Content is NOT king. I know. You've been reading otherwise everywhere you turn lately. Ever since the proposed nuptials between AOL (NYSE: AOL) and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) were announced back in January you've been told that online meat is throne-worthy. Forgive me your majesty, but I dissent. I refuse to see it that way. Stop this kingdom, I want to get off.
Content is not, nor will it ever be, king. Management is king. Community is queen. Content is the jester who entertains us along the way. Content is often mistaken for substance. It isn't. It is merely the sugar that coats the substance. You need something worth sweetening to make the recipe work.
Proof, you need? Let's take a look at the big three pure Internet portals. You have Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), Lycos (Nasdaq: LCOS), and GO.com (NYSE: GO). The first two went after community by buying up popular personal webpage hosts GeoCities and Tripod. The latter of the three has lined up some amazing content. Guess which one is not profitable? GO ahead. Guess.
GO is blessed with some hot online properties. ESPN is sports incarnate. ABC has reclaimed the broadcasting pole position. Disney remains the leader in quality family entertainment. GO has all this yet commands only half the market cap of Lycos. You can pawn 25 GO.com's for one Yahoo!.
Because, in case of emergency, content can be ripped out and used as a flotation device. Yet it can't beat the managerial foresight of swimming lessons.
It is for those reasons that I, as it turns out, am looking forward to the merger's completion. I want to see what AOL's excellence in management and community building can do with Time Warner's content. AOL has over 21 million subscribers. A billion people have access to Time Warner's CNN. Time Warner's cable division has twice as many subscribers as AOL, but do you think they interact with one another? No. Not yet.
Content is a seed. Unwatered it becomes a cobweb-ridden vault. But what will happen when AOL whips out the wrench and begins loosening up the fire hydrant? Who said gusher?
If you look through our Net-based Rule Breakers you will see that they aren't exactly purveyors of content. Some might even consider eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) the anti-content. It doesn't force or force feed. It feeds. It feeds the community and it manages. It knows its place. It is that tennis match line judge, watching the ball go back and forth. Occasionally it will call "fault" or "out." The color comes from the community. I will take a closer look at eBay when I return here Tuesday night.
Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), on the other hand, relies on content to help educate the buyer but that's the obvious part of the business plan. It was management that broke new ground with patented yet still imitated one-click ordering and affiliate programs. The one-click provided customer convenience but also made it that much more likely to close the deal. The affiliate programs were a bone to community, who in turn have cast Amazon's net even further into cyberbia.
Content. Content. The Rule Breaker lost 4.7% this week, while the S&P 500 jumped 5.69% and the Nasdaq Composite scorched ahead another 7.06%. But all the numbers mean little without management. They mean even less without you. Have a great weekend, community. I bow before thee.
Weekend Reading: Hot off the electronic presses today is our own Jeff Fischer's research report on America Online. Head on over to The Motley Fool's new individual stock research area to check it out. You can download a report on Amazon for free and then take a look at our other offerings: Rule Breakers Amgen, eBay, and Starbucks (available March 10), plus Disney, Apple, EMC, Yahoo! and a whole lot more to come.
