CNET Archive

Video blogger Natali Del Conte is moving to the big apple from San Francisco (the other tech city!) for a gig with CNET – I’d like to personally welcome her (along with all of the great CN readers) to the big apple! You may have seen Natali on her tech daily news show Textra and her fortnight stint on TechCrunch. Natali has really improved her game she her first days doing video blogging – you can read my review of her show on my video host smackdown.

In a blog post, Natali notes some of the things that she will miss about San Francisco and I thought I’d give some suggestions for replacements here in NYC:

Here are some other things that are different here:

• SF has BART, we have a real subway
• SF has pizza, we have real pizza
• SF has a tech blogger, you have to put up with me (though everyone says I am WAY sexier)
• SF wishes they had bagels, we have the best – I like H&H, Fred Wilson prefers Murray’s
• SF has great air and weather, ok you got me there
• SF has a MOMA, we have THE MOMA
• We’ve got free WiFi
• Oh yea, and our companies have business plans

Welcome to NYC Natali, you are going to love it here! For those of you who haven’t watched a Natali video show, I’ve embedded one below.

There has been a good bit of conversation over the past week regarding CNET and the financial issues they are facing. I don’t cover stocks on CN so we will leave that discussion on the side, but I’d like to take a look at why I believe Cnet isn’t where it could be in terms of revenue, customer satisfaction or traffic. We are only going to look at the CNET blogging empire in this exercise, not the downloads or other portions of CNET.

The first reason is way too much decentralization. From what I can tell, CNET has three main properties: CNET, ZDNet, TechRepublic and Bnet. We will leave Bnet out of this discussion. I started putting an overall site structure map together but gave up as it’s just way too confusing. Each of the three sites mentioned overlap each other in some form and it becomes an issue for the consumer.

CNET has what appears to be 100+ bloggers all over the place. It’s impossible to follow a single blogger. Two of my favorites are Rafe Needleman and Caroline McCarthy. Both blog in multiple places on the CNET properties and there’s no way to grab a feed of a specific author. Rafe mainly blogs on Webware, but also blogs on CNET News (and maybe other places!). Caroline blogs on CNET News, Webware, The Social and potentially others that I don’t know about. How many posts from Caroline/Rafe am I missing because they are on another CNET property that I don’t follow?

It would be easy to say that all news is published on news.com, but I’ve seen plenty of news items on the other CNET blogs. For those who only follow news.com, how many items a day are they missing?

Now let’s take a look at ZDNet and their mass of bloggers. There appears to be approximately 40 bloggers in the network. Should these bloggers be closer affiliated with the bloggers on CNET, Webware, etc. that cover the same topics? I suggest the answer is yes. Here’s an example: Janice Chen blogs about gadgets, why isn’t she on Crave? I enjoy reading Steve O’Hear’s social posts… should these be on Webware? I could go on.

Here’s a list of the blogs on TechRepublic – about 30 or so in total. These blogs tend to focus more on the development and business side so perhaps this could become a category in the new blogging network for CNET.

Why would CNET resist a change? Everyone fears change and CNET (I am assuming) fears lose of pageviews and thereby revenue (either that or they just ignore it). I believe the opposite is true. By creating a new hierarchy, they would increase pageviews and therefore revenue. Customers would be able to subscribe to a blogger of their choosing, blogs would be in silos that make sense and searching would find items across all blogs and the interface for customer interaction would be consistent. I went through an exercise just like this in 1998 when I merged 32 branded Web sites into one corporate site. The brand managers were against it and it took a huge amount of selling to make it happen but in the end it increased sales, customer experience and reduced the development time by a large sum.

Mike Arrington believes that TechCrunch is bigger than CNET in terms of page views but with the massive decentralization that CNET employs, it’s nearly impossible to find an accurate count of total traffic so the comparison is an unfair one.

I am by no means suggesting that CNET reduce its writing staff. What I am suggesting is that they get out their whiteboard and think about how their blogging network should be organized and ignore how it is currently organized. It’s the most difficult thing to do inside of a business, but by creatively destroying the current properties, the CNET network could rise again as the leader of the pack.

What are your thoughts? Do you read any of the CNET blogs? If so, which ones and do you find the CNET network to be as confusing as I do?

Update: Liz at NTV notes that it’s only a distribution deal, not an acquisition. Please resume normal life now, thank you.

This is completely a rumor at this point but has CNET acquired video-producer Revision3?

From Michael Tolosa (my emphasis):

Case in point… CNET is the current powerhouse in video podcasting. Not only do they already have a stable of good shows, but with the addition of Del Conte and the just-announced acquisition of Revision 3 (which includes Patrick Norton from Tekzilla, Kevin Rose & Alex Albrecht from Diggnation, and other shows like The Totally Rad Show), CNET has just become home to the highest caliber podcasters in America.

I have a couple emails out to see if I can get this confirmed or a correction issued.

Hat tip to Andrew Baron.

Techcrunch is reporting that Natali DelConte is leaving her "daily technology upload" Textra for the Big Apple and the studios of CNET TV. Natali reported for Techcrunch for 3 tough weeks before leaving for Textra. Mike notes, "It won’t be like TeXtra and a number of other tech news shows (webbalert, Rocketboom, PopSnap, Geekbrief, CommandN, etc.) that she describes as “camera, girl, news.”

We reviewed Natali’s performances in July and while she began slow, I think she become stronger in the position. The concern I have is whether she can become a "serious" news/tech video journalist. She has a strong "fun" character and if that is removed at CNET, I am not sure how successful she will/can be. I look forward to welcoming Natali to NYC and to see what she can do with a larger budget and on the east coast. There’s plenty to cover here! I could see her tag-teaming with NYC journalist Caroline McCarthy.

I can only imagine that Amanda must be a bit annoyed now as I have to assume she would like to work with CNET as well – though she moved to LA last year. :)

CNET has issued a release that they have sold Webshots to American Greetings for $45 million in cash. From the release:

CNET Networks, a leading interactive media company, today announced the sale of its Webshots business to American Greetings, effective immediately, for approximately $45 million in cash. Webshots, a leading photo-sharing property, was purchased by CNET Networks in August 2004. American Greetings is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of social expression products.

"This transaction enables CNET Networks to continue to focus on key areas of growth," said Neil Ashe, CEO of CNET Networks. "We’re pleased that Webshots can become an important ingredient to American Greetings business."

In other news, CNET holds their quarterly earnings conference call this evening. I am looking forward to hearing CEO Neil Ashe speak at the Future of Business Media conference next week.