this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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That’s not a scam, that’s just typical dotcom era stupidity. It’s probably the most egregious example and he saw the stupid Yahoo stock valuations and hedged his investment.
I’m not making apologies for billionaires but calling that a scam is stretching it. And, Internet radio was and still is a thing. I listen to stations that I can’t get on a regular radio or where I don’t have a radio.
Now, whether the current company is worthless, I can’t say.
Semantically it might not be a literal scam, but at best it was a bad faith transaction given that he literally bet on his company failing as soon as he sold it.
And internet radio might still exist today, but from a business perspective it’s basically a non-factor in terms of revenue when compared to any other form of music streaming or podcast distribution network. And more importantly, internet radio today can be created directly by each given station, e.g. Sirius can make their own website to host their shows. Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com was supposed to be a centralized hub for all radio stations. But why would any station host there if they can just make their own website and cut out the middleman?
All of this is to say that Cuban is either a poor businessman, a shady one, or both. And I don’t think it bodes well for the would-be consumers of his new pharmaceutical company.
It's possible he knew more about yahoos future rather then specifically about his particular product being bad.
Internet radio was absolutely a thing, think iheartradio, it's fucking massive now, sure their main business isn't internet radio anymore, but it's not like there was absolutely nothing of value there.
For "every station can just make their own site" sure, but look at the state of streaming services to see how that ends up panning out. Not to mention the difficulty and ongoing costs associated with that, especially back then, much less plug and play stuff.
Not saying I support Cuban, he's definitely part of the class that constantly exploits us, just had some specific critiques lol.
I actually hadn’t heard of iheartradio before, but after checking it out, it seems like as you mentioned it’s as much a podcasting/music streaming site as it is a radio network. And even then, it looks like it’s the biggest “internet radio” company in the US with a market cap of $250 million. Mark Cuban’s internet radio company was sold for $5.7 billion in 1999… which would be over $10 billion today. So I’m standing by my original statement that he absolutely fleeced Yahoo.
In 2021 at its height it was valued at almost 5b, yeah it's nose dived a LOT.
I didn't know how much broadcast.com was bought for tho, that is pretty nuts.