Stanford Summit: It's a Media Valley Says Roger McNamee . . .
I've been saying Silicon Valley has turned into media valley for more than two years. So it is good to have some backing.
Today at a fascinating VC panel, Roger McNamee, one of the top Silicon Valley investors, said Silicon Valley is doing great (despite the lack of exit strategies, and a mediocre IPO market.)
"For the first time, Silicon Valley is now represented in every form of media except television," he said.
About two years ago on a visit to New York, I wrote that someone should tell Mayor Bloomberg that the center of the media industry is moving to Silicon Valley and the West Coast. Because Google, Yahoo, EBay, (and now YouTube, FaceBook, etc) are all media companies.
New York is very cool partly because of its large media industry. The largest news and magazine companies have a heavy presence in midtown where I was staying. You can't avoid seeing their ticker tape news headlines whirl around their buildings, and their giant logos at night.
My alma mater, the Financial Times US HQ is there, and so are large offices of Reuters, CNN, Time-Warner, Hearst, etc.
But it's a shame that the center of the media industry has moved to Silicon Valley and nobody told New York :-)
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/09/a_report_from_n.php
GOOG, YHOO, EBAY, etc, publish pages of content with advertising around it. They are not technology companies, they are technology-enabled media companies.
Yes, GOOG et al would rather not represent themselves as media companies because they republish content for free from media companies. Media companies will let a "technology" company do this but not another media company...
A Report From New York City...
Silicon Valley has become Media Valley - someone should tell NYC Feb 2007.