Vevo, the music industry’s attempt to create a Hulu-like hub for its videos, is going to attract a lot of eyeballs when it launches later this year. Here’s the guy who’s supposed to attract advertisers: David Kohl, a former Nokia executive who starts work today as the site’s sales boss.
CEO Carol Bartz explains what Yahoo is getting for its $100 million ad campaign, its first global marketing effort, which was launched today in New York during Advertising Week.
Here’s the rundown of Bartz’s press conference on the branding blowout.
Remember when the analysts at Credit Suisse decided that YouTube was losing close to half a billion dollars a year? That was then–five months ago, to be precise–and this is now: Those same analysts estimate that Google’s video site is losing a mere…$410 million a year.
Kai-Fu Lee, the head of Google’s China operations, is leaving the company this month to start his own company. Lee had a four-year run that began with a bang: Google poached him from Microsoft in 2005, which kicked off a legal battle between the two rivals.
Big, beautiful high-def TVs are so plentiful and so cheap that nearly everyone who wants one has one. So what can TV manufacturers do to goose sales? Add new features and hope consumers clamor for them.
Hence, Sony’s announcement that it’s making a big bet on…3-D TVs. CEO Howard Stringer is using the IFA Technology Show in Berlin to announce that Sony will make 3-D Bravia sets.
And 3-D Vaio laptops. And 3-D PlayStation3s. And 3-D Blu-ray DVD players.
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.
When videogame sales tank, what happens to sales at the world’s biggest videogame retailer? The answer shouldn’t be a surprise, but somehow the performance that Gamestop put in this morning managed to catch Wall Street off guard anyway.
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!
Economists may be declaring that the recession is over, but declarations won’t do much for media businesses that have seen their ad dollars disappear. But here’s a bit of (very) cautiously optimistic news for them: Two reports from Wall Street research shop Sanford Bernstein noting the mildest of turnarounds.
As predicted, TV ad sales are down. And as predicted, TV networks are hoping they come back sometime in the next year, along with the economy. In the meantime, what do cheap TV ad prices do for Web video sales?
Amazon’s Q2 was just what Wall Street was expecting–which in Wall Street’s perverse logic means that Wall Street will be disappointed. Amazon delivered net sales of $4.65 billion and earnings of 32 cents per share; consensus called for $4.67 billion and 32 cents. Jeff Bezos might have been able to allay investors’ worries, but he was a no-show for the conference call.
Be very careful about reading too much into this. But for what it’s worth, several newspaper publishers are now announcing that things are looking…“up” is the wrong word. Let’s try “less bad.” And let’s see what the New York Times has to say tomorrow.
Vanity Fair’s prescient decision to put all of Todd Purdum’s Sarah Palin profile on the Web last week paid off big on Friday. But it would have done even better had the story featured a slideshow with photographs of attractive young women.
Even as the rest of the retail world stumbled in the past year, Amazon kept cruising and increasing market share. So if a cratering economy can’t hurt the e-commerce giant, what could? Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney throws out a suggestion: Movies, books and music–the same stuff that helped Amazon get the lead it enjoys today.
Never say never: Condé Nast, which is closing down its Portfolio business magazine, has decided not to turn off the lights at Portfolio.com. Instead, it is shifting control of the Web site–essentially, the Portfolio.com address and a couple years of archived content–over to American City Business Journals, its corporate cousin in the Advance Publications family.
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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