Media Industry Archive

Yeah, everyone but me was at AllThingsD this week, so this time, I’m linking to Kara Swisher’s interview with NBC CEO Jeff Zucker, who predicts an upfront that is going to be stronger than you previously believed! (By almost every accounting, by the way, that means it will still be down. Mediapost points to analyst reports that put the network end of the upfront market as being...

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In the minds of many media executives and most media buyers, there is still an absurd Chinese wall between broadcast and cable, which, inexplicably, leads the broadcast networks to still outpace cable in terms of the rates they can charge advertisers. But a few ratings figures from the last couple of nights. have to make you wonder why that continues be the case: The season premiere of...

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A number of trends in advertising are becoming clear this spring that have significant implications for the content side of the media industry. One is the rapidly expanding reach of vertical ad networks, like Adify Media, Federated Media, Glam Media and Travel Ad Network. Adify exemplifies this relatively young sector; it says that to date it has served roughly 25 billion ads to about 10,000...

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I guess this YouTube home page ad placement worked, because here I am blogging about an ABC special tomorrow night called “UN-BROKE: What You Need to Make Money,” which, in addition to telling viewers how to get smarter about money, is also a great example of the trend toward product integration — in which advertisers, rather than just buying boring old TV commercials on a show,...

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[Note to readers: This post has been updated -- see below.--DW] Trying to sort through today’s pile of industry reports to discern the trend lines is much like having to redesign a cranky website from the bottom up, though layers of spaghetti code. That said, here you have it: A Russian group has invested $200 million in Facebook for only a 1.96 percent stake in the company, indicating...

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Richard Branson eyes Playboy — A UK newspaper has suggested that Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Media, is considering purchasing Playboy. Playboy has been on the selling block for $300 million, despite the company only having a current market cap of $100 million. Playboy posted losses of $13 million for the first quarter of 2009. Hugh Hefner remains the controlling...

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Since the buzz this morning is about the Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD conference interview with Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, it’s time for BNET Media to join in the fun. The real action starts about halfway through, unless you’re obsessed with the minutiae of why Stone and Wiliams gave V.C. money back to investors who had backed another one of their...

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In a move that infuriated many its marketing associates earlier this year, Amazon removed the Kindle from its marketing affiliate program.  That means that affiliates who are driving eBook traffic to Amazon are not getting any financial reward for their efforts. But entrepreneurs love a void, so today eBook publisher Smashwords announced its own program, which allows authors and others to earn...

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OK, we know that print has a lot of problems, but here’s another one to add to the list: the average age of those who read print publications is aging faster than the population as a whole, according to a story in Advertising Age. If that finding is a little confusing, here’s further detail: in the last five years, the average age of the American population has increased by 1.3...

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It wasn’t back in the mid-nineties, when Craigslist was still new, that the newspaper industry truly lost its chance to retain its treasure trove of classified advertising, according to a new report, but just over the past four years. As recently as 2005, states the report from Pew Internet, only about one in five adult users (22 percent) reported having ever visited an online classified...

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