be a good sign for media owners who create original content. Right?

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Hey CNN, Look to Twitter to Fill Your 8 O’Clock Hole

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Campbell Brown’s “honest broker” attempt at “no bias, no bull” has fallen to the ideologically booby-trapped no-spin produced by Bill O’Reilly at Fox and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC. CNN will undoubtedly try to fill her spot with another old media type who has a little more star power. Or CNN president Jon Klein will have to go back on his word and find a television “opinionator” that can compete at 8:00 o’clock.

Early indications are that Klein will look for somebody that can impose his or her personality on the program. The rumor that former solicitor general for prostitutes Eliot Spitzer would be up for the job has been debunked. But Brown’s candid resignation letter illustrates CNN’s problem:

The 8pm hour in cable news world is currently driven by the indomitable Bill O’Reilly, Nancy Grace and Keith Olbermann. Shedding my own journalistic skin to try to inhabit the kind of persona that might co-exist in that line up is simply impossible for me. It is not who I am or who I want to be; nor is it who CNN asked me to be at any point.

But maybe there is a third option for CNN. A traditional news anchor is too boring for 8:00 pm. Opinionated infotainment is a space already dominated by two of the biggest names in the business. Instead of taking one of two bad choices, CNN should go outside the mainstream and make a new media news hour, anchored by a person who isn’t just fluent in new media, but speaks it as his or her native tongue…

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5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Online Porn Business

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Ever dream of building a porn website? Then you should have become an academic. Maybe you would have been one of the five “security researchers” from the Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and University of California- Santa Barbara who set out to answer one of the most pressing questions of our time: How do adult websites make money?

To get us an answer, they built their own smutty destination, which yielded plenty of insight into an oft-ignored and steamy little corner of the content business. Their findings were reported on MIT’s Technology Review today. Although it disappointed by not linking to the site, the post is otherwise chock full of factoids. Here are five you need to know:

1. Turns out being a successful porn mogul isn’t as simple as aggregating a bunch of bukkake videos. Once you’ve got the content, then you need the eyeballs and that means anteing up in a surprisingly complicated game of web traffic arbitrage. Or as the article rather kinkily describes it: “a seething ecosystem of traffic affiliates constantly skimming clicks and pennies off of one another.” If you’re interesting in getting into the porn-traffic brokering racket, know that $160 will fetch 47,000 sticky little clicks in the rather robust-sounding market.

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  • 17 May 2010 at 11:37 AM

The Facebook Exodus Will be Small — And Very Canadian

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When May 31 rolls around, I’ll do what I do on the last day of every other month: Pay my rent and some other bills, go to work and come home. What I won’t be doing is quitting Facebook, despite the best efforts of some to turn the day into a mass rejection of the social network.

Facebook PrivacySince Facebook rolled out yet another round of changes to its privacy settings earlier this year, the platform has been the subject of fierce criticism from an especially noisy core of early tech adopters. They’ve been hammering at Facebook’s arrogance on their blogs and in interviews and some internet celebrities, like Google’s Matt Cutts and Engadget founder Peter Rojas, have left the platform altogether. Quitting has become a sort of meme in and of itself, aided by the same buzz factor that has made Facebook a global hit in the first place.

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