Newspapers are supposed to be relying on the Web for new revenue streams. But the digital ad business may be letting them down. The Washington Post reported this morning that its online ad revenue dropped 7 percent in the first three months of 2012. That follows a New York Times earnings release which saw that publisher’s Web ad business drop 2 percent. (We should get some color on the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, when parent company News Corp. reports its earnings next week; News Corp. also owns this Web site.) The Times said that digital sales were “under pressure” in the first quarter of the year, while the Post didn’t bother to add any color to its results. But it did note that online display ads were down 11 percent, while classifieds were down 1 percent. Unlike the Times, the Post is essentially a regional newspaper, so it is harder to argue that its travails reflect a larger trend. And it’s also worth noting that the Post faces fierce competition for its core political coverage from Politico, an online/offline competitor that basically sprouted overnight. But for the record: The rest of the Web publishing business — including not only Google but laggards like Yahoo — has been posting Q1 revenue increases. [An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that AOL's ad revenues were up for Q1; the company won't post its numbers until next week.]
Read MoreCisco Systems Inc. Chief Executive John Chambers identified Huawei Technologies Co. as its toughest rival, stating that the Chinese company doesn’t always “play by the rules” in areas such as intellectual property protection and computer security. Mr. Chambers, who was responding to a question at a Wall Street Journal event, didn’t cite any specific actions by Huawei, which competes with Cisco in sales of networking equipment. But he suggested that, by contrast, Cisco is considered trustworthy by governments around the world. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreI’ve been surprised to realize lately that social media has awakened my sense of nostalgia. It seems ironic given our collective emphasis on the new and the now. I love receiving the daily emails from Timehop and Memolane that remind me what I posted on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on that day in previous years. It’s not just the photos of my dog as a puppy and parties I’ve forgotten I attended; it’s also the time capsules of what I thought was interesting at the time. And, how meta: For me, that was often social media itself. For instance, here are some of the pings I’ve gotten from Timehop and Memolane this week: Five years ago today, I tweeted a link to a Facebook company blog post noting a measurable and predictable decline in Facebook usage on Thursday night when “Grey’s Anatomy” aired. At the time, Facebook had only just recently opened up beyond students, and it was seeing peaks of one million users logged into the site at once. “When something occupies a big portion of the population’s attention, we notice,” wrote co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (who since left the company and is now co-founder of Asana). Now that Facebook is so much more global, it’s hard to imagine a single TV program having that kind of regular effect. Facebook usage plummeted during Grey's Anatomy airings in 2007. This week in 2010, I posted a link to an article citing a Google engineer saying Google personalized up to 20 percent of users’ Web searches. That might have seems like a lot at the time, but Google has gotten massively more personalized since then, with logged-in searchers by default now seeing “Search Plus Your World” results and Google+ content promoted. Almost five years ago, just after the 2007 edition of SXSW, the Wall Street Journal posted a story examining the emerging phenomenons of Twitter and Dodgeball . Jack Dorsey was quoted as saying, “You find a lot of connection in just the simplest, most mundane updates from your friends.” I recently reposted the link to the article on Twitter after finding it on my Memolane, and got to see people’s reactions to it five years later.
Read MoreLet’s put this in the simplest terms: Yahoo cannot spend the next half year in any kind of testy proxy battle with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb. Not shouldn’t. Can’t . Having closely covered the last goat rodeo in 2008 with corporate troublemaker Carl Icahn — which ended in big shareholders dinging the board badly and the controversial activist joining it — I can say definitively that the experience damaged the Silicon Valley Internet company in ways that are still resonating. Angry shareholders (whose anti-Yahoo votes were initially miscounted in a stunning bumble), distracted management, media story after story about the fight, it eventually led to the departure of then CEO Jerry Yang by the holidays of that year, a rejiggered board and a new CEO, Carol Bartz, and fervent promises of change and turnaround. Fast forward to today: Bartz was ousted in the fall of last year, a newish board is coming in, there’s another new CEO and, of course, more fervent promises of change and turnaround. This is like the movie “Groundhog Day,” except not nearly as funny. Speaking of funny, a Heard on the Street in The Wall Street Journal yesterday actually went fabulously snarktastic with its headline on Yahoo’s current tussle with Loeb of Third Point: “Is Yahoo Ready for a Loebotomy?” Heh. Opening with the line, “How many activists does it take to screw in Yahoo’s light bulb?,” the piece went on to ponder back and forth the impact of Loeb on the already dicey situation at Yahoo. It concluded: “Yahoo investors shouldn’t expect a quick fix whoever the directors are. But, given how long Yahoo has been struggling to gain traction on its own, having a champion of shareholder value on the board can’t hurt.” Nope, it can’t, as long as said investor wants to help find the successful fix previous Yahoo leaders have been heretofore unable to
Read MoreNews Corp. is in serious talks to hire former Bloomberg LP chief executive Lex Fenwick to be the new chief of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., according to people familiar with the matter. The hire, while not final, would fill a position vacated six months ago when the previous CEO, Les Hinton, stepped down amid the phone-hacking scandal at News Corp.’s UK newspaper division. When he resigned, Mr. Hinton, who ran the division before he joined Dow Jones, said that he was “ignorant of what apparently happened” at one of the company’s tabloid newspapers earlier, but characterized his lack of knowledge as “irrelevant” and said it was “proper” for him to step down. Read the rest of this post on the original site »
