Spanfeller’s departure comes amid a flurry of bad news for finance publications. In April, Condé Nast pulled the plug on Portfolio, its business magazine and Web site, after a very expensive two-year run. Earlier this week, publisher McGraw-Hill (MHP) announced that it was shopping BusinessWeek, and observers are floating the notion that the company may end up giving the magazine away to anyone who wants to take on its annual losses.

Time Warner’s (TWX) Fortune magazine has also been battered by the recession, which has been particularly hard on the finance, auto and luxury-good companies that business publications have traditionally relied upon. And Forbes itself has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since last fall.

In a memo to the company’s employees, Forbes CEO Steve Forbes praised Spanfeller for building out the company’s Web property, which says it receives 18 million unique visitors a month.In the aftermath of the dot.com crash, Spanfeller helped turn Forbes.com, which the family-owned company was close to shutting down, into a powerhouse.

But Forbes’s plan to take the Web property public earlier in the decade never panned out. And once Forbes sold a 40 percent stake to private equity investors Elevation Partners three years ago, plenty of Forbes employees, including me, had speculated that Spanfeller would look for a job that promised a big payout. That said, it wasn’t that long ago that Spanfeller was the victor in a power struggle with Jim Berrien, the former publisher of the Forbes print edition.

The news was first reported by AOL’s Daily Finance. Here’s the company memo from CEO Steve Forbes:

To: All Hands

From Steve Forbes

July 16, 2009

Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com has decided to step down from leading our website after nine years. In the entrepreneurial spirit that Forbes has always championed, Jim will be setting up his own media management company.

Describing his future plans Jim said, “The world of media has changed rapidly in the past 10 years and the velocity of the change promises only to increase going forward. I’ve had a great run at Forbes and have been deeply involved in the breakthroughs and transformations between traditional and digital media.  Now I see a huge opportunity to have my own media management business that will help other traditional media companies make the most of their enormous prospects in digital venues, taking all I have learned here in the past decade and applying on a wider horizon. Forbes.com has truly been a truly wonderful ride and I am deeply in debt to the Forbes family for letting me be a part of it.”

Jim has done a monumental job of bringing Forbes.com to the lead position in business websites, and secured Forbes.com as the must visit site for not only global business leaders but also anyone interested in the finest business reporting and analysis available. At present Forbes.com has 18 million unique visitors a month.

Along the way, Jim has overseen the development and growth of Forbes Digital, which includes Forbes.com, ForbesTraveler.com, Investopedia.com, RealClearPolitics.com, RealClearMarkets.com, Real Clear Sports, and Forbes Business and Finance Blog Network, which together reach 40 million unique visitors a month.

This immense growth on the digital side of the business was spearheaded, pursed, and led by Jim with enormous success. The digital world is still uncharted with few rules, and Jim’s intellect, creativity, and business acumen helped bring us our number one position. For this the Forbes family is very grateful and we wish him all the success in his future plans.

Since Elevation Partners partnered with Forbes three years ago, Jim has worked very closely with them on the growth and development and vision for Forbes.com.  Commenting on Jim’s departure, Roger McNamee of Elevation said, “Jim did a fantastic job leading Forbes.com. In an era when competitors feared it, Jim embraced and evangelized the internet, with huge benefits to Forbes and its audiences. We are grateful for his contributions over the past nine years.”

Jim will be staying through a transition period at least through Labor Day. Please join me and my brothers in wishing Jim all the best in the future, which he deserves.

The cable giant had planned on charging customers in four locations on a “consumption” plan in which they’d pay between $15 to $150 a month based on the amount of data they hoovered via the Web. But noisy opposition to the plan surfaced immediately and has been getting louder over the past few weeks.

Instead, the company says, it will spend time on “customer education” to clear up “misunderstandings” about the plan, which it still believes “may be the best pricing plan for consumers,” etc. Translation: We need more time to figure out how to do this without getting our heads ripped off. Or handing over customers to the competition.

That’s what was already happening in Rochester, where Time Warner’s plans were supposedly driving customers to Frontier Communications Co., which offered a (presumably slower) DSL service. From the Associated Press:

“‘We have gotten hundreds of calls from Time Warner customers into our call centers,’ said Ann Burr, the head of Frontier’s Rochester unit, in an interview with The Associated Press. ‘I guess it’s been a public relations crisis for Time Warner.’”

This doesn’t affect other pipe guys’ plans to institute similar caps or consumption-based pricing plans: Comcast (CMCSA), for instance, has a monthly cap on its broadband plans, and threatens to cut off customers who exceed it (thanks to Business Insider’s Dan Frommer for the fact-check).

