EP:009 – The Cotton Club Podcast
Just wrapped up another episode of The Cotton Club Podcast tonight w/ guest hosts Brant Collins and Robert Blake. The topic for discussion for this evenings show was SEO, or search engine optimization. I have actually gotten a lot of requests from people to do a show on this topic so hopefully we did a good enough job explaining our viewpoints without confusing everyone.
On the show we discuss some popular misconceptions regarding SEO as well as some standard practices that we all put into our clients projects for SEO. We also discussed which search engines you should worry about, and what market share the big SE’s have at this time.
Brant and Robert also shared some findings from a few of their own personal analytics reports to help give us some insight as to what they are seeing and we also touched on what impact social media saturation can have on a websites traffic. We also discussed quality versus quantity in terms of traffic analytics. If you own a website and would like to maximize your search engine rankings, you should definitely check out this episode.
To wrap up the show we each talked about our favorite iPhone apps of the week. Robert mentioned a game he has been playing called Angry Birds, Brant mentioned an augmented reality browser app called Layar that sounds pretty interesting, and I shared an app called Wind Meter that uses your phone to measure wind speed.
As always, thanks for listening and if you have any questions or topics you would like to see us address on the show be sure to drop me a line at: cotton.rohrscheib@pleth.com and I will be happy to consider it.
Remembering GeoCities (1995-2009)
I would be remiss if I didn’t make mention of the fact that Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities today. If you are wondering what GeoCities was, my best guess is that you weren’t around in the 90’s. Before social networks were all over the place, and before there were even web development firms and hosting companies all over the web, there was GeoCities…
GeoCities existed as a place where you could go on and host your free website, of course they were covered up with advertising that you had no control over, but it was a free website nonetheless. One of my fondest memories of GeoCities was all of the animated gif files that seemed to be synonymous with every page, and if you saw one that you didn’t have on your page, you became instantly obsessed with stealing it and calling it your own before any of your friends beat you to it.
I can remember having one of the guys that helped out with my computer business set me up a GeoCities page for the business somewhere around 1996 or so, it was extremely new at the time. Of course, as business websites go today, this was not what you would call a “business website” but to us, it was awesome!!! I think we even registered a domain name from Network Solutions (they were the only game in town at the time too) and we pointed it to our page to make us look even more professional. I wish there was some kind of way to go back in and time and see that page and see just how far we have come, it would be like the first chapter in a history book.
I can also remember having my own personal GeoCities page which would lay the foundation for the website you are on right now. I can also recall meeting some pretty intuitive pioneers online back in the day that were using GeoCities for everything from sharing their hobbies to pornography, the web was wide open back in the day, a lot less restricted than today in a lot of ways!
Sadly enough, I don’t think that GeoCities ever had a business model that would have worked, and probably the only people that ever actually made any money off of the project was probably the group that sold it to Yahoo back in the day. Once Yahoo took over the project I don’t think they ever did anything with it either in terms of making any money. I know that hindsight is 20/20 but had they had the vision of social networking before anyone else, this might be a completely different world we live in. There was a time when Yahoo was king, I can remember the first time that I ever heard of Google, most people didn’t have a clue what it was, there was also Lycos, Excite, and AltaVista, DogPile came along later as well. It’s a shame that they weren’t able to keep this running but I am not too sad about it all. There comes a time where sometimes things have to go away to focus on new and more viable products, and I guess in the end this is what happened with GeoCities.
Just for old time sakes, here are some of the funny animated gifs from back in the day…
What are some of you favorite memories of GeoCities?
Agile Messenger for the iPhone
My business partners and I frequently jump in between Google Talk and Microsoft Messenger to discuss projects during the day. When we are out of the office however we usually are forced to call one another if we need to ask a question about a project. In the past I have used a few mobile messenger applications that allowed me to connect to my partners at their computers using my MSN Messenger account or my Google account but I haven’t found one yet that does as good of a job as the Agile Messenger for the iPhone.
The Agile Messenger allows you to plug in your account information from MSN®, Yahoo!®, ICQ®, AIM®, GoogleTalk® and Jabber. It also does a good job importing your buddy lists from each of these services so you can easily see who’s online. The application also utilizes push technology so even if you are not in the application it will alert you if someone is trying to reach you for instant messaging.
