re: [webmasterworld.com...]
Smart money said that Alan Meckler was going to do for Search, what Comdex did for the DotCom and what CES did for home electronics.
August 2nd, 2005. Was a watershed day in the history of SEO/SEM. That was the day Jupiter sold SearchEngineWatch and the SES conferences to Incisive Media. After the events of this week with Danny Sullivan announcing his resignation from SearchEngineWatch, I think it is worth rolling back the clock to that fateful day and looking at the sale of the site and conferences again.
[incisivemedia.com...]
[daggle.com...]
[SearcheEgineWatch.com...]
[weblogs.jupitermedia.com...]
Search was sky rocketing a year ago. Google and the search sectors growth was spectacular. Adsense and other forms of advertising were setting new records every month. From SEO/SEM firms to mom-n-pops, we not only had survived the dot com crash – we came out stronger and more profitable because of it. Everyone was making out like bandits. At the time of the sale, Jupiter was doing great. Sullivan had the conference side of the conferences running like a well oiled machine and the trade show side was also jamming. SES was growing by 20-50% per-conference. The site was also rocking and hitting every note a webmaster should be hitting today. There are/were 20+ ads on the home page alone going for a rumored $4-5k a month – talk about your million dollar homepage! Life was good at Jupiter and certainly in the search space.
[finance.google.com...]
Jupiter didn’t appear to be hurting. Sure the stock price was flat, but not crashing by any means. The outlook for Jupiter was fairly bright and positive. Alan Mecklers fixation with the images seemed to be mostly harmless. Who knows, he may have been on to – still might be – something really big with all that recurring billing. In a few old school circles, soft licensing and recurring billing are the holy grail, come-to-jesus, show-me-the-money of business models. Seriously, guys like Bill Gates did all right by soft licensing (grin).
With Jupiter hitting on all cylinders, I just think that at the time of the SES sale, Meckler should have been standing back screaming at the troops to saddle up. It was a time to redouble their efforts. It was setup already. It was a time to hitch up the team and go to town on a rail.
Business maven Tom Peters used to say that the time to sell like hell” is when “you are already selling like hell”! You have to strike the iron when the metal is hot. Nothing was hotter than “Search” was last year.
[tompeters.com...]
The selling of SES at that time, just did not make sense. Everyone I talked to about it was bewildered. Why sell SES? It was a stunning and shocking move to those of us in the industry. No one could wrap their brain around it. Daddy Warbucks – dude – buddy – what the? Go round the bend!? Was Meckler getting ready to retire? Has he ticked off the major sponsors? Has he been put on notice? Is there some balloon payment due in the backwaters of Jupiters books that no one knows about? Contracts due to expire and no renewals in site? Someone calling in a loan? Does he think there is another bubble crash imminent? Missed a margin call? A greedy ex wife? Like the ponies too much? Ha! you could go crazy spinning the scenarios.
[weblogs.jupitermedia.com...]
Alan Meckler is a seasoned business pro. There are few in the tech space that have his years of real world seat-of-the-pants first hand old fashioned education you can only get from decades of on-the-job training. Aside from that sentence turning a record number of cliches per column inch, it’s true! Meckler is that old and experienced in this space. His name alone is almost a cliche! Alan built the awesome Internet World trade show and conference and he built SES. You don’t fall off a turnip truck and wake up with domains like Internet.com, ClickZ, and SearchEngineWatch. With Alan at the helm of Jupiter, we were getting that old deja vu Internet World feeling all over again. It just stood to reason that Alan Meckler was going to do for Search, what Comdex did for the DotCom and what CES did for home electronics.
For our part, we were just trying to stay out of the way – to keep from ending up road kill. Jupiter needed a wide berth. We mulled over thoughts of getting on the Jupiter wagon. We even met with the big guy himself (thanks for the lunch!). There was no kidding ourselves about our future direction. We were just caught in the draft of it all. We were along for the ride whether we wanted to or not – sucked in to the wake of the SES/SEW vortex. Fates and fortunes are intertwined. So goes Jupiter – so goes WebmasterWorld. It is the pure definition of that new catch word from competition and cooperation: co-opetition. There were days I could see my handwriting on SES/SEW, and I am sure there are days Danny saw his on PubCon/WebmasterWorld. And why not!? We are all doing well – making money – having fun – cranking out 7 figure daily traffic numbers – traveling the world – partying like rock stars – three finger snaps in a Z formation – cue the music – baby, we were Living La Vida Loca!
