Media Industry Archive

Just a quick note, if you’re a Twitter-aholic, that, for whatever reason, Sunday seemed the perfect day for the first TWTRCON, a conference, as is becoming all the rage, about Twitter. You can follow what speakers ranging from @guykawasaki to @mchammer are saying at #twtrcon. This time around, the conference theme is about using Twitter for business, which, yes, I admit, leads to the...

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As you probably know, one of the most perplexing things about the online ad market is the inability of some very popular sites, such as YouTube to monetize themselves. Well, look out. Went on that site today and found something I hadn’t seen before — a super-sized Mustang ad running across the entire top of the home page, making it more or less impossible to miss. Adding to its...

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Remember the upfront? That market where the majority of advertising is sold for the coming year following the upfront presentations, which wrapped up a week and a half ago? Where’d it go? Is it happening? Did everyone enjoy the merlot and canapes and then decide they’d be fine, thank you, spending their ad dollars on the Internet? No. But, the ad and media trades are reporting that...

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Far be it from me to jump on the Susan Boyle bandwagon, because from a financial standpoint in this country, there isn’t one. However, on this, the day of the “Britain’s Got Talent” final, I found myself being interviewed by the BBC World Service about the difficulties YouTube, and the media companies who own the show, have had in monetizing her online video stardom....

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So, the phenomenon of people shifting some of their video consumption from TV to the Internet has a name: it’s cord-cutting, suggesting, perhaps, that there is some electronic umbilical cord which connects us to the TV, and that switching to the video-on-demand world of online represents rebirth. OK, that analogy is a bit over the top, but according to data Nielsen released this week,...

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Although reports of newspaper execs holding a “secret meeting” to discuss how to charge for their online content were circulating here and there around the Web yesterday, there was, in fact, nothing particularly secret about what actually occurred. Senior execs from most major U.S. newspaper companies, including Hearst, Gannett, Scripps, The New York Times, the Media NewsGroup, the...

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Been meaning to link all week to a feature story in Adweek about Hulu, the most exhaustive 3000 words I’ve yet seen on the site’s popularity — and ad model problems. As I’ve noted in previous posts, given the site’s standing as the second most popular video site, and as the go-to provider for video content advertisers are comfortable with, it’s astounding just...

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There’s an excellent resource for the business-minded person called 24/7 Wall Street, and earlier this week the site published perhaps the most insightful analysis of Twitter I’ve seen to date, under the title “The Ten Ways Twitter Will Permanently Change American Business,” by Douglas A, McIntyre. This post is reoriented to focus on the media industry specifically, but...

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It’s been an odd week for me and my relationship with the venerable Wall Street Journal: On Tuesday, I cancelled my online sub, which, at $150, seemed not worth the money I’ve been spending on it. On Wednesday, UPS delivered a box of wine from WSJ Wines, my husband’s new way of getting a lot of wine (relatively) on the cheap. And all week long, I’ve been cribbing...

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AOL to be spun off — Last night, the board of Time Warner approved spinning off AOL into its own separate company. The spin-off had been planned for months, nearly ten years after the two companies completed the largest merger in American history. Time Warner will buy out Google’s five percent stake in AOL in the third quarter, and AOL will retain its declining dial up business that...

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