News Corp Adds Jamba to Bling Finger
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 12, 2006 | Share This
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Adding to its growing arsenal of web apps, News Corp today agreed to buy 51% of Jamba (aka Jamster), Verisign’s mobile content provider. Purchased for $188 million, the German company will be used to increase the European presence of News Corps’ Fox Mobile Entertainment. Though Verisign will hold on to 49% of Jamba, its catalogue of mobile music, video, and direct-to-consumer applications fits better with News Corp’s interactive media plans. Jamba will sell content via Myspace, for example, offering (among other things) downloadable Simpsons paraphanalia.
The Jamba deal is just one more marker to suggest that major news companies are going to start devouring web apps in the transfer of their operations from print to online media. And why not? Search engines aren’t the only sites that make money from huge volumes of traffic. For News Corp, and others to follow, the move online signifies not only the decentralization of media distribution, but also the entertainment industry’s awakening to new sources of revenue. As the engines have already proven, web 2.0 apps work better as layers of functionality to an already popular service - look at how Flickr has developed since it’s acquisition by Yahoo! The inclusion of Jamba into Myspace and other News Corp media will make both companies more attractive.
In the instance of Myspace, Murdoch has been subtly repositioning the social network towards more commercial interests since its acquisition. His inclusion of celebrity pages, the recent plan to sell independent music, and now the addition of Jamba, a paid content company, all indicate News Corps intention to turn Myspace into a cash machine. In my opinion, this is a good thing. The traditional business “plan” of most web startups is to build it first, worry about business later. As a result, social media sites have huge amounts of unmonetized traffic - case and point being wikipedia, which shows up in the top 5 of virtually every informational search, but has no self-sustaining revenue model. With business giants like News Corps adopting web 2.0 companies, the little guys can finally make some money for all their hard work and the big guys can add to their portfolio of services. The engines have been picking up online media services for long enough, it’s about time the actual media companies caught on.
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