Stream, Justin.TV, Stickam, Mogulus and everyone else trying to make a business out of live streaming can breath a little easier. YouTube, which had previously said it would start live streaming in 2008, won’t be getting into the business this year. And it probably won’t next year, according to a source familiar with its plans.
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. The newest rumor: Comcast, the cable giant with a huge appetite for digital mergers and acquisitions, is going to pick it up for $75 million. Update: People familiar with the company suggest that it’s still available, but that Pilot won’t let it go for $75 million. Pilot originally attached a $100+ million price tag to the property in 2006, and we’re told they’ve had offers above that range this year.
Both Comcast and Daily Candy aren’t offering comment on the report, but we’ll keep poking around.
We haven’t spotted many ads so far in Apple’s (AAPL) two-week-old iPhone app platform. But that could change soon: Mobile ad network AdMob is opening … up to iPhone app developers, and is giving away $1 million of free advertising to get developers to use it.
The key difference between AdMob and other iPhone app-focused ad networks we’ve seen so far: It already has a host of big-name advertisers and publishers signed up.
We know Google’s YouTube is a tough sell for advertisers. But video site’s sales team may be having an even tougher time than recent reports suggest. YouTube sales manager Brian Cusack says YouTube is able to sell ads against “less than 3%” of the total videos on the site.
We keep hearing that marketers increasingly like the idea of Web series as a promotional tool, and are finally starting to pay more for them. Case in point: the WSJ says Vogue and IMG are producing a 12-episode online reality series called Model.Live for $3 million, or about $31,000 a minute.
That’s quite a leap from Michael Eisner’s “Foreign Body,” which at $5,000 a minute had “big” budget by Web video standards.
Clothing retailer Express LLC paid a little more than $1 million to sponsor the series, and Vogue is guaranteeing Express 83.4 million views during three months on Bebo.com.
At a meeting with about a dozen senior members of AOL’s staff Monday, Jeff Bewkes left at least one member of management with the impression that the company is for sale, a source close to the company says. Another person who attended the same meeting says Jeff did not say specifically that the company is for sale but merely said that “everyone is talking to everyone” and that AOL might someday be sold.
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.
Now Mike Arrington reports that Bill Dagley, a California money manager, is repping a seller with a block of stock they’re willing to part with at a “value far less than $15 billion.” He then cites a source that says the valuation Dagley’s client is looking for is in the $3 billion to $4 billion range.
Have you ever wished you could fall asleep and wake up as Samantha, a 19-year-old who loves the outdoors? Or Erik, a 29-year-old booze hound with cooking skills? Now you can! On Facebook, at least.
An eBay seller named pseudopr415 is auctioning off 10 fake Facebook profiles, each with a minimum 200 real “friends,” who live in major cities across the U.S. The idea: Marketers might want to buy these profiles to sneakily advertise their wares under the guise of a real person. Who are these fake folks?
Slide, the company that makes Facebook’s most popular apps, says it’s done making new ones for the social network. Keith Rabois, VP of strategy and business development, told us this week that the company wants to concentrate on making the existing apps like FunWall and Top Friends better–and ultimately figure out how to generate real money from them.
To us, this sounded like Toyota announcing that it’s keeping its current lineup stable, so it can make better Corollas. But we double-checked with Keith, to make sure we hadn’t misunderstood him: Yup, he said–we’re going to work on improving our existing Facebook products, not making new ones.
There are plenty of folks waiting for concrete evidence that Facebook fatigue has set in. So each new data point offers up a new opportunity to prove that college kids, or grown-ups, or core users, or casual users, or whoever, have gotten bored with the social network. This year we’ve already seen drops in the site’s traffic from December through February, a move we chalked up to seasonal affective disorder.
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.
One thing’s for certain: The collapse of the Yahoo-Microsoft deal could be the best thing to happen to Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes for a good long time.
Yahoo reportedly has a deal teed up to buy AOL for about $10 billion. We suspect that the newly dumped Microsoft may have something to say about that.
AOL wouldn’t give Microsoft what Yahoo would have, but it would help the company strengthen its Web-based communication business (AIM, AOL Mail, etc.). MapQuest could be a nice fit with Microsoft’s mapping products.
Yahoo’s search partnership with Google played a major role in allowing the company to fight off Microsoft. By offering the hope of immediately higher cash flow, it should also stop Yahoo’s stock price from falling back to the teens.
In his sayonara letter, Steve Ballmer urged Yahoo to kill the partnership, arguing that the engineers behind Panama were one of the main reasons Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo and that, if Yahoo did the deal with Google, they would leave.
And he’s right: They will (or at least they’ll move on to other projects). That’s part of the reason the outsourcing deal makes sense: It allows Yahoo to focus on businesses it can win, instead of throwing money at a war it has already lost.
What do people like to watch on the Web? They don’t really know, according to a survey conducted by ClipBlast. The company says almost half of Web video watchers can’t tell you why or how they end up watching a specific video–they just do.
This is bad news for anyone trying to build a following around a specific show or series, but great news for YouTube, which services a world of people grazing for video.
The company asked 1,000 people how they find video on the Web, and of those that expressed a preference, 28% said they prefer “discovery” through browsing, the online equivalent of channel-flipping. That’s followed by recommendations from friends (27%) and search engine results (22%), all of which would heavily favor YouTube.
Sick of hearing about the great, free food at Google? Skip this post. Want to know how much it costs Google to pay for all that grub? Read on. Here’s the math: Googlers in the U.S. get two meals a day free, according to the jobs page, but people we talk to at the Mountain View, Calif., Googleplex tell us employees there are often chowing down three times a day. Google is open 251 days a year. So let’s say that Google is providing about 600 meals per year, per employee.
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