Came across another nice story by Michael Learmonth (who also writes for Silicon Alley Insider) at Advertising Age: this one is about some unfortunate holes in the “citizen journalism” experiment over at CBS, which is called CBSeyemobile. Apparently, one ad agency executive who downloaded the app — which allows anyone to upload newsworthy photos and video from their iPhone — was surprised to see photos of a woman bent over a kitchen sink with her skirt up, as well as a video clip of three women fondling each other while leaning up against the back of a car.

Among other things, this raises the question of what CBS means when it says “newsworthy.” You could argue that three women openly fondling each other in a state of undress in what appears to be broad daylight would constitute news — of a sort. For CBS, however, it’s not so much about news as it is about advertising. As Learmonth’s story notes, the ad agency exec who found the photos and video said he wouldn’t recommend advertising on the site to any of his clients, and AdMob (which was carrying ads from Google on the content) seemed concerned as well. CBS said it had controls to prevent such occurrences, and that it would “redouble” its efforts.

Unless you’ve been in a coma or backpacking through Mongolia recently, you’ve probably already seen the clip from Late Night with David Letterman, in which the host of said show laces into Senator John McCain — not just once, but over and over — for skipping out on an appearance on the program. The presidential candidate said that he had to fly back to Washington because of the banking crisis, but instead showed up on TV doing an interview with Katie Couric. It was classic Letterman, and it was clear that the talk-show host wasn’t just having a laugh — McCain’s behaviour in suspending his campaign seemed to really irk Dave.

That clip has been watched more than 3 million times on YouTube, which is a big plus for the network. Except that the video that’s getting all of the views wasn’t uploaded by CBS — or was it? As Michael Learmonth describes in a piece for Advertising Age, the clip was uploaded by a user named 1970oaktree, and doesn’t have any CBS pre-roll advertising or anything like that. It also wasn’t uploaded to the official CBS channel. But 1970oaktree has only been a member of YouTube for about a week, and the Letterman video is the only thing he or she has ever uploaded.

So why doesn’t CBS just take the video down? According to Learmonth, there are reports that the uploader is actually a CBS staffer. Is this the equivalent of a band leaking their own album on the Bit Torrent peer-to-peer network? Who knows. In any case, it seems the network has decided it’s better to have people watching the clip than not watching it, and that the publicity generated by it is worth it, regardless of the technicalities of copyright infringement. By now I would hope that CBS has figured out that when people want to watch video, they don’t suddenly think to themselves “Oh, that’s a CBS show; I guess I should go to the CBS website.”

So CBS — an “old” media giant that hasn’t been doing so well lately — plunks down $1.8-billion for CNET, a “new” media giant that hasn’t been doing so well lately. Does this sound like something to get excited about? Not to me. In fact, it sounds a little like desperation on both sides — CNET to get a deal done that would get it out of the clutches of some disgruntled shareholders, and CBS to get some kind of coherent online strategy going in the ninth inning. Some others seem to disagree, however. In fact, it’s interesting to see the polarized opinion on the deal when you look at some of the opinion out there.

Fred Wilson of A VC probably came closest to my thoughts on it when he sent a Twitter message right after the news broke, and said that he didn’t really care about the deal because it was “all about yesterday, not tomorrow.” Mike Arrington, who has been a relentless critic of CNET — and even wrote a post about how some of the top blogs should get together and destroy it — says that:

“CNET failed to disrupt the old guard, and will find itself to be a footnote in Internet history rather than the headline it should have been.”

Others seem to think the deal makes tremendous sense: Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web says that CNET is “as stable an online collection of brands as anyone out there” and that:

“What gets validated here is this: great online ad sales, high production value, serious talent, company maturity and breadth in both content and distribution.”

Paul Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider is another fan, saying that while “there’s almost no synergy, operationally or brand-wise” between the two companies, and CBS doesn’t have much of a digital platform:

“That’s as good an argument for making the deal as any — rather than trying to build your way on to the Web, why not buy it? And if the JANA guys are right, CNET isn’t a dying asset — it’s just one that needs to be revitalized.”

In a comment on Kafka’s post, Henry Blodget says:

“I actually think it’s smart. CBS is a dying business with strong cash flow–it’s about time they used it to make some big bets. More importantly, there ought to be a lot of ways these companies can work together. The size is far more manageable than AOL – Time Warner, the cultures are more compatible, etc. Strikes me as a bold but sound bet.”

So why would I say it feels like desperation? As Megan Barnett at Portfolio mag points out, CNET hardly fits the profile of what CBS said it was after when Les Moonves said that it was looking for “the next YouTube.” CNET isn’t even the last YouTube. It’s a pile of underwhelming assets that mostly make money because they aggregate eyeballs and have some good domain names. To me it feels like CBS just decided to buy something big and to hell with whether it made any sense or not.

I think Doug Macintyre at 24/7 Wall St does a good job of laying out why this is a bad deal, one that he says could be “the worst M&A deal of the year.” He says that “the high price CBS is paying borders on being irresponsible” given the kind of condition CNET is in, and that when it comes to financial performance, CBS “is almost as bad off as CNET, but on a larger scale.” Bingo. Nice job, Quincy.

For a Web company, the downside to getting acquired — as Last.fm was by media giant CBS last year, for $280-million — is that you have to actually start making money, and that means coming up with a business model that will satisfy the guys in suits. I think that, combined with the lame demands of the major music labels, explains a lot about the news out of Last.fm about their new subscription service.

The upside of the new features? Music from all four of the big record companies will be available. The downside? You get to stream songs just three times — accompanied by advertising, of course — before you get the corporate “up-sell” offer, in which Last tries to convince you to pay for the subscription version of the service, which apparently features unlimited streaming (no word on downloads).

As Adam Ostrow at Mashable notes, the advertising-supported streaming is similar to the model used by Imeem. But will Last.fm really be able to make enough from that approach to pay the labels for every stream? Colour me skeptical. I don’t know exactly how much the labels charge for a stream, but I’m betting it’s a lot. The other question, of course, is whether subscription-based streaming will work at all — if I were Rhapsody or Napster I’d be worried about Last.fm eating into a market that doesn’t show much sign of actually growing, last time I looked.

Note for Canucks:

You’re out of luck. It’s available in the U.S., the UK and Germany (why Germany?), but not the Great White North.

Dotspotter. Ever heard of it? Me neither — and I make it my business to keep track of as many Web 2.0-type new media sites as I can. Unheard of or not, the site has reportedly been acquired by CBS for $10-million (PaidContent has apparently confirmed this as well). How long has the site been around? Less than a year.

So, Dotspotter — which appears to be a kind of Digg for celebrity stories, with a user interface and site design that seems to have been designed by colour-blind gerbils — is worth $1-million for every month it has been alive. By that measure, a site like TMZ.com or PerezHilton (or Gabe Rivera’s WeSmirch.com) should be worth about $100-million — which, of course, would be insane (no offense, Gabe). And what kind of name is Dotspotter anyway?

According to the PaidContent piece, a source said the acquisition price wasn’t so much for the actual site but for the team, which includes a former Yahoo vice-president named Anthony Soohoo. So all of a sudden a crap idea is worth $10-million just because some Yahoo VP was involved? That’s genius. Maybe there’s hope for Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors.com after all.

Update:

My friend Om Malik says that (unlike me) he has heard of Dotspotter, and that they have an awesome development team. He also says his sources tell him the price was much less than $10-million. And if Om says it, I know it must be true :-)