azeem.azhar

Michael Liebreich, the hyper-focussed, high energy founder of New Energy Finance, has scored an impressive deal: being acquired by Bloomberg. Over the past six years, with incredible creativity and discipline, he has build a fantastic business–the number one player–in covering the new energy, cleantech and green energy markets.

Michael was kind enough to let me get involved in New Energy Finance as a small investor. And from the sidelines I was able to watch incredibly disciplined execution, a relentless focus on building a superb team and the best investor communications I have ever seen. And all this with a comparative modicum of external funding (compared to, say, Spinvox) and no VC involvement.

Well done NEF!

Popularity: 39% [?]

Thanks to a great conversation with Umair and Ditlev this afternoon, and a dogmatic column by Libby Purves which–if I boil it down–stated: ‘Good stuff needs to be paid for. Don’t pay for something then it can’t be good’ , I thought I’d offer one take on the newspaper industries options

It is possible for people who want to create useful or valuable content to do it for ‘free’ : that is free at the point of delivery. Great creative-common’s licensed photographs on Flickr are put up their by people who are happy not to be paid in cash for those particular activities.

A bike by Lulazzo

I don’t care what their motivation is (marketing, a hobby, a desire to humiliate somone) but the fact is that they do. Wikipedia is valuable–and is free in most contexts. My blog happens to be free. And in it you’ll find some commentary you won’t see elsewhere: http://azeemazhar.com/?p=317 and http://azeemazhar.com/?p=304 (both read in excess of 1,700 times).

Neither is the issue that people won’t pay for access to valuable intellectual property or content. They obviously will. People pay $1500 a year for Gregor’s oil analysis. They happily pay 2 and 20 to a hedge fund manager. (And even if they should pay less, we generally accept that premise that we should pay for measurable performance.)

(And before I am accused of being a free content zealot, note that I pay for more ‘content’ than the average person–last year: FT, Guardian, The Economist, The Week,  dozens of magazines and books; and over $1,000 on various investor content services).

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Popularity: 42% [?]

So my Sunday newspaper, The Observer, is rumoured to be under a strategic review. And we all know what that means for a loss-making

newspaper in 2009.

Let’s play a thought experiment and assume that, GMG’s denials aside, the Sunday Times is right and:

The Observer is thought to have lost £10m- £20m a year in recent years, and not to have made a profit since it was bought by The Guardian in 1993 …. [and]

Members of the Scott Trust, the charitable foundation that owns GMG, discussed the plan on July 6. They were shown trial copies of an Observer-branded news magazine that would replace the paper and be published on a Thursday.

How might you go about saving the Observer?

Guardian News and Media made a loss of £30m to March 2009. Revenues were £254m. It would be generous to assume that about 20% of revenues were from The Observer (or about £50m).

Let’s assume that half of £30m  accountable to the Observer, being a low circulation Sunday. This loss of £15m translates to an annual loss (or subsidy) to its readers of £37.50 a year or adding nearly 80p a week to the cover price.

Let us also assume that editorial costs run to about £15m per annum. I have no real verification of those other than the Guardian and FT’s editorial budgets are rumoured to be in the £50 to £75m annual range.

Let’s also assume that

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Popularity: 39% [?]