The only news here is that it took this long: The New York Times, which is trying to figure out how to boost revenue and cut costs, is freezing its pension and benefit plans–for management–at the end of this year.
If you’re someone who gets paid to market to people who use YouTube, there’s a good chance you already know about TestTube, the site’s suite of experimental services. The rest of us will find interesting novelties, like “Insights for Audience”: A nifty way to find out what people like–or unlike–you are watching.
While Rupert Murdoch is busy thumbing his nose at Google, he is making more friendly overtures to other media players. Sources tell me his News Corp. may join the digital e-reader storefront that Time Inc. and other magazine publishers are putting together.
The newest twist in Google’s quest to wring more more money out of YouTube: Ads you don’t have to look at. That’s a refreshing change of pace, no?
Add one more voice to the chorus of conventional wisdom: The Web ad market has stopped getting worse, but it’s going to be a while before it starts getting healthy.
The digital disruption wave is crashing down on the ad business. One agency’s response: A line of jewelry “that takes interesting data and transforms it into wearable art.”
AppNexus, an ad-buying “platform,” has raised $5 million in round led by Kodiak Venture Partners, along with Venrock and First Round Capital. The company is one of many trying to take advantage of “real-time” bidding for Web display ad inventory.
Slowly 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.
Did 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.
Rupert 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.
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
Comcast 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.
Yesterday, 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.
Everyone 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.
Here’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.
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. Read more »
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