While Rupert Murdoch is busy thumbing his nose at Google, he is making more friendly overtures to other media players. Sources tell me his News Corp. may join the digital e-reader storefront that Time Inc. and other magazine publishers are putting together.
Digital music entrepreneurs Dave Goldberg and Bob Roback, who built up Launch Media in the 1990s and ran Yahoo’s music group for much of this decade, are trying their hands at tunes again.
This time, though, they’re not trying to convince consumers to pay for music or asking advertisers to subsidize it. Instead, they’re trying to act as a middleman between labels and publishers who own music and advertisers, Hollywood and other folks who want to use the tunes for commercial purposes.
No surprise that Americans are dropping their newspaper subscriptions, as a new batch of numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations showed yesterday. But before you file this under “death of newspapers,” something to ponder for a second: This might not be the worst news in the world.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt used the opening moments of a New York City press conference to reinforce a message he’s been delivering for several weeks: The worst is over, things are looking up, and Google is spending accordingly.
Time Inc. has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet. Publishers like the idea. What will Apple and Amazon say?
Here’s your daily dose of goodish news about the Web ad business, courtesy (again) of Mark Mahaney, who says display ads are perking up. Or at least some of them are.
Web advertisers are trying hard to create ads you can’t look away from. But they can get a little too disruptive.
Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful.
A survey of some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, concludes that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent. Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent.
The hackers who duped the New York Times into serving a bogus ad last week may be part of a growing trend. Or they may just be very active: Microsoft says it has been hit by a similar attack and is suing the people behind it.
But first the company needs to figure out who the culprits are.
Rupert Murdoch has been pushing The Wall Street Journal to raise its prices. Here’s one way to try it: Levy an additional fee for subscribers who want to use the paper’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps.
Google is about to flip the switch on its long-awaited Ad Exchange.
The search giant will reportedly open up its AdX service, which is supposed to bring together ad buyers and sellers the same way a stock market does, within the next two weeks. AdX isn’t a surprise, but it is a big deal.
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.
Is Time Inc. building a Kindle Killer? Nope.
A report suggests that Time Inc. wants to get into the hardware business and produce its own e-reader.
That’s something other publishers, like Hearst and News Corp., are actually doing or have at least mulled. But multiple sources familiar with the Time Warner unit’s thinking say that’s not the case here.
Web video companies that wanted to take on YouTube are having a very hard time. But Web video isn’t going away, either, and there has to be some way to make it work for users, publishers and investors. Right?
Hence, another round of funding for 5min, a video start-up that just raised a $7.5 million B round. New investor Globespan Capital Partners led the round, and Spark Capital, the VC shop that has made several video bets (along with a big one in Twitter) made a second investment.
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.
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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