WebMediaBrands CEO Alan Meckler
Search Engine Marketing Kit
Chris Sherman wrote an interesting piece the other day on searchenginewatch.com about a terrific "book" entitled "Search Engine Marketing Kit."
I am sure the product is worth the purchase price, but what really struck me was Chris' reference to 1994 and a hot product in those days called "Internet In A Box." I remember the launch of this product at either Internet World Fall 1993 or 1994.
And while on the subject of Internet history, I read a piece in the International Herald Tribune today (I am in Budapest right now on my way to the CEPIC stock photo trade show in Prague ---by the way this is my first time in Budapest and it is a stunningly beautiful city). The writer pointed out that Google's stock price last week took Googles stock market capitalization to $80 billion. The writer went on to day (there was no byline on this article):
What does it mean when the most valuable publicly traded media company in the world does not actually produce anything original to read or watch or listen to?...Google's shares rose above $293 this week, making the company worth more than $80 billion. That tops the ailing Time Warner's $78 billion...
This is a profound thought on the part of the Tribune writer. But then the Internet can cause violent change in terms of how one values one pure Internet company compared to another that is in a variety of mediums. Let's see where Google's value is at the end of the year? Will it keep on growing and continue to have an astounding market cap value or will it settle in at just an incredible market cap?
I recall using a Lexis Nexis terminal when I was still in college in 1989. And, I seem to recall this terminal allowing one to enter keywords in to a graphical search field; these keywords would then draw a list of newspaper articles from the Lexis database that would provide a great deal of background information on practically anything. At the time, I thought that this Lexis Nexis search capability was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
So, when the mid-1990's rolled around and people began talking about "search engines" to comb through the giant decentralized database that is the internet, I was a little underwhelmed by the novelty of the concept. It just seemed like a cheap Lexis Nexis but, without access to old NYT's articles and plenty of access to everything and everybody that you didn't want to know about.
Anyway, now it's 2005. Google, king of search engines, is trading high and the internet has matured; the small to mid-sized business person is putting his hard-earned dollars on targeted Google advertising. Though I admittedly wasn't a proponent of search engines in years past, I now admire search companies, such as Google, for the way their targeted advertising has created new efficiencies for business.
So, I think Google's stock has a way to go before it peaks and I expect splits over the next couple of years (However, I currently do not own any Google stock).
"What does it mean when the most valuable publicly traded media company in the world does not actually produce anything original to read or watch or listen to?"
It means the definition of a "media company" is changing rapidly from a company that creates and distributes proprietary content, to one who embraces the distributed nature of the internet by finding clever ways to find, aggregate and distribute third party content.