Media giant Hearst has hired two senior execs — Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford and former Los Angeles Times CEO Jeffrey Johnson — in a significant move to digitally turbocharge and jumpstart its flagship but long-suffering newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle and its SFGate.com website.

“They have deep publishing and new media experience and believe in the power of great content with a valued brand,” said Heart CEO Frank Bennack in a statement. “We are excited to work with them to redefine the choices for how and where readers can experience the trusted Chronicle content they depend on.”

In the new leadership, Johnson will be the publisher of the Chronicle, while Bradford will be its president. Both will report to Hearst Newspapers President Mark Aldam. Current publisher Frank Vega — an old-style publisher who has had a controversial tenure at the Chronicle — will retire, though Hearst said he will continue as chairman through the transition.

“The San Francisco Chronicle should be a shining star and use case of how to build a community and cover local news,” said Bradford in a text to me today.

Indeed. While the Chronicle and its website is the largest for local news in the Bay area, it has lagged a lot in aggressively covering key trends — such as tech — and the fast growth of the region. While the area has blossomed, the Chronicle, like many big-city newspapers, has suffered, as digital businesses of all kinds have made incursions on its business.

Its daily print circulation is now 265,000, and combined with its website it reaches close to two million people.

Getting all that a whole lot higher — and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more relevant — will be a tough job and will likely require a major reinvention of the Chronicle brand.

That is especially true since the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the world’s key digital hub, as well as a leader in a number of areas — from top-notch sports teams to having one of the most innovative food and indie cultures. After a few years of rough economic times, the city is on a bit of a roll, including being the location of some upcoming major events such as the Super Bowl and America’s Cup.

Bradford has a lot of experience in both old and new media and is well known in the online media advertising space, having had top sales and media jobs at BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft, Yahoo and, now, Demand.

She has been at that content site, where she has been its chief revenue and marketing officer, since 2010. At Yahoo, previous to Demand, she was an SVP in charge of North American revenue and also worked on branded entertainment partnerships. At Microsoft, she was a corporate VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network.

And, although I have known her well over many years — full disclosure: We are very good friends — I had no idea she had an undergraduate degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

Johnson is also a longtime media exec. He has recently been an operating partner at the Yucaipa Companies — owned by kingpin Ron Burkle — focusing on media investments since 2007. Previous to that, he was president, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times for just a year, but had been its SVP and GM since 2000. At the Times, he was responsible for the newspaper’s digital and print operations including editorial, advertising, circulation, consumer sales and marketing, finance and technology. Johnson has also worked at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel and has an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The Chronicle is the largest newspaper in Northern California, founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young. Its owner, the privately-held Hearst, is one of the nation’s largest media companies, with dozens of daily and weekly newspapers; has a huge group of television stations and cable network stakes, such as Lifetime, A&E and ESPN; hundreds of magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle; and many other varied holdings.

Bradford will be replaced at Demand Media by Jeff Dossett.

Yahoo, which had dropped off the important BrandZ Top 100 list several years ago, scratched its way on again this year at No. 92.

The Silicon Valley Internet giant had last been on the key list of brands in 2009, when it had a brand value of $7.9 billion. It now has a brand value of $9.8 billion, which is still down from its $11.4 billion in 2008.

And that’s tiny in comparison to Apple, which remains No. 1 on the list with a brand value of $185.1 billion. Google ranked as No. 2 with a brand value of $113.7 billion.

Apple rival Samsung’s brand value rose by by 51 percent to $21.4 billion, clocking in to the No. 30 spot.

In tech, Amazon’s brand value was $45.7 billion, rising 34 percent to No. 14. IBM is No. 3 with a brand value of $112 billion.

And more: Microsoft (No. 7, $69.8 billion, down nine percent); Facebook (No. 31, $21.3 billion, down 36 percent); and eBay (No. 47, $17.7 billion, up 40 percent).

The eight-year-old BrandZ list, which is much watched by marketers, is commissioned by WPP and conducted by Millward Brown Optimor.

Here’s the full chart of the list and report:

Top100BrandZ2013

BrandZ Top 100 Media Deck 2013 U S

And here is a super-cool infographic too:

2013_BrandZ_Top100_Infographic

According to numerous sources close to the situation, the Tumblr brand will continue on in the wake of its $1.1 billion acquisition by Yahoo.

That includes definitive promises by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer to once-sale-shy Tumblr CEO David Karp to allow him to shepherd the fast-growing blogging product, with no forced integration with Yahoo’s many other content properties.

That said, sources added, there will be more back-end changes to marry infrastructure, such as undergirding Tumblr’s nascent advertising business and giving it more distribution opportunities.

“At the beginning, at least, it’ll be hands-off,” said one person close to the situation. “It has to be.”

While that is probably no surprise, it’s still good news for Tumblr employees as well as its very opinionated user base, which is not likely to greet a takeover by a corporate giant of the social, iconoclastic user-generated content service.

That said, Yahoo execs discussed and are aware of issues around porn published on the site, although they believe it to be fixable over time.

As Peter Kafka noted:

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

Or, as a Tumblr investor also told Kafka: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard-follower model, opt-in.”

Moving on from porn, sources close to the situation — okay, pretty much everyone is chit-chatting away now — said that Mayer spent a lot of time with Karp (who was in Silicon Valley last week, in fact, visiting her) about the transition, and about how the new ownership would impact him and the service.

One source called them “kindred spirits” on the issue, and that Mayer has been given great purview by the Yahoo board to foster Tumblr to prevent it from turning out like Flickr, Delicious and many other big acquisitions dating back to GeoCities. (I was there covering that deal way back when, and what a mess that was!)

Mayer is well-liked by product and engineering entrepreneurs, and has often focused on them at Yahoo, over the perhaps more important demands of business and advertising execs.

That would appeal to Karp, who once famously said that online advertising made him physically sick. Still, he has recently begun to embrace ad sales at Tumblr.

