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Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

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Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#41

Post by bernardom »

marcamillion wrote: post #32

Wow....I feel like I am watching a brilliant game of chess. Marissa Mayer is increasingly showing her genius. It is clear that she understands that Yahoo is a New Media company. They serve assets to many eyeballs and monetize those assets. It seems that in her case, their main goal is grab up as much quality inventory as she can, and monetize the hell out of it. As their media inventory gets bigger, economies of scal…

I agree. The other contributing factor here: Yahoo's in a position to bet the farm. They're not growing, and haven't been for years.

(Look at their financials: http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/yhoo/financials)

Analysts only expect sales to increase 1-3% over the next few years: http://www.thestreet.com/story/11933654/3/4-big-stocks-ripe-...

She was pulled in to make big moves.... and is making them!

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#42

Post by criley »

glhaynes wrote: post #31
criley wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hulu, Netflix and Amazon all produce original content and are perfectly positioned to disrupt them as their distribution volume increases. Uhh, as a Hulu subscriber, I'll just let you know: If I only had "Hulu" content to pick from, I'd cancel my subscription immediately. It's not great stuff, barely worth paying for and CERTAINLY not worth both paying for and sitting through the same 4 advertisements over-and-over…

sitting through the same 4 advertisements over-and-over-and-over again for What is it I don't understand about the online video business that causes this to happen? They can't get enough advertisements from their partners to allow them to be less repetitive? Advertisers don't want to provide variety? (Maybe advertisers specifically want the monotony? Surely not, else they'd follow the same scheme on network TV.) The…

Honestly, I'm just glad someone took that Gangnam Style pistachio commercial out back and shot it finally.

I'm scared to even mention the commercial though, in fear that I will go home and be subjected to another 20-30 plays of it :(

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#43

Post by tomkarlo »

marcamillion wrote: post #32

Wow....I feel like I am watching a brilliant game of chess. Marissa Mayer is increasingly showing her genius. It is clear that she understands that Yahoo is a New Media company. They serve assets to many eyeballs and monetize those assets. It seems that in her case, their main goal is grab up as much quality inventory as she can, and monetize the hell out of it. As their media inventory gets bigger, economies of scal…

Except Hulu doesn't have much inventory, at least on an exclusive basis. It has eyeballs and distribution. The assets belong to the studios and networks.

A roll-up is not exactly a new strategy, especially in media. You attempt to build economies of scale by amassing audience and distribution. Historically, however, the prices you pay (especially once folks figure out what you're doing) often prove to be inflated later on.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#44

Post by just2n »

marcamillion wrote: post #32

Wow....I feel like I am watching a brilliant game of chess. Marissa Mayer is increasingly showing her genius. It is clear that she understands that Yahoo is a New Media company. They serve assets to many eyeballs and monetize those assets. It seems that in her case, their main goal is grab up as much quality inventory as she can, and monetize the hell out of it. As their media inventory gets bigger, economies of scal…

It sounds to me like she's trying to build another Google. It's really (almost impossibly) hard to dethrone innovators without actually doing any innovation. It's equally difficult keeping talent when the corporate culture isn't hacker-centric.

While buying your way into the party is a nice first step, what do you do when you don't have the talent pool to continue to innovate and can't even grow it? Especially when you don't allow remote work, and this industry is increasingly going remote (even if only part-time)?

I'm seeing a lot of big talk (primarily via money) from Yahoo, but I don't feel convinced that this is going anywhere. Without a focus on the people and innovation, what do you do after you buy a bunch of startups? So far Yahoo's response has been "buy them and let them operate independently." People go to work at Google to work at Google, not to work at a subsidiary of Google. So if I wanted to go work for Hulu, I'd want to work for Hulu, not Yahoo. Yahoo hasn't been an engineer's company for a very, very long time, and I don't see them taking strides to fix that, so it's hard to say what's going to happen.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#45

Post by kevinalexbrown »

Can anyone explain why Hulu wants to sell to a third party? I understand there's infighting according to the article, but it's unclear to me why one of the owners doesn't buy out the rest. Is there some general principle behind not selling to your competitors and choosing a party currently without a huge stake in television or movies like Yahoo? I'm curious about both reasons specific to this particular deal and general principles behind selling to third parties.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#46

Post by waterlesscloud »

chollida1 wrote: post #30
jfb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Hulu is 100% a creature of the content owners. It's not a business. What would anybody be buying? The brand?

The advertising stream? I've never seen Hulu but there would be a lot of chances to show ads on it I'd imagine. And yahoo is a company with alot of add inventory!

Of course, the whole point is that most of the revenue from the ads goes to the content providers, not to Hulu.

Still, you can imagine a scenario where Yahoo signs an ad deal with say General Motors for an overall package for all their properties, and then throws in Hulu as a bonus.

Keep the ad rates at Hulu at whatever minimum is written into the content deals, but use that as a bonus/loss leader for the real money that's allocated to advertising on the other Yahoo properties.

Might work.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#47

Post by legitsource »

yoster wrote: post #24

I tried Hulu multiple times with their free month offers. It sucked so bad that I canceled before I had to pay for a subscription. I'm sure people love Hulu, but I am definitely not one of them.

It burns me to pay a subscription and still have to watch advertisements.

It burns me even more that the ads are so repetitive.

Re: Yahoo submits bid for Hulu

#48

Post by untog »

marcamillion wrote: post #32

Wow....I feel like I am watching a brilliant game of chess. Marissa Mayer is increasingly showing her genius. It is clear that she understands that Yahoo is a New Media company. They serve assets to many eyeballs and monetize those assets. It seems that in her case, their main goal is grab up as much quality inventory as she can, and monetize the hell out of it. As their media inventory gets bigger, economies of scal…

Is "buy lots of big properties so you can advertise across all of them" really CEO genius? It's something that Yahoo was doing for years before Meyer even came on board- they bought Flickr and Delicious, and tried to buy Facebook. Granted, none of those were hugely successful, but we're still yet to see whether Tumblr and (maybe) Hulu will be.

I'm not sure that buying Hulu is such a slam-dunk, anyway. They are entirely at the mercy of the TV networks- if they pull content, Hulu is worth very, very little. People use Hulu largely because they have to.

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