So along comes the SES sale to a no name company that no one stateside had every heard of and who had no history in this space. Most analysts felt that the sale price of $43 million was pretty cheap at the time. The public explanations about it didn’t match the reality of the sale. Alan Meckler is as wise an old owl as there is on the net today. This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There was another shoe to drop. Befuddled and not a smoking gun in sight. That left the only plausible explanation to be the simple face value one: that $43 million in the hand is better than the vast unknown in the future bush.
We had a sharp consultant working for us a year ago. She was helping with a long term business plan and strategy. She did a study of the seo/sem/conference sector. Her work, was all top notch. Stuff we read about in business books, but we never thought we could actually have completed. As she was presenting the competitive Intel on Jupiter/Incisive to us, she talked a bit about the sale of ClickZ/SES. She made a comment that now seems pretty insightful:
I would be curious to see Danny Sullivans contract. It is the only variable we don’t know about.
As they say; that knowledge and $3.75 will still buy you a small coffee at Starbucks. The only thing we could do was go back to work and continue improving and producing our sites and conferences. We always knew there was going to come a day when “the rest of the story” would come out. We put our heads down and focused on our work – that is all we have ever tried to do. Competition will always be there. One of my all time heroes Jonny Carson told Dave Letterman when he was in 3rd place of 3 talk shows to: “forget about the other guys and what they are doing. Focus on your thing, your audience and what you do best”. I had a full plate running my own business and didn’t need to dedicate any more brain power to thinking about it. I knew it would work out. This too shall pass.
So, Yesterday when I read the news that Danny was leaving Search Engine Watch, I honestly was not all that surprised. 13 months later, Alan Mecklers other shoe hits the floor. I finally exhaled.
From there, you lead into all kinds of questions about the state of Danny’s contract going back more than a year to the time of the sale. psst: Apparently, he did not have a noncompete. Hello!? I can only imagine he refused to renew at some point or the right phase of the moon… Ack, stop that. Here we go again with margin calls and ex wives… So lets get off that track and say we did but we didn’t explore those possibilities. As much guilty pleasure fun as it would be to play “what if”, I have some sanity to think about you know. We’ll leave the rest of that as an exercise for the reader and ask good old Bones McCoy to bail us out: dam it Jim. I’m a conference producer – not a mind reader!
Lets cut to the chase: $43 million for SEW/SES/ClickZ without Danny Sullivan locked into a long term contract and no non-compete? (belly laugh) Raise a virtual glass to Mr. Alan Meckler. You old dog you – nicely done sir! Daddy warbucks is back at the top of my list!
[weblogs.jupitermedia.com...]
[weblogs.jupitermedia.com...]
I know for about six months I have been increasingly concerned about the industry. There was something soothing and calming about SES San Jose, but it seemed so status quo to borderline “been there – done that”.
I’ve been thinking the industry was going to see more rapid change again this year. Last year was about consolidation and acquisition. This year has been about, huh? Not much really. There has been a vacuum. No defining moment until now. So far, that hole is being filled with the Web 2.0 talk. Hey, Web 2.0, is proof that people need to talk about something.
Me and a good friend were chatting a few months ago that we knew we were probably going to see some shake up at SearchEngineWatch this year. You see, Danny Sullivan just turned 40 this year. I don’t care who you are, the big four oh works on a man in weird ways. I know it does. I’ve been there recently. I have the new convertible sports car to prove it. We thought Danny would get a dog or something – not leave SEW!
All the possibilities are swirling. It reminds me of something I have never talked about much. Six years ago I was faced with a difficult choice between the words: SearchEngine and the word Webmaster. Those two domains SearchEngineWorld and WebmasterWorld were both powerful in my mind and both were/are extremely brandable domains. I have been telling myself that I choose WebmasterWorld because I wanted to go horizontal and not vertical with the topics. I wanted to cover both search and webmaster related site operation and management. I still feel they are not divorceable from one another. You can’t talk search, without immediately getting to page and then server issues. That intention still covers the basics of my reasoning at the time and without that desire I never would have chosen WebmasterWorld over SearchEngineWorld. I knew that I was choosing the one that would ultimately be the horse we would ride. I realize that some of that decision process was the gnawing fact that I didn’t want SearchEngineWorld to compete with SearchEngineWatch. I didn’t want to muddle the waters of branding. I can distinctly remember trying to find another domain because I didn’t want the branding confusion. When I first registered SeearchEngineWorld, I just thought it was a cool name. Even in 99, Danny had done a great job at positioning SearchEngineWatch as a good brand. I never intended to see SearchEngineWorld wither and get forgotten. That was more from the fact I could never find my Chris Sherman, than any other factor. Guys like Chris don’t grow on trees.
