BBC Worldwide has a £350m kitty for social networking projects and acquisitions. Oh - and the BBC is thinking of selling TV Centre. Any connection there?
OK, so it's a vast organisation, and Worldwide is technically a separate beast, blah-di-blah. But as Matt Wells wrote today, closing TV Centre would signal the end of an era: "symbolising the shift in the balance of power away from media companies towards independent producers and individual consumers".
The internet has empowered those individual consumers of course, and media companies are battling to weigh up which technological tools will help them engage with consumers and help them build new audiences.
The strategy of building community sites around successful brands is not radical, and we'll only see much more of this as broadcasters, publishers, the music industry and just about everyone else work out how to exploit the marketing potential of the social networking trend.
BBC Worldwide is likely to split its £350m "borrowing facility" between building sites around existing brands and acquiring new sites. So how much social net do you get for £350m?
In the big league, Murdoch was quickly vindicated in his $580m MySpace acquisition. That was about £332m back in July 2005; in August 2006, Murdoch signed a deal with Google which guaranteed a minimum of $900m revenue share. Any guffawing about Murdoch's MySpace move ended abruptly.
Bebo reportedly turned down a £300m offer from BT the same month but were asking for more like $1bn, or £515m. Facebook reportedly turned down offers from Yahoo and Viacom that were also getting on for half a billion. And then there was deal of last year - Google buying YouTube for £850m.
I think it's safe to say most of us won't have heard of any of the social nets that Auntie might be sniffing around.
Andy Bell at Mint Digital (the company behind social net Islandoo, but more about them soon) said some of the UK's popular social nets like dontstayin or flirtomatic would be an odd fit for the BBC, and given the crazy valuations he thinks building the sites themselves would be a better bet.
"But for the BBC it's really important that they are focused. There's a whole bunch of sites trying to create communities around things like sports or cars, particularly in the US where there is more venture funding. Generally these sites are quite underwhelming," said Andy.
That could be the danger with the BBC and its extensive resources, and then there's also the, erm, fashionability of social networking that the BBC might be all caught up with.
"There's lots of enthusiasm about this area and if you can do it right there is potential to commercialise these sites - particularly if you have international media assets to leverage."