With the Agile Messenger you can also do photo and video messaging. There is also a push to talk feature that allows you to use your phone as a walkie-talkie to send instant voice messages while on the road. It’s a little pricey but if you rely on messenger to connect to your co-workers, it’s pretty easy to justify. Here are some screenshots from the app that I have installed on my phone:
Great Blog Content –vs- SEO
A while back I did a post on Social Saturation and Search Engine Optimization, in that post I emphasized how important it is to get your content onto the social networks. I was reading a post today by Dawn Foster at Web Worker Daily and she brought up some points that I also agree with and I wanted to share it w/ you.
In her post she mentioned a discussion panel that she was a part of where there were 2 content people and 2 seo people that do seo full time. She hit a home run in the first few sentences on this post and I could not agree with her more:
This weekend I was on an “SEO Smackdown” panel at our local WordCamp Portland. Two of us were from the content side, while the other two panelists were SEO experts. My take on SEO is that writing compelling, interesting blog content that people will want to talk about and link to will get you around 95 percent of the way to good search engine rankings. If you don’t have great content, SEO is not going to be very useful for you. You might be able to do some SEO trickery to get people to your web site, but if they aren’t impressed by the content when they arrive, they won’t stick around long enough to have any impact.
Now, I want to emphasize that I am not advocating abandoning SEO, there are some basic principles that you should adhere to, you can find some of my thoughts on SEO in a post I did a while back, that’s not what this post is about though. You should pay attention to key things such as page titles, descriptions, etc., but you should do that on everything you publish to the web. Much more than that though, you need to focus on your content. Here are some valid points that Dawn brought out in her article…
Write Great Titles
Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.
- Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
- Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
- Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
- Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon
Write New and Interesting Content
Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.
Include Personal Anecdotes
Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.
I just thought that this was very good information and thought that I would share it w/ my readers. Of course, if you work in this industry you well know that getting clients to write content is a lot like pulling teeth, but the ones that do put forth the effort usually see the results from it.
Tools for Managing PPC Campaigns…
If you are using the Internet as a vehicle to market your products or services through PPC campaigns I strongly recommend ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools. And trust me, I know that when you are running PPC campaigns that you often find yourself on the front end getting ready to shell out some serious cash, and it’s intimidating. I also know that the last thing you are looking for when getting into PPC is another online service that is going to cost you money, but if you take into consideration that by investing in a service such as this it can actually save you money in the long run, or allow you to get the most bang from your investment, it really makes a lot of sense.
Managing PPC campaigns is a service that my partners and I have offered for a number of years now, and the sheer amount of buys that we have made on our clients behalf over the years is amazing, and the management fees that we have made from our clients for providing this service is substantial, so trust me when I tell you I would not recommend using anything that I didn’t believe in because honestly I would just assume to sell you our management services, but I know that in a lot of cases clients don’t have the budget to do PPC and to pay a company like ours to manage it for them, and I hate to see our neccessary management fees cut into what the client could be investing into PPC buys. But this program works, I have seen it in action and I can say that ShoeMoney know’s his stuff. Here are just a few of the features that come along w/ ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Tools that you should consider:
Generate Ads – Ever wonder if your competitors’ ads are working better than yours? With the PPC Ad Generator, simply input your keyword, display URL and click URL. Click the Generate Ads button and receive sample ad copy for that keyword. This ad copy comes directly from actual competing ads currently displayed on major search engines. Select the ads you like and save them for your future campaigns.
Manage Ads – Increase your efficiency by managing all of your PPC ads from one location. Use the PPC Ad Manager to create, edit and delete your saved ad copy. You can then export your ads to Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.
Manage Keywords – Easily manage all of your keywords from one place! After using the ShoeMoney Keyword Generator, Grabber and Suggestion tools, use the PPC Keyword Manager to create, edit and delete your saved keyword lists.
Generate Keywords – Are you looking for great keyword ideas? Type a niche keyword into the Keyword Generator and create a list of possible PPC keywords. Once you’ve edited your keyword list, you can simply save it to your ShoeMoney Tools account.
