MySpace, rumored to be on the verge of purchasing the free music streaming site imeem, is struggling to keep up with its own payments to music copyright holders, according to a top News Corp executive–a problem that has plagued every other licensed free music service.
Yet another News Corporation executive is talking about Google, and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages.
News Corp.’s digital chief said Thursday that the company’s social-networking property MySpace is going in a different direction than rival Facebook, based on how its members socialize and share interests.
We’ve already covered how Rupert Murdoch has flip flopped his position on free online news, but his recent foray into blaming search engines and aggregators is really reaching the height of hypocrisy.
Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises.
The social-media service–where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages–came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin.
Five months ago, a group of media executives including Steven Brill seemed to have the field to itself when it said it was building a system for newspapers to charge readers for access online.
On the web, lurid, sensationalistic news is priced at $0 (for now, at least). Maybe it’s worth exactly that.
Drippy Manhattan evenings aren’t usually a draw for an outdoor cocktail party but the FoundersClub NYC Internet Week soiree had something that overcomes a little rain: power.
As Mark Gimein noted last week in The Big Money, the media giants have put the Web’s journalistic “parasites”–blogs, aggregators, Google–on notice that they will no longer allow them to pinch their copy without reimbursement.
Hulu is stepping up its global initiatives to compete for audience and advertising dollars overseas.
On Monday, the video-streaming site added Johannes Larcher to its executive ranks as senior vice president of international. Mr. Larcher must work with each content provider to negotiate international rights for each video. Hulu has more than 130 content providers and 1,100 TV programs and movies, and its library continues to grow.
Is more always better?
Hulu has expanded its content library considerably since its launch a year ago. The Internet video site has grown from 50 content partners to more than 130 and has nearly 40,000 pieces of video.
When NBC Universal and News Corp. created Hulu, they gave the video portal a valuable but short-term asset: exclusive rights to distribute NBC and Fox shows outside of the media giants’ own websites. Hulu.com has become the fourth-biggest online video distributor. But with exclusivity deal ending soon, Hulu will have to see if it can defend the audience and brand it has built.
News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media digital division is laying off about five percent of its workforce, or about 100 people, amid continued cost-cutting efforts, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The cuts, which started in the last month, are happening gradually unit by unit, the person said. The layoffs include all groups, from social-networking site MySpace to photo-sharing site Photobucket to mobile.
On TV, content is king. But on the Web, community may reign supreme. Throughout television history, the way to lure most viewers was to air the best shows. It doesn’t necessarily work that way on the Web, where many shows can be seen on multiple sites.
I got WebEx’d. I saw a well-practiced demo of the new MySpace Music last night, and fell under the impression that the News Corp JV with the labels was a simple, straightforward music destination: You search out a song, you add it to your playlist and you listen to it as much as you want, voila.
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