Rafat’s deal report
Well if you spend all your time talking about deals - you might as well add them up and make it report. That way you have soemthing to sell. And that’s what Rafat Ali and his great team has done:
I mentioned about our new Social Media Deals Report, covering the venture capital and M&A deals in the social media sector, for second half 2005 and first half 2006. Coincidentally, it is also a year since Fox Interactive/News Corp bought MySpace, arguably the turning point in social media sector, at least from a deals perspective.
We’ll have it for sale Monday morning, but a preview of some stats:
VC Deals: Breakdown by Sub-Sector
– Social Networking: 21 companies, total: $95.8 million, 8 undisclosed
– Business Social Networking: 3 companies; total: $21 million, 1 undisclosed
– Video Sharing: 14 companies; total: $60.2 million, 5 undisclosed
– Photo Sharing: 8 companies; total: $68.26 million, none undisclosed
– Avatars: 6 companies; total: $52.73 million, none undisclosed
– Gaming/Role-Playing: 2 companies; total: $16 million, none undisclosed
– Personal Media/P2P Management and Sharing: 5 companies; total: $17.5 million, 2 undisclosed
– Entertainment Content: 4 companies; total: $28.5 million; one undisclosed
– Collaborative & Social Search: 4 companies; total: $7.3 million; two undisclosed
– Listings/Review/Events/Recommendations: 7 companies; total: $20.7 million; one undisclosed
– Music Related: 6 companies; total: $16.7 million; 2 undisclosed
– P2P: 3; total: $11.75 million; one undisclosed
– Citizen-Blog Journalism: 9 companies; total: $22.9 million; 5 undisclosed
– RSS Tools and Services: 8 companies; total: $13.5 million; 5 undisclosed
– News Personalization & Sharing: 4 companies; total: $43.3 million; one undisclosed
– Podcasting: 4 companies; total: $14 million; 2 undisclosed
– Blogs Tools & Services: 5 companies; total: $26.1 million; one undisclosed
– Wikis: 3 companies; total: $10.15 million; none undisclosed
– China: 8 companies; total: $47.3 million; one undisclosed
– Physical Media: 2 companies; total: $17 million; none undisclosed
– IM: 1 company; $3.5 million
– Mobile Social Media: 13 companies; total: $67.35 million; 2 undisclosed
I just love thinking about all those small players HAVING to support open standards - to create our own unified, diversified, distributed meshed web. Afterall - they ALL can’t get bought by Google, Yahoo or AOL. Or Fox or IAC. Or heaven forbid Microsoft or Apple (sic!)
I hope his reports contain better information that his usual “from a reliable source” quotes for deals that are not happening. Now having seen 3 deals he discussed have wrong information and in two cases didn’t even happen as described, I’ve stopped reading paidcontent.org, since if the news he puts out is really going to happen, it will likely appear on other more reliable and well researched blogs. Perhaps some of the funding he got can be put to finding of 2nd and 3rd sources for the rumors he lists
I hope his reports contain better information that his usual “from a reliable source” quotes for deals that are not happening. Now having seen 3 deals he discussed have wrong information and in two cases didn’t even happen as described, I’ve stopped reading paidcontent.org, since if the news he puts out is really going to happen, it will likely appear on other more reliable and well researched blogs. Perhaps some of the funding he got can be put to finding of 2nd and 3rd sources for the rumors he lists
I hope his reports contain better information that his usual “from a reliable source” quotes for deals that are not happening. Now having seen 3 deals he discussed have wrong information and in two cases didn’t even happen as described, I’ve stopped reading paidcontent.org, since if the news he puts out is really going to happen, it will likely appear on other more reliable and well researched blogs. Perhaps some of the funding he got can be put to finding of 2nd and 3rd sources for the rumors he lists