Danny Sullivan Poaches Search Engine Watch With New Blog
Danny Sullivan has said he will be doing a new search blog after leaving Search Engine Watch at the end of this month, but nobody expected it to be this dramatic: Danny is launching Search Engine Land with the same damn cast he had at SEWatch! SELand will feature Danny, Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz, in other words, 2/3 of the editors and SEW’s most prominent regular correspondent are leaving, all in the course of a few weeks.
Holy crap, I think we just saw Technorati’s #66 blog die. Wow.
Most likely, the owners of Search Engine Watch will try to keep the blog going because, obviously, it is a money-maker and gets publicity for their conferences, but one has to believe they’ve just been screwed royally, and would have a tough time recovering. If there was ever a test of the strength of blogs as brands, this is going to be it.
Here’s what Barry says at Threadwatch:
I am not on contract. I do it month to month and I am leaving Nov. 30th with Danny.
Chris’s contract is up at the end of the year and he is coming over the first week of January.
I’m glad to see Danny stick it to “the man”, go it alone, and probably beat his old company, but I am shocked that this sort of thing wasn’t covered in a non-compete. I mean, I could see a contract being nice enough to let him work as a competitor, but let him take half the staff with him? Wow, what a coup. Lisa Barone says Incisive, the owners of SEW, must be certifiable for allowing this to happen.
Via Andy Beal, another guy who wrote a major, company-owned blog, and left and struck out on his own. For the record, Andy’s self-operated search blog, Marketing Pilgrim, has already trounced his old one, Search Engine Lowdown. Good luck, SEW, and likely, goodbye.
UPDATE: Holy cow, SEW must be really over. Danny announces at Search Engine Land that they will be joined by Phil Bradley, Bill Slawski, Jennifer Slegg, Brian Smith, and Greg Sterling. That leaves Search Engine Watch with just one editor, Elisabeth Osmeloski, and one contributor, Detlev Johnson. Seriously, when you take 7 out of 9 from someone else’s staff, you aren’t building an organization, you’re completing a raid. Unbelievable.
At this point, I have to ask if Incisive is going to just shut down Search Engine Watch. Considering that they were supposedly making Chris Sherman the new head of the Search Engine Strategies conference, shut they just close up shop and turn off the lights on the way out?
On the flip side, if Danny is just recreating the same company, I wonder if he plans to do a new conference. Based on the name of the site, I recommend he goes in a different direction, and create “Search Engine Land”, a search theme park. There can be rides like the PageRank roller coaster, the Banned-From-Google Haunted House, the Yahoo acquisition ferris wheel, and the Microsoft-muscling-into-a-new-market bumper cars. Got any others?
If you job is “blog about search engines”, how can you possibly have a non-compete that says “you can’t work for another company and blog about search engines”.
And since Danny started the company in the first place, he probably quite a powerful hand in the drawing of his contracts.
Comment by RichB | November 21, 2006
Why do you think non-competes suck?
Still, even a very limited non-compete should say “You can’t start a new company and hire all our best guys”. You’d have to be an idiot to allow that!
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | November 21, 2006
I’m not saying they suck. I’m saying that if your skillsbase is totally defined by your job (blog about search engines), then having a non-compete that says you can’t blog about search engines for anyone else is tantamount to forbidding you from ever working again. I know that in my country, that would be unenforceable.
Comment by RichB | November 21, 2006
Rich, I should have explained more: Typical non-competes last for a period of one year. While making Danny not work for the rest of his life would be unlawful and absurd, a typical non-compete would force him to do something different for just one year, either take a sabbatical, or give lectures, or write a book.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | November 21, 2006
[…] Danny Sullivan Poaches Search Engine Watch With New Blog (Inside Google) Will SEW survive without Danny, Chris and Barry? (Bruce Clay) Add to feed reader | Digg this | Post to del.icio.us | Add to Reddit Posted on Saturday 25 November 2006 Filed under: Search oriented sites and forums and All […]
Pingback by » The fall of Search Engine Watch | November 25, 2006
So, is the only thing he gained from this money? He was just out to make a quick buck?
Or are Miss Osmeloski and Mr. Johnson such ___s that they decided to just leave them? No, that makes no sense - he could’ve fired them, right?
Oh well, I don’t know anything about SEW/SEL. But it’s a very strange move indeed.
Comment by Tim | November 26, 2006