Get Your Competitors Keywords – What if you could get your competitors’ keywords? Now, you can! Other people have tried to imitate this tool, but none with our accuracy. Use the Keyword Grabber to reveal all of the keywords being bid on for a particular domain.
Get Keyword Suggestions – You can get quality keyword suggestions from various search engines. But where else can you get keyword suggestions from multiple search engines all in one place? With the Keyword Suggestions tool, simply enter a base keyword and the tool will expand upon the keyword using five different databases including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ask and Cuil.
Build PPC Campaigns Instantly – Maximize your efficiency with the Instant PPC Campaign tool. After you have generated quality keyword and ad lists in your ShoeMoney Tools account, choose the lists you would like to use, name your campaign and determine your maximum cost per click (CPC). Ad files for your Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing advertising accounts are then instantly generated! Start earning more PPC cash now.
Build Local PPC Campaigns – Pay per click marketing on the local level is like shooting fish in a barrel! When people search locally, they typically use the keyword mixed with a zip code, city, state, or a combination. Input your keyword, zip code, and the radius you would like to target. With the Local Keyword tool, you can then develop a solid, local keyword list targeted towards specific geographic areas – perfect for local PPC marketing!
Find Local Keyword Competitors – Often times when people search for local businesses and services, they do so by searching for specific brands, stores, companies or professionals. By using ShoeMoney Tools’ Local Brand tool, you can find the names of local competitors to add to your PPC keyword list. When you’re done editing your list, simply save it to your ShoeMoney account.
Build Google AdWords Campaigns – Maximize your PPC profitability in four simple steps! With the Google AdWords Campaign Builder tool, you can instantly build a PPC campaign that gives you great, competitive results. First, select your campaign name and bidding options. Next, choose your keywords and keyword mixing options. Third, determine your display and click-through URLS. Finally, input your ad copy and click the Build PPC Campaigns button. Upload your campaign directly to your Google AdWords account and within minutes, you can start generating cash!
Tools for Managing SEO…
One of the popular services we offer our clients at Pleth is SEO, or search engine optimization. I know that lately I have made profound statements saying things like SEO has taken a backseat to social saturation, etc., but honestly SEO is still something that your company should take a look at and track pretty closely. One of the worst things that can happen for your online presence is for your search engine rankings to deteriorate, especially after all of the time and effort you have put into your rankings.
As I mentioned earlier, my partners and I manage SEO for our clients, and it’s something that keeps evolving over time. For example, things that we used to do a year or two ago to help our clients outrank their competition have changed dramatically in only a short period of time. But, for the most part there are things that remain constant also, these elements are somewhat easy to track. If you are a do it yourself SEO person, I have one set of tools that I recommend, and that’s it. These tools are provided by ShoeMoney. Here are a few of the high points included with the tools if you are interested:
Analyze Your Backlinks – More links equal higher search engine rankings! It’s that simple. The Backlink Analyzer tool allows you to see first-hand where your competitors are gaining links from and the exact anchor text being used in the links. Now you can use their same tactics! With this tool, you can also find out how people are linking to you and increase your rankings by contacting those sites that have misspelled your link.
Buy Valuable Backlinked Domains – Want to give your domain a boost in the search engine rankings? At the ShoeMoney Tools Domain Marketplace, you can find thousands of currently unregistered sites – each one with a valuable amount of powerful links pointing to them (including .edu, .gov., .mil, and .org). Purchase and redirect 5 to 6 of these domains to a site you already have in a particular niche for a ranking boost.
Find Backlinks – Want to see if a site is worth pursuing? Want to find some quality places to purchase links? Want to view your competitor’s backlinks? With the Backlinks Finder tool, simply type in a keyword for any niche. You will then be able to view the top 10 Google results for that keyword as well as each site’s backlinks along with corresponding PR and Alexa data.
Find Out Your Keyword Density – See how your competitors are using keywords and compare it to your current strategy. The Keyword Density tool allows you to compare one keyword and one domain against the top 10 Google competitors. The tool analyzes the keyword density of on-page text and also whether or not the keyword is in the title tag, meta tags and even heading tags. Improve your keyword strategy today.
