Media Industry Archive

Hulu’s traffic down — After an October fueled by Tina Fey’s parodies of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Hulu has seen its traffic dip 10 percent in November. Hulu was one of two sites on the Internet where viewers could legally watch Fey’s popular caricature (the other being NBC.com). Despite the drop, Hulu’s traffic has been on the rise since leaving beta...

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Since posting one of my most popular columns ever here at BNET on Thursday, commenting on the layoffs at NPR, I have been flooded, ironically, with comments and inquiries about whether a possible solution to the current catastrophe sweeping traditional media might just be the non-profit business model employed by companies like public broadcasting. According to several of the media execs...

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Times are tough for all media, and local TV stations are no exception. But there are some promising online revenue trends for local stations that, while not substantial enough to offset double-digit revenue drops predicted in 2009, will at least soften the blow. Local television ad revenue will drop about 6 percent in 2008, or roughly $1.5 billion, according to the Television Bureau of...

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Advertising Age’s Nat Ives reports this happy holiday news: that an organization calling itself ASSME (yes, ASSME), is having a holiday party on Wednesday night at a Manhattan bar that, fittingly, is an homage to the 1920s. ASSME has nothing to do with ASME,  the American Society of Magazine Editors; that’s a completely different organization, for employed people. No, ASSME is The...

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Five months after merger, CBS and CNET trim staff — After purchasing CNET for $1.8 billion in July, CBS (this blog’s parent company) has cut roughly 275 employees from a variety of media properties including last.fm, GameSpot, CBSNews.com and CBSSports.com. TechCrunch has the exact memo sent to employees.  [Source: TechCrunch] Washington Post’s CEO jumps to Facebook —...

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It’s somewhat alarming, but not at all surprising, to see that yesterday’s New York Times’ story titled “YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money” has leaped to the top of the nytimes.com’s most emailed business stories. It focuses on one money-making producer of a celebrity gossip show who apparently makes six figures in annual income from his ad revenue split...

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NPR announces cuts — National Public Radio will cut 64 employees, or seven percent of its work force. Many of those cut will come from cancelled shows Day to Day and News and Notes.  NPR also noted that corporate sponsorships are also down, thus increasing the company’s projected operating deficit from $2 million to $23 million.  [Source: PaidContent] Newsweek trims down —...

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It looks like few, if any, media organizations will escape whole from the current economic meltdown — regardless of business model. For the first time in a quarter century, National Public Radio has cut a substantial portion of its workforce. The network announced that it is letting go 64 (7 percent) of its 889 employees, to address a $23 million shortfall. It is also eliminating two...

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Given my longstanding support for Google’s efforts to create a digital archive of book and newspaper content, it should surprise nobody that I am positively oriented toward the company’s recent announcement that it will henceforth include print magazines in its ambitious effort to preserve pre-web content for future generations. Although I had a great deal of trouble myself today...

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Fifteen years ago, the author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, etc.), published these words in one of the first issues of a brand new San Francisco magazine called Wired: “I want to focus on another dinosaur, one that may be on the road to extinction. I am referring to the American media. And I use the term extinction literally. To my mind, it is likely that what we...

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