The thought process on both Yahoo trading tries was the same—in the digital media landscape, eyeballs are the new audience. In a few short years, plasma TV’s, computer monitors and phone screens will serve customized content to end users as networks morph into channels in the next-generation digital experience.

Through that lens, Yahoo has the largest television audience in the world with upwards of 500 million viewers. It simply needs to program those pipes with content and monetize its massive captive eyeball base. Either it’ll do it—and it very well could—or someone else will step in to do it for Yahoo.

I view our Minyanville Media model as a wagon wheel—a central hub with “spokes” that extend outwards in several ancillary directions such as professional financial products, animated television shows, an immersive children’s community, advertising, licensing, merchandising, books and so forth.

When our management team meets, we discuss potential wagons to which Minyanville might one day affix itself. None of these situations are imminent—we enjoy the “Switzerland status” that allows us to stay true to the roots with which we have grown—but those discussions allowed us to identify the “wagons” in the marketplace.

There are five: News Corp (NWS), NBC-Universal (GE), Viacom (VIA), Time Warner (TWX) and Disney (DIS).

When I arrived at work this week following recent knee surgery, my first order of business was to buy some April Yahoo calls. I didn’t bet the ranch—it’s a starter position with no discernable catalyst and considerable market risk—but directionally, that’s how I want to be positioned.

Yahoo has tremendous franchise value with global reach and the potential to reshape the digital media landscape. It must reinvent itself from a portal to a platform that is a primary destination for content consumption and customization.

If you put a water pistol to my head and asked me whether Yahoo will be a standalone entity this spring, I would offer that Disney could emerge as the most likely suitor

The House of Mouse buying Yahoo makes strategic sense for both organizations as they prepare for the next phase of the digital age.

One has digital distribution pipes throughout the world while the other has a massive library of content and an evolving medium in animation. I’ve got no edge or insight that this transaction takes place, just instinct and intuition that it’s an intuitive fit.

Walt Disney once said that all our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.

Yahoo shareholders around the world would be wise to wish upon this star.
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