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.
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.
The publisher delivered a pleasant earnings surprise yesterday by cutting costs. Now it’s hoping for a revenue bump, if advertisers will play along.
Condé Nast is still in layoff mode, but that hasn’t stopped the publisher from putting together an app worth writing about. It’s part of a digital magazine strategy that actually makes some sense.
Another scandal, another Gawker story, and another payday for the person who sold Gawker the news. No big deal, says Nick Denton, the blog impresario: We’ll keep doing it.
As expected, Condé Nast executives are swinging the layoff ax around the fabled magazine publisher. Today’s cuts are at Vogue, where I’m told at least six people have been let go from one of the company’s best-known titles. There will be more to come from the publisher, which shut down four magazines last week and is trying to bring down costs at its remaining titles by 25 percent.
Eric Spiegelman has a Web video hit on his hands. “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” a series of short clips featuring exactly what the name suggests, is popular, viral, and cheap to make. But he still can’t cover his costs with Internet advertising. Enter the ancillary products, like a new book deal.
Remember when the analysts at Credit Suisse decided that YouTube was losing close to half a billion dollars a year? That was then–five months ago, to be precise–and this is now: Those same analysts estimate that Google’s video site is losing a mere…$410 million a year.
In order to move from money pit to profit center, YouTube has to spend less, which is hard for the site to talk about. And it needs to sell more ads on more videos–which YouTube is happy to talk about. Hence, yesterday’s news that YouTube would start selling against “viral videos.”
More love from Google for its oft-maligned YouTube unit: Last week, Google officials went out of their way to praise the video site’s progress and said it was well on its way from money pit to profit center. Today, the company gives YouTube a pat on the back via an atta-boy blog post. Not much new here, but the message is that the Google folks are feeling ever more confident about YouTube’s prospects. But not enough to actually talk about them in concrete terms.
Next to no news from the Apple earnings call this afternoon, which is just the way Apple execs like their earnings calls. Once again, the company provided no information about CEO Steve Jobs’s health except to note that he is still scheduled to come back to work in June. And the company continued to pooh-pooh the concept of netbooks–supercheap, supersmall laptops with very little horsepower that are the hottest part of the PC business right now.
Yesterday the New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears. But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.
In the first three months of this year, the company saw ad sales drop 27 percent, and the Internet no longer helps: Web ad sales were down 6.1 percent. The company says to expect more of the same, for a while.
Google’s new 2008 proxy statement looks a lot like Google’s proxy statements from previous years: It tells us that the company’s top executives received nice bonuses, though slightly smaller than last year’s. And Google’s ruling troika–CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page–all took home salaries of $1. One smallish change: Eric Schmidt’s friends and families spent a lot more time with him on the company jet last year.
Everyone who wondered why Randy Falco and Ron Grant were still running AOL finally got an answer today: Time Warner was lining up their replacement. Google sales chief Tim Armstrong becomes chairman and CEO of the troubled Web property, effective immediately.
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 »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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