And I thought I was negative about CNET
April 1, 2008The Jana Group, which is leading a shareholder fight to replace the Board and officers at CNET, just released a whitepaper analyzing what has gone wrong at CNET. And I thought I was sometimes a bit overly negative on CNET — these guys don’t pull any punches. You’d think from their whitepaper that the CNET leadership was a bunch of idiots.
It’s hard to argue the whitepaper’s main point though, that CNET has significantly underperformed its peer group. For a company that was once in the top 10 globally for Web site traffic, they sure haven’t monetized it very well.
They further make a good point that much of the senior leadership at CNET are greenhorns, without significant management experience anywhere but from their jobs at CNET. For the longest time much of the senior leadership was a bit of a good ol’ boys club, where who you knew was way more important than what you knew. After all the first two CEO’s were cousins.
I think it’s kindof inevitable that Jana is going to win this fight. They have the facts on their side — declines in value compared to the peer group, lackluster per-page and per-user revenue, yada yada yada. It all adds up to a pretty overwhelming case when you look at it.