Vizzavi: new year, new CEO, new business model

More novelties than usual in the Christmas cracker...

Vizzavi's chief executive Evan Newmark has announced his decision to quit as the company unveils a new business model. The new direction will see Vizzavi, a portal jointly owned by Vodafone and Vivendi Universal, taking a much larger cut of the revenue generated by ecommerce over networks owned by Vivendi and Vodafone. Instead of a 50-50 split, Vizzavi will now take 80 per cent of revenues from the sale of value-added services like alerts, logos and ringtones. Vizzavi will also take up to five per cent of the airtime revenue the operators make while their customers are accessing the portal. The announcement will take Vizzavi closer to meeting its target of breaking even by 2003. Even though 100 job cuts were also announced today, the group will find it extremely hard to meet that target. Chief marketing officer Guy Lawrence will take the place of the departing Newmark. Vizzavi will also have to pass a percentage of its revenue to third-party content providers, who will be providing much of the content for its portal. Vizzavi already has over 100 content providers, but many of them are believed to have sold their content for a one-off licensing fee rather than a revenue sharing deal. However, Vizzavi's rivals have been moving towards a revenue sharing model. The portal operations of Orange, One2One and mmO2 (formerly known as BTCellnet) have all put revenue sharing deals in place, with their partners taking between 91 and 50 per cent of their revenues.