We crank out comparables reports for buyers and sellers and publish a 100-page quarterly update on deals and trends in this highly volatile sector. I love the topic. I got my first exposure to mergers and acquisitions by helping scout deals for Ziff-Davis back in the 1980s and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Interestingly, buyers are still buying, but they're paying a heck of a lot less money. But valuations have plummeted.
Cash is king and cash flow is emperor in today's market.
Burn rate is poison. But for advertising-driven models, especially those that have a focused enough audience to hold their CPMs, page views are still, absolutely, important. I see a couple of trends that relate to Internet content and community properties that I believe will work together to create a rebound of sorts for the sector. One, advertising is just coming out of a creative backwater where it's been stagnating for the past two years. For some reason, online advertising stalled when it hit upon banner advertising, which is really quite a pathetic form of promotion.