Comments on: You Can’t Just Be Cool, You Either Are, Or You Aren’t

By: Jim Kukral

Jim Kukral — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:55:32 +0000

Heya Don, thanks for stopping by. How do you convert cool to cash? I dunno.
That’s biz-dev’s problem, I just do the marketing, lol. Kidding.
@Andy, yeah, I know they had some revenue, but if you read don’s piece, he argues it wasn’t enough I think.

By: Don Dodge

Don Dodge — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:39:17 +0000

Jim, I agree that Yahoo has acquired a lot of cool web 2.0 services. I think they overpaid in some cases but an extra few million here or there isn’t going to kill Yahoo.
The real problem is how they are going to convert “cool” to cash. Where is the revenue?
Cool is great but every quarter management has to report earnings to Wall Street. I have participated in earnings calls for other companies and I can tell you “cool” doesn’t cut it. Its all about cash.
BTW, I use Delicious, Flickr, and MyBlogLog myself. I like them all…especially the free part.
Don

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:30:10 +0000

Hi Jim
They haven’t got zero revenue, they receive money from their analytics.
I actually have paid subscriptions on 2 blogs for their analytics.
It does need some improvement, for instance I would love to be able to sort by most recent referral, and access the statistics by API or RSS authentication
I am sure I am not alone in having a paid subscription.
I do agree that they were acquired because Yahoo knows cool when they see it, not from a monetary angle.
Also having a Yahoo presence on blogs is valuable advertising, even if it is just a “Mybloglog by Yahoo” moniker.