Media Industry Archive

[Update: For more detail and perspective on this story, please check out Erik Sherman's take.] [Note: This blog has been updated to correct an error in the original version. Google is investing 2.6 million in 23andMe, not 2.6 billion.] One thing I like about Google is no matter how big and important the company becomes, it maintains a certain informality that is often quite admirable. Take the...

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One of the problems effecting the online advertising industry — in addition to a dismal economy — is the continued emphasis by advertisers on valuing advertising only when users click. While that methodology seems to work just fine for Google, it’s potentially crippling for content sites, since people are at them not to search for things but to consume non-advertising content, and one...

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The debate rages on over the proposed settlement of a class-action lawsuit between Google and some authors over the effort by the search giant to scan and sell out-of-print books and other print publications (including magazines). The U.S. Justice Department recently announced that it is looking into the matter, and throughout the traditional book publishing industry, as near as I can tell,...

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Like many of you, including my colleague, David Weir, I’ve been musing about what the business model for Twitter and other social networks is, particularly in light of Twitter’s role in the Iranian election protests. I wrote about this yesterday for a social media column for Mediapost; now it’s time to bring that discussion over to BNET Media. The central question: Are we...

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This has been a rough year for the Associated Press, and lately, the 163-year-old news cooperative has been feeling its age. Its execs have lashed out at the “Internet” as the source of all evil in its battle to survive the historical transition to the new world of interactive, networked, social and mobile media. They’ve also announced ambitions to become a news portal. But...

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One perplexing difficulty we face here at Bnet as we document Twitter’s prominent role the events unfolding in Iran is the young company’s utter lack of any apparent business model. As my colleague Erik Sherman outlines in a new post,  just catching a wave — even as big a one as this current spike in a news cycle — will not necessarily mean much in the long run for...

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If the TV business wasn’t so full of out-sized hype, I would’ve been shocked at the hubris of an ad I saw this morning on both the sites for Advertising Age and Mediaweek; one which, in four frames (two of which are shown here), proclaimed the “Tonight Show”’s continuing dominance of late night TV in the new, Conan O’Brien age. Dominance? At this point, less...

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If there were any doubters left about the importance of social media in the ongoing rebellion occurring in Iran, today’s intervention by the U.S. government, requesting that the micro-blogging service Twitter delay its scheduled maintenance shutdown, should put an end to any debate. Let’s take a deep breath here. A still-tiny open-source software company in San Francisco with <50...

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Pricewaterhouse Coopers has released its annual Global Media & Entertainment Outlook and, though the fact that we’re going digital isn’t lost on anyone reading this, what does jump out from the study is how rapidly this acceleration is happening, and how the revenue numbers shake out as we shift away from analog media technologies, like anything printed on paper. The study,...

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News coverage of the situation in Tehran and other Iranian cities today has reverted back to the early stages of the rebellion last Saturday, i.e., once again we have to get most of our news from social media. The reason is that the Iranian government has today banned foreign media from covering the demonstrations. The outpouring of coverage via social media continues unabated. Today, for...

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