And as of yesterday, at least, the cable guys’ trade group was pooh-poohing people who complained about the idea. Here’s Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, on his group’s blog:

“Hundreds of billions of dollars have been and continue to be invested by our industry in the deployment of broadband and now the deployment of next generation broadband; speeds have doubled or tripled in just the last few years; new and spectacular applications keep getting launched; no anti-competitive conduct has remotely occurred; and, in fact, compared to many other industries, the Internet ecosystem seems to be one of the few really healthy, growing, and creative parts of our economy with continued investment and innovation taking place every day. At a time of economic and financial challenges for our country, I for one would rather Congress spend its time on real problems, not fictional ones.”

[UPDATE: McSlarrow just put out a new post discussing Time Warner's move.]

By the way: McSlarrow, Time Warner Cable, Comcast other pipe guys with similar plans, like AT&T (T), may not have a terrible idea. But they’re going to undergo a lot of public whippings before they get this one through.

NEW YORK–Time Warner Cable today announced it would alter plans to test Consumption Based Billing, shelving the trials while the customer education process continues.

Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process.”

Time Warner Cable also announced that it is working to make measurement tools available as quickly as possible. These tools will help customers understand how much bandwidth they consume and aid in the dialog going forward.

Britt added, “We look forward to continuing to work with Senator Schumer, our customers and all of the other interested parties as the process moves forward, to ensure that informed decisions are made about the best way to continue to provide our customers with the level of service that they expect and deserve from Time Warner Cable.”

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles–in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

That isn’t going to mollify Amazon’s most vocal critics in the blog- and Twitter-spheres or the ones who ascribe the screw-up to either homophobia or nefarious hackers. But it’s almost certainly going to be the last word from Amazon (AMZN), which is about as tight-lipped as a publicly-held retailer can be.

Wall Street analysts have to beg Amazon to part with even basic financial details. If you think Jeff Bezos and company are going to get into the workings, and failings, of their online catalog, I admire your optimism.

If you’re at all interested in sports and business, it’s worth a quick read–Cuban has a nice touch at the keyboard, and really, how many other billionaires can you describe that way?

But for the time-pressed, here’s the upshot: Given that the Zell’s Tribune Company has turned into a nightmare for Zell, that price should come down, which seems to be Cuban’s thinking here:

So when it came down to it, I did what I thought was the only smart thing to do. I asked for an extension. I knew that if they got the money they wanted for the team, well my bid was not going to be high enough anyway. If they didnt, or the other bidders couldnt come up with their money, they would come back to me.

I’m still waiting.”

Who actually made the move to drop the label’s content from the world’s biggest video site is a matter of dispute, though. Both sides are taking credit for the decision.

Here’s Warner Music (WMG)’s statement:

We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists’ content to the site. Until then, we simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”

But a person familiar with the situation tells me that the two companies were close to an agreement until recently, when Warner changed its terms. In response, Google (GOOG) made the move to yank the label’s content.

Google’s blog post about the matter is more oblique. But note that it doesn’t say it is taking the music down at Warner’s request:

Sometimes, if we can’t reach acceptable business terms, we must part ways with successful partners. For example, you may notice videos that contain music owned by Warner Music Group being blocked from the site.”

As I explained yesterday, music videos are some of the most popular content on YouTube. But the videos are also money losers for the video site because it has to pay the labels each time someone views a clip, regardless of whether it’s generating any revenue. YouTube’s contracts with all of the the big labels–in addition to Warner, it has pacts with Sony (SNE), Universal Music Group and EMI–are set to expire in the near future, so there are multiple games of chicken to watch here.

Meanwhile, taking down an entire music company’s catalog can take quite a while, which means that if you head to YouTube right now, you can still find plenty of Warner stuff  there–like the Madonna channel, which has golden oldies like this one:

In July, cyclist Christopher Long was charged with resisting arrest after participating in a bike rally through New York’s Times Square. But anyone who saw the video below–and since it has generated more than 1.6 million views on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, that’s a lot of people–would have a hard time figuring out what Long did to get arrested.

And viewers might also wonder what the city of New York would do about police officer Patrick Pogan, who is the one knocking Long to the ground in the clip.

In September, charges against Long were dismissed. And now Pogan is about to be indicted–presumably for “felony charges of filing false records in connection with the police report that Officer Pogan filed after arresting the bicyclist”–reports the New York Times. Pogan could also be charged with a misdemeanor count of assault, says the NYT.

The Times, via its City Room blog, has been doing bang-up coverage of the story, which is pretty much designed to be consumed on the Web. Check out the fascinating story behind the video clip’s origins, and its journey to YouTube, here.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy:

Instead, the New York-based company has just raised a $4.5 million Series B round that its CEO, 22-year-old David Karp, says will fund it for two and a half years. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which led the company’s first $750,000 round a year ago, also led this financing. My educated guess is that its investors now value Tumblr at around $15 million.