Within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages on users’ dashboards, which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year, and sources said it could get to up to $100 million this year.

“We’re going to be very careful here,” said a source with knowledge of the acquisition.

A source at Tumblr agreed: “This will be a very delicate dance, since so much could go wrong if done without care.”

Still, some at Yahoo are worried that the company might be chasing the youthful demographic at Tumblr too assiduously. “This is a very fickle audience,” said another high-ranking Yahoo exec. “Chasing a young one is a very tricky thing.”

Yes, indeed, but Mayer thinks she is the one to be able to pull it off and make Yahoo relevant with an even wider consumer base.

AllThingsD broke news of the deal in the offing last week, which has since been approved by Yahoo’s board.

The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

Joyus, the video shopping platform startup led by former top Google exec Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, said it had raised $11.5 million in a second round of funding, led by InterWest Partners and Time Warner Investments. Existing investors Accel Partners and Harrison Metal also participated.

In related news, Joyus said that Ido Leffler, co-founder of natural beauty brand Yes To, would join its board.

The San Francisco-based Joyus has now raised total capital of $19 million to push its efforts to combine video with retailing online. Along with the funding news, the company underscored the efficacy of its approach in a study it also released that it says shows “fashion, beauty and lifestyle brands can directly monetize video through direct response product sales.”

Using premium video content to flack its wares, Joyus said that it converts at 5.15 times the rate of visitors who only browse product listings on the site and that its viewers buy 4.9 times more than those who don’t watch the product videos.

“Every time someone watches a video, Joyus can measure the resulting sales revenue, creating the first ever metrics for return on investment (ROI) using online video to drive product sales,” said Joyus, which noted that on a half-dozen product areas that the average revenue per video (RPV) view ranges from 47 cents to 93 cents, meaning every thousand views of video on Joyus produces between $470 and $930 in direct sales revenue. Joyus shares a cut of the sales on its site with its merchants and provides the purchasing tools.

While others might dispute this performance and many online retailers have added video to their sales processes, Joyus CEO and founder Cassidy said in an interview that online retail has to shift from a focus on engagement statistics and monetization via brand advertising to direct product sales results.

“The data on video shopping needs to be aimed at a return on the investment rather than on just brand recognition,” she said. “We think by providing an informative and entertaining experience, where you can make purchases right away, consumers buy and that this is the direction online commerce is moving.”

As I noted in a previous post about Joyus when it launched in mid-2011: “If you think about a link-laden infomercial, you’ll get a general idea of what is being created by Joyus.”

While Cassidy did note that a comparison could be made to television shopping networks like HSN, which shows elaborate demos of its products, Joyus has its own tech stack and video platform that allows shoppers to watch in a non-linear way that is preferable online and also on mobile.

“We are aimed at those customers who are bred and born on digital, so the merchandising formula is different,” said Cassidy. “This is a shopper from 30 to 50 who wants entertainment and commerce together in a format that is convenient.”

According to sources, Facebook has moved well-regarded exec Emily White to a new job as director of business operations at its Instagram mobile photo-sharing unit.

In this capacity, she will work with Instagram head and co-founder Kevin Systrom to scale nascent efforts to expand partnerships, improve user operations and, presumably, come up with ways to make some money. The fast-growing service, which the social networking site bought a year ago in a billion-dollar mega-deal, has been popular with consumers, but it has not focused as much on its business operations.

(Update: Facebook confirmed the move and also released this statement from Systrom: “I’m excited to bring Emily White onto the Instagram team. As we continue to scale our operation to support over 100 million active users, her experience with partnerships and business operations will play a major role in our future success.”)

In fact, related to business, it has waded more into controversy — such as when changes to its terms of service suggested that Instagram could sell user photos to advertisers, a change that was quickly rescinded by Systrom. That said, it left the door open to selling advertising of some sort on the app.

White has a lot of experience in the online ad space in smoothing out and organizing ops, both at Google — where she previously worked — and at Facebook, where she started in the deal-making arena and later worked on mobile partnerships.

White — who has recently been courted by other Internet startups, reportedly including scrapbooking phenom Pinterest — is also on the board of women’s yoga and running gear retailer Lululemon. That’s good since part of her new job will be to get more big brands integrated into Instagram, which has already begun to do that with some initial level of success.

Systrom will continue to focus more on product development and overall strategy and vision, which he has done since Instagram was purchased last April.

(That photo above is of White, which she just posted on her Instagram account — natch!)

Sources said AOL is set to hire well-known media and Internet exec Susan Lyne to be CEO of its content brands unit at the New York-based Web company, except for the Huffington Post Media Group headed by Arianna Huffington.

Lyne has most recently been chairman of the Gilt Groupe and was CEO previous to that. She will retain her board role at the online retailer, but is likely to give up her director role at AOL. She is set to be on its executive operating committee going forward.

Lyne has had a long and varied career in media and is a high-profile hire. Beside Gilt, she also ran Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and was a top television network exec at ABC.

At AOL, she will have purview over a range of properties, including TechCrunch, Engadget and StyleList.

In related news, Bloomberg reported earlier that COO Artie Minson was departing AOL, but there are no immediate plans for him to leave. But that could change, since CEO Tim Armstrong has been moving to decentralize the company and his role could shift accordingly.

An AOL spokesperson declined to comment.

Well-known digital media exec Zander Lurie has been hired by former Yahoo exec Ross Levinsohn to become one of his key lieutenants at Guggenheim Digital Media.

Lurie will be an EVP there, where he will help manage and grow the new heavily funded digital unit of Guggenheim Partners, whose current media assets include Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, the Clio Awards, Film Expo Group and the digital extensions for Dick Clark Productions.

Lurie was most recently an exec at CBS, including as SVP of strategic development, where he worked on a number of key digital initiatives. He was CFO and head of business development for CBS Interactive and also worked on M&A at its CNET tech news unit. Lurie left the media giant in May.

