CEO Henry Blodget has posted a bare-bones plan with more details promised for “when the time comes” for Yahoo to purchase Business Insider for $150 million then appoint BI acting CEO (he says “us” not “me”) of Yahoo so they can implement their “plan”.

Publicity stunt? Perhaps. We’ll bite. Should Yahoo?

“Given all the private-equity firms circling around Yahoo, we expect we would have little difficulty raising the $20 billion or so we would need to buy Yahoo outright,” Blodget writes. “But we’re busy, and that would take time and be messy. It would also involve paying several hundred million dollars to investment bankers and other “strategic advisors.” And there’s no reason for Yahoo to waste that kind of money.”

He says BI’s plan will “unlock the value embedded in Yahoo’s clobbered stock, and it will restore compelling organic growth to Yahoo’s core business,” and that it doesn’t necessarily involve BI’s remaining CEO of Yahoo.

“We live in New York, not California, and this is not a power grab,” he says. “The plan involves our hiring the right CEO, something Yahoo’s board has had a tough time doing over the past 11 years. We think there are only a handful of great candidates who have the combination of talents and experience necessary to succeed in this job. And part of our plan would be to quickly bring the best one of them on board). We’re not going to waste a lot of time putting a book together and hiring advisors to help pitch Yahoo’s board on our offer (we have our own business to run). But if Yahoo! would like to entertain our offer, we would be happy to discuss it.”

Yahoo, as you may know just fired Carol Bartz as CEO and is looking for a new CEO while Timothy Morse fills in in the interim.

It did not get to the point where Blodget was hassled over it. He used his own judgment and trimmed the excerpt down himself after using one that was five paragraphs long. "No, DJ did not contact us," Blodget tells WebProNews. "I reread the post a few minutes after posting and decided to trim it."

So there’s not exactly an issue there, but the concept remains a hot issue nonetheless. We are of course reminded of when Gatehouse Media recently filed a suit against the NYT Company itself when Boston.com published headlines and ledes from one of Gatehouse’s sites (it was ultimately settled out of court). And let’s not forget the AP’s legacy of content stinginess.

Sidenote: More on the NYT Gatehouse case in the following exclusive discussion:

Some have called the practice of quoting other sources and using said quotes on pages that contain advertisements, scraping. However, this is a far cry from what real scraper sites do in stealing entire articles, often with no credit or links to the original given.

No, Blodget and the Huffington Post (also cited in the NYT article), and many others including the NYT itself, WebProNews, and probably the majority of blogs and online publications you read all practice the quoting of other sources with links and proper attribution.

This argument is almost as old as the Web itself. iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord founded the Internet’s first news aggregation site NewsLinx.com back in 1996 and recalls the same issues then as now. Rich says, "I was contacted by nearly every major news site when I launched NewsLinx including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and was asked with an aggresive tone if I had permission to link to their stories. I always answered that I did not and that I would remove the links if they liked. They universally told me to keep linking. Even then they realized the value of the exposure outweighed their old style control over what I considered fair use of their content."

The real beef (at least currently) stems from the doom and gloom attitude about the state of the online advertising industry, and the newspaper industry itself. Publishers are afraid of losing readers (aka ad viewers) to the blogs and sites that are quoting their content.

Nevermind the fact that as Brian Stelter at the NYT notes, these blogs/sites are actually opening up the original sources to other readers who would not have gotten to the them in the first place had they not followed a link from the blog/site doing the quoting.

The "original sources" are more concerned about those readers of secondary sources that don’t click through to their sites. Another point I have often seen made in this discussion is that in the end, even the most original sources had to get their information from somewhere.

The most valuable articles are ones that bring together related points, and often these points have been made by others first. In the news industry, stories break from all kinds of different sources, and in the interest of keeping readers informed, other publications do not want to ignore the news. It seems only logical and courteous to give credit where credit is due via a quote and a link.

Blogging is not going away. In fact it will likely continue to grow. If publishers take action to eliminate the excerpting, it will likely just result in more uncredited regurgitation. A lot of trust in content will probably be lost as a result of a lack of accreditation. To me it seems this would only hurt the industry as a whole.

>>> How Much Excerpting Is Fair Use?

… discuss with other WebProNews readers below:

Values And Egos Inflate: The Bubble Returns

Bubble. There, I said it. Just two years ago, a half-billion dollars for MySpace seemed a bit on the frivolous side. But now it’s obvious News Corp. got in on something before the rest of the media world caught on, especially as Facebook, with a fraction of the audience, demands a steeper and steeper price.

But, say supporters of these valuations, it’s not just the size of the audience or the annual revenue taken into account, but the margins of profit they bring in. Online properties, especially Web 2.0 properties, are so low-cost to run compared to brick-and-mortar one that it’s not unreasonable for them to sell for as much as 100 times earnings. 

Critics were blisteringly quick to point out Henry Blodget’s unpardonably sinful Wall Street history of inflating values just before the dotcom bust – the term "gasbag" came up in one place, in lieu of bubble. Blodget argued Tuesday that Google shares could hit $2,000 one day.

This number, even as we remember the flack analyst Jim Cramer got flack for suggesting GOOG might reach $800, earned no shortage of scorn (and attention); TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington called for Blodget to be "muzzled."

In an ironic twist, Douglas McIntyre, editor of 24/7 Wall Street crunched numbers suggesting blogs like TechCrunch and The HuffingtonPost were worth upwards of $100 million to outfits like CNet or the Washington Post, as big media organizations look to find less expensive ways to build a loyal, sustainable audience.

Blodget concurred with that valuation; Arrington decided Blodget shouldn’t be muzzled after all; and Howard Lindzon, creator of CBS-owned Wallstrip, thought it quite funny "the lamest asshat on the internet" (he means Arrington) was buying into the hype.

Potshots aside, are we or are we not looking at (or standing within) the next dotcom bubble. If so, will it burst?

Lindzon seems to have his umbrella ready. "We just started another bust in real estate," he tells WebProNews. "This is another side book and may not end until the China Olympics. Obviously the global new wealth is not as sophisticated about the dangers of asset bubbles and it will be especially ugly when it ends."

Cynthia Brumfield, president of Emerging Media Dynamics, Inc., seems to agree these valuations are bubblish, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

"I do think these valuations are over-the-top but I don’t think a ‘bust’ is imminent," she said. "For one thing, Facebook and Huffington Post are privately held companies and individual and institutional investors in general will probably be spared the rude smack of any ultimate come-down in value. 

"They might feel a trickle-down effect in the sense that Microsoft, for example, might have to write-off some portion of its investment in Facebook, but that loss will be blended into a very big company. As for Google, investors are already forewarned that it might be overvalued even at today’s prices, and that doesn’t seem to spark much fear."

Even then, eBay’s not so happy about the $2.4 billion they shelled out for Skype – and they were warned rather loudly then. How many overpriced purchases can the major players afford to make?

The answer to that may be relatively simple. There is an echo of Brumfield’s assertion that the Microsofts and eBays of the world can afford to overpay in the words of McIntyre. They can afford it because the cost of running Web 2.0 companies is virtually nil.

"We know that Huffington raised $10 million from Softbank and other VCs," said McIntyre. "With the election year about to begin, Huffington’s pageviews, advertising, and value are only going to rise. Is $100 million the right number? No one knows that, but I think $75 to $150 [million] is not even close to wild, especially given the strategic value that a strong online brand could have for a company like the Washington Post."

An online property bringing $1 million annually, for example, could pull in 100 times revenue because of the relative low cost of operation.

"What people don’t want to look at is the value of these brands and how inexpensive they are to run compared to traditional media. The margin leverage is tremendous."