Media Industry Archive

With Microsoft’s talks with Yahoo about an advertising partnership back on, it’s time to take a look at search share, as I did several months ago, and, more specifically, at how Yahoo and MSN as a joint search venture stand up to Google. As was true back in January, their share of searches continues to slip, sliding to a combined 26.1 percent from 27.4 percent according to Nielsen...

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I spent most of the last week in the obviously beleaguered Boston newspaper market, where the hand-wringing over the possible demise of the Boston Globe resulted in this weird navel-gazing exercise in yesterday’s paper. Meanwhile the tabloid Boston Herald chugged along, happily coasting on a river of stories about the Vermont sea captain (local angle!) who, this morning, was released from...

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There is a new storm gathering over an online media company this weekend, and this time it is Amazon. It appears that the Seattle-based discount merchant is imposing what writers believe is censorship by removing sales rankings and searchability for books that, according to some sort of questionable standard, are deemed “objectionable.” This dark category appears to focus on gay and...

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Thanks to first-rate investigative work by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, we now know that companies including Apple, Skype, Flip, StubHub and Box.net have started paying Twitter users to hawk their products. Yuck! It’s all part of an effort to monetize the fastest-growing online phenomenon since, well, since the web was born. It works like this: Twitter’s new new...

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Maybe some people like to say, “I told you so,” but I’ve been around way too long to feel any such pleasure when one of my lonely analyses turns out to have been right on, some 15 months later. Probably the only reason you are reading my posts here at Bnet at all is due to a certain piece I wrote on one of my personal blogs, back in January 2008, expressing my skepticism about...

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YouTube and Universal to launch music site — Google and Vivendi will be launching a new music video site featuring artists signed to Vivendi’s Universal Music Group. The new site, dubbed “Vevo,” will be a Hulu-like site featuring Google’s technology and UMG’s content. Vevo will also have its own channel on YouTube with a uniquely branded player. UMG...

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The now Web-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer is “encouraged” by traffic data since it shut down its print edition in mid-March, according to a story this morning in Editor and Publisher.  Here’s what qualifies as encouraging: an increase in Web traffic of 1.2 percent, or 1.25 million page views, as compared with the same period last year, and a decline in unique visitors of...

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It’s beyond disingenuous for NBC Entertainment’s Ben Silverman to say the network is running an advertiser-and-agency only comedy showcase because it’s “partly just fun.” The lineup of Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon and a special Weekend Update segment from “SNL” is, if not a Super Bowl of stand-up comedy, at least akin to the home run...

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As we recently calculated using figures available via Compete.com, Twitter’s unique visitor total is soaring past the NYTimes.com’s this month, landing the microblogging service well up into the list of Top 50 websites. Tonight, again using Compete data, we are projecting that Twitter will pass another media giant, CNN.com, sometime early next month and crack into the Top 20 list of...

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One of the most thoughtful analyses of what is happening to the traditional media industry I’ve read lately is Adam L. Penenberg’s essay in MarketWatch in which he states: “What’s the solution? There isn’t one. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift. The big media companies with huge legacy costs pertaining to gathering, printing and distributing information...

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