I’ve been reporting a steady drip of cautiously optimistic forecasts for the ad business, but this one is less sunny: A JP Morgan survey of ad buyers says they’re unlikely to boost spending until next year.
Here’s the big media deal everyone has been waiting for. Or at least, here’s the report: Sharon Waxman of TheWrap reports that cable giant Comcast is buying all of NBC Universal from GE for $35 billion. Comcast says the report is “inaccurate.”
Google marked down AOL’s value from $20 billion to $5.5 billion earlier this year. That’s still too high, argues a JP Morgan analyst.
Another month, another half-point: Microsoft’s search market share crept up again in August, according to the newest numbers from comScore. Since Steve Ballmer and company launched Bing at the end of May with a $100 million marketing push, they’ve moved from eight percent to 9.3 percent. So: If you’re Yahoo, and you’re about to kick off a Bing-sized marketing blitz of your own, do those numbers give you encouragement or pause?
The announcement from RealNetworks that Apple had approved its iPhone app–all you can eat music, to go, for $15 a month–gave the company’s stock a brief jolt yesterday. That’s over now: Wall Street seems to have thought about it and concluded that people won’t pay a monthly fee for music, even on an iPhone.
Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest retailer, but online, it’s still a relative piker. Now the company is trying to change that by opening up its Web store to other retailers–just as its biggest competitors already do. But no need for Amazon and eBay to start sweating just yet.
Microsoft slowly claws back a bit of share from Google, as well as Yahoo, its partner to be. But despite a huge ad blitz, there are probably more than a few people who have no idea that Bing is a “decision engine,” or what that means.
Have you bought a Kindle? Do you plan on buying a Kindle? If you answered yes to either question, you’re part of a not-that-small group: JP Morgan estimates that some 10 million Americans either own one of Amazon’s e-book readers or plan to get one soon. Meanwhile, whatever happened to Amazon’s plan to bundle newspaper subscriptions with its DX reader?
We’ve seen multiple studies showing a boost for Microsoft’s search share since it launched Bing a month ago, and now comScore weighs in and says the same thing. ComScore is the market mover when it comes to this stuff, so it will be interesting to see how Wall Street digests the news. My gut: Not a needle mover.
JP Morgan has good news for Microsoft: Its massive ad campaign for Bing is working just fine. The bad news for Microsoft: For most people, Google is already working just fine.
Take a bow, J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan: You predicted that AOL would report an 18 percent drop in ad revenue for the last quarter of 2008. And it did! For your next trick: Tell us whether new AOL ad boss Greg Coleman can do anything about those numbers.
Back to grim news: A bad economy and bad timing mean that the DVD business, once a source of strength for Hollywood, is going to be a weakness. “Home entertainment revenue” may shrink five percent or more this year, which is particularly bad news for Viacom and Time Warner.
Want a break from gloom and doom about the state of the magazine industry? The industry’s trade association is happy to help. Or at least, to try to help, with some sort-of-true but not-that-relevant happy talk.
Along with a $25 billion write-down, Time Warner announced that operating income would be lower than it had predicted for 2008, in part because of weakness at AOL and Time Inc. J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan thinks that means AOL ad revenue fell off a cliff at the end of the 2008.
As predicted, Sam Zell’s Tribune Co. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In the company’s initial filing, it lists assets of $7.6 billion and $12.9 billion in liabilities. Much of that debt belongs to big banks, of course–J.P. Morgan has more than $1 billion by itself. But Tribune owes lots of money to lots of media companies, too.
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.
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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