“The opportunity to join Guggenheim Digital Media and work alongside Ross was a no-brainer,” wrote Lurie to me in an email. “We have high-quality, trusted brands in the portfolio and an appetite to grow our position in the premium content/video landscape.”

Expect more acquisitions now that the deal-making Lurie is joining the deal-making Levinsohn and there’s a pile of dough to spend.

Lurie is the first significant hire by Levinsohn, who became CEO of GDM last month. He had been interim CEO of Yahoo, but lost that job when the Silicon Valley Internet giant hired former Google exec Marissa Mayer.

Michel Protti, who worked with Levinsohn at Yahoo as his chief of staff, is also joining GDM as SVP. Before Yahoo, Protti worked at McKinsey & Company.

The stores would likely sell Google-branded hardware, these people said. But it isn’t clear when or where any stores would open, and one of the people said the Internet giant might not move forward with the plan this year.

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This week in Las Vegas, the new management team running Yahoo — including CEO Marissa Mayer — is at International CES to schmooze with big advertisers and convince them that Yahoo is the place to put large chunks of their marketing budgets.

One of the longtime selling points of the company is the sheer size of its audience, especially for the key money-making parts of the site — the homepage, Yahoo Mail and search.

But private stats from comScore show that those three areas have continued their longtime decline over the last year, in some cases dropping significantly. In November and December, for example, compared to the same two months a year ago, U.S. search was down 28 percent and 24 percent respectively, while mail was down 16 percent and 12 percent.

This matters a great deal, since the troika of homepage, mail and search have been the critical driver of the Yahoo value ecosystem for advertisers.

The impact of those drops is felt all over Yahoo, whose music, movie, games and travel site have also seen massive drop-offs in traffic year over year in those same months.

Stopping the decline is critical for Yahoo, since Mayer herself has underscored the need for size in her pushing for new businesses at Yahoo that are 100 million users in size and/or have revenue prospects of at least $100 million.

While this is a lofty vision, the reality of traffic falloffs on key properties is a vexing issue, especially since they remain its main source of revenue and also an important element in launching future products Mayer is promising will turbocharge the company.

It’s not that Yahoo is not huge, especially compared to most sites on the Web.

As one of the top Internet brands, according to a recent Nielsen report, the average number of total monthly unique visitors for the longtime Silicon Valley Internet company in 2012 was 141.6 million, No. 3 behind Google and Facebook in the U.S. market. Similar rankings were reported by comScore, which placed Yahoo at the No. 2 spot after Google, with 171.4 million monthly visitors in November.

But, for many years, traffic to those important consumer destinations of Yahoo has been on a clear and unstopping decline, statistics (usually from comScore) that the company nonetheless always dutifully puts in its earnings slides — see below — for investors to get some idea of the major and vexing issues facing the company.

That was suddenly ended in the last quarter with the engagement slide removed from Yahoo’s public deck entirely. Not all companies include such stats, so when I inquired as to why the company had made the change, Yahoo PR never returned my phone call.

But it’s not hard to guess the reason for the shift — the numbers were not good and they called more attention to Yahoo’s glaring challenge, which is getting users reengaged with its products by creating what Mayer has dubbed several times “delightful” experiences.

According to numerous sources, that has also been the case within the company too, with the new regime restricting an internal transparency initiative pushed by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving that shared product performance numbers with the top 100 leaders at Yahoo.

And while it’s an interesting strategic choice, several sources inside the company this week urged me to get ahold of increasingly worrisome numbers from comScore — available to its private clients — comparing November 2011 to November 2012 and also December 2011 to December 2012 at home and work in the U.S.

So I did, getting the same stats from numerous sources — numbers that a spokesman for comScore confirmed were correct.

And, as promised, they are worrisome indeed.

In November 2012, compared to November 2011, the monthly unique visitors to the homepage declined 17 percent to 91.8 million from 110.9 million; Yahoo Mail dropped 16 percent (from 92 million to 77.7 million); and Yahoo search dropped 28 percent (from 93.3 million to 66.9 million).

Also off significantly for all three areas, often by one-third, were a plethora of other stats: Percentage of reach, total minutes, total page views, total visits and more.

One of the only bright spots for Yahoo was the relatively small Flickr sites, which were up 37 percent — 26.7 million versus 19.4 million — in unique monthly visitors year over year. The photo-sharing site — which has been getting a much-needed refresh — was also up in all other stats.

But Flickr — which Mayer (pictured here) has laudably touted and supported after years of inexplicable neglect — is not a money-maker for Yahoo, even if its return does burnish the company’s tech and innovation cred.

In December 2011 to December 2012, the homepage was more stable, gaining four percent in monthly uniques from 109.4 million to 114.2 million, but with other key stats both rising and falling. Total visits were up 14 percent, for example, while average minutes per visit was down 13.6 percent.

But the trouble for mail or search continued, off 12 percent (89.9 million to 78.7 million) and 24 percent (88.7 million to 67.4 million) respectively in monthly uniques, with similarly major declines in all other stats.

Mail recently got a refresh too under Mayer, despite some recent security glitches, so new stats will show if that will help stem the declines. Search is another story all together, with Yahoo in what can only be described as a dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft that numerous sources tell me Mayer is seeking to end.

The homepage, too, is undergoing a redo, with a design that has a decidedly more mobile and social feel, and pushing an ethos of Yahoo becoming a hub for content discovery. It is hoped the new look will boost traffic relatively quickly from its current downward trajectory.

To be fair, there can be lots and lots of reasons for these declines, although most of Yahoo’s competitors are, at worse, seeing a flattening of growth and not outright declines.

And sometimes Internet sites complain that services like comScore undercount, although Yahoo had previously used the firm in its public documents. More to the point, as multiple sources within the company note, the stats are directionally correct in that they closely track with internal Yahoo numbers.

