Posts Tagged ‘pokorny’
SV Angel Partner Brian Pokorny Now CEO Of Dailybooth
SV Angel, the angel fund founded by super-angel Ron Conway, is losing one of its general partners to a portfolio company. Brian Pokorny is now the CEO of fast-growing Silicon Valley-based Dailybooth.
Dailybooth, the runner up in the “best social app” and winner of the “time sink” categories at this year’s Crunchies Awards, is “your life in pictures.” Some 6 million monthly visitors share pictures and status updates with eachother. “It’s a community for self expression,” says Pokorny.
A typical interaction: a users posts a photo, taken with their webcam, showing what they’re eating, what they’re feeling, or perhaps with friends in the background. Other user then respond via text or photos. Some strings go on for hundreds of responses. Here’s an example.
The company, originally incubated by Y Combinator, has raised just under $1 million from notable investosr such as Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, Betaworks, Kevin Rose, Caterina Fake, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schachter, Gary Vaynerchuk and Aydin Senkut.
Founders Jon Wheatley and Ryan Amos will remain in their current roles at Dailybooth.
Pokorny has worked with Conway on his various investments since 2006, and has racked up quite an angel portfolio of his own. He owns stakes in Twitter, Square, Milo, Blippy, Bump, Tweetdeck, OMGPOP and others.
He’s staying close to SV Angel, too. In addition to his new role as CEO of Dailybooth, Pokorny will remain as a Strategic Partner with SV Angel where he will continue to provide key insights into sourcing and evaluating investment opportunities in social media and other sectors.
“I’m excited to have Brian join one of our hottest portfolio startups and lead it to the next level,” said Ron Conway via email. “He will remain part of the core team at SV Angel as a strategic partner, and I look forward to working with him in this new role.”
SV Angel has also been in the new recently – they are reportedly closing a new $10 million fund, the first time the fund will take outside investors to participate in their startup investments.
Google’s Chief Economist: “Newspapers Have Never Made Much Money From News”
Earlier today, Google chief economist gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.
Google is understandably on the defensive, trotting out Varian to paint an unemotional picture with as much data as he can muster. But the picture he paints is a dour one for print media. For instance, the chart above shows the decline of overall newspaper ad revenues. Newspapers have taken huge hits in classifieds advertising (in blue) and national brand advertising (in red). The online portion (green) is still too small to make much of a difference.
The collapse in print ad revenues is coming from two places: the overall ad recession of the past couple years and the shift to online news consumption. Here are some telling stats from Varian’s presentation, which is also embedded below:
- About 40% of internet users say read news on the Web every day.
- Time spent on online news sites is only about 70 seconds per day, compared to 25 minutes spent reading a print edition.
- Online news readers tend to read at work, not for leisure, so they don’t have much time to stick around and are thus worth less to advertisers.
- Overall, less than 5 percent of newspaper ad revenues come from the online editions.
- Search engines account for 35 to 40 percent of “traffic to major U.S. news sites,” according to comScore.
- The cost of printing and distributing print editions, makes up about half the cost, while editorial operations only make up 15 percent.
Varian concludes: “Newspapers could save a lot of money if the primary access to news was via the internet.” It sounds like he agrees with Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen, who recommends that newspapers “burn the boats” carrying their dying print businesses.
“The fact of the matter is that newspapers have never made much money from news,” says Varian. They make money from “special interest sections on topics such as Automotive, Travel, Home & Garden, Food & Drink,, and so on.” The problem is that on the Web, other niche sites which cater to those categories are a click away, leaving the newspapers with sections which are harder to sell ads against, such as sports, news, and local.
So what are they supposed to do? He doesn’t really have a good answer, but ignoring the realities of consumer shifts in reading behavior and news consumption is not it.