Tumblr is a “microblog” platform that is supposed to let its users quickly create nice-looking posts with a minimum of effort; it sits somewhere between Twitter and full-fledged blogs like Blogger and TypePad. It is popular with a relatively small but prolific user base: Its 500,000 users have created pages that draw 15 million unique visitors and 61 million page views a month, Karp says.

Money? Nope. Tumblr is free–and has no ads cluttering up its hipster vibe.

Way back in 2007, those kinds of numbers would have been catnip for the likes of Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO). Now, though, even deep-pocketed buyers aren’t racing to snap up revenue-free start-ups. But Karp says raising money from his previous investors was easy: “These guys came to us with a deal that made us incredibly comfortable.”

Karp says he’s going to start generating money in early 2009. Not by selling ads on his members pages–Karp thinks the site will eventually incorporate ads in some way, but not yet–but by selling users “premium” services, most of which he’s not ready to describe. He does promise they will be “really sexy.”

More practically, Karp points out that other Web services, like the WordPress blogging platform and Yahoo’s Flickr photo service, have been able to upsell many of their users with goodies like extra storage. He figures many of his users will pay up, too.

The new money means he’ll have time to prove his thesis. Karp has just doubled his staff–which means there are now all of six people on payroll. One of them, hired in September, is John Maloney, Karp’s former boss at Urban Baby, where he started his Web career. Maloney is now in charge of business operations.

The money also means there are heightened expectations. Karp has done much more than people twice his age (and has the press clips to prove it). But the newest funding round means his investors think the company will be worth as much as $50 million by the time he sells it or raises more cash. In order to prove them right, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.

[Image Credit: David's Log]

But I’m quite glad I’m wrong. Cuban can’t help himself, and has already begun waging a high-profile campaign against the regulators who are suing him.

Yesterday, someone in Cuban’s camp gave the New York Times what is purportedly an email from a SEC lawyer to Cuban; the letter seems to indicate that Cuban and the SEC had already been feuding over “Loose Change,” a documentary Cuban had funded that is critical of President George Bush.

Today, Cuban uses his personal blog to sound off against the SEC once again. Here’s the complete text, in case Cuban (or his lawyers) has second thoughts about carrying this on in public. But we don’t think he will:

November 18, 2008

On behalf of

Mark Cuban

RE: SEC Civil Action in the United States District

for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division

The SEC knows their case centers on one telephone conversation between two individuals–4 years ago. The SEC claims there was an agreement between these parties to the conversation to keep certain information confidential. We interviewed Guy Faure, the former CEO of Mamma.com Inc., with whom the SEC claims Mr. Cuban made an agreement. We had a court reporter transcribe the interview. There was no agreement to keep information confidential. Here is a relevant excerpt from the interview with Mr. Faure:

CHRISTOPHER CLARK :

1) Q- We spoke earlier about you were telling Mr. Cuban in words or substance : “I have confidential information for you”.

A- Right.

2) Q- Do you recall anything Mr. Cuban said in response or reply to that statement by you ?

A- No, I do not.

The SEC knows this-they have the transcript, yet they brought the case anyway. Why? Do they have a different statement from Mr. Faure ?

Why did the SEC end their multi-year investigation of Mamma.com Inc. for alleged securities laws violations days before interviewing present and former Mamma.com Inc. executives about this matter? Was the timing a coincidence? We think not.

Any inquiries respecting this release should be directed to Stephen Best at Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP (202) 346-8735.

——————————

——————————Stephen A. Best

Partner

Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP

1101 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 1100

Washington, D.C. 20005″

[Disclosure: I once bought Mark Cuban an Amstel Light.]

Hi there. Welcome to a new blog/column/site/space carved out for me by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, who’ve invited me to join the AllThingsD.com team.

I’m a pretty boring person, but if for some reason you’re interested in verifying that, you’ve got some options.

I also hope that MediaMemo is descriptive enough of a name. But in case you’re wondering: I’ll be writing, frequently, about the ongoing battle between the established media business and the technology that is reshaping it day by day. It’s a pretty big beat, and an exciting one.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you.

Specifically, let’s talk about how you can make MediaMemo a whole lot better: By giving me feedback. Tell me what I’m missing, what I got wrong, what I need to take a closer look at. Praise is fine, too. But I’ve got a thick skin, and what I really need is an honest, thoughtful input from the best sources out there: You folks.

So please, drop me a line, as frequently as you’d like. You can sound off on any particular post by leaving a comment. Or if you’d like to be a bit more discreet, you can contact me directly: peter@allthingsd.com.

I look forward to hearing from you. Now, let’s get to work.

[Image credit: Oskay]