Read MoreAccording to multiple sources, the long anticipated public offering of Facebook is now likely to come in the third week of May. That means that the company must file its IPO documents within the next month, given the review by the Securities and Exchange Commission usually takes about three to four months. That’s if there are no issues, of course, such a turbulent market or thornier-than-usual questions from regulators that require amending the filing. Groupon, for example, filed for its IPO in early June, but did not go public until five months later in November. The usual caveat on the late May timing (even though I called 143 people on this one): This IPO planning could all change in a New York minute to another month. In any case, the Facebook IPO is expected to be one of the largest Web offerings ever — with some reports saying the company will be raising $10 billion on a $100 million valuation. That amount is presumably to match its huge consumer growth and also revenue explosion. Users now number 800 million — a figure that is likely to hit one billion this year. And revenue, which was reportedly close to $4 billion in 2011, is expected to be higher by another third in 2012. Facebook will need such oomph if it is to impress investors, although the social networking site’s leadership is still warning that its focus is products over dollars. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, for example, Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hedged the point, even as he sang his same familiar strategic tune of the last few years. “The thing to take away isn’t that we don’t care [about business]. People for years were asking me why aren’t we trying to make more money,” he said. “I would say I’m trying to build a business for the long term and it was clearly the right strategy.” While admirably I’ll-row-my-way in tone, Zuckerberg needs a public offering heft more than ever as Facebook’s battles with rivals — most especially Google — escalate. Just last week, the monocratic-inclined search giant ham-handedly shoved its own social networking service, Google+, into its results , in a move that could severely disadvantage Facebook. Thus, into the Wall Street breach, to get a giant pile of dough to fight back! But, unlike Google’s more kookified 2004 IPO, sources said Facebook’s is probably going to hew to a more traditional offering script. That is likely to include a hefty consortium of irksome investment bankers — think firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on top of the filings and a spate of smaller ones (Allen & Co.) below and you have the approximately accurate idea. And, while shot-caller-in-chief Zuckerberg will be the one key voice in the IPO, the man to watch has and will be CFO David Ebersman. The longtime Genentech exec, who came to Facebook in 2009, been doing all the heavy lifting in preparation for the IPO, said sources, and will continue to do so. Facebook declined to comment (but I would too, if I were them).
Read MoreFans of Fox's broadcast and Fox News content will soon have a new way of consuming the programming. News Corp. has announced it plans on making some of its television content available through a new app on Xbox 360. The apps are slated to be available to Xbox gold members starting in 2012, though a specific launch date hasn't yet been set. The arrangement will allow Xbox users to access shows like Family Guy ,
Read MoreThe end the year is a time for many kinds of awards. The Associated Press annually votes on the top news stories of the year . The Wall Street Journal picked the year’s biggest flops in tech . The readers of Footnoted, the Morningstar-owned blog that follows the surprisingly fascinating world of SEC filings, annually select its worst footnote of the year — in other words, the best/worst disclosure of 2011. Hewlett-Packard won.
Read MoreSprint CEO Dan Hesse Shares of Sprint are rallying by about 6 percent in after-hours trading, on word that AT&T has abandoned its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile. That’s really only a jump of 13 cents per share — a figure that says a lot about the pickle in which Sprint remains, despite the fact that its arguments against the AT&T-T-Mobile combination have prevailed. Sprint no longer has to deal with the threat of a merged AT&T-T-Mobile. But it still has to cope with the fact that it is a distant No. 3 to AT&T and Verizon Wireless. And, after betting on a different 4G technology, the company also has to bring up an entirely new network, all while trying to turn off its older Nextel network. Still, there is some cause for celebration, an opportunity that Sprint did not let go to waste. “From the beginning, Sprint has stood with consumers who spoke loudly and clearly that AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile would create an undeniable duopoly that would have resulted in higher prices, less innovation and fewer choices for the American consumer,” Sprint said today in a statement, in which it also praised federal regulators for their opposition to the deal. Sprint and its CEO, Dan Hesse, had opposed the deal mightily before government regulators and Congress, and in the court of public opinion, investing a lot of political capital in the process. That said, the deal’s failure doesn’t exactly help Sprint out of the messy spot it’s in. For one thing, Sprint is still losing money . In its most recent quarter, it booked a $301 million loss on revenue of $8.3 billion, which was an improvement over the prior year’s period. On the bright side, it added 1.3 million customers — and that was before it had Apple’s iPhone in its stores to help entice new customers. But while having the iPhone is nice, it’s not helping the bottom line. As The Wall Street Journal reported in October , Sprint has committed to buy more than 30 million iPhones, which will cost it as much as $20 billion over time, and on which it expects to lose money through at least 2014
Read MoreIn August 2010, Libyan journalist Khaled Mehiri shot an email to his editor at al-Jazeera proposing an article about the hollow nature of the Gadhafi regime’s anticorruption efforts. Before the story was even written, the regime knew about it. Libyan security agents had intercepted the email, using an Internet-surveillance system purchased from a French company, Amesys. For months, the agents monitored the journalist’s emails and Facebook messages via the Amesys tools, printing out messages and storing them in a file that The Wall Street Journal recovered in an abandoned electronic-surveillance headquarters in Tripoli. Read the rest of this post on the original site
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