Did Rupert Murdoch wait way too long to fix MySpace? It’s easy to get that impression from the News Corp. earnings call today.
The takeaway: The site is losing traffic and money and is going to get at least $100 million less from Google than it once thought. “It’s a work in progress,” News Corp. says, over and over again.
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.”
Here’s a front-page story the New York Times would rather not be running: The paper is warning readers to be aware of bogus ads running on its Web site.
The paper says “some readers” have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn’t spell this out, it has likely had its site hijacked by a “malware” scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.
Last week, Amazon acknowledged that it deleted some copies of “1984″ and “Animal Farm” from customers’ Kindles. So what book will be next?
Because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or remote-anything removal, for that matter–altogether. Does that worry you? It should.
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.
Amazon has explained why it has been deleting some novels from its customers’ Kindles: It shouldn’t have been selling them in the first place.
Amazon says the copies of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984″ that it removed, without warning, from some Kindles this week are “illegal”, because the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell them. Won’t happen again, the e-commerce giant says. Sort of.
Remember the good old days of 2002, when many of us were out of work and the Dow was hovering around 7300? OK, so things haven’t changed that much, after all. Here’s a reminder of Web 1.0 buzzwords that seemed novel at the time, but have proved surprisingly–and in some cases, frustratingly–resilient.
For much of 2008, the big ad conglomerates seemed unaffected by the global slowdown. But that had to stop sometime: Omnicom Group just announced that its fourth-quarter revenue and earnings dropped seven percent and 13.7 percent, respectively. The good(ish) news: The company thinks things will stink for at least another nine months, but sees a light at the end of the tunnel.
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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