Getting Social with Alan Meckler, CEO of WebMediaBrands

Hello and welcome to Zing Talk, where Benzinga brings you the biggest names and brightest minds from New York City to Silicon Valley.

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Today our guest is Alan Meckler, the CEO of WebMediaBrands. How ya today Alan?

Fine, thanks.

Could you start off by telling us a little about yourself and WebMediaBrands?

I've been in media publishing for about 40 years, done everything from book publishing, journal publishing, I've done trade shows. Now primarily at web media brands, we have a site called media bistro which I believe covers the media industry more comprehensively than any website or group of blogs. We also do trade shows. We have the largest online job board for the media industry.

WebMediaBrands has been growing a lot this year, buying up several companies and pioneering new sites. What does WebMediaBrands look for when it makes acquisitions or starts something new?

Primarily we're interested in growing our reach into the coverage of media. Recently we've been looking at social media. We've made some acquisitions there. Our main goal is to invest heavily in content and to get a loyal readership and then our goal is to sell services to that readership. Our job board, our events and trade shows, our online educational offerings, and advertising.

And AllFacebook has been in the news recently with it's election tracker. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about that?

The election tracker was put together to help people interpret how Facebook was being used by the various candidates – you'd be able to compare the number of friends that a particular politician had relative to their opponent. For example, Meg Whitman in California – you could easily see graphically on our site had approximately 170,000 followers, whereas Jerry Brown only had 40-50,000. Didn't matter in that case because Brown won. It was a nice adjunct to information services for AllFacebook.

How did it do in predicting the races this year?

I'm not sure it was necessarily for predicting, it was for accurate information.

Social media is really transforming the way elections develop, and WebMediaBrands is clearly getting a deeper foothold in this area. What other ways is WebMediaBrands placing itself at the forefront of the social media revolution?

Well, what we're doing in and around AllFacebook and our other blog social times, is adding more and more content features to attract more and more readers which as I said will hopefully lead to more people using our job board, which we feel is one of the better places to find a job in the social media field. Just today we launched a new service on AllFacebook, where companies or individuals who have freelance services, or any type of services that want to learn to market better, will be able to market those services inexpensively. So that's how we expand. We're not an inventor so much as a middle man between those who have services and those who want to learn more about these things.

WebMediaBrands also recently released its third quarter results, which saw a significant increase in revenues and reduction in expenses - a good thing for any company. What do you think contributed most to the better numbers?

I think we have products and information at the right time for the growth in social media and other types of media. And as we grow traffic, our job board expands, we've been able to reduce our basic expenses – that's a good formula for growth.

But, it's no hiding that WebMediaBrands stock price has seen better days. What is WebMediaBrands planning to do in the near future to show investors that this company is destined for success?

We attempt to do that is through Twitter. I have about 2,000 Twitter followers, I imagine some of them are stockholders. It helps me get into somebody's mind about how we're virtually every week launching some type of service that we feel will make our company more success, so that's one of the ways we do it.

Though, to be fair, no company escaped the financial crisis with their stock price unscathed. Could you shed some light on what it was like to be a publicly-traded company in a time when the market was completely collapsing? I'm sure you can share some interesting experiences and thoughts with our listeners.

Our company has had quite an evolution – we've had quite a few ups and downs. In 2000 we were $76 a share, and then after 9/11 we were $0.96 and then after 2005 we were $24 a share, and then last year we were $0.20 a share. We've had our ups and downs and I feel we're on our way up again. Luckily I've had experiences managing this sort of thing over the years and has helped me steer the company through these crises into the modern day.

How do you think WebMediaBrands has changed the most?

Web Media Brands has had a few names and iterations, it first went public as Internet.com, and then JupiterMedia and then WebMediaBrands. Each one of those name changes indicates a change in our focus. There are certainly some aspects of the company that are the same. But just two years ago we had 750 employees and doing $150 million dollars. Now we have 73 employees and are doing about 10 million a year. We were also able to pay off our debts in these hard times.

Okay, we're giving you the loudspeaker to break any news, sound off on anything you don't think is sufficiently being reported or give your opinion on anything you want to get out there.

My message would be, is that we're a tremendously undervalued company – I've purchased over $5 million in our stock. Our job board alone is worth more than our market cap. Our blogs and our assets make us worth more than our current market cap. We've undiscovered as of yet, but I'm putting my money where my mouth is and buying stock as rapidly as I can because I believe I am going to make a lot of money doing it.

Now that we've got the tough questions out of the way we have a few fun ones for you. What was your first, and what was your worst job?

My first job was in book publishing for a field called scholarly reprint business with a small company on long island that doesn't exist anymore. Pretty much after that I went on my own, I started my own business about a year after working for someone else. I left the Army, started my own business and since then I've been on my own.

What was the highlight, and what was the low point of your career?

Highpoint was selling one of my companies for $300 million in cash. And then a low point was trying to sell off $81 million dollars in debt during this recent crisis.

Where do you go to get get your news?

I read the WSJ and the NYT. I get a variety of websites that deliver news to me. RealClearPolitics is a good one. That's pretty much how I do it.

Do you think print based publishing is in trouble?

Print will always be around, but primarily consumer printing. Not much B2B publications anymore, and certainly not in 5-10 years. People will still want to read novels. I don't think print has a bright future except for some very popular magazines.

Okay, this last one is Benzinga's trademark question: What was the best, and what was the worst investment decision you've ever made?

The best decision was gambling in 1990 that the internet was going to be significant – and betting my business and the future of my family that the internet was going to develop. I never dreamt it would happen like it did, but that led to me getting $300 million dollars.

The worst was not listening to someone who used to work for me, buying a company called iStockphoto when it was fledging – today it is probably worth half a billion.

Do you see any internet-like opportunities out there that might be starting that will be huge down the road?

There are obvious ones – I don't think I can alter or make a lot of money off of them – like smart phones and mobile. We are betting in our business about something called semantic web – and we have the foremost website and material in that area. If you take semantic web out to its natural conclusion, it has the ability to supplant Google. So I guess the semantic web.

Thanks Alan. That'll do it for this episode of Zing Talk. Remember to check out www.benzinga.com for more market-moving news, actionable trading ideas and insightful commentary.