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All posts tagged ‘advertising’

Thursday, November 5, 2009

YouTube’s Newest Partner: Will Ferrell

will ferrellSlowly but surely, YouTube has been able to bump up the number of “premium” content creators willing to hand over some of their stuff to the world’s biggest video site. Here’s yet another one: Funny or Die, the comedy site backed by Will Ferrell, Sequoia and HBO, among others.

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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

MySpace’s “Work in Progress”: Losing Money and Traffic, Blowing Google Guarantees

jokerDid Rupert Murdoch wait way too long to fix MySpace? It’s easy to get that impression from the News Corp. earnings call today.

The takeaway: The site is losing traffic and money and is going to get at least $100 million less from Google than it once thought. “It’s a work in progress,” News Corp. says, over and over again.

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News Corp. Saved by Movies and Cable, Hammered by Broadcast and Print

rupert-murdochRupert Murdoch and company aren’t exactly celebrating, but they did provide a better earnings number than Wall Street expected. They can thank Fox News, and yet another “Ice Age” movie. Not helping the cause: The company’s broadcast TV and newspaper properties. Not very relevant: MySpace, et al.

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Why Time Inc. Is Slashing Jobs: The Chart

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes kicked off his quarterly earnings call by explaining why the company is cutting hundreds of jobs in its Time Inc. magazine unit.

But if you’re impatient, you can simply look at this grim chart, which details the publisher’s Q3 performance

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Comcast Won’t Talk About NBCU, Will Talk About Internet Video

fancastComcast couldn’t mollify Wall Street about its pending deal to buy NBC Universal this morning, because it refused to talk about the deal at all. The company did spend time, though, explaining the peril and possibilities that Web video poses for the cable giant.

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Time Warner Gives Wall Street a Pleasant Surprise, but Has Bad News for Time Inc. Employees

bewkesYesterday, Viacom told Wall Street that its third quarter had been better than most analysts expected. Today Time Warner delivered a similar report: Revenue was on track, but cost savings improved the bottom line. That won’t help hundreds of Time Inc. employees who face job cuts this quarter. Meanwhile, the company can’t ditch AOL soon enough: It has already spent $100 million prepping it for a spinoff this year.

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Netted, a Web-Centric Tipsheet, Tries Squeezing Into Your Inbox

mailboxEveryone loves to complain about email. Except for the growing batch of entrepreneurs using it to launch newsletter businesses. Latest example: Netted, a Web-centric recommendation guide from the guys who bring you the Webby Awards.

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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

A Slow-Motion Recovery: Viacom Says Things Aren’t Getting Worse

sponge_bob2Here’s another quick glimpse of the advertising market, courtesy of Viacom. The cable giant says ad sales are still down, but that the rate of decline is slowing. And in the fall of 2009, that constitutes pretty good news.

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Monday, November 2, 2009

Apple’s iTunes Pitch: TV for $30 a Month

appletvWould you pay $30 a month to watch TV via iTunes?

That’s the pitch Apple has been making to TV networks in recent weeks. The company is trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service that would deliver TV programs via its multimedia software, multiple sources tell me. The industry finds this idea both tempting and terrifying.

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Hearst’s UGO Gets New Blood, Still Needs CEO

Hearst’s dude-centric UGO site, which has been without a permanent CEO since June, is still looking for a new boss. But in the meantime, it has some new blood: The company has brought in Hearst veteran Christopher Johnson to run programming and product strategy and hired Julie Shumaker to run 1UP, the gaming site it bought earlier this year.

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Friday, October 30, 2009

Apple Ad Guru: I’m Not Going Anywhere

apple adLee Clow, who gets credit for a couple decades worth of Apple’s iconic advertising campaigns, wants us to know that he isn’t going anywhere. Cool! Now, take a look at some Apple ads.

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BusinessWeek’s Future Is Cloudy, but Better Than It Could Have Been: The Grim Non-Bloomberg Scenario

clint-escapesBusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.

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Bad News From the Washington Post: Ad Sales Slide Again

newspaperlessMany newspaper publishers say the ad sales slump has stopped, but not at Wapo: Both print and Web ad declines accelerated over the last quarter. Newsweek, meanwhile, saw its ad sales drop by half.

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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Surf’s Up? News Corp. Mulling Sale of “Action Sports” Channel Fuel TV.

fuel.tv_logoNews Corp. is reportedly interested in purchasing the Travel Channel from Cox for something like $800 million. Here’s one way to help pay for a small piece of that deal: Sell off Fuel TV, its modest surf, skate and snowboard-themed cable channel.

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Layoffs Come to the Wall Street Journal, Too: Boston Bureau Closing

The layoff ax swings close to home today: The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau, which will result in up to nine job losses. News Corp. which owns the Journal as well as this site, has been pouring resources into the paper, but the Journal certainly isn’t immune to the pressures that all print publishers are under these days

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About Peter

Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider.

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Ethics Statement

Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.

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