Which is to say, traffic is going down rather than growing. That is clearly why Mayer has loudly stressed mobile since arriving at Yahoo, an area not included in these numbers that many sources said has strong growth to about 70 million monthly unique visitors via its apps and mobile-enabled Web offerings.

But unlike the homepage, mail and search — which push and pull traffic all over Yahoo and are responsible for most of its current monetization — mobile also makes very little money now. And Yahoo — unlike Facebook, which recently did — does not break out mobile results.

So, it will be interesting to see if the company does so when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on January 28 and also if it says anything about continued traffic declines of its traditional Web business in the period and the impact on revenue.

Still, there are lots of ways to counter declining or flat revenues, even with declining traffic — via cost cuts, efficiencies, charging more and selling assets (as Yahoo did in the last quarter). And Yahoo has ably managed to keep its operating margins growing over the years, despite both the declines in traffic and moribund growth in its revenue.

But the real and only fix is the drastic fix to existing tentpoles Yahoo has and the creation or acquisition of products that excite consumers and, therefore, advertisers.

It’s not an easy thing, of course, as well-known venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recently wrote in his blog about the need to focus on products over building and improving culture — one of Mayer’s other big initiatives at Yahoo.

Wrote Horowitz in what I consider one of the clearest articulations of what it takes to win for startups, as well as big companies like Yahoo:

“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10X better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does.”

If you want to take a gander, here are some more of those old Yahoo quarterly engagement slides, which were recently eliminated from its presentations:

(Note: I reached out to Yahoo’s outside PR firm — since they do respond to queries — and also some company execs to get a comment on this story, but so far there has been none.)

Tonight, new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer gave her first public interview since becoming the leader of the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Not to cranky me, of course, but to the much more amenable Fortune magazine writer and editor Pattie Sellers, who hosted the former Google exec at a dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., as part of the magazine’s Most Powerful Women franchise.

Fortune recently put a glamour shot of Mayer on the cover, and Sellers also did a profile. Now, Mayer was ready to sit down to talk about Yahoo and more.

(I wish I could have reported from the event, and almost did. I had initially been invited to the dinner at the Garden Court Hotel for about 100 guests, mostly women. But I was then waitlisted, and then told by Sellers directly that I could not attend, as the editors had decided to close out outside media and only have Fortune staffers covering it.)

Whatever! I have my ways to liveblog it and do it faster than any magazine writer can — and none involve disguising myself as a cater-waiter or solely using the Twitter feed from Fortune. As if!

Here goes:

7:50 pm: After some lovely cocktails, the audience sits down at about 10 tables of nine people and starts in on the salad course.

Soon enough, the night starts off with a speech by a McKinsey partner (and presumable sponsor of the dinner), delivering some stats as part of a study of some sort about how businesses are using — or should be using — social tools.

More than 60 percent of knowledge workers spend time exchanging information … Social can deliver an estimated $1 trillion in value.

Big news! Not! Even! Slightly! Oh dear, please get to the opening act!

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

8:04 pm: Sellers notes that her conference had hosted Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz in 2010 (she was ousted in 2011), and in 2011 had Mayer when she was an exec at Google (she became Yahoo CEO this year).

Now, in 2012, Mayer is top dog at Yahoo, and the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500.

“Why don’t we just call this ‘the most powerful Yahoo dinner,’” jokes Sellers.

Why not!

Mayer — for those who care, and forgive me, since I am fashion-stupid — is wearing a black frock and some heeled Mary Janes. She gets big applause when Sellers notes that Yahoo stock is up 18 percent since Mayer became CEO.

Note: It did go down when she made a shareholder misstep early in her tenure, but has gone up since she repeated mobilemobilemobile with confidence on a recent earnings call that got investors excited about her tenure.

8:08 pm: By the way, Mayer put in a call for people to vote for her as Time magazine’s Person of the Year (she is on the list of nominees — more kudos from a Time Inc. property).

Mayer starts off with basic PR messaging that she trotted out previously on the recent earnings call, around how she wants Yahoo to be focused on “delighting and engaging users” and how it is a brand that touches people every day.

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

Also, she notes, Yahoo should be the bestest place to work.

As apparent proof of that, Mayer says that all Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones have been banished, and that Yahoos will be using Apple’s iPhones, Google’s Android phones and Microsoft’s Windows phones.

This has been endlessly reported, even though most other Internet companies do this, but it’s a good line, anyway.

8:12 pm: By the way, iPhones are the most popular with Yahoo employees.

News at 11! (I will add that iPhones are the most popular with the Swisher boys, too, and — irony alert — one of their moms works at Google.)

Sellers then asks about what makes a good product, which is precisely why the product-savvy Mayer was brought in to fix Yahoo.

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

Also, says Mayer, products have to be created in a way that is “frictionless and beautiful,” and that the offering cannot get in the consumer’s way.

Sellers asks her to name a great product. Mayer notes that she was not talking acquisitions, but quickly namechecks the iPhone and Google.

Since those companies’ market caps are a billionty times bigger than Yahoo’s, she def cannot acquire anything there.

8:17 pm: Mayer also apparently likes some kind of luxury paper made in Germany that looks like velvet. It’s Gmund, by the way.

The topic moves on to Flickr, the once hip photo-sharing service that Yahoo bought and proceeded to ignore. Meanwhile, Instagram.

Mayer says that Yahoo needs to focus on the “global suite” services that are excellent, and on executing them well.

She points out Yahoo’s fantasy football service, mentioning its recent breakdown on game day that sent fans into a tizzy.

It’s a they-love-us-so-much-they-hate-us point.

Yahoo will not do things like online maps, though, Mayer says, noting that where Yahoo cannot compete, it should partner.

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

8:22 pm: Mayer then mentions the importance of small teams that work together, such as its recent Stamped purchase.

She notes that the bigger and more strategic opportunities are around advertising technology. Calling the Rubicon Project!

Mayer veers away from a question about layoffs, a sad Yahoo tradition. I have reported previously that she will make cuts via performance reviews.

