Crenk

This has to be the biggest news since the Microsoft bid for Yahoo. Digg is still up for sale and Techcrunch reports that they are close to finding a buyer. If you dont already know, investment bank Allen & Co have been shopping around on Digg’s behalf to find a potential buyer. A source very close to the deal mentions that four companies are in heavy due diligence with Digg - two media/news companies, and two big Internet companies - Google and Microsoft. And Google and Microsoft are on the verge of making their bids.

Originally, Digg was looking for a price tag of around $300 million, but it is reported that Google are likely to bid approximately $200 million for Digg. Microsoft however will be offering a figure lower that the $200 million, solely because they already have a three year advertising deal with Digg.

Even at $200 million is Digg overpriced? I think it is. Digg has received a lot of rewards for their technology and product, but the community is the key. If Digg is bought by Microsoft will the community continue to use the product with the same intensity as they current do? I think not.

So far Digg has only raised $11.3 million in funding, so this will be a great out for Kevin Rose and friends.

The New York times reports that Getty Images is now up for sale. The world’s biggest supplier of pictures and video to media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block and could fetch more than $1.5 billion, people briefed on the situation said Sunday.

Getty was founded back in 1995 and current has a catalogue of 3.2 billion images and 4 million unique visitors to its website each month. These figures make the company very lucrative. Goldman Sachs was hired to advise it on a potential sale and Getty has already attracted several potential buyers, mostly private equity firms, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and others.

Bids for the company are due to be finalised by the end of the month. A sale is not assured, but with this high end company being up for grabs, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few private equity firms join forces to finalise a sale.

I saw this article over on The Times and thought it was very interesting to see a company pay too much for another company in which they have no idea about the industry or how it works.

The Times reports that Terra Firma who recently purchase EMI, are currently looking to sell off 15% of the company and have also set a target to exit the entire business within 5 years.

It is also reported that Terra Firma expects to increase profits to 528 million pound by 2012, from 61 million today. The majority of that increase will be because of cost cutting measure that will be in place.

There has been a lot of talk in the past few months on whether Terra Firma paid too much for EMI and with them already getting a quick exit strategy in place maybe they should just have steered clear of the music industry in the first place!

Over the last few weeks there has been a surge of blog sales at various prices, but will your blog be next and what will your site actually be worth.

We have seen the Bloggy Network sell off their most popular blogs to Splashpress Media (Bloggy now to focus on Blogflux), Blogging Fingers sold for $6000, Ryan Shamus sold for $2500, OneMansGoal sold for $8500, NxE sold for $8200 and Shylock Blogging for $4000.

These sites have had a great mixture of statistics with relevance to visitors, pageviews, subscribers and blog life. At present because of this a lot of bloggers are trying to work out how these blogs have be evaluated, with mixed views. 45n5 divides subscribers by the sale amount and then average the amounts per subscriber, thus averaging about $30 per subscriber. This $30 per subscriber seems to be a great amount to judge if you should place advertising on your site for the little income in the short term compared to the value you will have from subscribers in the long term.

If you site currently has 100 subscribers and has been making $200 per month ad revenue, but your subscriber growth has been slow. Wouldnt it be a better idea to remove the ads if your goals are set beyond 6 months so that you can allow subscriber numbers to grow at its full potential. There is no point monetizing your blog as much as possible in the early days unless you are looking for an income or getting ready to sell.

Additionally, how come there isnt a place online that specifically provides auction space for blogs that are trying to sell?

I have been reading around the blogosphere today and there seems to be a buzz around Google and if they are dropping PageRankings due to sites selling Text Link Ads. Google has admited to SearchEngineLand that if sites sell text links then their page rankings might drop. I have noticed that a few month ago Crenk was a PR4 and now since i have added Text Link Ads it has dropped to a PR1, for no real reason. Who else has been seeing a drop in traffic and or page rank?

Starbucks said it will be giving away millions of songs via download on iTunes. It is reported that more than 10,000 US Starbucks locations will be participating in the give away, which will be running from October 2 to November 7. Customers can receive “Song of the Day” cards redeemable on Apple’s iTunes store for a complimentary song selected by Starbucks. Starbucks said it will give away 1.5 million downloads per day for a total of more than 50 million free songs. Customers will have until the end of the year to redeem the song on iTunes.

Crenk is auctioning off a 125 x 125 banner spot on this site, and the highest bidder as of midnight GMT on the 30th October, will receive that spot for 30 days! from the 1st November. Bidding starts at $1 and each subsequent bid should be made in at least $1 increments. As always, payments can only be made through PayPal.

Crenk has grow rapidly since the 21st August and I am expecting 30,000 impression on the banner in the 30 days. This could be the cheapest banner slot you ever purchase!

Who will win the very first auctioned ad space on Crenk.com? Will it be you? Let the bidding begin!

Mike Butcher and other outlets are reporting that the 8-gigabyte iPhone will be in the UK on November 9 for 269 quid or USD $542, a considerable price increase as it leaps over the pond. O2 will be providing service and free WiFi will be available from The Cloud, a UK pay-as-you-go public WiFi provider. The WiFi music store will also appear on UK iPhones next month, allowing for on-the-go downloads from the ITMS.

O2 has been building out its EDGE network to support this launch, which is actually a downgrade of its current European 3G offerings. The move to give away free WiFi is probably an attempt to offset the poor 2.5G data coverage in Europe in general. Jobs said that 3G was not embedded into the phone due to battery concerns, which means the next iPhone will probably come attached to a car battery and it’s own handtruck. This is right in line with TC France’s discovery of the FrancoiPhone on Orange.

Via: John Biggs (Techcrunch)