Media Industry Archive

Sony joins Vevo — Sony Music Entertainment has announced it will be joining Universal Music Group on Vevo, a site for premium music video content. Described as “Hulu for music videos,” Vevo is set to launch later this year. In exchange for contributing cash and content, Sony will become an equity partner in the venture. Vevo is also said to be courting Warner Brothers as well....

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In the comments thread following his excellent piece about NPR over on Mashable, Josh Catone documents one of the key business reasons public radio is faring better during the current media industry shakeout than are many commercial networks. It boils down to NPR’s diversified set of revenue sources. A surprising number of  people, including some who should know better, think NPR is...

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A recent report about the global newspaper industry published by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), and aptly titled “Moving Into Multiple Business Models,” identifies the key questions newspaper execs should be asking themselves in these troubled times. Is your brand identity clear - both internally and externally - and focused on what differentiates you from your competitors? Are...

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Feel free to take me with a grain of salt here, but I think Conan O’Brien is onto something in terms of how to use social media tools to build buzz for his new “Tonight Show.” Here’s the recipe: Make fun of Twitter. Sit back as Twitterati share joke. Watch “Conan O’Brien” become a top trending topic on Twitter. Measure buzz. Repeat. In show no. 2,...

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News Corp. chief digital officer Jon Miller spent part of one of his first public appearances since joining the company making it clear that a return to a paid content model — as in paid by consumers — is all but inevitable. Mostly (though sadly The Hollywood Reporter, which conducted the interview, doesn’t seem to have uploaded video of it), Miller was talking about the...

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So much of the news about the U.S. media industry is about short-term trends and emergencies that significant indicators about future growth opportunities are often overlooked. Meanwhile, the lines are being drawn for for a series of Battle of the Titans that will have repercussions in various sectors for years. Take eBooks, for example. It’s become clear in recent days that Google...

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Was perusing The Wall Street Journal’s chart of General Motors ad spending by medium from yesterday (the content is free), and the one statistic that really stood out is that, in the first quarter of 2009, GM actually increased spending in newspapers by 150.4 percent to $112 million, a bright spot that is completely out of sync with the Newspaper Association of America’s first...

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YouTube launches YouTube XL — Only two days after the release of Hulu desktop, YouTube has released YouTube XL, a portal of the site optimized for viewing while on the couch. The site is formatted for big screen viewing with many of the extra features stripped out to simplify the layout and controls. YouTube also released a remote control application to control the player from a Google...

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Granted, Twitter is the expanding faster than any other galaxy in the digital universe, but it still has a long way to grow before it can catch up to Facebook, which, according to a new report from Nielsen Online, remains by far the social media site where users spend the most time. Measuring the time spent on these sites (ToS) is getting to be a little like astronomy because the numbers are so...

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Except for the fact they have not been able to sufficiently monetize their content online, many print publications are attracting substantial traffic to their websites. Seeking Alpha has released a list of the “top ten” print sites for April, with The New York Times leading the pack. These ten sites account for almost a quarter (24.72 percent) of all traffic to the universe of U.S....

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