Here is a great story. A 19 year old from the netherlands starts a news aggregation service called Breaking News Online. It is shaking the online media industry.
Michael van Poppel used to be like a lot of young people, trawling the internet for interesting news about the world. Just like many others have considered doing, he created a place where he could post the most interesting news he finds, as fast as he can. Today he’s one of the most-watched movers and shakers in online news media - and he’s not yet twenty years old.In September 2007, when seventeen years old and living in the Netherlands, van Poppel decided to launch a news aggregation business called Breaking News Online. Months later, somehow, he came into possession of a full video of an Osama Bin Laden statement before any of the major news outlets had it, and sold it to Reuters.
That was just the first strange chapter in a very strange story leading up to today, when van Poppel announced plans to release a push iPhone app for his fast-growing Breaking News Online network next month. A 19-year old announced that he would be releasing an iPhone app in a month and many people around the world took pause and noticed. How did this all happen? Asking that question illuminates some of the most interesting trends on the web today.
Paidcontent.org thinks media companies should buy BNO. Now!
The kid from Netherlands is hands down eating everyone’s lunch when it comes to pushing out breaking news first, bar none. He and his team’s news judgement on what’s-really-important is impeccable. The nascent service has lot more Twitter subscribers than almost all big news media companies, except maybe CNN and NYTimes. And now it is generating revenues through the paid iPhone app, and among the first to launch a subscription service on top of the paid app. It has also started syndicating its wire stories to some online pubs. List of its services is here.
Beyond its micro-news service, which essentially is about staying on top of worldwide news reports from other sources—and no small feat, it does that better than anyone—it has also started doing some original reports as well, most recently around the tsunami warnings in New Zealand, if I am remembering it right (it doesn’t archive the stories). And I feel I am a lot more informed about international developments than by reading or getting any other online/U.S. source. Sure, it is not groundbreaking original reporting like NYT or BBC, and it is aggregating third parties, and it gets it wrong sometimes in the quest for speed, but that’s the point of the service. The currency here is speed in a multiplatform environment, followed by news judgement. This is the web native news creature we all have been waiting for.
So Jon Miller, if you haven’t considered this already as part of your news consortium idea, here’s what you should do: e-mail the kid, or call him, catch the next flight to Netherlands, and give him a buyout offer. It will be a lot better way to spend $5 million than the $5 million your company has spent hiring all these new hotshot execs for MySpace…