Broadcast stations are seeing rising profit margins -- now up to 35% in the first quarter of 2009 -- across a range of publicly traded TV groups. This is an 11-point gain in profit margin -- with its ratio of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) to revenue. These results are from New York-based media investment banker M.C. Alcamo & Co.
Last fall, Alcamo said the broadcasting industry will continue to outpace the rest of the economy as a whole -- growing at a 6.0% revenue clip this year -- against an estimated 2.8% for the U.S. gross domestic product.
Next year, things will ramp up for stations, with a 11% to 15% revenue hike -- against an expected GDP growth rate of between 3.8% and 5.0%.
Read more at Media Post.
Thursday, June 24
YouTube Reaches All-Time High
According to the web metrics company U.S. comScore, 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month compared to 178 million in April. ComScore reports that YouTube saw record viewership in May with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time. The report also showed that 144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos on YouTube.com (which works out to 101.2 videos per viewer).
Read more at Tech Crunch.
Read more at Tech Crunch.
Facebook Goal: 1 Billion Users
Facebook is halfway to its goal of 1 billion global users. But to get there, the social network knows it has to crack four key markets in Asia where it's not currently the leader, founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Ad Age editor Abbey Klaassen today during the 57th annual Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The company plans to double down efforts in China, Japan, Korea and Russia. In most of those nations, the site only has 1 million users, Mr. Zuckerberg said, although he noted that Russia is doubling sign-ups about every six months right now. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has "no chance" of hitting that magic billion mark this year, Mr. Zuckerberg indicated, and while he's optimistic that Facebook has the potential to be the first social network to get there.
Mr. Zuckerberg said he's observed that usage trends on the site around the globe don't vary all that much. "By and large, people are using the service for the same thing," he said, which is engaging with a community of selected family and friends.
Read more at Ad Age.
Mr. Zuckerberg said he's observed that usage trends on the site around the globe don't vary all that much. "By and large, people are using the service for the same thing," he said, which is engaging with a community of selected family and friends.
Read more at Ad Age.
Copyright Lawsuit Dismissed
Handing Google a sweeping victory, a federal judge on Wednesday dismissed Viacom's three-year-old copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube. Viacom had alleged that YouTube infringed copyright because the site allegedly contained tens of thousands of copyrighted clips uploaded by users. But U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton in New York ruled that Google was protected by the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which broadly state that sites are immune from copyright infringement liability for material uploaded by users as long as the sites remove the material upon request. Viacom said it intends to appeal "as soon as possible."
Stanton also rejected Viacom's position that YouTube was comparable to the peer-to-peer company Grokster. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Grokster was liable because it intentionally induced copyright infringement. Stanton wrote that Grokster wasn't comparable to YouTube because YouTube removed infringing clips upon request.
YouTube is at least the second video-sharing site to prevail in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Last year, a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed a lawsuit by Universal Music Group against video-sharing site Veoh, ruling that the site qualified for the DMCA safe harbors. That judge ruled that the DMCA doesn't require sites to proactively police for piracy; rather, sites need only remove infringing clips upon owners' requests.
Read more at Media Post.
Stanton also rejected Viacom's position that YouTube was comparable to the peer-to-peer company Grokster. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Grokster was liable because it intentionally induced copyright infringement. Stanton wrote that Grokster wasn't comparable to YouTube because YouTube removed infringing clips upon request.
YouTube is at least the second video-sharing site to prevail in a copyright infringement lawsuit. Last year, a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed a lawsuit by Universal Music Group against video-sharing site Veoh, ruling that the site qualified for the DMCA safe harbors. That judge ruled that the DMCA doesn't require sites to proactively police for piracy; rather, sites need only remove infringing clips upon owners' requests.
Read more at Media Post.
TV Reporter: Shoplifted for Story
Police say a Connecticut television traffic reporter told authorities she was working on a freelance news story when she was arrested for shoplifting. Thirty-three-year-old Desiree Fontaine, a reporter for WTNH-TV in New Haven, was charged with misdemeanor larceny last Saturday at a Milford shopping mall. Police say she stole about $105 worth of merchandise including jewelry, cologne and a men's Hawaiian-style shirt.
Read more here.
Read more here.
Wednesday, June 23
Mobile Apps May Not Be Big Moneyspinners
Apple recently announced that its App Store now offers 225,000 apps, which collectively have been downloaded 5 billion times. Android Market, the storefront for the operating system that powers many other smart-phones, now boasts 60,000 apps and is catching up fast. And GetJar, an independent mobile store that offers programs for all kinds of handsets, claims 72,000 apps and 1 billion downloads.
