Warner Music and YouTube, co-owners of the one of the Web’s nastiest spats, are about to patch things up. How’d they do it? By cutting a deal that looks a lot like the one YouTube has already made with Universal Music Group.
Don’t say they didn’t warn you: Last week, Yahoo formally rolled out its new $100 million-plus marketing campaign. Today, the TV ads begin. Here’s what you’ll be getting if you watch AMC, ESPN, USA, Comedy Central, Bravo or any of the broadcast networks in the U.S.
It took Apple a year to move its first 1.5 billion apps from its iTunes store. It took a mere 76 days to move the next 500 million.
Web advertisers are trying hard to create ads you can’t look away from. But they can get a little too disruptive.
CEO Tim Armstrong says he’s still overhauling the Internet company in advance of its spinoff from Time Warner, but he has hopeful noises to make about ad sales. He has nothing, however, to say about chats with Microsoft.
The hackers who duped the New York Times into serving a bogus ad last week may be part of a growing trend. Or they may just be very active: Microsoft says it has been hit by a similar attack and is suing the people behind it.
But first the company needs to figure out who the culprits are.
How did the New York Times end up serving a fake–and potentially dangerous–ad from its NYTimes.com site over the weekend? It got paid to do it by someone masquerading as a legitimate ad buyer.
We saw a mini-rally in newspaper shares yesterday, based on the notion that the worst may be over for the industry. But the New York Times’s Q2 results are pretty inconclusive:
The publisher was able to take a big chunk out of costs, but revenue kept plunging, and Web ads dropped by more than 15 percent. The paper did say, though, that things got less bad as the quarter progressed, and that they’ll get slightly less bad next quarter, too.
When will the online ad market finally start bouncing back? We’ve yet to see it in Q2 earnings reports from the likes of Google and Yahoo.
But one observer says it’s already here: Ad optimization firm PubMatic reports that prices for ad-network inventory it sees have increased 35 percent since the beginning of the year.
Be very careful about reading too much into this. But for what it’s worth, several newspaper publishers are now announcing that things are looking…“up” is the wrong word. Let’s try “less bad.” And let’s see what the New York Times has to say tomorrow.
Yesterday, Google told Wall Street that its business had “stabilized” during the spring, but it may be one of the only media companies that gets to say that.
GE’s NBC Universal, for instance, just posted second-quarter results that were as bad as its first quarter. Jeff Zucker’s TV and movie unit said revenue was down eight percent, and profit down 41 percent for the three months ending June 30; in the previous quarter, revenue was only down two percent, while profit was down 43 percent.
Web video publishers are desperately trying to figure out how to make money selling ads against their clips, but Viacom’s MTV Networks says it has figured it out: Use lots of ads in each clip!
Let’s be honest. You’re not getting anything productive done with the rest of the day. Why not sit back and watch a couple of interesting ads before the weekend starts?
Funny because it’s true, almost: “For just pennies a day, you can clothe, feed, and shelter newspaper professionals.” Meanwhile, this one’s for real: The New York Times asks subscribers what they’d think about paying $5 for Web access to the paper.
An endless ad barrage may be enough to get you to sample Bing. But it can’t ensure you’ll like the results once you try it.
That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s and Yahoo’s. The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.
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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