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Microsoft and NBC have broken off their web news partnership. The MSNBC.com web site will now become NBCNews.com while Microsoft will create its own site.

Early next year, MSNBC.com will relaunch as a stand-alone site for the cable channel MSNBC. Steve Capus, president of NBC News, told the New York Times, “we will fully own our digital businesses.” The changes show that the internet’s impact on the media business is far from complete and more disruption is likely to hit the business in the future.

Comcast, the media company that owns NBC, will acquire Microsoft’s 50 percent stake in the joint venture that was born in the mid-1990s. Microsoft will receive $300 million, the Times said. Microsoft’s own stake in the cable TV channel was dissolved in 2005. One of the problems, the Times said, is that NBC felt handcuffed by the web joint venture. More of its advertisers wanted to buy ads on both its TV newscasts and web sites. But the cross-media sales were stymied because Microsoft rand the ad sales part of the business. The joint venture had to set up a special team for those sales.

MSNBC.com and its associated sites have 50 million monthly visitors, according to comScore.

Filed under: media

The folks at Online Degree Dictionary have put together a startling look at the current social media business market, and they focus on comparing it to the real-estate bubble and dot-come bubble from the last 15 years.  Are things really different this time?  The infographic takes a cynical position, stating that social media has no real guarantee of future probability, and these sky high valuations are tremendously risky and are — in fact — a bubble.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Unlike Yahoo, AOL’s activist shareholders won’t be able to boot out the company’s CEO due to falsifying education information on a resume.

Instead, Starboard Value LP, which owns 5.3 percent of AOL, decided to create a 96-page presentation outlining all of the missteps the company is currently making in regards to its media business.

Much like it’s done in the past, Starboard highlights that AOL spent about $668 million on acquisitions since 2009 for the purpose of boosting its display advertising business. These acquisitions include the $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post, which generated about $30 million in revenue with a staff of about a hundred in 2009. Huffpost revenue is currently up, but so are its expenses. Starboard isn’t necessarily calling the Huffpost a bad investment, but it does accuse AOL of mismanaging the property so that it because woefully unprofitable. (See table below.)

The most damning thing about the report remains AOL’s focus on turning its hyper-local news property Patch into a profitable business. Patch is returning $13 million in revenue this year (a number Starboard is convinced is padded), after AOL spent over $160 million. Based in interviews Starboard commissioned, the majority (70 percent) of advertisers admitted they didn’t renew their ad deals with the service after the first contract ended.

Starboard estimates that AOL’s overall display ad business is losing about $500 million per year, and has already lost $1.3 billion cumulatively.

So, what do the activist investors propose should happen to change all of this?

Well, for starters Starboard wants to replace three directors on AOL’s board, which will better represent the interests of shareholders. It also wants to kill Patch, dead as in immediately stop dumping bags of money into a dumpster. My guess is that it would probably consolidate the number of properties AOL currently owns to only those that can be profitable on their own, without the help of pushing ad campaigns from other more successful properties.

Oh and one other thunderous slap to the face: Starboard wants to change the compensation of its executive team to mirror that of a media company — not a tech company. This makes perfect sense, especially since AOL recently laid off a large swath of employees in its email and instant messaging communications department. It also sold a very valuable chunk of technology patents to Microsoft. Starboard points out that AOL’s current board is allowing the company to compare themselves with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, and Google. I really don’t think anyone could make the case that those companies are “peers” of AOL at this point.

You can check out the full hulking 96-page presentation via the SEC. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.

Filed under: media

Business-to-business bedrijven lopen achter op business-to-consumer organisaties wat betreft de implementatie van social media strategieën.

Here’s one of those posts that seem to confuse people who don’t understand how someone can embrace digital content as I do doesn’t also embrace the notion that the print magazine format is endangered.

Here’s a hint to understanding this: I think that a magazine company (or any media company, print or digital) that is built entirely on the media-business model (advertising and subscriptions) is endangered.

However, I think magazines (and other media) that support another business model are not endangered.

Today, a post on Pandodaily has the subject line, “The Future of Magazines Should Look a Lot Like Spotify.”

The 12 readers of this blog know I think the word “magazines” should refer to the paper kind of magazine, like the word “book” is used to differentiate between the p-book and the e-book. So, I’m going to start using the term emagazine to refer to something that is digital and magazine to refer to the print-format.

While I don’t disagree with the point of view of the writer, it follows in a long tradition of such suggestions that go something like this: The way to save something is to kill it.

I feel certain the writer would explain that he means “saving” means something other “saving the print version of a magazine,” but when I parse the sentence, one has to read his mind to understand what he means.

No matter the intention or meaning, the essay advocates something different than the headline: The print magazine format can be killed and the articles inside the magazine can be distributed in another way — like Spotify does (which, I’m not quite sure has saved the music business yet, but whatever). That will save something, but it won’t be magazines that are saved. And I’m fine with that — magazines that can’t survive as print magazines should die.

I’m not going to repeat the countless posts on this blog that explain the magazine business model vs. magazines that support another business model. Nor am I going to point back at articles that explain the difference in magazines for a business to business audience vs. those in the consumer marketplace. Nor am I going to point to the posts that, in many different ways, explain why this is a great era for writers and other creatives because there are some many opportunities (like Spotify) to distributed great writing, music or video. (In other words, why I agree with one-half of what the writer advocates.)

What I’ll do, however, is point to a Wikipedia article about the 1995 book called Being Digital. It is a re-packaged collection of individual essays written by Nicholas Negroponte that first appeared in the magazine and website (yes, back in 1995) Wired.com.

