AOL formally acknowledged that it plans on a round of very large cuts: In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Time Warner unit said it plans on taking up to $200 million in restructuring charges through the first half of 2010. Earlier this week, Kara Swisher reported that AOL’s coming spinoff would be followed by layoffs of up to 1,000 employees.
Amazon won’t even tell us how many Kindles it has actually sold, so projecting how many it’s going to move in the future makes for particularly tough fortune-telling. But that doesn’t stop anyone from trying: Forrester thinks Jeff Bezos and company will move 600,000 newly discounted units this holiday season and sell 1.8 million by the end of 2009.
I’ve been reporting a steady drip of cautiously optimistic forecasts for the ad business, but this one is less sunny: A JP Morgan survey of ad buyers says they’re unlikely to boost spending until next year.
Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest retailer, but online, it’s still a relative piker. Now the company is trying to change that by opening up its Web store to other retailers–just as its biggest competitors already do. But no need for Amazon and eBay to start sweating just yet.
Hard to tell how much of the modest ad recovery we’re hearing about is real versus hoped for. But analyst Richard Greenfield says that either way, Viacom won’t be getting a boost.
Can Google’s boldest attack against Microsoft succeed? Absolutely. Even if it flops.
The newly announced Google Chrome OS won’t show up until the second half of 2010, when it will first appear on lightweight netbooks. Eventually, it’s supposed to run on full-sized PCs. But Chrome OS will start working long before consumers start booting it up next year as it forces Steve Ballmer and company to open up yet another front in their long-running war against Google.
Another vote for the “we’ve seen the worst of the recession” camp: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, talking to reporters at the big advertising festival in Cannes, says the economy should start picking up in a few months.
YouTube generates billions of views but no profits. That’s because Google’s video site only sells advertising on a small portion of the clips it shows. That may be changing, argues Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay.
It’s now conventional wisdom to expect advertising declines of 20 percent or more as the big media companies deliver this season’s earnings reports. But the giant ad holding companies that make and place those ads aren’t getting beaten up quite as badly. In fact, they’re all delivering remarkably similar results.
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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