Many people have been following the recent public dispute between Tom Cruise and Paramount pictures. Despite the fact that Tom Cruise made this studio almost $100 million dollars per film over the last few years and was consistently profitable for them for the last 14 years, they very publicly fired him this week after refusing to offer up $10 million to be used by his production company for overhead.

Now from an accountant's perspective a company that lets go of a product line that brings in $100 million in profits year in and year out because they didn't want to throw an additional $10m in expenses towards that line for maintenance or investment seems crazy.

The studios balked at Tom's ever increasing public image and acts of slightly strane behavior. However, lets be honest the guy is a superstar and probably prone to some megalomania. Notable other superstars such as Michael Jackson and Mel Gibson have done crazier things to be sure.

Plus, I'm sure there's no good will between Tom and Viacom, who also owns Comedy Central's South Park. How would you like it if you worked for a company and it started making cartoons about you being secretly gay and then making fun of your religion.

OK, so I'm not trying to take Tom's side here, but the recent split with Paramount was not really over money. The numbers showed that both sides should have continued happilly printing twenty dollar bills for the next 30 years or so.

The real reason why Tom left Paramount came about due to his desire to save the Blogosphere from Advertising!

Tom knows about marketing and media and knows the power of the blogosphere both the good and the bad. He's recently learned that the blogosphere is increasingly being used to promote products instead of soley conveying educational and information content to readers scouring the internet looking for something very very important.

Tom had read many reports about a new trend in the blogosphere. Blogging for dollars. One company had been demonized in particular for tihs trend, PayPerPost.com founded by Ted Murphy. PayPerPost.com sponsors Bloggers to freelance paid editorials, reviews and more about products and services through its concept of putting ads on blogs.

Now Tom Cruise and many other people think that promotion of products and services, but not movies is very very evil. And so Tom is rumored to be considering a public campaign to wipe out this service and return the internet back to the people free of advertising.



Technorati Tags: grain of salt, Tom Cruise, payperpost, Ted Murphy