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Friday, November 13, 2009

Google Makes AOL’s Turnaround Task Even Harder

tim_armstrong_lgLittle by little, AOL is offering investors more and more details about what the company will look like after it spins off from Time Warner. But the more AOL discloses, the less attractive the company looks. The newest problem: AOL’s steady flow of Google money is going away.

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Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Time Warner Gives Wall Street a Pleasant Surprise, but Has Bad News for Time Inc. Employees

bewkesYesterday, Viacom told Wall Street that its third quarter had been better than most analysts expected. Today Time Warner delivered a similar report: Revenue was on track, but cost savings improved the bottom line. That won’t help hundreds of Time Inc. employees who face job cuts this quarter. Meanwhile, the company can’t ditch AOL soon enough: It has already spent $100 million prepping it for a spinoff this year.

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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

A Slow-Motion Recovery: Viacom Says Things Aren’t Getting Worse

sponge_bob2Here’s another quick glimpse of the advertising market, courtesy of Viacom. The cable giant says ad sales are still down, but that the rate of decline is slowing. And in the fall of 2009, that constitutes pretty good news.

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Thursday, October 22, 2009

New York Times Delivers Some Not Terrible News: Earnings, Ad Sales Better Than Expected

new-york-times-buildingThe 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.

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Thursday, October 15, 2009

How Good Is Google’s Growth Story? Time to Find Out.

light-tunnelGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt couldn’t be any clearer: He’s been saying, over and over, that he thinks the recession is in his company’s rear-view mirror. And Wall Street has been listening: It has been steadily pushing up the search giant’s shares for months. Today we get to find out just how good Google’s growth story is.

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Monday, October 5, 2009

Microsoft Says It’s Done Buying Search. Writing Big Checks for Search? Different Story.

ballmerSteve Ballmer says he doesn’t expect to do much search-related M&A, which makes sense since there’s little left to buy. But he may be willing to pay for search. Ask AOL.

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Friday, October 2, 2009

Wall Street to Comcast: No NBC for Us, Thank You Very Much

the_office_promo_pic_nbcMaybe this is why Comcast rushed to knock down a story that said it bought NBC Universal from GE: It knew Wall Street would hate the idea.

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Monday, September 28, 2009

This Just In: YouTube Is Ginormous!

kingkonglivesYou already know this, but it’s always good to be reminded: In online video, there’s YouTube, and then there’s everybody else. Today’s data point: ComScore’s August video report, which shows Google’s video site generating 10 billion views and owning 39.6 percent of the market. That’s 10 billion views, and that’s just counting Web surfers from the U.S. Factor in international visitors and…it would be a lot bigger.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Measure This: Adobe Buys Web Traffic-Counter Omniture for $1.8 Billion

What do you do if you’ve got a grip on the Web/design software market? Expand into the Web measurement business, apparently. Adobe, whose Photoshop and Acrobat software offerings dominate the Web publishing business, will pay $1.8 billion to acquire Omniture, whose Web traffic measurement software is that industry’s standard.

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Monday, August 31, 2009

Spidey, Meet Mickey: Disney Buying Marvel for $4 Billion

mickey-and-friend1Get used to headlines like this: Disney is buying up comic powerhouse Marvel for $4 billion. The cash and stock deal values Marvel at $50 a share, up almost 30 percent from its Friday close.

We’ll get more details during a conference call later this morning, but if you want to kill time until then, you can play amateur M&A guy and draw up your own list of big media companies that will be buying or selling in the next year or so.

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Amazon’s Digital Music Store Takes a Tiny Step Forward, Still Trails Apple by Miles

appleamazonsmallA 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!

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Not Dead Yet! The CD Still Rules Music (But iTunes Is Closing the Gap).

victrola_ladyReady to toss dirt on the old, unloved CD? You’re going to have to wait a while. Compact discs are increasingly hard to find (at least in physical stores), but someone out there keeps buying them: The ancient format still makes up the majority of music sales in the U.S. And since album-length CDs are a whole lot more lucrative for the industry than iTunes singles, expect to see the industry cling to them as long it can get away with it.

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Friday, July 24, 2009

What Happened to the New York Times’s Web Ads?

newspaperlessThe paper’s Internet operations used to be a bright spot. But last quarter Web advertising dropped more than 15 percent. What gives?

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Thursday, July 23, 2009

Amazon Delivers: Revenue, Earnings in Line, Bezos MIA for Conference Call

bezos_shoeAmazon’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.

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A Mixed Bag From the New York Times: Q2 Costs Got Better, Ads Got Worse, and Web Dollars Disappeared

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.

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About Peter

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 »

Ethics Statement

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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