News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch told the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference that print newspapers would outlast him. Not so sure. Industry analyst Mark Potts has been telling clients that rising online advertising will finally offset the decline of print revenues by about 2012. (That's his chart…
Why is Microsoft so desperate to acquire Yahoo's search business? According to ComScore, Google's video-sharing site YouTube and Google's other subsidiaries alone attracted more search queries than all of Microsoft's properties combined in April. Comparing total searches for each company is similarly lopsided;…
The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that MySpace, based in Los Angeles, is a tech nightmare, blaring songs through a user's speakers while crashing all the time. Skilled engineers are in short supply down south, so the website must be falling over all the time, right? Not so. Pingdom, a website-monitoring…
Makers of Facebook applications have seized control over the social network's latest redesign. So who are these mighty developers capable of bending the stubborn Mark Zuckerberg to their will? Among others, the makers of "You're a Hottie," which tops the "Recently Popular" list in Facebook's "Just For Fun"…
eMarketer predicts the number of people who create so-called "user-generated" content will rise from 77 million in 2007 to 108 million in 2012. More baffling yet, the ranks of people who consume this content will only rise from 94 million in 2007 to 130 million by 2012. Why don't we just junk our computers, attach…
Daily Show correspondent turned Apple pitchman John Hodgman is on Twitter, and he's using it to mock the habits of Twitter users. His salvos include entries like " BATTLESTAR GALACTICA REFERENCE," "VAGUE SHOUTOUT ('Cheers, @SFslim!')" and "GRADE A NON-SEQUITIR." Normally, this would be a bad self-promotional…
Not that we're merchants of gloom, the latest figures for magazine advertising are dismal. Tallies of the number of pages carrying advertising in the first quarter, an early indicator of publishing woes, are down by double-digit percentages at news weeklies such as Time and business magazines such as Business Week.…
When Google debuted on the stock market in August 2004, it had a lean 10 executives at the top. Over the last four years, the number of senior managers kept pace with the growth of the stock. Until recently, when for the first time in the company's history, the ratio of executives to stock price became less than…
Nielsen, one of the outfits which tracks where web users spend time online, also asks survey respondents a series of questions about themselves-including, interestingly, their political leanings. So which sites are the most liberal, and conservative? The blue bars represent the proportion of the site's audience who…
Ben Bernanke tells Congress that the US economy may slip into recession. But the media is way ahead of the Fed Chairman. Media hysteria about the impending recession is even more intense than it was after the stockmarket bubble burst in 2000. Chart represents number of headlines each month including the word…
Online advertising spending will reach $25.9 billion in 2008, up from $21.1 billion in 2007. Search marketing accounts for 40 percent of that amount. Video ads, about 10.2 percent of the market this year, will account for 18.5 percent by 2012. Display advertising's share, at 21.1 percent, will remain flat through…
Last week, Digg CEO Jay Adelson wasted no time debunking rumors that Google, Microsoft and two media companies were bidding $200 million or more to buy the social news site. It's too bad, because last week would have been a good time for Adelson and Digg cofounder Kevin Rose to sell. According to metrics firm…
AOL CEO Randy Falco said the $850 million Bebo acquisition put his company in "a leading position" in social networks. Too bad his claim doesn't jibe with ComScore's chart comparing Bebo's traffic to social networks MySpace and Facebook, above. Where was "human computer" Ron Grant when Falco needed him to do some…
Eight years ago today, on March 10, 2000, the Nasdaq closed at 5,048.62, an all-time high. Then the bubble burst, Marketwatch notes. By October 2002, the Nasdaq was down to 1,114.11, a 78 percent drop in less than three painful years. In fact, we're still not over it. Check out the chart. The Nasdaq today stands 56…
As far as Digg users are concerned, Ron Paul, Steve Jobs and slobbering dogs have nothing on Britney's latest baby. Digg and StumbleUpon users click most on stories related to celebrity gossip, videogames, and online clips, according to clickstream data from metrics firm Hitwise. Digg accounts for half of all visits…
Depending on which search-engine marketing firm you believe, Google either had a really good month monetizing is search traffic, or a really poor one. It's so confusing! Seeing HitWise's search market share numbers from the month, I bet competitors Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com are glad they didn't have to worry about…
The declining amount of clicks on Google ads may not forecast a recession. Check out this chart from Hitwise. It shows that the amount of traffic going from Google to retail sites continues to increase year-over-year, up to 13 percent in January. Searchers are shopping more than ever. So why the declining ad clicks?…
Now we know why Bebo's so eager for more cash. It needs more servers. According to Pingdom, Bebo has already been down for 12 hours and 28 minutes so far this year. Check out the full chart to see how 13 other social networks have fared so far.
Nielsen estimates the Academy Awards telecast attracted about a fifth fewer viewers than last year. The dip's been blamed on the bleakness of contenders such as the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men, and the short buildup to the awards ceremony: it wasn't even clear until a couple of weeks ago that the show would…