As this is all part of the ongoing “platform war” between different mobile operating systems, the numbers should be taken with several grains of salt. The more the numbers are puffed up, not least with some double-counting, the more users and developers the respective app stores hope to attract. Ilja Laurs, GetJar’s chief executive, admits that his tally includes different versions of the same software. What is more, many apps are the mobile equivalent of marketing: they are given away to tout other wares.
In a recent study Juniper Research put last year’s revenues from mobile apps at nearly $10 billion and estimated that it will more than treble by 2015. Yet such figures are educated guesses at best, argues an analyst with a rival market-research firm which has refrained from making predictions of its own because of the paucity of data.
Apple says that it has already passed on more than $1 billion in revenues. Some developers are certainly making a killing. But success is often a matter of luck and much depends on how an app is promoted by the mobile store.
Despite the lack of hard data, at least the dynamics of the app economy are becoming clearer. And they seem to be more like the music business than the software one. On average, it takes about the same time to write an app as it does to compose a song, says GetJar’s Mr Laurs. Both cost about the same to download, $1.90 on average. In each case, some make it big but most never become hits. And apart from evergreens, such as games, utilities and programs to use Facebook and Twitter, even the most successful mobile apps often quickly fade into obscurity.
Read more at The Economist.
As this is all part of the ongoing “platform war” between different mobile operating systems, the numbers should be taken with several grains of salt. The more the numbers are puffed up, not least with some double-counting, the more users and developers the respective app stores hope to attract. Ilja Laurs, GetJar’s chief executive, admits that his tally includes different versions of the same software. What is more, many apps are the mobile equivalent of marketing: they are given away to tout other wares.
In a recent study Juniper Research put last year’s revenues from mobile apps at nearly $10 billion and estimated that it will more than treble by 2015. Yet such figures are educated guesses at best, argues an analyst with a rival market-research firm which has refrained from making predictions of its own because of the paucity of data.
Apple says that it has already passed on more than $1 billion in revenues. Some developers are certainly making a killing. But success is often a matter of luck and much depends on how an app is promoted by the mobile store.
Despite the lack of hard data, at least the dynamics of the app economy are becoming clearer. And they seem to be more like the music business than the software one. On average, it takes about the same time to write an app as it does to compose a song, says GetJar’s Mr Laurs. Both cost about the same to download, $1.90 on average. In each case, some make it big but most never become hits. And apart from evergreens, such as games, utilities and programs to use Facebook and Twitter, even the most successful mobile apps often quickly fade into obscurity.
Read more at The Economist.
Tuesday, June 22
Magazines Losing Online
Despite their coveted value, the great brands of old media aren’t proving out to be much of an asset online. And to the extent old media is relying on the value of their brands to ensure a digital future, they are headed in the wrong direction. Over the past year old media brands lost share of online audience to new media in nearly all of the traditional magazine categories.
But my new analysis shows that legacy brands are on the defensive, far more threatened by new entrants than the other way around. The upshot appears to be that upstarts’ execution is earning new audiences (and building their new brands), drawing audience on average away from more established players. The reason for this shift, and the dominance of new media in categories such as Tech News is simply that the old media magazine model is ill equipped to compete with more nimble online competitors.
While news outlets have always operated on a fast pace, magazines are at a particular disadvantage in that they are not structured to turn information around quickly. With online share falling — in some cases dramatically — now is the time for offline legacy publishers to take action and get their brands working harder before it’s too late.
Read more at Business Insider.
But my new analysis shows that legacy brands are on the defensive, far more threatened by new entrants than the other way around. The upshot appears to be that upstarts’ execution is earning new audiences (and building their new brands), drawing audience on average away from more established players. The reason for this shift, and the dominance of new media in categories such as Tech News is simply that the old media magazine model is ill equipped to compete with more nimble online competitors.
While news outlets have always operated on a fast pace, magazines are at a particular disadvantage in that they are not structured to turn information around quickly. With online share falling — in some cases dramatically — now is the time for offline legacy publishers to take action and get their brands working harder before it’s too late.
Read more at Business Insider.
Monday, June 21
CNN Stops Using AP Content
CNN announced today that it has ceased using Associated Press content, in order to rely more on its own newsgathering. CNN is bulking up its CNN Wires operation to get news on the air faster, Walton said. And the Time Warner unit is creating “CNN Share” to move breaking news across its television, mobile and Internet platforms, he said.
As it dropped AP, CNN is contracting with Reuters to “supplement” breaking news coverage, Walton said.
Read more at Editor and Publisher.
As it dropped AP, CNN is contracting with Reuters to “supplement” breaking news coverage, Walton said.
Read more at Editor and Publisher.
