Shoestring opportunity

TV Guide was purchased for more than $3 billion, back when a billion dollars was a lot of money. At one point, it was worth more than ABC or NBC.

CMP, like many other trade magazine publishers, is busy consolidating, laying people off and closing magazines as they try to move to digital.

Put those two facts together and there's an opportunity. In fact, a bunch of them.

Who is curating YouTube? Who's the TV Guide of a world with a million channels?

We don't need someone to point us to goofy edited scary car ads. What we need are tiny, specialized sites that obsess about specific industries. Is there a good video every day about how to do better real estate sales? If there isn't, there soon will be. Or for heart surgeons?

For every segment where there is currently a trade magazine, I believe there's an opportunity to build a blog-like, woot-like, ad supported page that finds the good stuff. Jeff Jarvis, who ironically used to work at TV Guide, is already doing this with politics.

Like most opportunities, this one will be obvious later. And then it'll be too late for most of us to get in.