Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says he’ll have a decision on the future of AOL “soon”. That can’t come fast enough for AOL boss Randy Falco, who we’re told is now fuming about the limbo state his company has entered: “When is New York going to sell us?” we’re told he muttered in earshot of his lieutenants recently.
Looks like Chris Gorog really was serious about selling off perennially troubled Napster, after all. He’s selling the company to Best Buy for $121 million. That’s $2.65 per share, which works out to be $54 million net of cash.
Daily Candy, the pioneering newsletter start-up owned by Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group Ventures, is perennially supposed to be on the block, but has yet to change hands.
What is Facebook really worth? We know it’s not worth $15 billion–earlier this week a federal court, ruling on the ConnectU case, confirmed that the company has already placed a different value on its shares than the one it publicly announced as part of last fall’s Microsoft deal.
News Corp. execs did more than just admit that they weren’t going to hit their revenue goals for MySpace and Fox Interactive Media today. They also fessed up to another open secret: Selling ads on social networks is really difficult. How difficult? Consider that even while MySpace and all of the other FIM sites continued to grow, FIM revenues dropped from $233 million in Q2 to $210 million in Q3; about a third of that total came from a three-year guaranteed deal from Google.
Newsflash, courtesy of PR agency Edelman: Young people don’t feel warmly about the music industry, presumably because they are harshing their mellow and trying to stop them from pirating music. Leave aside the dubiousness of a PR agency telling other people they have a PR problem, and take a gander at these supposedly damning statistics …
Gawker Media boss Nick Denton is “rationalizing” his blog business by spinning off three underperforming sites: Wonkette, Gridskipper and Idolator. “There’s a cold wind coming,” says Denton, via IM. “We need to focus on our core titles.” The move will leave Denton with 12 sites, including science fiction site io9, launched in January.
Now that Barry Diller has won his court case against John Malone, he’s free to break up IAC into 5 pieces. The problem: Convincing investors that those pieces are worth more than the sum of their parts.
After reviewing the Google proxy, Henry Blodget asks a reasonable question: How did Eric Schmidt spend $474,662 on security last year? One answer: By spending $58,093 less than he did the year before.
The saga of the Kindle, the product so popular that nobody has one, continues. Jeff Bezos has turned Amazon.com’s home page into an apology/ad for the device.
Last we heard from Atari, the storied video-game maker that’s been floundering for years, it seemed likely that the company was in the process of winding itself down/selling itself of for spare parts.
We hear from two sources that News Corp. and Yahoo are still discussing a possible transaction, designed to create an alternative to a Microsoft takeover. (Or at least the appearance of one). News Corp. [owner of Dow Jones, which owns this site--Ed.] declined to comment, and we don’t have details. We do not believe News Corp. is considering an outright acquisition of Yahoo. News Corp. has repeatedly said it’s not interested in buying Yahoo, and it’s hard to see how the company could afford to compete with Microsoft’s resources.
Good news for MySpace: January comScore numbers show some audience metrics ticking up–and in many cases, outpacing rival Facebook. The bad news for both social networks: Those same numbers still indicate that American users, at least, may be reaching social-network fatigue.
Earlier today we noted that two different Web metrics showed MySpace losing ground and remarked that the News Corp. unit, which normally works hard to promote growth statistics, hadn’t squawked in protest. Two hours later came this press release: “MYSPACE MARKET SHARE GROWS IN TYPICALLY INACTIVE PERIOD.”
We’re running the full release at the end of the story, but we’ll sum it up here: The headline isn’t accurate–there’s no data showing MySpace’s market share increasing.
The most compelling image we’ve seen out of CES to date: Bill Gates sitting down for a one-on-one interview with Engadget editor Ryan Block. What’s compelling? The fact that Bill Gates granted an interview with a blog–and that it’s not considered news.
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