Shiny Media

Day two of Le Web 3 and it's time to give the latest raft of internet start-ups a hard time. Over 30 companies were invited to do an 'elevator pitch' - a kind of Dragon's Den but without the pantomime - and most of them, it seemed, failed to impress the judges including renowned blogger Robert Scoble and venture capitalist Saul Klein of Index Ventures.

In many instances, there was a suspicion that they weren't even solving a real problem, but simply showing off some neat looking technology that had little value in the real world. Presentations were generally unprepared, they weren't very slick and they also seemed talk an awful lot about how great they were without actually showing the product at any point (I did wonder how Shiny Media would fare if we were asked to do our pitch to venture capitalists again!)

Basic questions were left unanswered (such as how is this even going to make money) and while a lot of them seemed keen to let everyone know about how cool their technology was, they didn't actually spend much time showing the technology. As Robert Scoble pointed out:

"Don't talk about the team. Show us some sex appeal. Wow us. It's like dating a girl. Make sure you have a story to tell to nail your pitch," said Scoble.

Highlight of the afternoon so far was the bunfight between Emily Bell of The Guardian Unlimited and controversial 'Cult of the Amateur' author Andrew Keen - the Floyd Mayweather and Ricky 'Hitman' Hatton of the Web 2.0 world.

Whereas Emily believes that the internet is generally a good thing for established media organisations, Andrew believes user generated content and social networking generally is undermining traditional media.

Round one = Emily Bell gets off to a great start with lightening quick comments. "We would be more and more irrelevant if we didn't let people interact."

Round two = Andrew Keen fights back. "Guardian is a very valuable resource. Unlike other sites it doesn't allow kids to spew their crap and their journalists are paid."

Round three = "Internet is a fantastically vibrant right of reply. Your history follows you around. It needs to be an iterative process" (Emily Bell)

Here we are in Paris at Le Web 3 - a big Web 2.0 party, sorry, conference, where the great and good of the internet world - and bonkers designer Phillipe Starck - come together to chat, eat pastries and watch the ebullient host Loic Le Meur bounce around the stage like a mad thing.

Typically, it's gone midday and I've only just got the flakey wi-fi working, but here are the highlights so far. Designer Philippe Starck talked at length about sexual ergononomics - how to make sexy furniture that you're not ashamed to show your granny. He was also doorstepped on stage by uber-blogger Robert Scoble who asked him to evaulate the design of Amazon e-book reader, the Kindle. Surprisingly, unlike Scoble, he didn't think it was rubbish but questioned whether the designer had really gone far enough in losing 'his identity'.

So YouTube sells to Google for $1.65 billion, not bad work for a start-up that's only been going 10 minutes. The venture capitalists must be rubbing their hands in glee. To be fair, it's no less than YouTube deserved. Over the past year or so it's proved to be a massive source of inspiration, creation and - yes entertainment - to all of us here in Shiny towers.

But I can't help thinking that it might be all down hill from here for the revolutionary online video service. Yes, the name YouTube may survive (though personally I quite like GooTube as an alternative), but I can't imagine that all copyright owners will be so lenient on their content appearing gratis on YouTube now that it's owned by a much larger, and wealthier, organisation rather than a relatively small private company.

Of course the big challenge for Google is how to make money from YouTube (by the way where does this leave its own Google Video service?) Sure there's Google Adsense, but how exactly will these ads work out the context of the video - I suppose it will have to rely on the category tags?

Amazingly, when we talk to some advertisers they still tell us that they don't want to be associated with user generated content, beacuse of the perceived lack of editorial control. However there's only so long they can stick their head in the sand on this one.

You Tube has consistently been in the Top 5 of the world's most trafficked websites over the past six months or so. And where viewers go advertisers are sure to follow. Which I think in someways is a bit of a shame. But then with hosting costs for YouTube running into millions of dollars each month, it needs to get the money from somewhere if it's to remain the internet phenomenon it is at present.

OK that was a long 24 hours. But it's been a hectic old week since The Guardian Changing Media conference last Monday. We've been spending quite a bit of our time here at Shiny Media recently talking to various media and business types about blogging and it's clear that the message is starting to get through.

In particular many ad agencies are waking up to the fact that people who are passionate about their products are some of the very same people who are reading our blogs. We spoke to a few ad agency folk at The Guardian Changing Media conference who attended the Commercial Impact of Blogging seminar which we spoke at and they seemed receptive to what we are trying to do.

Of course we've not been shy about talking about some of the deals we've done with companies like Dyson and Sony and the results they have achieved. But it's a long old haul. Many ad agencies are still very 'old school' in their thinking, preferring to play it safe with placing ads in offline media and, maybe, a Yahoo! if you're lucky. Industry figures show that only 5 to 7 per cent of ad spending is is online which is absolutely crazy when you think how TV audiences/newspaper and magazine readership is constantly being eroded by the power of the internet.

We believe that's going to change though and with 1.1 million unique visitors to our sites in March we think we're in a pretty strong position to take advantage of future advertising opportunities at the same time as delivering quality editorial content.

Chris