At Yahoo, she says, it’s now about performance, not potential: “No offense to potential, but what we really care about now is performance.”

No offense taken!

Also, everyone’s goals will be posted on the Yahoo Web site for everyone to see.

Oh, wait, there will surely be offense taken by those lazy potential people at Yahoo.

Mayer does add that Yahoo should be a “growth company,” and not one defined by cuts.

8:28 pm: “The consumer Internet is growing, and we need to invest,” she says.

To achieve this will be a hard job, and will take multiple years, she adds.

Sellers asks about the Disney turnaround, which Mayer is apparently fascinated with. Mayer does indeed love Disney.

Who doesn’t? (Well, me, but I am an outlier.)

Speaking of Disney, one of its directors, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, sent regrets, but has emailed a question from its board meeting in New York.

Sandberg once worked at Google with Mayer, though the pair is still not working on a search engine together.

Sandberg asks what was most surprising to Mayer about taking over at Yahoo.

Mayer says she thought the job would be hard, and her new baby would be fun. Mayer had her first child at the end of September.

“The job is fun, and the baby is easy,” says Mayer.

Sellers wants to know how Mayer gets it all done. The answer: “Ruthlessly prioritize.”

She notes that that’s why she has not talked to the media at all, and why she will not be talking after this event.

(Well, I guess I will go back to not waiting by the phone for Yahoo PR to call back. Hi Anne! — also looking forward to not getting the holiday media party invite, which is no prob as the Googlers are throwing one the same night and they usually have organic arugula picked by elves they employ that’s acutely delicious.)

Then, as a Wisconsin Green Bay Packers fan, Mayer does her version of the famous Vince Lombardi quote: “God. Family. Yahoo.”

Cheesehead moment! And Mayer and I have so much in common! Mine is: Dog. Family. Yahoo.

8:33 pm: Sellers throws in one more question from famed investor Warren Buffett, who apparently wants to know what, if Mayer was not CEO of Yahoo, would she want to run?

Not Berkshire Hathaway! Mayer says she would build something herself.

It seems as if that is what she is doing at Yahoo, so we await the result.

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

Much of the toy industry’s success will hinge on how many customers the top toy retailers can lure to their stores with a mix of door-buster deals, exclusive merchandise, price-match guarantees and layaway programs.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In the midst of last week’s earnings call, after the company had released strong results, Demand Media CEO and co-founder Richard Rosenblatt made an unusual declaration about its once-tight affiliation with now-disgraced professional racing cyclist Lance Armstrong.

Said Rosenblatt about the Santa Monica, Calif., social content company to Wall Street analysts about the status of the relationship in the wake of Armstrong being stripped of his many Tour de France titles:

“Our relationship is with the Livestrong Foundation, not with Lance, and we are aligned in empowering people to live healthier lives, and we support the important work of the foundation. We have built a powerful destination, popular applications and a very engaged community. None of this has changed and we have seen no material impact on the consumer traffic or metrics.”

In reality, the once-close relationship between Demand and Armstrong ended a while ago, even though the athlete’s cancer-fighting charity has been a high-profile shareholder since early 2008. At the time, Demand struck a four-year exclusive deal with Livestrong to create a health and wellness site, and also got a perpetual license to the Livestrong.com domain name.

But Armstrong — despite appearing at the Web 2.0 conference in 2008 with Rosenblatt — eventually had little to do with the Demand brand.

And it is down to zero involvement now, after he recently stepped down as chairman of Livestrong, due to the doping controversy. That mess has caused a lot of the brands he was tied up with, such as Nike, to disassociate themselves from Armstrong himself, although not from the Livestrong Foundation.

That has also been Demand’s direction, especially given that the commercial Web site, which has become the No. 3 health property in the U.S., is one of the company’s strongest ones. That adds up to about 26 million monthly unique visitors, a gain of 97 percent since last year.

But with that success, why did Demand make the statement at earnings — as well as putting up a blog post recently clarifying that it had “no direct relationship” with Armstrong?

Apparently, according to several sources, Demand had to move to be as explicit has possible, not because of consumers, but because of advertisers.

“The advertisers did care about the affiliation,” said one source. “So it was time to say in no uncertain terms to them and shareholders that Lance Armstrong has nothing to do with Demand.”

Or, as the blog post in late October noted rather strongly:

“We don’t believe the struggles of one individual should detract from the millions of real people who have benefited from work that’s been done to prevent cancer and improve the lives of those unfortunate enough to have it.”

Or, as they say in bike racing, Armstrong had simply become too much of a wheel sucker.

For Zynga, which has struggled to develop a new hit game recently, the strategy has two aims. Obviously, it wants to generate more ad revenue. But, just as important, it wants to give game developers a reason to work with its CEO and founder, Mark Pincus.

Multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans say the platform is still under development, but some of the components could launch by the end of the year. It may not be available to third-party developers immediately. A Zynga spokesman declined to comment.

Up until now, the social game maker has been slow to adopt advertising, opting instead to rely on the sale of virtual goods for the bulk of its revenue.

The advertising efforts will be a part of its push into third-party publishing and will be used as another way to attract developers looking for a complete package when it comes to bringing games to market. Sources said the initiative is being headed up by the company’s long-time CTO, Cadir Lee, who has also been in charge of other major platform projects, including the build-out of its own cloud network.

Over the past year, Zynga has been slowly ramping up its advertising efforts. Recently, it announced a deal where Words With Friends players were rewarded for using Honda-related words on their game board. Another example: A virtual State Farm blimp that players used in FarmVille to revive crops.

Last quarter, ads generated $41 million for Zynga. That’s up 170 percent year over year, and represents 12 percent of the company’s overall revenue.

The spike in advertising over the past year likely has a lot to do with the acquisition of OMGPOP, which was generating massive amounts of ad inventory at the peak of its hit game Draw Something.