Magazines Look to iPads
For the magazine industry, Apple's iPad isn't just a new gadget - it's an opportunity to get readers to do what they have been reluctant to do: Pay for digital content. Magazines are moving aggressively to reinvent themselves for the iPad and other tablet computers coming to market. They envision a new product that combines the feel of a traditional magazine - with the same eye-catching graphics and design that keeps readers engaged - with the immediacy and multimedia of the Web.
Read more at the SF Gate.
Read more at the SF Gate.
Google Checkout: A News Pay Wall
Google is getting closer to launching a full-scale pay wall system for publishers. Ongoing discussions with news organizations could include helping with "technology to power any subscription services they may be thinking of building."
Google Checkout could become the perfect tool for publishers looking to add a pay wall for content. It provides a one-click tool to complete the process to pay for content on PC, mobile and tablet devices. And with falling revenue and diminished resources, publishers need to find a way to revive the newspaper industry.
Read more at Media Post.
Google Checkout could become the perfect tool for publishers looking to add a pay wall for content. It provides a one-click tool to complete the process to pay for content on PC, mobile and tablet devices. And with falling revenue and diminished resources, publishers need to find a way to revive the newspaper industry.
Read more at Media Post.
Sunday, June 20
Online News Outlet Turns to Print
On Tuesday, the San Francisco Public Press will do something that few Web-based news outlets have done before: go to print. The Press, a nonprofit news source that started covering local issues online in 2009, will release a full 20-page main section with an eight-page pullout - bucking a national trend whereby startup, nonprofit news Web sites sprout online and stay in cyberspace.
This "backward" move from the Web to potential daily print has surprised many. "There are a bunch of digital evangelists who have made it their career and their business to proclaim the death of print, and to say the sky is falling," he says.
Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle.
This "backward" move from the Web to potential daily print has surprised many. "There are a bunch of digital evangelists who have made it their career and their business to proclaim the death of print, and to say the sky is falling," he says.
Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Newspapers Become Leaner, More Focused
Central European publisher Axel Springer recently recorded the most profitable first quarter in its history. The profit margin on its German national newspapers is a startling 27%. The firm is expanding into Poland.
Steep cover-price rises have helped. But for the most part newspapers have cut their way out of crisis.
Another unexpected boon is that spending on paper—the second-biggest expense at many firms, after staff pay—has plummeted by as much as 40%. A global commodities slump depressed prices. Newspaper companies are using less of the stuff, printing fewer words on smaller, thinner pages. Particularly on Mondays, papers are often so light that they are hard to fling from a car or bicycle to a doorstep.
Outside America newspapers have fared better, as a report to be published by the OECD next week shows (although there are exceptions: see article). Japanese newspapers, the world’s biggest by circulation, are slowly losing readers. But they have an enormously long way to fall, and ought to be cushioned by the media conglomerates of which they are a part. Outside the English-speaking world newspapers often face less competition from online news aggregators and other Silicon Valley wheezes. In countries like Germany they have suffered what Paul Zwillenberg, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, calls a “single whammy”—recession, but not rapid structural change.
In emerging markets one must look hard to find any sign of crisis at all. In Brazil advertising wobbled only briefly during the recession. The total circulation of Brazilian newspapers has expanded by 1m in the past ten years, to 8.2m. Brazil’s growing middle class is hooked on a clutch of inexpensive new papers that are heavy on murders and bikinis. In 2003 just three of Brazil’s top ten papers were tabloids. Today five of them are.
That emphasis on giving readers what they want to read, as opposed to what lofty notions of civic responsibility suggest they ought to read, is part of a global trend. Newspapers are becoming more distinctive and customer-focused. Rather than trying to bring the world to as many readers as possible, they are carving out niches.
In America many newspapers have plumped for local news and sport, leaving everything else to bigger outfits or to wire services like The Associated Press. Several of them now refuse to deliver papers to readers far from the urban core.
The survival of newspapers is by no means guaranteed. They still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form.
Read more at The Economist.
Steep cover-price rises have helped. But for the most part newspapers have cut their way out of crisis.
Another unexpected boon is that spending on paper—the second-biggest expense at many firms, after staff pay—has plummeted by as much as 40%. A global commodities slump depressed prices. Newspaper companies are using less of the stuff, printing fewer words on smaller, thinner pages. Particularly on Mondays, papers are often so light that they are hard to fling from a car or bicycle to a doorstep.
Outside America newspapers have fared better, as a report to be published by the OECD next week shows (although there are exceptions: see article). Japanese newspapers, the world’s biggest by circulation, are slowly losing readers. But they have an enormously long way to fall, and ought to be cushioned by the media conglomerates of which they are a part. Outside the English-speaking world newspapers often face less competition from online news aggregators and other Silicon Valley wheezes. In countries like Germany they have suffered what Paul Zwillenberg, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, calls a “single whammy”—recession, but not rapid structural change.
