Miscellaneous 'Shoe: Folgers On Its Own, Irrational Widget Exuberance
-- Procter & Gamble to spin off its Folgers coffee unit. Over the next few years, P&G is expected to unload companies that don't fit with its desired portfolio of high-growth beauty and health care products.
-- The Wall Street Journal's Kelly Spors says 2008 will be the year bloggers start making money. How?
"Starting Feb. 1, San Diego-based V2P Communications is offering five-to-eight-second audio ads, called NetAudioAds, that will automatically play when a visitor lands on a blog or Web site. Publishers sign up for the free service and V2P then lines up advertisers, who bid on rates they will pay to have their ads played on a given blog. Bids generally start around $14 per 1,000 plays. Blog publishers get a 25% cut of the ad revenue."
No matter. My volume is usually off anyway. Now it's definitely off. By the way, taking 75% of revenue is attrocious. BlogAds takes about 30%. Spors mentioned a few other ad solutions by Revver and Google. The problem thus far is that many bloggers are part-timers and have an "I'll be happy with anything" attitude and take far too little money. By charging rates that are too low, they could be taking away money from those that charge correctly. Hopefully these new services will get them up to a fair and sensible rate.
-- Widget maker Slide gets two big investors -- Fidelity and T. Rowe Price -- and a valuation of $500 million. Is this irrational widget exuberance? Does that valuation assume Slide will have a monopoly on widgets? Business Week asks, "How could a widget company be worth half a billion dollars? What is the revenue model? How could it ever make a profit on slide shows running on other people's sites?" Then Business Week tries to rationalize the valuation. Lame. Look, I don't know much about widgets, but I do know that users will have little loyalty to one widget maker. There will always be something better to capture attention, and the barriers to entry are about as high as a gnat's eyelash.
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