Shumaker comes to Hearst from DoubleFusion, the “in-game” advertising company, where she ran sales for its core games group, and was at Electronic Arts (ERTS) prior to that. Johnson spent the last three years building Hearst’s magazine sites (Cosmopolitan.com, etc.), then took off this summer to run something called Modelina.com; he has also put in time at IAC (IACI) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL.

UGO is one of many players trying to capture a piece of the market for young men between 18 and 34 who like girls, funny things and videogames, and the company, which claims 13 million monthly uniques, is often mentioned as an M&A candidate.

But Hearst says it is still looking to hire a new CEO for the spot that opened up once co-founder J Moses left in June. Hearst Interactive president Ken Bronfin is still running the unit on an interim basis.

After factoring out one-time charges and write-offs, Bob Iger and company earned 43 cents a share on revenue of $8.1 billion. Wall Street had been looking for 40 cents and $8.15 billion, respectively.

Iger: “We had a difficult second quarter due to the weak economy and other factors.”

The bright spot for the entertainment conglomerate is the same one you see at every media giant these days: Disney’s cable business. Revenue at ESPN and the Disney Channel was up four percent and operating income was up five percent. That’s because those powerhouse channels have locked in payments from cable operators that show up regardless of the economy’s state.

And that’s why you won’t see (much) programming from those channels on Hulu–there’s no way Iger is going to rile up the cable operators who pay for that programming by running it for free online.

Disney’s interactive group, which includes videogames and sites like Club Penguin, but not revenue from ABC.com and sales from Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store, saw revenue decline 17 percent, and operating income drop two percent.

Here’s the breakdown by segment (click to enlarge):

Write-down watch: Disney took $203 million in “impairment charges”–accountant-speak for “the stuff we bought back then isn’t worth much now.” That includes “$108 million related to radio FCC licenses and $46 million related to an investment in an Indian media company.”

This follows on the heels of a lousy February quarter in which the company didn’t hit expectations.

Disney (DIS) is the first of several big media companies to report this week. News Corp. (NWS) weighs in tomorrow, followed by CBS (CBS) on Thursday.

The Disney earnings call is starting now. I’ll listen in and update as warranted.

Disney CFO Tom Staggs on ad market, economy: “While we believe the pace of decline has generally stabilized, we believe ad buyers and consumers remain cautious.”

During Q&A, Iger has a long monologue about online philosophy, Hulu, etc., but my Webcast cut him off before he was finished. Don’t know whether to blame Disney or Time Warner Cable (TWC) for that one….

In any event, here’s my paraphrase of what I could get down, with a smattering of quotes:

“We found that as we move product to the Web…at least [with regard to] piracy that we’re aware of, there’s been a stabilization….We feel that if we don’t put it online…it will be demanded by consumers, and they’ll find ways.”

Research on cannibalization and piracy in general is inconclusive and some research conflicts with other research we’ve seen. “Some of this is instinct, by the way. It’s not all based on research.”

We feel media consumption is moving to the Web and that media consumption may be expanding. We think we’re better being online than not being online. We realize that Web monetization doesn’t exist yet, at least not at TV-like levels, but we believe that eventually it will.

A lot of the consumption that we’re seeing is incremental because it’s a different demographic. The average age of consumers watching ABC.com and itunes is younger than the average age of those watching network TV. The Hulu demographic is generally younger than prime-time network demographics. So we don’t believe it’s cannibalization.

In October, Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis laid off staff at his human-powered search engine. Then he announced he was hiring engineers for a mysterious new “Project A.”

Today he’s unveiling it: An “answers” service designed to compete with one of Yahoo’s most successful sites.

Like Yahoo Answers, Mahalo’s new product relies on users to answer other users’ questions. Unlike Yahoo’s (YHOO) site, Calacanis promises to give his most prolific answer-givers a chance to make money, via a virtual currency they can earn by answering questions.

The proposition: Users can ask questions for free. But they can also buy “Mahalo Dollars” using real money and reward people who answer their queries. Users can eventually cash out the Mahalo currency they earn for real dollars, with Calacanis taking a 25 percent cut.

This aligns him with a growing number of Internet execs who think they can make money via virtual goods and currencies. That’s worked well for Asian companies and a handful of Western videogames, like Activision Blizzard’s (ATVI) World of Warcraft. But the market for virtual stuff has yet to appear at most U.S.-based Web sites.

Still, Calacanis thinks he’s got a better shot of making it work next year than his original plan for 2009: Selling ads on his site besides the ones he runs from Google’s (GOOG) AdSense. “I think it’s going to be very hard to make money selling ads,” he said. “The market needs this more than it needs us out there trying to sell inventory.”

All of this supposes that people are actually willing to pay for advice they get over the Internet. I’m dubious, but then again I had no idea Yahoo Answers was as successful as it was until Calacanis walked me through the user stats in his demo*: 24 million unique users in the U.S., according to Quantcast.

I did try it out myself, and found that Calacanis’s beta users (who are presumably incented to answer as many questions as they can) did a decent job of answering my query about moving my Palm data to my BlackBerry via my MacBook–and much better than the people at Yahoo Answers and Answers.com, who didn’t even try.

But it’s still not good enough. Looks like if I want to get this done I’m going to have to pay someone real cash.

*A note for anyone who ever has to demo a product: Find some way to watch Calacanis go through his paces live if you can. You can get a sense of the experience by reading his tutorial, or by watching video of him in action. But it’s another thing to get it in real time, and watch him simultaneously hype and soft-sell. Really effective stuff.

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

If you’re not paying attention, it may seem as if the cratering economy hasn’t stopped the steady stream of start-up funding announcements.

Today, for instance, we learned that online music distributor TuneCore has raised $7 million, while CrispyGamer, a newish videogame site, has raised $8.25 million from J.P. Morgan’s Constellation Ventures.

But don’t be deceived: Almost all of the deals you’ve read about recently, as well as the ones you’ll see for the next few weeks, were closed earlier this fall.

If you want to get a sense of why these announcements will slow to a trickle going forward, scan down through VentureBeat’s discussion of CrispyGamer’s business.

Let’s leave aside the basics. The site wants to make a name for itself in the crowded world of videogame review sites by offering high quality reviews, but it’s not clear that CrispyGamer’s reviews are much different than its peers, and it’s not clear that readers are making the distinction either.

Instead, focus on the dollars, from the VentureBeat report:

Right now, the site isn’t commanding huge ad rates. It gets about a $2 CPM (cost per million, a measure of the amount of money that comes in for every 1,000 readers). Just a month ago, it looked like it would get $8 CPMs, but the economic downturn is taking a toll. CrispyGamer relies on a half-dozen ad networks to feed it the ads.”

Assume that the CripsyGamer folks, like most publishers, are inflating their advertising rates (and traffic, too) for public consumption. It’s still telling VentureBeat that its ads have been marked down 75 percent in the last month.

Yikes.

The upside, I suppose, is that CrispyGamer has advertising revenue, period. There are plenty of ad-supported start-ups that have yet to get around to actually selling ads, and it’s going to be awfully difficult to start doing so now.

And, if you want to be really generous, you could argue that videogames are going to get beaten up less badly than other sectors during the coming recession/depression/meltdown/whatever. In theory, dudes will keep buying videogames, while they hunker down in their basements, because it’s cheaper than most other entertainment options.

But CrispyGamer also says it has a staff of 20 people, including five full-time writers (what does everyone else do there?). That’s an awfully big staff to keep afloat on $2 CPMs–and it’s hard to imagine that CripsyGamers’s backers imagined that’s what they were getting into earlier this year.

[Image Credit: Itjournalist]