A year ago, Apple’s iTunes owned about 70 percent of the digital music market, and newcomer Amazon had just five percent. Today, Apple still has 70 percent, but Amazon has…eight percent. In other news: People are buying music from Microsoft’s Zune store!
When will the online ad market finally start bouncing back? We’ve yet to see it in Q2 earnings reports from the likes of Google and Yahoo.
But one observer says it’s already here: Ad optimization firm PubMatic reports that prices for ad-network inventory it sees have increased 35 percent since the beginning of the year.
This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…
Hulu and other purveyors of Web TV are going to see a rush of ad dollars over the next few years. But compared to the ad money going to conventional TV, that won’t mean much. A cautionary tale.
Did you wait in line this morning to buy a new iPhone 3G S? If you want to take advantage of its “tethering” feature and use it as a modem, you’re going to have to wait a while longer. And you’ll have to pay–though it’s unclear how much that’s going to cost.
Google has already shut down its radio and print advertising programs–because “they didn’t work well enough,” in CEO Eric Schmidt’s words. But the company is still hoping that its foray into TV pans out. Latest (small) milestone: The search giant is boasting that it has gotten marketers to commit “upwards of seven figures to buy ads” through its automated system.
More fuel for the “things may not be getting worse, and may even be getting a little bit better” meme that I’ve been detecting (or perhaps promulgating ) recently: Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney notes that the Internet stocks he covers are up an average of 28 percent so far this year while the tech-heavy NASDAQ is only up seven percent and the broader S&P is down two percent. If this keeps up, we might have an M&A market again. Wouldn’t that be interesting?
Ad giant Omnicom reported that its revenue dropped 14 percent and profits declined by 21 percent in the last quarter, but investors are bidding up the stock in a down market. That’s presumably because the profit slump isn’t as bad as Wall Street expected. But maybe investors are buying some of the optimism CEO John Wren doled out–sparingly–during the company’s earnings call: He thinks stimulus spending could lead to more advertising spending by the end of the year.
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.
Chris Anderson’s influential Web theorem says that endless choice equals unlimited demand. But a new study argues that most people want the same stuff–and no one wants that unpopular stuff, period.
It’s now very old news that the online ad market is going to get roughed up next year. But by how much? Don’t bother guessing until the end of the month: Online ad execs say sales have basically stopped until the end of the holiday season.
Are you still thinking there might be growth in the online ad market next year? Perhaps this will disabuse you of the notion: New numbers from an industry trade group indicate that growth has already stopped for everyone except Google.
Time Inc. is cutting something like 600 employees, but for the past few weeks it has been doing so in small steps: 10 here, 30 there. That will change today when up to 250 people at Time Warner’s magazine unit are expected to get pink-slipped. Leaving the company along with them, executives from Cooking Light and Southern Progress.
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 »
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