johnny won

Reverse Synergies

Marketing: P&G’s $57 Billion Bet on Gillette Five Years Later - Advertising Age - News

When Gillette married P&G it was supposed to be about ‘reverse syngergy.’

Jack Donaghy would be proud.

Ben Huh is LOL. Ben Huh is Business.

1. That I Can Has Cheezburger? purchase price was probably lower than the $2 million Time and others (ahem) reported. Huh is unflappably mum on what he spent, but he’s too good a business man to have ponied up that much—even as fast as the profitable site was growing. Plus, regulatory filings show his angel round he raised to buy that blog and build a company around it was just $2.25 million. When I asked why he’d spend almost the entire amount on one acquisition, he didn’t so much nod, answer or agree as make a face that said “Yes, thank you for not assuming I’m a total idiot.” But, yeah, he won’t comment.
2. Huh has really studied what makes humor catch and made an interesting observation: Male sites and female sites grow distinctly differently. Men tend to share by gut instinct, so male oriented sites grow faster but can churn users quickly too. Women are more trust-oriented, says Huh. That means they share links and sites less frequently, but with more credibility. So the sites grow slower but maintain their audiences better.
It’s an interesting observation given how much of the early breakout Web 2.0 were so male dominated, and Huh should know seeing the traffic patterns of Hawtness (slightly NSFW) andLovelyListing. (Guess which one is for men?)
For the record I Can Has Cheezburger? is about 50%-50% male-female, but nearly 100% geeks-who-love-cats, both of which have aided huge and sustained growth. As Huh explains it, dog people go to parks, cat people sit inside on computers.
3. Just how good that traffic is. The Pet Holdings Network boasts 12 million uniques a month and does 1 billion page views every four months. Those numbers are astounding for a 26-person, user generated content company built largely on frivolity.
We all know about Cheezburger, which surpassed 1 billion page views last month. But FAIL blog went from zero to 10 million page views-per-month in just 90 days, and the recently launchedThereIFixedIt.com  has matched that pace.
That said, Huh doesn’t hugely care how fast a blog grows, as long as it grows. What gets one of his sites shut down is a huge spike and then a fall.
His newest site, NotVeryTalented.com launches on Friday.
4. Revenues. Huh has done a great job making money in tough industries. While a lot of blogs are sputtering, his have 30% margins, posting CPMs anywhere between 15 cents and $8. The least profitable is clearly Hawtness, which Huh doesn’t even try to sell ads on, given the dodgy inventory. “It just hooks in readers,” he says.
Here’s the shocker: The company also makes 30% margins from book publishing deals, and advances and royalties make up nearly a third of the company’s revenues, which are in the “single digit millions.” More shocking: Huh can’t seem to get a publisher to sign him to a multi-book deal. This despite the fact that the first LOLcats book spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Really, New York publishing houses?
Huh plans on releasing six books next year and – SPOILER ALERT- the third LOLCats book will be all about kittens.
5. Huh has a social network too. Even if you knew all of the above, this one must surprise you because it recently surprised Huh. Pet Holdings has long offered a log-in and profile for contributors who regularly post images and passively given them the ability to friend each other. The result? A niche social network with 1.3 million users. Huh hasn’t quite decided what to do with this revelation, but he’s thinking about it. As comparatively well as he’s done with blog ads and book sales, to really scale the company, he’d like a sexier revenue stream that can grow fast without massively growing content.

TechCrunch

The Concept of the Four Seasons

The luxury concept didn’t occur to Mr. Sharp for years, after he had built a couple of successful hotels and was asked by an English developer to construct a property in London; it ultimately opened in 1970. Mr. Sharp argued that the place should compete with Claridge’s and the Connaught and other elite, old-world hotels.
That part of the market seemed crowded to Mr. Sharp’s overlords, but he had been to those hotels and here’s what he noticed: They treated you like royalty only if they knew you.
“If they didn’t know you and you walked in with blue jeans a regular shirt, you wouldn’t even get the time of day,” he said. “That was the difference.”
The luxury hotel for everyone else — it could have been the corporate motto. Given Mr. Sharp’s eagerness to go head to head with British swells, you would assume that class resentment was a motivator here. After all, the guy’s dad grew up penniless in Oswiciem, Poland — known better as Auschwitz — and his parents arrived in Canada with next to nothing. But class resentment, he says, is not in his psychological makeup.
He simply saw a niche.