Speaking of experts, Henry Blodget, formerly a Merrill Lynch research analyst who is banned from the market because of a fraud settlement, just got some money for his site Business Insider. As Marco Arment points out, the site is a shitpile that takes the best parts of blog posts and articles by others and re-posts them surrounded by ads. There are tons of sites like Business Insider that hope to capitalize on search engine misdirection when reprinting content — our spam filter is full of trackbacks from them. But only an expert can raise $7 million from Wall Street for that kind of site.
(Thanks to reader Michael for the video.)
Alex S.
It’s so simple. Find a name that’s easy to remember, add some remotely related content that attracts viewers, sell the name. Something like shitpile.com, with cute copy/pasted pictures of cats (and their shitpiles), then wait a bit and sell the address shitpile.com for a few millions.
deep cap
All the more reason to turn off cookies in your browser. (With an exception for Balloon Juice, of course!)
Linda Featheringill
I suppose the purchaser has intentions of making Business Insider into a useful site. But 7 mil? Wow.
MikeJ
@Linda Featheringill: He didn’t sell it, he got $7M in backing.
geg6
Jeebus. 7 mil? WTF?
@deep cap:
Sadly, I have to keep cookies on for my work computer because too many sites that I have to use won’t work unless you have the cookies on (VA-ONCE is a big one for that).
khead
“It’s important to note that this significantly understates the social gains from digital transmission and reproduction because it fails to account for the enormous advantages in disseminating the works that are produced.”
No linky, you gotta guess.
MattF
Hey folks, it’s all about money. Not love. In case you hadn’t noticed.
Gilles de Rais
Even when the bastards are losing, they’re winning.
How do you kill something that won’t die?
Mino
Off topic a little. The Citizens United SCOTUS ruling has influenced redistricting among Republicans. Everyone wants the city centers in their district. More business, more graft. Republicans are nothing if not nimble.
Jack the Second
Business Insider is really the death of the dream that was Alley Insider. A couple of guys start a little internet news site, and when it turns out it’s damn near impossible to make a living doing that (at least, a midtown-NYC living), the dream dies and they turn to content scraping and SEO to keep making a living.
So I feel a little sorry for Blodget, et al, for outliving their dream, even if a bed of $7 million makes it pretty easy to sleep at night.
flamingRedDingo
Yay @ the Laurie Anderson vid…
I luvs her so much =)
her reading of Moby Dick breathed new life into Melville’s tired old manuscript.
She’s great – always has been great – and she doesn’t get enough attention from teh kidz these daze… =P
Thanks mistermix =)
ploeg
Speaking of experts:
basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2011/9/22/how-to-summarize-a-complex-topic.html
Amir Khalid
This Henry Blodget dude is clearly connected to people with much more money than sense. He may have persuaded some investors that his largely worthless site was worth a flutter in the high six figures. Maybe he said that, for people like them, time is too valuable to be wasted on spending a few minutes to find and bookmark a few of the sites he so shamelessly aggregates and reposts. They’d be just the sort to fall for a line like that.
rjv
Mistermix,
” But only an expert can raise $7 million from Wall Street for that kind of site”
Thats a little unfair. After all, he does publish a daily reports on how Apple will fail because of “”, on how Apple will succeed despite competition from “”, and painful slideshow of 13 awesome photos of “” that no one cares about
Cris (without an H)
Pleased as punch to see that Laurie Anderson was still performing as recently as 2007.
This one is surprisingly talky by the standards of her earlier work. Language is her medium, of course, but her best work communicates the idea more succinctly.
Also, too: trust your mechanic.
forked tongue
@flamingRedDingo:
Her recent album, Homeland, from which this is taken, is very good. But only an idiot would call Moby-Dick a “tired old manuscript.”
flamingRedDingo
@forked tongue:
I think you read my comment the wrong way.
My point was, that nobody really gets excited about Moby Dick anymore. I’m not arguing that it wasn’t a seminal work, or that it isn’t compelling (if you are a lit-hound at least)
I was saying that it’s not something that exactly flies off of the shelves anymore. And that Anderson helped keep it relevant.
hawestile
While I agree that there are plenty of sites that do nothing but reprint and profit off the quirks of SEM, Business Insider might not be your best target here. The only times I’ve come across the site have been while researching tax rates and the articles were produced by the site.
Here’s a good one (by Henry Blodget himself) on the ridiculous notion that low tax rates lead to higher growth:
businessinsider.com/do-low-tax-rates-on-rich-people-ruin-the-economy-2011-7
He may be a Wall Street type, but at least he’s not pushing the same BS.