Media Industry Archive

Since all I have to offer tonight is a grab bag of sorts, let’s put the best light on it, shall we, and call it a Christmas stocking, hung thick with gelt. Okay, so I mixed my religious metaphors, we could all do a lot worse, I suspect, than getting a stocking full of chocolate candy this holiday season, when so many of our colleagues are receiving pink slips, buyouts, severance packages,...

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Gatehouse Media sues New York Times — Gatehouse Media has filed a copyright infringement suit against the New York Times over one of its Boston Globe sites. The suit alleges that Boston.com’s Your Town Newton links to content from Gatehouse’s Newton TAB publication and, through advertising and aggregation, confuses readers about the original source of the article. [Source:...

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Yesterday I posted about how the record companies (and, actually media companies in general) have no choice but to play ball with YouTube, in light of Warner Music’s decision to pull its content off the site. Today, I’d like to talk about why it may be in YouTube’s best interest to reach agreement with media and record companies over licensing content. It has little to do with...

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On the heels of the collapse of print publishing, what if online media companies start failing, as well? Or, put another way, is Web 2.0 doomed just another bubble that will pop much as did the first dot.bomb? Reporter Spencer E. Ante at Business Week obtained financial statements for Digg, and revealed a couple days ago that last year the company lost $2.8 million on $4.8 million in revenue....

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The online media news du jour is certainly Warner Music’s decision to pull all of its videos from YouTube, but, for all the headlines, one has to wonder how effective this attempt to control distribution of its content is going to be. As an experiment, I did a search early this afternoon on YouTube for “Madonna video” and the first link was to her official YouTube channel. Her...

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WB pulls out of YouTube — Warner Brothers Music Group has pulled all of their content off of YouTube after licensing negotiations with Google broke down. The two sides were close to coming to terms on a new deal. [Source: All Things Digital] Digg losing money — BusinessWeek has obtained the financials of the popular social news site Digg. The magazine reports that in the...

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Universal Music sees tens of millions from YouTube — Universal has earned nearly $100 million in income as the result of a deal that has record labels and YouTube splitting ad revenue from music videos. Google, which purchased YouTube over two years ago, has recently become more aggressive in monetizing its $1.65 billion acquisition. In addition to its deal with record companies, the...

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 Whet Moser at the Chicago Reader has done a nice bit of investigative work on the Huffington Post’s current strategy for aggregating cultural coverage, in this case concert previews. He has documented that the HuffPost is lifting entire pieces from the Reader, Time Out Chicago, Centerstage, and the Onion’s Decider. Moser details that in case after case, the HuffPost is publishing...

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Mashable has posted a list of the top U.S. social networking sites, according to Nielsen Online, and though MySpace still dominates, with a unique audience in November of 59.1 million, that stat barely counts when you compare its year-on-year growth to the no. 2 social networking site, Facebook. In that category, Facebook shows 116 percent growth compared to last year, while MySpace had 3...

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For a couple days now, I’ve been puzzling over how to evaluate a report entitled “Size Doesn’t Matter” conducted by a research company called ContentNext (which is the publisher of paidContent) that was summarized in AdAge on Tuesday. This report covered everything from the Drudge Report to The New York Times and Google News. My colleague Catharine Taylor wrote about the...

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