Go Big Always

What CNET could have been: an insiders view

Last week’s CBS acquisition of CNET saddened me for a number of reasons. I was VP Marketing there from 1999-2001 and still feel a strong personal connection to the company. It was an innovative company that transformed a lot in 15 years and, in my opinion, lost the chance to redefine media.

The land-grab product company (CNET’s first seven years)

Halsey Minor was a product guy. Just before I left Dell to come to CNET, Halsey had built an AOL-like product called SNAP (sold to NBC) and spun up Vignette. Since then he’s been involved with a ton of successful ventures like Salesforce.com, GrandCentral, and many more.

When I arrived, CNET’s core was News.com and Shopper.com, a consumer reports-like directory for technology vendors. CNET had invested heavily in engineering their own proprietary content management, publishing, inventory and ad-serving software. It had also begun a sprint to launch as many new properties as possible as well as securing a foothold internationally. CNET went after search, auctions, images, tv, radio, and brands that extended beyond technology like MySimon.

I was brought on to build a kick ass CNET brand (some examples below) which seemed to be in conflict with the fact that CNET wasn’t a product and the various brands wanted to do their own brand-building. Our dot-bomb advertising explosion shook ZDNet’s tree enough to acquire them for about the same price that CBS acquired CNET last week. I left after Halsey turned the reigns over to Shelby Bonnie.

The ever-pruning media company (CNET’s second seven years)

The change in guard was very telling. Most all the ZDNet execs stayed while the CNET execs moved on. The focus went from being a product company to traditional publishing. After 9-11, the company (like most) was hard hit and trying to get focus while diversifying its revenue beyond advertising. But after the recession, CNET never seemed to wake up. Their proprietary content, publishing, inventory and ad-serving systems had become an albatross. It went on to launch more tangential companies like Chow, UrbanBaby, TV.com and MP3.com while the news side of their business seemed comparatively vastly under resourced. Especially when compared to the blogosphere which began to boom. By 2005, the attention of CNET’s once digerati audience had sufficiently left to go where the coverage really was, places like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, and Ars Technica. A stock backdating scandal ousted Shelby in 2006 but CNET was already past the point of no return.

What CNET could have been

CNET lost focus. It lost it’s innovative roots. It should have been insightful enough to see the media landscape transformation and stayed nimble enough to have jumped all over it. That was its business. CNET had amazing talent like Dan Farber, Larry Dignan, Martin LaMonica, Rafe Needleman, Michael Krigsman and Dennis Howlett but blogging was secondary and these folks never got to step out as individual brands. CNET should have handed them a microphone and a web designer. They should have rallied their mountain of assets like video, audio, and images around these talented people. They should have looked at the 36 editors they employed out of 2,700 employees at the company and said, “this is just backwards.” They should have jumped all over social media and used social media rules. They should have reached out to all the tech influencers and offered their financial support in return for their blogging talent (I mean, bloggers are poor!).

Equally, CNET could have led the micro media model by investing R&D efforts toward microblogging and RSS media monetization (via Twitter, Seesmic, etc). And maybe even developed a consulting arm that could council the later adopting vendors (and even traditional media companies) on how to transform themselves to deal with the attention fragmentation, too.

The brand I started to build at CNET was all about being authentic, people-centric and simple. That’s exactly how the current social media movement is defined and CNET could be leading the way. I remember sitting with Halsey and listening to him passionately talk about how he wanted to create new marketplaces where people could easily cut through all the bullshit and talk openly to get answers to their questions. That vision left CNET a long time ago. The CBS nail closes that coffin, and secures CNET’s spot in the traditional media game. It will be interesting to see what happens from here and if the editorial rock stars stick around.