Here’s the thing about the TV business: It’s only as profitable or as valuable as the people who watch it. And if the only people who watch it are senior citizens strapped by debt, it’s not worth much–not to advertisers, anyway.

When Viacom posted second-quarter results yesterday, the company admitted its TV business hit a snag. Global advertising sales grew just two percent, and U.S. ad sales only eked out one-percent growth. Ad volume “dropped off” mid-quarter, according to Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman.

Read the rest of this post

“The Dark Knight” made a mind-warping, record-breaking $155.3 million at the box office over the weekend. Thousands of people waited hours in line to sit in a dark room and watch the movie with strangers. They didn’t have to wait in line, though–they could have watched it at home.

Read the rest of this post

Ariel Waldman says she’s been harassed over Twitter for close to a year and the company has refused to do anything about it, despite the fact that it violates their own terms of service.
Waldman, a community manager at Pownce, says a longtime stalker launched a campaign against her over Twitter in June 2007. When she contacted the company about the tweets, somebody said they took them down from the public time line. As the tweets continued to stream in, Waldman says she periodically reported them to Twitter.

Read the rest of this post

While pundits yap away about how Yahoo is fresh acquisition meat, we find it hard to believe. The company is pretty pricey, with a market cap of roughly $33.5 billion, and the number of businesses that could actually swing it is minuscule.

Read the rest of this post

This is what we know about eBay’s current state of affairs based on recent news: a) CEO Meg Whitman is apparently following Mitt Romney on the campaign trail; b) John Donahoe, head of eBay’s marketplace division, has been fingered as a potential CEO successor, and he’s complaining to anyone who will listen that the site looks like a flea market; and c) eBay users are mad as hell and they’re writing to the New York Times to complain about it.

Read the rest of this post