I just happened across a post from Adrian at the dailyDOOH suggesting that aka.tv may be at the end of its rope. For those of you who hadn't been to the site before, for a while it was a really good place to get industry news, and had a much better handle on European dealings than Digital Signage Today (which actually started up several years after aka).
In any event, there hasn't been any new news on the site for several weeks, and the firm's editor, Barnaby Page, recently left to start a competing site with ScreenMedia magazine. We had also heard that for a while one of the bigger digital signage software companies was propping them up in exchange for essentially every prime advertising slot on the site. In fact, at one point I chided aka for doing advertorial work for them, but as I noted at the time, it was probably a financial necessity.
Still, if the rumors are true it would seem that in the end even that may not have been enough. And if the company is really up for sale, their 11,000+ subscriber list and a bit of goodwill may be up for grabs.
Has anybody else heard anything (preferably definitive) about this?
Tags: digital signage, aka.tv
In any event, there hasn't been any new news on the site for several weeks, and the firm's editor, Barnaby Page, recently left to start a competing site with ScreenMedia magazine. We had also heard that for a while one of the bigger digital signage software companies was propping them up in exchange for essentially every prime advertising slot on the site. In fact, at one point I chided aka for doing advertorial work for them, but as I noted at the time, it was probably a financial necessity.
Still, if the rumors are true it would seem that in the end even that may not have been enough. And if the company is really up for sale, their 11,000+ subscriber list and a bit of goodwill may be up for grabs.
Has anybody else heard anything (preferably definitive) about this?
Tags: digital signage, aka.tv
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2 comments:
I heard rumour (in line with what you have said Bill) that the company that was supporting them agreed to finance them for a set period while they got set up and learned to monetize their growth.
If they didn't learn to monetize it and the "window of support" on the finance front just closed (which I heard it did) then that would explain a lot
What a pity, if true. There's so much hype and other quasi-news-worthy stuff going on in the industry that it almost seems absurd that they couldn't figure out a way to make money on it.
I mean honestly, how high could their overhead have possibly been? A webserver, a full-time editor, a couple of freelance guys that get paid by the article, and a modest advertising budget. It doesn't seem like it ought to be that hard.
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