Yesterday, TechCrunch’s U.K. blogger Mike Butcher spun the tale of buyer’s remorse run amok with a report that Time Warner online unit AOL was “seriously considering selling Bebo, the social network it acquired for $850 million only a year ago,” citing poor performance and a bad advertising market.

Later, AOL went on the record saying “there is no truth to this rumor,” although Butcher insisted otherwise from his sources.

Well, actually, no. While Time Warner was crazy to pay that much for Bebo, it is not quite that nuts to sell it for bupkis.

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Last Friday, what BoomTown would call the Web’s first bona fide hit ended, as the lonelygirl15 online series finale took place with 12 video segments uploaded over 12 hours.

Now, apparently, it is time to meet EQAL, a “social entertainment company” that is still essentially the two guys–Greg Goodfried and Miles Beckett–who dreamed up LG15 and also the KateModern Web series.

Except, rather than operating out of their homes on a wing and a prayer, they are now armed with $5 million in funding.

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The thudding failure of the online-born “quarterlife” original series on network television Tuesday night, garnering some of the worst ratings in NBC’s history (after experiencing a declining Internet audience too), was loudly touted yesterday as a possible impediment to online-to-offline dreams of original content creation that Hollywood has been nurturing.

Well, it’s not. One show, which just did not work, is in no way representative of a trend, any more than the box office failure of the movie “Snakes on a Plane” meant online marketing and hype was finished.

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I have seen the future of online entertainment and–no surprise–it’s not being created by Hollywood.

That’s because people there are too busy fighting over nothing these days.
Still, Hollywood’s writers and studios come back to the bargaining table again today, resuming their discussions to settle the strike that has been going on for three weeks now.
The Writers [...]

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So when, if ever, will there be a truly bona fide Internet hit?
And please, pretty please, it just can’t be “lonelygirl15″ (pictured below) and some clever music videos.

The lack of lasting and profitable professional content online is once again in sharp relief with the writers’ strike now taking place in Hollywood.
In a Wall Street Journal [...]

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One of the more interesting things about my interview yesterday with Mike Volpi of Joost–Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here–was our discussion about what kind of original and high-quality material will be created on the Web and how popular it will be.
It’s certainly been a hit-or-miss proposition, since the Internet was [...]

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