It’s official: You still can’t buy the Beatles’ songs on the Web, despite the efforts of a site that attempted to do so by rewriting copyright law on the fly. In other news: Have you seen this clip of Richard Pryor reading the alphabet on Sesame Street? Awesome.
Slowly but surely, YouTube has been able to bump up the number of “premium” content creators willing to hand over some of their stuff to the world’s biggest video site. Here’s yet another one: Funny or Die, the comedy site backed by Will Ferrell, Sequoia and HBO, among others.
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.
Is Hulu putting up a pay wall around its Web TV site? Nope.
Does Hulu want to charge people to watch Web TV? Yes.
Confused? Don’t be.
Here’s the explanation about what’s going on at the premium online video site.
Three years after the Google deal, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley explains some of the cryptic language in the clip that defined the Web 2.0 era. Also, he’d like you to know his site is generating more than a billion views a day.
Twitter’s status site said this yesterday: “We’re currently diagnosing the causes of an unplanned site outage that happened a few minutes ago. We are recovering from this issue now and apologize for the interruption in service.”
Earlier this year, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton announced that he was going to start paying for salacious clips, tips and other submissions, but that he hadn’t worked out the details. Looks like he figured it out: Denton says he paid the source who provided his blog network with the so-called “McSteamy” sex tapes that have earned him both a lot of traffic and a lawsuit.
How did the New York Times end up serving a fake–and potentially dangerous–ad from its NYTimes.com site over the weekend? It got paid to do it by someone masquerading as a legitimate ad buyer.
Flickr is one of the Web’s most popular photo-sharing sites. Flickr users’ camera of choice? The iPhone–even though the image isn’t great, the flash is nonexistent, and the only way to zoom is to move your hand closer.
YouTube, the world’s biggest video site, is a money loser for Google. But it may not stay that way for long, the company hinted today.
In response to a question during Google’s, quarterly earnings call today, chief financial officer Patrick Pichette contended that the company could begin making a substantial profit, someday soonish. If Google really does pull this off, it will be a remarkable turnaround project.
Here’s the beginning of the inevitable online video shakeout: Joost, the once-hyped video service that was supposed to rival Google’s YouTube, is restructuring to focus on “white label” services, i.e., a back end for other video players.
The site is laying off the majority of its 100-plus employees, and CEO Mike Volpi is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering.
You can hear the head-scratching going on at movie studios and music labels across the world: What just happened to The Pirate Bay? Reports out of Sweden are murky at best. But supposedly, a Scandinavian software outfit is buying the world’s most notorious file-sharing site for about $8 million and will create a service that pays copyright owners when people download their work. But let’s be honest: That’s never going to happen.
Here comes the battle the online ad business has been dreading: Congress is drawing up a bill that would require users to sign up to let advertisers track their online behavior–and, if you believe online publishers, more or less destroy the online ad business.
Twitter notched yet another milestone yesterday when it finally showed up on comScore’s index of Web search milestones. The catch: It barely registered, pulling down a search share of just 0.001 percent. But I’m sure that comScore is missing the majority of Twitter’s searches. So what’s the real number?
Want to watch Web clips of Barack Obama’s latest press conference (or backyard shoot-around) but worry that the Administration–or Google–is watching you? Worry no more!
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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