Warner Music Group has a mixed bag of results for Wall Street this morning: The music label’s revenue was a bit higher than analysts had expected. But even after factoring out one-time severance charges, the company lost three cents a share, and the Street was assuming it would earn four or five cents a share.
Why did Google start labeling blogs as “blogs” in its search results? Eric Schmidt thinks it may have to do with your mother.
It’s all well and good for Google to say the worst is over. But what about media companies that survive on revenue streams other than search ads?
Things should be better for them, too, says Publicis, one of the biggest advertising companies in the world. The French holding company, which announced its results today, says things bottomed out this summer.
The New York Times announced plans to cut eight percent of its newsroom payroll this week, citing “economic thunderstorms,” which suggested that this morning’s earnings results were going to be particularly unpleasant. Surprise! They’re not that awful, at least by the diminished standards of the newspaper industry.
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.
Take that, Microsoft! Meet “Caffeine,” Google’s new search engine…which looks just like the old search engine. Confused? Don’t worry–the world’s search pros are trying to figure out the difference between plain-vanilla Google and the new version, which Google is previewing via a blog post.
We saw a mini-rally in newspaper shares yesterday, based on the notion that the worst may be over for the industry. But the New York Times’s Q2 results are pretty inconclusive:
The publisher was able to take a big chunk out of costs, but revenue kept plunging, and Web ads dropped by more than 15 percent. The paper did say, though, that things got less bad as the quarter progressed, and that they’ll get slightly less bad next quarter, too.
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…
An endless ad barrage may be enough to get you to sample Bing. But it can’t ensure you’ll like the results once you try it.
That’s the conclusion Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney reached after taking Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin and comparing it to Google’s and Yahoo’s. The result: Google still delivers better results most of the time. In 71 percent of searches, Google either supplied the most relevant answer or tied with other engines. Bing did that 46 percent of the time.
For the last year or so, the Washington Post Co. has reported steadily declining results for its newspaper business–just like every other newspaper publisher in the country. But in previous quarters, it was at least able to argue that its slide wasn’t as bad as the one the New York Times was going through. It can’t say that anymore.
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 »
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