Shiny Media Bags Multi-Million Funding
Okay, so Shiny Media, UK’s (and Europe’s, as claimed) largest blog network has recently received venture funding.
The UK’s Sunday Times newspaper yesterday broke the news that Shiny Media have secured US$4.5m worth of funding, thanks to Bright Station Ventures who now take a 50% stake in the company.
Now the next question is what they would be doing with that money. If I were Shiny, I’d be asking for wads of cash in a few backpacks so I can just run off to some unknown island and splurge there. Okay, kidding aside. Here’s what Shiny Media says it will do with the dough.
- Compete with mainstream media.
- Develop the commercial side of the business.
- Get into video production.
- New projects and ventures.
The plans actually look promising. I mean if you’ve got several millions at your disposal, then you won’t have to worry about paying the bills and putting food on the table—at least in the medium term. That goes the same for your employees, mostly your bloggers who are the creative talent behind it all. They won’t have to worry that the network might suddenly go bankrupt one day. But then again there’s the question of creative control. Shiny’s investor now owns 50% of the network.
Well we have worked really hard to develop Shiny and we wanted like-minded entrepreneurs who were prepared to ‘sweat’ with us, not just look over our shoulder. Shaa and Dan are both dynamos who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. They don’t just bring the backing of an exciting new fund to Shiny, they also bring experience, contacts and the kind of commercial nous Shiny needs to achieve its goals.
The investors seem to know what they’re doing, with apparent experience in new media. This notwithstanding, I can see potential problems here. Sure, there’s no single entity that owns an actual majority (more than 50%), but at the end of the day, it’s he (or she) who has money who usually has the say. Remember the rumored DIGG buyout?
[R]eports came in that News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch was offering over $100 million for Digg. In Leo Laporte’s TWiT podcast netcast ( This Week in Tech Episode 77: Kiss My Ring, 1:16:25), he mentioned that Kevin (and maybe even CEO Jay Adelson) wanted to take it.BUT and that’s a big but, the investors weren’t willing to settle with anything less than $150 million. Now, that’s what happens when you take investors. You don’t really get to say when and how you want to get compensated with a pet project that turns out get a lot of attention. Kevin’s original $10,000 capital turned $100 million in 2 years is a huge success. He surely deserves to reap the fruits of his success, and if he wants to cash in now he has every right to do so.
But then again I may be wrong. And the business model in this case is different. DIGG is surely a Web 2.0 behemoth, but blog networks aren’t probably big enough to warrant a quarrel over a matter of 50 million bucks or so.
Good luck to Shiny!
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Blog networksWeblog said this on January 31, 2007 1:14 pm
Hi.
Good design, who make it?
naisioxerloro said this on November 29, 2007 10:49 am