Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Gadget Gods Peter Rojas and Ryan Block Finally Unveil their Newest Gadget Site: Gdgt. Get it?
Does the world need another gadget site? Yes, say two of the gadget world’s biggest stars, who are launching gdgt.com today. The site is the work of Peter Rojas, who helped build Gizmodo and Engadget, and Ryan Block, who took the torch from Rojas after he moved on. Gizmodo and Engadget are the best known and most powerful of the new generation of gadget sites, which makes Rojas and Block revered by the gadget gang and able to cobble together funding. But they’re still taking on a very crowded field.
One big reason why very few ad dollars have yet to make their way from television to the Web, even though online video is booming: TV viewing isn’t shrinking. Yet. Nielsen says more Americans are watching TV than ever before–up 1.2 percent in the last quarter–and they’re spending more time watching TV, too–that’s up 1.9 percent, to a staggering 153-plus hours per month.
The traditional publishing business is grim, but if you broaden your perspective and look at the rest of the media business, things are starting to look… not horrible.
For the past year or so, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has been a consistent voice of pessimism, and he forecast an ugly economy before his big media peers did. And now he’s more upbeat than his fellow media CEOS. Here’s his opening salvo: “It is increasingly clear that the worst is over… there are emerging signs in some of our businesses that the days of precipitous decline are done and that revenues are beginning to look healthier.”
A bad quarter for Disney, but it could have been worse–at least Wall Street was expecting it. After factoring out one-time charges and write-offs, Bob Iger and company earned 43 cents a share on revenues of $8.1 billion. Wall Street had been looking for 40 cents and $8.15 billion, respectively. The bright spot for the entertainment conglomerate is the same one you see at every media giant these days: Disney’s cable business.
What does it take to add a third player to a joint venture between two media conglomerates? More than four months of negotiations. Tens of millions of dollars help, too. That’s what finally got Disney to join up with GE’s NBC and News Corp.’s Fox in Hulu, the fast-growing Web video site. Here’s what that means for the three networks and the rest of the Web video business.
Broadcast TV’s “upfront” season–the odd tradition whereby the networks try to get advertisers to buy much of their inventory in advance for the coming year–doesn’t start till next month. But once it does, it’s likely to be grim.
Apple says its customers have downloaded one billion apps for the iPhone and iPod touch from its iTunes store. You can learn more by reading one of the many stories about the milestone or by visiting Apple’s site. Or you can visit the homepages of big Web publishers like the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or CNET.com, all of which have once again handed over prime real estate to Apple for another intrusive/interesting ad.
