Thursday, September 30, 2010

A message to all multimedia companies seeking to purchase the Empoprises blog empire

I've working on a couple of high-priority projects and keeping odd hours as a result - EXTREMELY odd hours - and therefore haven't had much of a chance to religiously follow the tech news. So I didn't learn about the sale of TechCrunch to AOL until I heard Episode 152 of the Braindead Techcast. (For the record, TechCrunch's own announcement of the deal is here.) If you haven't heard the techcast, Steven and Sean spent some time talking about the possible valuation of other properties as a result of this sale. Would Mashable go for over $50 mililon? Would the Braindead Techcast itself go for $1 million?

This, of course, raises the obvious question - what would Empoprises go for? And who would buy it?

As all of the leading multimedia companies know, Empoprises is a massive empire of vertical blogs that cover various topics - Empoprise-BI for business, Empoprise-MU for music, Empoprise-IE for California's Inland Empire, and Empoprise-NTN for NTN Buzztime news. These blogs are obviously a complementary fit to a new of multimedia companies with a whole bunch of money, so I fully expect to be in the wonderful position of sorting between scores of multi-million dollar offers.

So, who do I sell to?

Oprah is an obvious choice. She already has a significant online presence at oprah.com, and I'm sure that many of the topics covered in the Empoprises blog empire will fit in quite nicely with Oprah's current online offerings. Let's face it, the mom who fathered her own children goes hand in hand with the California girl who sells wishes.

But it's probably more likely that Empoprises will be sought by a firm that needs to boost its online image, and while Empoprises would certainly boost Oprah's image, the boost would be relatively small. So, which firm is in such desperate straits that it will pay any amount of money to acquire such a valuable property as Empoprises?

No, not BP. There's not really a good fit between BP and Empoprises.

If you haven't figured out the answer yet, it's MySpace.

As Steven and Sean noted, the acquisition of TechCrunch allows AOL to be a major content provider without having to use the AOL brand - a brand that, for whatever reason, has become tarnished over the last couple of decades.

Now the MySpace brand, for whatever reason, has also become tarnished. For example, the wise folks at Neowin started a thread about the site, and the 38th message in the thread read as follows:

That sites still up?
Wow, I thought it died a long time ago.


But what if MySpace recast itself as a content provider, and de-emphasized the MySpace brand and emphasized the Empoprises brand instead. Imagine the revolution that would occur!

So, multimedia companies, go ahead and leave your bids as comments to this message. But I may not be able to contact you immediately - the odd hours and stuff, you know.
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