Last week, Jeff Bezos made $2 billion in one day, courtesy of a massive spike in Amazon shares. That gives him more money to plow into the likes of Aviary, a Long Island-based company that makes design software. The Amazon CEO has made a second investment in the company as part of a $7 million round led by Spark Capital.
The newspaper bailout proposal you may have heard about over the last few months? The newspapers want no part of it, says an industry spokesman.
That said, the industry wouldn’t turn down some help from Congress, says John Sturm, CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. He is testifying before a joint committee this morning.
Daylife, a news aggregator that launched a few years ago with a good deal of hype but has since retreated to the back pages, has landed another investor: Getty Images has bet $4 million on the company, which has raised some $12 million to date.
You’ll be hearing about this most of the day, so best to take five minutes and watch it now: “The Daily Show” visits the New York Times.
More fuel for the “Google didn’t kill newspapers, Craigslist did” meme: A report that says the listings service has seen revenue jump 23 percent this year and will end up booking $100 million–even as the newspaper classifieds business falls off a cliff. Craig Newmark’s online classifieds site is mostly, but not entirely free–it charges for a handful of listing categories, like real estate and employment. But that’s enough to create a very healthy business, says AIM Group, which has been estimating Craigslist numbers since 2003, when it said the company booked $7 million.
I’m still not exactly sure why Google has become the chief suspect in the “Who Killed Newspapers” investigation playing out before our very eyes. Because it’s quite clear to me that the real baddie here is bespectacled, mild-mannered Craig Newmark, whose eponymous free service blew up the industry’s most profitable line of business: classified advertising. Here’s the argument in line-graph form.
The online classifieds Web site is shutting down its “Erotic Services” section under pressure from state and local officials from around the country. In its place, Craigslist will open an “adult” category. It promises to keep said area cleaner by having employees sweep it periodically for ads that are obviously soliciting prostitution, etc. It won’t keep Craigslist free of bad stuff, but it may make it harder to find.
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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