Find Most Linked to Pages – Analyze any domain to see which pages are the strongest, or the ones with the most "link juice" from incoming links. With this tool, you can view the top 10 most linked to pages for a specified domain. Now you can see what sort of content is working for your site and others when it comes to gaining links.
Optimize Your Text – Ever wondered if your website copy was keyword rich? Most well ranking pages have at least 11 to 20 repetitions of a keyword. With the Text Optimizer tool, simply paste copy into the text box. Then input the keyword for which you would like to optimize the text. Within seconds, the tool analyzes any page or article text for that particular keyword’s density. Optimize your text today!
Find Your Outgoing Links – Before approaching a website about a potential link exchange or purchasing a link on the site, it’s good to see what other sites they have already linked to. With the Outgoing Links tool, enter a specific domain and you will instantly see all the websites this domain is linking to.
Track Your Keywords – Enter the domain that you would like to track keyword rankings for. After you have entered the domain you would like to track, enter the keywords you would like to track for that domain. The system will then determine what URLs rank for those keywords.
Yahoo CEO to Resign
I have to admit that I wasn’t too surprised when I learned yesterday that Yahoo Founder and CEO Jerry Yang was going to be stepping down as the CEO of Yahoo.
This comes on the heels of a wicked 12 months for Yahoo where they have seen their market share decrease sharply as well as a potential Microsoft merger fall through the cracks. All along I have felt that Yang was the sole reason that the Yahoo / Microsoft thing never happened and that’s an opinion I think I share w/ a lot of other Yahoo shareholders and employees. Employees make up a large part of Yahoo’s shareholders too so I bet that company morale this morning is at a 12 month high! This morning at the open, Yahoo shares were up! Someone tell Mark Cuban, he loves to bank on these search engines! (sorry couldn’t resist)
November 18, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) co-Founder Jerry Yang has stepped down as the company’s chief executive officer, ending a tumultuous almost year-and-a-half long post as the head of the second-largest US Internet-search engine company.
After being named CEO in June 2007, the Yahoo board of directors announced Monday that 40-year-old Yang will be replaced and will continue his former role of “Chief Yahoo!” and continue to serve on the board once his successor is found.
Yang has led Yahoo! through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform, marred by failed mergers and partnerships, and dropping stock prices.
Six months ago, Yahoo failed to negotiate a Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) merger, causing Yahoo’s market value to fall by more than $20 billion. Added to the company’s troubles has been its failed partnership with AOL (www.aol.com) and only two weeks ago, Google (www.google.com) walked away from an advertising revenue-sharing deal.
However, its value rose as much as 13 percent in Nasdaq trading following Yang’s resignation. Just half-an-hour after markets opened, Yahoo’s stock climbed $1.38 to $12.01, the largest gain in a month. Bloomberg reports that Goldman Sachs Group suspects Yang’s resignation may renew talks with Microsoft and other suitors.
“Over the past year and a half, despite extraordinary challenges and distractions, Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! on an open platform model as well as the improved alignment of costs and revenues,” Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock said in a statement. “Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board.”
Yang said that he also felt it was time for the company to transition to a new leader.
“From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensable to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” Yang said in a statement. “When the Board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the Company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth. ”
The CEO position could possibly be handed to current Yahoo president Sue Decker, however, Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay told Market Watch that former Time Warner executive Jon Miller will be a more likely choice.
Yahoo Email Vulnerability
This is yet another reason why premium email solutions, like those offered by Pleth Networks, are a wise investment even for personal usage over free hosted email solutions.
I ran across this security notice this evening on Netcraft and thought that it was a pretty big deal. If the media wasn’t buried so deep in the presidential race I suspect this would have been pretty well publicized but it turns out, most of you are probably learning about this for the first time here.
Turns out that Yahoo email user account information was recently exploited. Details of this exploit from Netcraft can be found below. I should also probably state for those of you that aren’t already aware that I co-founded a company, Pleth Networks, LLC, who sells a premium email solution for individual and enterprise level accounts. If you are interested in email solutions for your business or even a personal email account that you can have peace of mind about, click here to contact us.
Here’s some info regarding the exploit / vulnerability taken from Netcraft’s website.