In the book, Negroponte (among other things) describes something he started talking about in  1970s called the Daily Me.

What was this 1970s concept called the Daily Me?

It’s sort of like a Spotify for articles found in newspapers and magazines … and blog posts.

This is my 4212th post on TechCrunch, and my last as editor in chief. The past few months have been a whirlwind for everyone at TechCrunch. We’ve had a lot of departures lately, but behind the scenes we’ve also quietly been building a new TechCrunch.

For every departure there’s been a new hire, we’ve been rolling out new features across the site (like the video and events hubs), and there is more goodness in the works including an awesome tablet app I am personally excited about. I didn’t want to leave until TechCrunch was set up for the next few years. And now it is.

When I joined TechCrunch in 2007 as Michael’s co-editor, the prospect of helping to build a new media brand online from scratch was what convinced me to jump from the magazine world to blogging. I got my share of headlines as a blogger, but what I found really exciting was helping to create a media business from whole cloth. It’s been an amazing ride, and I’d like to thank everyone at TechCrunch past and present for making it possible.

There is a lot of noise around TechCrunch right now because TechCrunch is changing. Ignore the noise, and focus on the work. In the end, that is the only thing that matters.

Photo credit: Federico Soffici

This guest post is by Alexis Grant of The Traveling Writer.

During the last six months, I’ve published two ebooks: one that’s selling wonderfully, and another that flopped.

Why did one succeed, while the other—at least in sales terms—didn’t? What was the difference?

It wasn’t a beautiful cover, nor a pre-launch sale, nor an impressive newsletter list. The differentiator was a factor you have to consider before you even begin writing your ebook.

But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, some background on the products, so you can avoid making the mistake I made:

EBook No. 1: How to Build a Part-Time Social Media Business

I released this guide to the world without much of a strategy. It was my first time writing and launching an ebook, so it had a DYI cover, no affiliate program and no guests posts at launch. At the time, I didn’t realize promotion—or getting eyes on my product—was just as essential as writing an awesome guide, so I simply created a product I was proud of and put it out there.

I cobbled together a sales page on my website, used ejunkie to sell it and spread the word through my networks, sharing the link to the sales page on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Immediately, the guide began to sell. Not at a ridiculous pace, but steadily, enough copies to make this first-time-product-creator happy. After three weeks, I reported selling 32 copies at $24 a pop.

Then Mashable ran a post I wrote about how to use your social media skills to make money, and copies flew off the digital shelves. Word began to spread among the social media community, and within two months of launch, I’d sold my first 100 copies.

I’d been bitten by the ebook bug! I began studying how to launch a product—homework I should’ve done weeks before—reading resources and guides on the topic and asking launch experts for advice. Soon I’d slapped a more professional-looking cover on the social media consulting guide and created an affiliate program.

Each morning, I woke up to see a guide or two had sold while I was sleeping. So this was what passive income was all about! I loved the instant gratification, and I smiled every time I got an email from someone who had used my guide to land their first client.

Then an idea hit me. I’d been scheming to write a traditional book about how to take a career break to travel, having left my job as a newspaper reporter several years ago to backpack through Africa. What if I turned that into an ebook instead? That would allow me to bypass the traditional publishing process, sell the product on my own site and keep all the profits. Genius, right?

So I toiled away on the guide. This time, I wrote nearly twice as long as I had for the first ebook, packing the guide with practical tips for anyone who was thinking about long-term travel, plus interviews with travelers who’d actually taken their own trips.

The result? Ebook No. 2: How to Take a Career Break to Travel

Now that I knew what it took to sell an ebook, I hired a designer to create a flashy cover and arranged the details for an affiliate program. I pitched guest posts to more than a dozen popular blogs and spend hours writing the pieces. I offered a pre-launch discount to my (lean but growing) newsletter list, plus a bonus for anyone who bought the guide.

In terms of launch strategy, I did everything right.

Except I’d overlooked a crucial detail: people didn’t think they needed my career break guide.

As guest posts for the guide went live around the Web, something funny happened: sales for the social media consulting guide spiked. What?! A few sales for the career break guide came through, but the first ebook sold far faster. I was getting eyes to my site, but they were buying the first guide instead.

For the record, both guides were priced around the same: the social media consulting guide went for $24, the career break guide for $29. And yet people felt compelled to learn about how to make money off their social media skills, not how to take a career break to travel.

The Lesson

In retrospect, I’d made the biggest of mistakes, creating a resource people didn’t think they needed.

To be honest, I knew when I began writing the career break guide that it was a risk; I wasn’t sure how big of a market was out there for that type of book. But I wrote it anyway because finding time in your life to travel is a topic that’s important to me personally. I wrote it because it was a guide I couldn’t not write.

Yet at the other end of the spectrum, the market for the social media consulting guide is even bigger than I realized. Which is great not only for me, but also for the reader. Because there’s a huge need for those skills, there’s also huge opportunity for each of my readers to make money, often on the side of their day job.

And that’s the other differentiator: the first ebook helps readers make money. I think people are more willing to shell out a few bucks if it means they’re going to make money in return. Often, we’re willing to invest if it means financial gain on the other end.

So do I regret writing the second ebook? No, and not just because I care about the topic. A big part of my transition into entrepreneurship is allowing myself to experiment. Sometimes I’ll make mistakes, but sometimes—like with ebook No. 1—I’ll strike a chord, one that helps fund my next project. In many ways, experimenting—and as a result, learning—is what this is all about.

Alexis Grant is a journalist, social media strategist and entrepreneur. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her Solopreneur Secrets newsletter.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

A Tale of Two Ebooks