But it’s not enough. Earlier this month, Zynga updated its full-year guidance, saying that revenue will fall below previous expectations for the second time this year. Zynga will report final results for the third quarter on Wednesday.

So, what could a Zynga-built advertising platform look like?

The platform could enable the company to expand beyond brand integrations and sponsorships into more lightweight experiences, including banner ads, interstitials, video pre-rolls and incentivized downloads. While it will span both Facebook and mobile, it will likely focus more on mobile games, since Zynga has repeated over and over again that they don’t bring in as much revenue as its social games.

To bolster its efforts in the space, back in April Zynga hired Julie Shumaker (formerly of RockYou and Electronic Arts) to be the VP of global ad sales. Since then, sources say, Zynga has hired a few more direct ad sales employees, and lists several more job openings on its Web site, including roles for sales managers and directors.

It is not entirely clear why Zynga is choosing to compete with so many ad platforms that already exist today, but according to sources, there are a few benefits that may outweigh the costs.

For starters, it will keep more of the revenue that way, without having to work with a middleman — important for a company that has been forced to give 30 percent of its virtual-goods revenue to Facebook.

Another theory is that Zynga wants to ensure that it owns all of its own data. Zynga has an incredibly large audience — roughly 300 million monthly active users — and a lot of rich information about them in terms of their behaviors and their social graph.

The Nexus 7 tablet costs $199 handheld computer and features a 7-inch screen. The research firm UBM TechInsights has come up with a $184 preliminary estimate for the costs of components in the Google tablet. That compares with its $153 estimate in November for the components inside Amazon.com’s identically priced Kindle Fire.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

It has been a little over three months since Apple appealed to the Higher People’s Court of Guangzhou, a lower Chinese court ruling that found it erroneously purchased the iPad China trademark from a Proview affiliate that didn’t have the right to sell it. But the Higher People’s Court of Guangzhou is withholding judgement on the case because its two players are in mediation talks.

Proview, Apple’s cash-strapped opponent, is looking for a big payout from Cupertino — $1.5 billion — enough to appease its creditors. Apple doesn’t want to pay anything close to that, arguing that it has already legally purchased Proview’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark in 10 different countries, China included. And it has a fair bit of evidence to back it up. Among the documents supporting Apple’s claim: A Dec. 23, 2009, contract signed by a Proview representative stipulating that the company will transfer to Apple all rights, “powers and benefits belonging or accrued to the [iPad] trademarks, including the right to sue for past infringements and passing off.”

Quite the rat’s nest here, and one the two companies don’t seem any closer to unraveling than they were a few months ago. As Proview attorney Roger Xie told Bloomberg, “The mediation will continue. There is no specific deadline.”

RELATED POSTS:

• Apple, Proview Will Try to Talk Out iPad Trademark Tussle
• Apple vs. Proview: We Lawyers Have a Word for Cases Like This, and It Starts With “Cluster”
• Proview’s New PR Attack: Apple Cheated Us Out of the iPad Trademark
• Proview Loses Bid to Ban iPad in Shanghai
• Surprise — Proview’s Ready to Talk Settlement With Apple
• Proview to Apple: You Owe Us $2 Billion
• Take a Look at Some of Apple’s Evidence in Proview iPad Dispute
• Here’s the Chinese Court Ruling Backing Apple in iPad Trademark Tiff
• Apple: China’s Proview Trying to Weasel Out of iPad Trademark Deal
• All Apple coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120614/apples-battle-over-china-ipad-trademark-evidently-interminable/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120522/100-most-valuable-brands-apple-tops-again-nokia-disappears/ http://allthingsd.com/20120522/100-most-valuable-brands-apple-tops-again-nokia-disappears/#comments Tue, 22 May 2012 18:02:23 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=211120 WPP’s Millward Brown published its annual BrandZ study, ranking the world’s leading brands, which are increasingly technology companies. According to the research house, four of the top five global brands and seven of the Top 10 are tech firms.

At $183 billion, Apple is the world’s most valuable brand, a title it claimed last year as well, though at that time the brand was worth $153.3 billion. In the ensuing year, it has grown another 19 percent. IBM ranked second with $116 billion in value. Google, which ranked second last year, this year swapped places with IBM, after its brand value slipped 3 percent year over year. With a $76.7 billion brand, Microsoft claimed fifth place, ranking below McDonalds — the only non-tech company in the top five.

The biggest year-over-year gain also went to a tech company: Facebook, which rose from No. 35 in 2011 to No. 19 in 2012. A meteoric rise, and one that spiked the company’s brand value 74 percent to $33.2 billion.

Nokia, which ranked 81st in brand value in Millward Brown’s 2011 study after a 28 percent year-over-year decline in value, fell even further in 2012. So far, in fact, that it seems to have fallen right off the chart. Not a surprise, really, given the company’s current situation. But worth noting just the same; as recently as 2008, Nokia was the world’s ninth most valuable brand.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120522/100-most-valuable-brands-apple-tops-again-nokia-disappears/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120502/silver-lake-grabs-large-minority-stake-of-wme-to-push-digital-initiatives/ http://allthingsd.com/20120502/silver-lake-grabs-large-minority-stake-of-wme-to-push-digital-initiatives/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 17:59:41 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=202614

Large private equity firm Silver Lake is buying a large stake in powerful Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, which is being described as a way to turbocharge its digital efforts.

While the pair would not disclose any financial details of the deal, which they are calling a “strategic partnership,” sources said Silver Lake is acquiring 31 percent of WME.

“Over the years, we have been brick-building, as we have been doing more and more digitally,” said Patrick Whitesell, co-CEO of WME with Ari Emanuel, in an interview today. “But the opportunities are so vast, there is a need for more capital to do more.”

Whitesell and Emanuel said they had been considering a range of investors, especially among media entities, but that they wanted to work with Silver Lake since it had more digital experience as an active investor in technology.

