Request: Your input on VentureBeat’s digital media expansion. And a party next week.

April 24, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

We’re throwing a party next Thursday, May 1, to celebrate the introduction of our digital media team and forthcoming blog, and our overall growth as a company.

We’ve invited friends who are investors, entrepreneurs, fellow reporters — both in the Silicon Valley tech scene and from other media companies — and we have some tickets to hand out to readers.

The party will be held at classy, vintage lounge The Ambassador in San Francisco, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. We also have some special guests attending. The cofounders of online competition site IBeatYou — Abdul Khan, Cash Warren and Warriors basketball star Baron Davis — will be making an announcement.

If you’d like to come, please send me an email (eric at venturebeat dot com)… and here’s the catch. When dishing out tickets, we’ll give special consideration to those who provide input on how we can expand our focus on digital media in order to serve you better.

We’re looking at moving from having just a “digital media” category and tab (see the top of this page), to creating a stand-alone publication. We’d like your input on what you think we should cover, because digital media encompasses a lot of things and the digital media team members — Dean “The Machine” Takahashi, MG “Machine Gun” Siegler and myself — have a wide range of interests.

Why the focus on digital media?

Record labels, newspapers, movie studios and other traditional media companies are going through major disruption. Among other things, they’re grappling with the expectation that everything online should be free. What is creative content worth on the web? Anything? As media companies try to answer this question and find sustainable online business models, we’re going to be on the front lines, reporting about how they manage.

The ironic thing is, the companies that are taking the attention of millions away from traditional media are themselves struggling to monetize — social networks like Facebook, video sites like YouTube and many others are not yet very profitable.

At VentureBeat, we’ve found ourselves in the middle of this media flux (and not just because we’re reporters who publish only online). We’ve covered the most formative new media companies from birth through investment rounds, product launches, and in some cases, purchases.

We’re looking at how to connect our understanding of Silicon Valley companies with the efforts of technologists, businesspeople and talented creators in other media industries.

In turn, we also hope to help entrepreneurs better understand where the opportunities are in online media — opportunities they may not hear about within the Valley’s echo chamber.

We’ll deepen our coverage of web companies, mobile companies, gaming companies, online advertising companies. We’ll look at innovative startups, but also innovative traditional media companies. We’ll go beyond covering investments and engage in significant analysis of the news in digital media.

This is a work in progress. So send me those emails about coming to the party — and about how to improve. Feel free to critique our efforts so far, and help us to make this new site a valuable place for you to spend your time.

We’d also like to thank our sponsors for their generous help in putting on this event, including:

Gold Sponsors: O’Melveny & Meyers, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Silver Sponsor: Sun Microsystems
Event Sponsor: SparkPR

[Photo by Digon3, via Wikimedia]

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • Greg Lanz here..., VP of Sales at Wikia.

    With the explosion of UGC communities, like Wikia, it would be great to learn more how brand advertisers and their agencies are looking to engage with these communities beyond traditional display advertising.

    UGC communities cover a broad spectrum of opportunity and risk for advertisers. Larger agencies are re-organizing their digital teams to address these fast growing communities.

    Thanks and I hope to be invited to the party :)

    -Greg

    P.S. If possible, please include an invite for Wikia's CEO, Gil Penchina (gil@wikia.com).
  • Michael Zerman
    PLEASE DONT publish my email address if possible - public comments always result in more spam!!

    <<<<<>>>>

    It's the writers and contributors that are important, much more so than the focus of your mag. The focus will be variable and changing, depending on market conditions, current fads and more importantly souces of ad and circulation revenue.

    But the writers are what will get the readership or viewership to the site. People come to intelligent sites for analysis of ideas, discussion about objects and services, and most importantly good writing. Whatever "good" is. For example, Merc News has had many terrific writers, (Dan, Dean, etc); there are locals from non-USA backgrounds who've also setup new ventures around inovation and media, such as Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher; and the team at BusinessWeek are very strong.

    Revenue is the problem, and profitable revenue is the really big problem. Tom's solution looks problematic to me, as his recently-launched video lounge seems much more like a client's PR outlet, rather than a journalist or publisher's vision.

    So my two bob's worth (Aussie vernacular) is to keep church and state well separated (ie, revenue generation programs VS editorial content), give your writers a long leash, be sceptical of startups and boosters, and use external technical expertise to analyse "new ventures". Coz we don't need another two hundred search startups being written about.

    It's a long way from Adelaide to Frisco, so I wish you all the best with the venture, and have a grand bash.

    Michael Zerman
    Adelaide, AUSTRALIA
  • We have built a digital music download business. In doing so we continually search for relevant pieces of early adopter phase information and of course curent marketing efforts by various companies. As you state, and correctly, there is a noticeable vaccuum present when it comes to how the world will buy its music and how those sites will interact. The digital music market including mobile phones has grown dynamically to $809 million in 2007 but yet very little is reported about sales numbers, marketing efforts, technologies, and investors. Bravo to your company for recognizing the vaccuum. Break a leg!
    John in Houston