Bubble 2.0
It's front page news in at least one mainstream paper that Google is lining up to buy YouTube for up to $1.6 billlion
And yesterday, the news came through that MySpace founder Brad Greenspan is having a hissy fit about having sold his company to the Murdoch empire for only $580 million, as it's clearly going to be worth $20 billion in a year or two.
The signs are becoming ever clearer that we're already some way into a second internet bubble. Like last time, all the justifying blether is of targeted advertising and eyeballs. The sense of deja vu is further heightened by the fact that MySpace, say, resembles nothing so much as the web circa 1994, with lots of horribly designed personal sites linking to and copying content off each other. The market might be bigger, but it's still crap.
It's not just the valuations being paid for these nebulous businesses. It's that the deals are being judged as front page news (on a Saturday too). Fingers will be burned, once more.
UPDATE, 10/10/06 - here's a feature from BBC News explaining how This Time It's Different.
And yesterday, the news came through that MySpace founder Brad Greenspan is having a hissy fit about having sold his company to the Murdoch empire for only $580 million, as it's clearly going to be worth $20 billion in a year or two.
The signs are becoming ever clearer that we're already some way into a second internet bubble. Like last time, all the justifying blether is of targeted advertising and eyeballs. The sense of deja vu is further heightened by the fact that MySpace, say, resembles nothing so much as the web circa 1994, with lots of horribly designed personal sites linking to and copying content off each other. The market might be bigger, but it's still crap.
It's not just the valuations being paid for these nebulous businesses. It's that the deals are being judged as front page news (on a Saturday too). Fingers will be burned, once more.
UPDATE, 10/10/06 - here's a feature from BBC News explaining how This Time It's Different.
Labels: economics, journalism, technology
posted by Tim Chapman at 10:00 am
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