Internet and Digital Media Articles of the Day
Media Giants Discuss YouTube Killer - News Corp., Viacom, CBS Corp. and NBC Universal are discussing the possibility of building their own YouTube competitor. The four media companies’ would unite to create a Web site that would be the official destination for video content from their respective TV studio networks.
YouTube Allows CBS, Others To Edit, Place Comments - The NYT picks up on one of the non-copyright issues at YouTube―manipulation of user comments. Instead of using the YouTube template that shows comments at the same time as the video, official CBS video, for instance, is often separate from user comments (already limited to registered users). The comments also are filtered for content to remove what CBS digiczar Quincy Smith told the Times is “profane, unconstructive criticism” and off-topic political vitriol.
The Tale of Traffic Numbers: Content Sites As Popups - NYT does a story about how some content sites, like Entrepreneur.com and others are using pop-ups to inflate their traffic number. In this case, no, they’re not using pop-up ads on their sites, but serving themselves up in those ads units on other sites.
Online Ad Vendor Consolidation: Atlas Acquires Accipiter For $30.3 Million - Atlas, the technologies business unit of online advertising biggie aQuantive has bought out ad serving company Accipiter, for about $30.3 million in cash. Accipiter sells ad serving technologies to web publishers in about 20 countries.
Metacafe Traffic Dips, Acquisition May Have Stalled - The rumors around a possible Metacafe acquisition continue to swirl around silicon valley, with Yahoo or Microsoft being considered the most likely acquiror, at a $300 millionish acquisition price. But we are hearing that those discussions may have stalled due to the recent release of November Comscore traffic numbers. The number of monthly unique visitors to Metacafe continues to decline from a high of 4.2 million in September, to just 3.1 million in November, a drop of approximately 25%.
High-School Sports Social Net Takkle, SI Team Up - This has been in the works for months … high-school sports social net Takkle is going national and launching a strategic alliance with Sports Illustrated at the same time. The SI deal is tied to Faces in the Crowd, the weekly feature that spotlights high-school athletes. People will be able to log on to Takkle to nominate athletes and the site will feature an exclusive Sports Illustrated-Video Faces in the Crowd.
Big Media Taps New Set of Digital Gurus - Media titans are still a long way from figuring out how to deliver their goods and engage with their audiences over the Internet, while still making a profit. As they enter 2007, many of these companies will be turning to newly installed executives to make it happen.
Omniture To Soon Unleash New “Genesis” Product - Web metrics provider Omniture Inc. is soon to introduce “Genesis”, a new addition to its product line-up that’s designed to be eaiser to use. The upgrade, available starting late today, requires a one-time fee of between $3,000 and $15,000. The biggest change involves how to customize the Omniture features, which are used to track the number of visitors a Web page gets as well as someone’s behavior on the site.
Sabre Holdings To Be Sold For $4 Billion+ - Travel-booking company Sabre Holdings, owner of the Travelocity site, is in advanced talks to be sold to private equity investors for more than $4 billion, according to a New York Times report this morning. Two investor groups are competing to buy Sabre: the favorite is a group led by Silver Lake Partners and Texas Pacific Group, with a rival bid led by Apollo Group.
Wikipedia Founder Remakes Web Publishing Economics - Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Monday his for-profit company, Wikia Inc., is ready to give away — for free — all the software, computing, storage and network access that Web site builders need to create community collaboration sites.
