Take a kid and head over to this web site.  Amazing.

I understand the intuition of the people proposing this revenue model. They know that consumers dislike ads, yet ads are a “necessary evil” in order to make free web services sustainable, or hopefully profitable. So, they’re trying to strike a compromise with consumers that appeases both free-zealots and anti-advertising-zealots.

But, this revenue model seems silly to me. Advertisers pay a premium in order to reach people in their specific demographic with disposable income. This idea of people paying to remove ads ensures that the audience for your ads are actually CHEAPER than the average internet audience. Why? Because the people in your audience with disposable income who are willing to pay for web services are the ones that will self-select out of your audience for your ads because they are willing to pay for your product. So, all that remains in the audience for your ads are people that are too cheap to pay for your service. That doesn’t sound like the audience that Disney, Coca Cola, or even your average direct response advertiser wants to reach.

Paying to remove advertising is an interesting thought, but it’s not fully baked at this point. The real sustainable solution is to create “paid content” that your audience doesn’t actually view as “ads.” For example, the last time I tried Adblock Pro, I noticed that it didn’t remove AdWords… in other words, the creator of the ad blacklist I used saw AdWords more as content than as advertising. That’s the real home run.

But the more significant shift can’t be blamed on the strike. In the past television season, there has been a sharp increase in time-shifting. Some of the six million are still watching, but on their own terms, thanks to TiVos and other digital video recorders, streaming video on the Internet, and cable video on demand offerings. So while overall usage of television is steady, the linear broadcasts favored by advertisers are in decline. [From In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime Time? - New York Times]

It’s probably unfair to say television execs are a bunch of lemmings who have no one to blame but themselves. All of the major networks minus CBS have expanded into cable and an increasing number have integrated their online offerings, as opposed to treating them as side projects. In the final equation I think this is less about a new technology, or in the case of DVRs an old technology, altering audience behavior and more about consumer attention spans and competitive activities.

It’s a fact that people watch less television today than they did even just a few years ago, and when combined with the explosion of content that is available and you have a perfect storm that results in substantially greater complexity in attracting an audience.

This complexity is also why television sitcoms have become much more targeted and are allowed a much shorter period of time to develop. The days of a Seinfeld or Cheers pulling down 15 or 20 share are gone and won’t be seen again.

Another dimension to all of this is that consumption of web-based video often happens at work, which may or may not have implications for content producers. I’d have to think that through a little before commenting. But one interesting side observation is the globalizing consequence of web-based video, which of course is not limited to a specific broadcast network and a geography.

- 30 percent of daily video consumption comes from Indians outside of India, largely from the Bay area and New York.

This international aspect represents a phenomenal opportunity for content networks to rethink the way they do advertising to appeal to new audiences online that they would never have the opportunity to reach through broadcast. In the end the big television network will prosper as new channels for delivering content create new placement opportunities for advertising.

On the production side of the business it is clear that a decade of changes in the way that television shows are developed, financed, and syndicated has resulted in a broad array of content development capabilities across every genre, meaning there is no shortage of content to pump online.

Having a broad portfolio of content and a seemingly endless opportunity to distribute content doesn’t equate to content that audiences find appealing, so if there is one thing that could be targeted as white space at this point, it would certainly be instrumentation of the player endpoints and the content itself to register user engagement and subjective qualitative aspects.

It’s worth pointing out that Gideon Yu did a similar deal while at YouTube. Triplepoint walked away with $6.5 million worth of Google stock thanks to the deal.

PE Week recently wrote about the re-emergence of venture lending and leasing and where that market is going. Subscribers can link through.

Henry Blodget posits that Facebook couldn’t get a $15 billion valuation on its equity for a further raise, citing the failure of its “Beacon” advertising campaign. I doubt this is the case. The company could likely attract all the “dumb money” in the world at an even higher valuation thanks to its ubiquity and name brand.

I would consider Yu’s move a smart bit of protection for shareholders as it prevents further dilution.

The rock star wannabe turned venture capitalist, the "uncle" to many a rising star in the European venture market, George Coelho has left Balderton and focus on the emerging opportunity for the next 250 years, i.e. cleantech, with Good Energies.

George will be a Managing Director heading up the venture opoortunities from Zug.  He was a founder of Benchmark Europe and behind companies such as Kalido, Orchestria, Video Island (Saul Klein's business which merged with ScreenSelect and later Arts Alliance's Lovefilm) and as I understand it Codemasters (though I think Ynon was on the board).  George was previously with ETF Group as CIO and with Intel Capital as head of the international strategic investment group.  He is also hilarious.

<--- Can you recognise this man ?

From where I am sitting this make a lot of sense; when you were the Managing Partner of Benchmark Europe, moving to another fund seems to make limited sense.  Moving sideways to a next-gen investor that also allows you to work out of Switzerland (George is based in Lugano) is undoubtedly a logical next move.  I wish him best of luck !  After all, clean tech is overhyped, overfunded and overexposed (as one example the SPPV index of solar businesses was up a whopping 2,300% over the last 4 years), so it will take all his wits to keep the right deals rolling in.  Good Energies was ranked as NEF's top cleantech investor in 2007 (ok, by number of deals :-)), so this should be a good platform from which to rise above the noise.

That’s significantly lower than the $39.20 per share that Bain Capital and THL Capital had originally agreed to pay, and I’m assuming that the equity checks will remain pretty constant (i.e., banks will put up less debt). Moreover, $36 is still way higher than where Clear Channel has been trading for the past month. So if you bought long recently, this is a very very good day.

The stock opened today at $30.29 per share, has has traded as low as $25.90 post-buyout announcement. The last time CCU traded above $36 was in early March. It had been trading close to the original buyout price until last November, when it became public that the sponsors and banks could not get along.

Shares are currently up at $33.04 per share.

Assuming this settlement gets signed today, I’m interested in seeing what terms get changed other than share price. The banks had given the sponsors a number of concessions, in order to get this deal done in pre-credit crunch boomtime. In fact, Scott Sperling of THL Capital has repeatedly said such concessions are the only reason that this deal makes sense for the buyers.

A CCU spokeswoman did not yet have a comment, but I’d expect one within the next few hours.

Update: Heidi Moore has some additional details over at Deal Journal, including that the sponsors will take a higher interest rate in exchange for the lowered price, and that Morgan Stanley initiated negotiations last week via a third party.

Pay particular note to the comments section, where some CCU shareholders don’t seem too excited about the lower price. I’d assume that