Skype, for example, was the driver of the sale of Internet telephony giant Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, while WME reps stars such as Matt Damon and Hugh Jackman, among others.

“In addition to capital, we really wanted a partner to help us build it out that had more technology expertise,” said Emanuel. “We are good with brands and creative and talent, but there are many more Silicon Valley opportunities.”

In fact, WME has long tried to up its digital portfolio to respond to the needs of its clients and the changing nature of entertainment distribution as consumer Internet use has exploded. That’s included a digital advertising effort, as well as one in online gaming.

Silver Lake, which has most recently looked at investing in Yahoo, it was a chance to get closer to a trove of premium entertainment content.

“You have two forces at play, ubiquitous distribution and four billion people connected,” said Silver Lake’s Egon Durban. “As that distribution has been commoditized, the only way to differentiate is through A-plus content.”

Along with the core investment, WME and Silver Lake said they will also be considering other possible deals together as they move forward.

“There is nothing we like more than handing our best partners more money,” said Durban, who will join WME executive committee and also help create a technology advisory counsel at the firm.

Calling Marc Andreessen! Actually, in an interesting factoid, it was the well-known tech investor and entrepreneur who introduced Durban to Emanuel.

But this movie has been shown before and is not the first Hollywood-tech hookup to happen. A variety of efforts have waxed and waned over the years — most of which have largely been underwhelming.

Last year, for example, Accel Partners invested $40 million in Legendary Pictures and, back in 2008, Accel, the then William Morris Agency and AT&T formed an investment consortium to focus on Southern California start-ups.

Most closely related was the 2010 deal, in which TPG Capital took a 35 percent stake in Creative Artists Agency.

Here is the official press release on the Silver Lake-WME deal:

WME Press Release_5 02 12_FINAL

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120502/silver-lake-grabs-large-minority-stake-of-wme-to-push-digital-initiatives/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120402/third-point-launches-value-yahoo-blog-which-does-not-value-current-leadership/ http://allthingsd.com/20120402/third-point-launches-value-yahoo-blog-which-does-not-value-current-leadership/#comments Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:30:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=192096

In another high-profile parry in its increasingly aggressive proxy fight against Yahoo, activist shareholder Third Point has launched an extensive Web blog to support its case with investors called “Value Yahoo.”

Along with a long statement — a blogifesto of sorts — about what it will take to fix the Silicon Valley Internet giant, Value Yahoo also tries to keep up the pressure on Yahoo’s board and management.

The purple-themed site — this is Yahoo’s well-known color — features a humorous take on Yahoo’s now dearly departed neon sign in San Francisco, with the banner: “Yahoo Shareholders Deserve Overdue Representation!”

It includes a section on “Failed Leadership,” info on its “Road to Recovery” slate of alternate directors and even an FAQ and mission statement.

“We believe in Yahoo!, its loyal users, committed employees, dedicated partners, and the potential of the brand,” it reads, in part. “Yahoo! shareholders, employees, and partners have suffered for too long with a revolving door of management teams and Directors who have been unable to seize opportunities despite the Company’s enduring role as the premier online source for news, sports, business, entertainment and email.”

By the way, in a clever dig, there is also a Facebook site for Value Yahoo — patent lawsuit or no, you can “like” Third Point’s effort.

Here, for example, is one of Value Yahoo’s charticles:

The goal of all this, presumably, is to get Yahoo to give in to demands for several board seats using its directors, including Third Point’s Dan Loeb. So far, ongoing discussions between Loeb and Yahoo have failed to stop the shareholder battle, which comes in the midst of the company’s wrenching restructuring.

Last week, Yahoo said it had appointed three new directors to its board. In a pointed slap at Loeb, the company said it had rejected him specifically, although Yahoo added that it was willing to accept one of his current choices and another that was mutually agreed to.

Loeb reacted to that, um, badly, with another letter last week that said Yahoo leadership was living in an “illogical Alice-in-Wonderland world.”

The war of words continues with the new site, which Third Point said it will maintain actively like a blog, with updates, charts, filings, outside news stories and more.

(Since Yahoo has apparently banned me from its internal news offering to employees, according to more sources than you can shake a stick at, I hope they can see my work here!)

In its newest post — titled “Why Are We Running for Election to the Yahoo! Board?” — Third Point presents an argument for other shareholders to act, even though Yahoo has actually made a lot of the changes that Loeb has been pushing for already.

(In fact, that’s an FAQ question on Value Yahoo, natch: “Yahoo! has made changes to its Board. Hasn’t Third Point already gotten what it wanted?” Short answer: Vigilance, since they are well-known backsliders over there!)

As the firm notes in its reasons-why essay, with the original bolding on the Value Yahoo blog:

“After years of failed leadership and poor governance, Yahoo! shareholders have a chance to inject experienced, independent voices aligned with their interests. The “Shareholder Slate” — Daniel Loeb, Harry Wilson, Michael Wolf, and Jeff Zucker — seeks a voice and a choice for Yahoo! owners hurt by the current “Legacy Board’s” track record of value disintegration, and wants to prevent the Board from simply nominating their handpicked replacements — the “Insider Slate” — for Yahoo!’s board.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120402/third-point-launches-value-yahoo-blog-which-does-not-value-current-leadership/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120229/who-really-owns-the-ipad-trademark-in-china/ http://allthingsd.com/20120229/who-really-owns-the-ipad-trademark-in-china/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:30:18 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=179299 The hearing that could determine ownership of the iPad trademark in China kicked off this morning with a broad rehash of the battle we’ve seen play out in the media over the past few weeks: Apple arguing it bought Proview Technology’s worldwide rights to the iPad trademark several years ago, and Proview claiming it bought them from an affiliate that didn’t own them.

“Apple meticulously formed a band of lawyers to buy the trademark, but the transacted amount was given to Taiwan’s Proview, not Shenzhen’s Proview,” Proview’s attorneys told the court, adding that the iPad trademark therefore still belongs to Proview’s Shenzhen unit, its claimed original owner.