The Netcraft toolbar community has detected a vulnerability on a Yahoo website, which (at the time of writing) is currently being used to steal authentication cookies from Yahoo users — transmitting them to a website under the control of a remote attacker. With these stolen details, the attacker can gain access to his victims’ Yahoo accounts, such as Yahoo Mail.
The attack exploits a cross-site scripting vulnerability on Yahoo’s HotJobs site at hotjobs.yahoo.com, which currently allows the attacker to inject obfuscated JavaScript into the affected page. The script steals the authentication cookies that are sent for the yahoo.com domain and passes them to a different website in the United States, where the attacker is harvesting stolen authentication details.
When websites use cookies to handle authenticated sessions, it is extremely important to protect the cookie values and ensure they are not seen by other parties. Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities often allow these values to be accessed by an attacker and transmitted to a website under their control, which then allows the attacker to use the same cookie values to hijack their victim’s session without needing to log in. This type of attack can be mitigated to some extent by using HttpOnly cookies to prevent scripts gaining access to the cookies — a feature that is now supported by most modern browsers.
Earlier this year, Netcraft blocked a similar flaw on another Yahoo website. The previous attack targeted a cross-site scripting vulnerability on Yahoo’s ychat.help.yahoo.com site, which was served securely using a valid SSL certificate, adding further credibility to the attack. The attacker used the vulnerability to inject malign JavaScript into one of the site’s webpages. Unlike the current attack, the injected code was sourced from a server in Spain, but also resulted in the victim’s cookies being stolen and transmitted to a PHP script on the same server.
Netcraft found that the Yahoo cookies stolen by the attacker would have allowed him to hijack his victims’ browser sessions, letting him gain access to all of their Yahoo Mail emails and any other account which uses cookies for the yahoo.com domain.
Simply visiting the malign URLs on yahoo.com can be enough for a victim to fall prey to the attacker, letting him steal the necessary session cookies to gain access to the victim’s email — the victim does not even have to type in their username and password for the attacker to do this. Both attacks send the victim to a blank webpage, leaving them unlikely to realize that their own account has just been compromised.
The Netcraft Toolbar protects users against both of these attacks, warning that the malformed Yahoo URLs contain cross-site scripting elements, and that the URLs have been classified as known phishing sites.
Netcraft has informed Yahoo of the latest attack, although at the time of writing, the HotJobs vulnerability and the attacker’s cookie harvesting script are both still present.
Governor Palin’s E-Mail Hack
See Added Notes Below:
There were two things that shocked me about Sarah Palin’s email account being hacked, the first was the obvious, that someone would do something so bold and absolutely crazy, ha. The other thing that really shocked me was that the Governor of a state would actually have a Yahoo email account, ha. This was the biggest shocker for me!
It is my understanding that this is was her personal account and not her official business or government email account.
I was showing to a friend yesterday how easy it is to locate these “brute force” password cracking applications on questionable websites and how easy they were to use to get into applications like email, etc.
Here’s an article that I found on Wired.com regarding the attack and some notes about the guy who hacked in:
A person claiming to be the hacker who obtained access to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo e-mail on Tuesday has posted a supposed first-person account of the hack, revealing the relatively simple steps he says he took to crack the private e-mail of the Republican vice-presidential candidate.
The story was briefly posted Wednesday to the 4chan forum where the hack first surfaced. Bloggers have connected the handle of the poster, “Rubico,” to an e-mail address, and tentatively identified the owner as a college student.
As detailed in the postings, the Palin hack didn’t require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse — the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.
The simplicity of the attack, of course, makes it no less illegal.
Source: Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy | Threat Level from Wired.com
Source: Memo to US Secret Service from The Register
Added Notes: From The Register…
Updated Memo to law enforcement investigators tracking down who broke into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account: Gabriel Ramuglia might be a good place to start.
The 25-year-old webmaster and entrepreneur is the operator of Ctunnel.com, the browsing proxy service used by the group that hacked into the vice presidential candidate’s personal email account and exposed its contents to the world. While he has yet to examine his logs, he says there’s a good chance they will lead to those responsible, thanks to some carelessness on their part.
“Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it’s Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that,” he told El Reg in a phone interview. “Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot that showed most of the [Ctunnel.com] URL, I should be able to find that in my log.”
Ramuglia got into the proxy business a few years ago, after schools began blocking access to an online game site he used to co-own. Pretty soon, people began using the proxy service to access YouTube, Gmail, MySpace, and dozens of other sites that are routinely blocked by IT departments.
To prevent abuse of the service – such as the occasional bomb threat or other illegal act that’s been known to happen – Ramuglia logs each user’s IP address, along with the time and web destination. That often isn’t enough to track down people who access extremely popular websites. But in this case, the perpetrators included a whole string of random-looking characters when posting screenshots of Palin’s hacked account. That will probably be enough for him to pinpoint the proverbial needle in the haystack.
The information at the moment is on a server at a Chicago colocation site owned by FDC Servers. Logs are automatically flushed after seven days, so the clock is ticking for law enforcement, who presumably are under intense pressure to protect the privacy of a candidate for the White House. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Ctunnel.com was only one of multiple anonymization services the email hackers used to cover their tracks, but there’s only one way to find out.
Ramuglia said if he is contacted by law enforcement officials he will probably give them the information they seek. At time of writing, he’s received no inquiries from any law enforcement agencies, he said.
The breach of Palin’s account “is pretty clearly against my terms of service,” he said. “As exciting as it is to be in the news, this is not the type of activity I can encourage by any means.”
Update
Within hours of this story posting, Ramuglia received a phone call from an FBI special agent from the Anchorage, Alaska, field office.
“He just wanted to make sure I wasn’t losing the logs,” Ramuglia said, referring to the special agent. The two are scheduled to speak again soon to coordinate the turning over the logged information.
What’s more, Wired.com has a story here detailing a now-removed post to the 4chan website in which a person claiming to the hacker who accessed Palin’s email “used only a single proxy service to hide his IP address.” Oops. ®
AOL to Yahoo? Microsoft?
In a move that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Time Warner is poised to sell off AOL in separate pieces and will reportedly separate its advertising and content platforms with its dial-up business to get the most out of the poor sucker that acquires it.
According to those close to the move, Time Warner believes AOL may be more valuable to them once it’s separated and it believes that it can make about $10 billion off the sale of its parts. But as most analysts correctly point out, that’s probably not going to happen.
“The Yahoo discussions have valued AOL at around $10 billion, excluding the dial-up business,” The Wall Street Journal is reporting. “In contrast, Time Warner’s current stock price — around $14 — suggests a value of no more than $3 billion to $4 billion for the ad-sales and content businesses, some analysts say.”
Wishful thinking or an attempt to capitalize on the Yahoo malaise? Most reports suggest both Microsoft and Yahoo are looking to acquire AOL, but Microsoft, obviously in no danger of worrying about money anytime soon, knows that AOL isn’t worth the $10 billion valuation Time Warner is trying to place on it.
But for Yahoo, a company that has been rocked by more controversy than any other tech company in the past year, an AOL acquisition may be just the right move to allay some shareholder fears and keep Carl Icahn off Jerry Yang’s back. And perhaps that’s what Time Warner is banking on.
AOL may look like an attractive target for some companies that are trying to expand their presence online, but what does Yahoo have to gain through an acquisition of Time Warner’s stepchild? It’ll acquire a company that’s having serious trouble on the Weblogs, Inc. front and is desperately trying to find its way as a dial-up company in a broadband world. And although it is profitable, it has been held back by declining growth and revenue over the past few years and its prospects for growth are all but lost.
This is nothing more than another desperate plea by two companies with two totally different strategies. Time Warner is desperate to do away with AOL and finally put that problem behind it and Yahoo is desperate to acquire AOL to make its shareholders believe its management knows what it’s doing. And if that happens, only one company will lose: Yahoo.
If any company acquires AOL, it’ll be Yahoo. And not because Yahoo has grand plans for the future of this dilapidated firm, but because of its desperation to satisfy shareholders. I think Microsoft is too smart for this acquisition; at that price, AOL simply isn’t worth it. But Yahoo doesn’t have the luxury to simply walk away that easily. And in no time whatsoever, the company will be paying too much for too little.
