You can’t read a media brand by its cover. For instance, Daily Candy looks like an incredibly healthy site. But its owner, NBC Universal, is not pleased with the numbers.
So displeased are the suits that they decided to pull the plug on Daily Candy and Television Without Pity.
According to Variety, Comcast bought DailyCandy in 2008 for $125 million from investment firm Pilot Group. Since then, Comcast acquired NBCU — with female-focused networks like Bravo and Oxygen — but the hoped-for synergies with DailyCandy never materialized.
Kara Swisher thinks there may be a lesson here.
Beware! While there may be a perceived boom in content online recently and interest in investing in it, not all of the players get to survive.
Nor should all the players survive. Although in a more perfect world, purveyors of high quality content will have a decided edge.
In the real world though, quality is not always a determining factor. Financial success requires that you provide content—be it good, bad or ugly—to an interested audience that is willing and able to support the media enterprise directly via subscription or indirectly by being open to sponsored messages.