The problem with that argument, as Apple’s legal team was quick to point out, is that negotiations over the iPad trademark were authorized by Rowell Yang, chairman of Proview Shenzhen, and the actual transfer agreement was signed by Ray Mai, head of Shenzhen’s legal department.

Proview’s explanation for this, according to its lawyers: “Personnel may have multiple roles or titles within the group, but the question is in what capacity were they acting?“

And that really gets to the heart of the issue here: Did Apple buy the iPad China trademark from a company that didn’t own it?

“The ownership of the trademark when it was allegedly sold is not really in doubt; it was owned by Proview-Taiwan,” Dan Harris, an intellectual-property attorney at Harris & Moure, explains. “The real question is whether Proview-Shenzhen authorized Proview-Taiwan to sell the iPad trademark to Apple.”

Because if it is determined that it didn’t, Apple is in quite a bind. “The value of iPad’s trademark rocketed after Apple launched the tablet computer in January 2010,” the company’s legal team told the court. “In the eyes of the consumer, iPad is associated with Apple. If the court decides that Proview wins the case, then this will confuse consumers and hurt their interests.”

And it will force Apple to negotatiate a new deal with its cash-strapped opponent, undoubtedly a very expensive one.

Which is exactly what Proview is seeking here.

Said Harris, in a separate interview with AllThingsD, “We lawyers have a word for cases like this: Clusterf–k. The facts are going to keep coming out, and nobody is going to look very pure as they do, and this just strikes me as the kind of case that both sides are going to want to settle.”

RELATED POSTS:

• Apple, Proview Will Try to Talk Out iPad Trademark Tussle
• Apple vs. Proview: We Lawyers Have a Word for Cases Like This, and It Starts With “Cluster”
• Proview’s New PR Attack: Apple Cheated Us Out of the iPad Trademark
• Proview Loses Bid to Ban iPad in Shanghai
• Surprise — Proview’s Ready to Talk Settlement With Apple
• Proview to Apple: You Owe Us $2 Billion
• Take a Look at Some of Apple’s Evidence in Proview iPad Dispute
• Here’s the Chinese Court Ruling Backing Apple in iPad Trademark Tiff
• Apple: China’s Proview Trying to Weasel Out of iPad Trademark Deal
• All Apple coverage

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120229/who-really-owns-the-ipad-trademark-in-china/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120224/hey-yahoo-when-you-act-like-a-media-company-i-like-you-i-really-like-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20120224/hey-yahoo-when-you-act-like-a-media-company-i-like-you-i-really-like-you/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 15:15:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=177642

Last night, I did the unthinkable, and actually drove myself through rush hour traffic in Silicon Valley to go to an event in San Jose.

I did this for three good reasons.

First, it was to see Bill Maher’s “CrazyStupidPolitics: Live From Silicon Valley” show, which was being being broadcast live and exclusively on Yahoo Screen, the Internet giant’s video destination. The event launched the Yahoo Comedy Channel, which will offer premium original video from some top talent for free, underwritten by advertisers.

Second, Maher is really, really funny, and even better in stand-up than on his HBO cable show.

Third, some Yahoos always think I am too mean to the company and don’t focus on what it’s doing right.

To be fair, that’s because it has not been doing much right when it comes to stabilizing leadership, handling its longtime moribund board, and giving non-cat-wrangling direction to its talented pool of much-beleaguered employees.

Thus — with some sort of usually self-inflicted fire drill going on all the time — there is a lot for me to report on, from persistent attrition to declining metrics to the latest bickering with its Asian partners.

Which is why it was a pleasure to see the Maher event and then also watch it online, because it was done by Yahoo with the kind of beautiful ease that it used to roll out all the time from its media properties.

When I say pleasure, it is a major compliment, since making and presenting content on the Web has usually ended in pain. Google-owned YouTube, as successful as it is, still hurts my eyes when I watch it, and has not yet become the kind of environment that big brands would want to live in for a long time.

But, from its very first day, without a lot of fuss and noise, Yahoo has created and distributed some of the very best online content experiences from its undersung media units, whether it was Yahoo Finance or Yahoo Sports or Yahoo News.

While there were some notable misses — there was a strange original news show produced in Web 1.0 that was so bad it was good — Yahoo has always had a strong talent for media distribution, and has the huge audience to aim it at.

What has been a shame is the lessening focus the media side has gotten, despite its success over the many years, and even though many of its channels have long been No. 1 across the Web.

The often short shrift has been largely due to the faux struggle between whether Yahoo was a media company or a technology one. It has been an exhausting and toxic debate within Yahoo over the years, with no clear conclusion.

But here’s the truth: The Maher event showed that what Yahoo can do well is be a high-level, high-quality, highly selective distributor of media of all kinds to millions upon millions of users.

This has been and can still be — if properly organized, staffed and sold — a very good business for Yahoo, which has always treated it like some sideshow, rather than the main one.

I get that, of course — why be in a media business, when the pickings are so good in search, commerce, social … whatever?

Why? Well, because a terrific guide of all sorts of media experiences online is what Yahoo was from its very start, and what it has since tried not to be as definitively.

Having covered Yahoo from its very beginnings, it has been a lot like watching someone you think looks good in one outfit change into one ill-fitting and inappropriate get-up after the next in search of the right image.

But if the company only cared to take a look at how well and seemingly effortlessly it pulled off the Maher event, it would know immediately what it has always done well is what it should always be doing.

The Maher live offering was not fancy and it was not flashy and it did not have all kinds of the latest trends hanging all over it.

It was just good, well done and well worth a watch, whether in person or at home. And it was very, very funny.

It would be nice, then, if Yahoo learned to laugh like this much more often.

Here are some of the clips from Maher’s patter to enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120224/hey-yahoo-when-you-act-like-a-media-company-i-like-you-i-really-like-you/feed/ 0