In emerging markets one must look hard to find any sign of crisis at all. In Brazil advertising wobbled only briefly during the recession. The total circulation of Brazilian newspapers has expanded by 1m in the past ten years, to 8.2m. Brazil’s growing middle class is hooked on a clutch of inexpensive new papers that are heavy on murders and bikinis. In 2003 just three of Brazil’s top ten papers were tabloids. Today five of them are.
That emphasis on giving readers what they want to read, as opposed to what lofty notions of civic responsibility suggest they ought to read, is part of a global trend. Newspapers are becoming more distinctive and customer-focused. Rather than trying to bring the world to as many readers as possible, they are carving out niches.
In America many newspapers have plumped for local news and sport, leaving everything else to bigger outfits or to wire services like The Associated Press. Several of them now refuse to deliver papers to readers far from the urban core.
The survival of newspapers is by no means guaranteed. They still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form.
Read more at The Economist.
Wiki Gaga
Wikileaks, an international publishing service for whistle-blowers, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its sources. Julian Assange, an Australian former hacker, founded the service in 2007. It now has perhaps 800 volunteer technologists, activists and lawyers around the world. In addition to footage revealing how soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed unarmed civilians in Iraq, it has published evidence of corruption in Kenya, financial improprieties in Iceland, procedures for detainees in Guantánamo Bay and a string of Sarah Palin’s e-mails.
Anyone can submit a document by old-fashioned post or over the internet and volunteers check its authenticity before publication. Wikileaks wraps encrypted submissions in layers of junk data to obscure their size and origin, then routes them through servers in Sweden (where it is a crime to disclose a source) and Belgium (where a wiretapped conversation with a journalist is inadmissible in court).
It is impossible for a single government or corporation to prevent a document from being published or to force its removal. As a result, Wikileaks calls itself “multi-jurisdictional”.
Read more at The Economist.
Anyone can submit a document by old-fashioned post or over the internet and volunteers check its authenticity before publication. Wikileaks wraps encrypted submissions in layers of junk data to obscure their size and origin, then routes them through servers in Sweden (where it is a crime to disclose a source) and Belgium (where a wiretapped conversation with a journalist is inadmissible in court).
It is impossible for a single government or corporation to prevent a document from being published or to force its removal. As a result, Wikileaks calls itself “multi-jurisdictional”.
Read more at The Economist.
Newspapers Have Cut their Way Out of Crisis
In much of the world there is little sign of crisis. German and Brazilian papers shrugged off the recession. Even American newspapers have not only survived but often returned to profit. Not the 20% profit margins that were routine a few years ago, but profit all the same.
It has not been much fun. Many papers stayed afloat by pushing journalists overboard. The American Society of News Editors reckons that 13,500 newsroom jobs have gone since 2007. Readers are paying more for slimmer products. Some papers even had the nerve to refuse delivery to distant suburbs. Yet these desperate measures have proved the right ones and, sadly for many journalists, they can be pushed further.
Fully 87% of their revenues came from advertising in 2008, according to the OECD. In Japan the proportion is 35%. Not surprisingly, Japanese newspapers are much more stable.
Car and film reviewers have gone. So have science and general business reporters. Foreign bureaus have been savagely pruned. Newspapers are less complete as a result.
The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it. It is grim to forecast still more writers losing their jobs. But whether newspapers are thrown onto doorsteps or distributed digitally, they need to deliver something that is distinctive. New technologies like Apple’s iPad only make this more true. The mere acquisition of a smooth block of metal and glass does not magically persuade people that they should start paying for news. They will pay for news if they think it has value. Newspapers need to focus relentlessly on that.
Read more at The Economist.
It has not been much fun. Many papers stayed afloat by pushing journalists overboard. The American Society of News Editors reckons that 13,500 newsroom jobs have gone since 2007. Readers are paying more for slimmer products. Some papers even had the nerve to refuse delivery to distant suburbs. Yet these desperate measures have proved the right ones and, sadly for many journalists, they can be pushed further.
Fully 87% of their revenues came from advertising in 2008, according to the OECD. In Japan the proportion is 35%. Not surprisingly, Japanese newspapers are much more stable.
Car and film reviewers have gone. So have science and general business reporters. Foreign bureaus have been savagely pruned. Newspapers are less complete as a result.
The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it. It is grim to forecast still more writers losing their jobs. But whether newspapers are thrown onto doorsteps or distributed digitally, they need to deliver something that is distinctive. New technologies like Apple’s iPad only make this more true. The mere acquisition of a smooth block of metal and glass does not magically persuade people that they should start paying for news. They will pay for news if they think it has value. Newspapers need to focus relentlessly on that.
Read more at The Economist.
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