[blogs.guardian.co.uk...]
I think the change may do us all some good. Other than our reaction to it, we don’t have a big choice in the matter. We need a bit of a status quo shake up. The conferences and the sites are getting fairly mature. Change is ultimately good.
I doubt Danny will have any problem finding work (grin). I can only imagine he has a tough task of deciding what he wants to do next. Think about it for a minute: Imagine you could do anything you want with almost anyone you wanted to in your industry? The world is your oyster. How would you decide? Ultimately, I think Danny will follow his passions and the things he finds most fulfilling in life.
It is also interesting to to see that Susan Bratton is leaving as the Chair of Ad-Tech. I believe we will see Susan pop up somewhere very soon. When I first met Susan, it was a huried introduction at a conference. I recognized the look and the brusque stick-to-business style. That is the same look I see in clips of me from our conferences. At the time, I flat out – umm – didn’t get her. Then Mike ‘rock on’ Grehan took us all out for dinner in London. We had a nice time and talk with Susan. Then I stumbled on to one of her shows on WebmasterRadio and she started to make perfect sense. Maybe she has found her forte in Radio instead of conferences? Either way, her rolodex is a whos-who of the entire marketing industry. I doubt she’ll have trouble finding work. From the whispers of the rumor mill, Susan was never highly compensated at Fad Tech. I could see her doing other conferences soon. However, I wonder if her contract allows it?
[blog.dmnews.com...]
As for Incisive, this looks like it was a simple 1 plus 1 must equal 2 business decision. It sounds like Danny was already making top dollar on the circuit and Incisive thought any more would be financial suicide. Although we don’t know alot about Incisive on this side of the pond, they do alot of conferences and small trade shows around the world. They are very well versed in the economics of conferences.
As for SES, it is an intersting pickle Incisive is in. The large sponsors are locked in contracts for another year. That’s Mr. Meckler’s handy work in action again. Before Alan brought that to Search conferences, there were only a few super large conferences that could get sponsors to lock in for a year at a time. That means that SES is directly funded through SES San Jose next year. Contracts are reserved on the conference space and other conference associated services. You can’t just show up at a Hilton in New York or the San Jose convention center without a year+ advance reservation.
Regardless of the over all appearance or make up of those conferences – those conferences are locked in for the most part. We have also heard (know) that many speakers also have had their expenses covered to these shows. A few of them go back many years on the circuit. Some, simply wouldn’t have a career, let alone a speaking slot if it weren’t for Danny and SES. Many will continue to ride the SES horse for as long as it has legs. Then there are the attendees. Most of the NYC crowd is corporate Madison Avenue. Same goes for San Jose. What that means, is that many of those people already have it in next years budget to attend those conferences and whether DS’s smiley face is up in front or not, there will be a sizable set of attendees present.
Then there is the real value of a company and conference – the people. The SES crew is strong. Karen and the gang have done an incredible job over the years. I know just how important and valuable those people are and I have the highest regard for them. Trust me – running, planning, and executing a conference the size of SES is no easy task and experienced people are very few and far between.
I think Chris Sherman has been contributing a ton of stuff to SES over the last few years. He has organized many panels and session tracks – exclusively doing many of them.
What I am getting to – tipping toeing around – is that for the short term over the next year, SES doesn’t flounder too far. Sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and attendees – it’s a dead lock. Attendance may suffer, and the quality of the sessions may suffer – but the beat goes on. Incisive has six to nine months to figure it all out. That is if Danny doesn’t throw a curve ball their way.
Where Incisive is truely going to miss DS, is on the site. SearchEngineWatch *is* Danny Sullivan. And despite all the blog stuff, guest writers and moderators – whatever dude – searchenginewatch is Dannys off spring. Always has been – and always will be…
For our part – fresh opportunies open up. The phone has been ringing alot this week. The popular question has been about speaking in Vegas and next years conferences. Yes, we still have few slots to fill for Vegas.
[pubcon.com...]
All-in-all, things will work out ok I think.
Brett
For the first five years of Google, you could effectively sum up 80% of the Google algo this way: