AllThingsD » Conan O’Brien

Louis C.K. Uses Twitter, Louis C.K. Hates Twitter

Peter Kafka — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 23:33:17 +0000

If you’ve seen Louis C.K. do stand-up (and you should) or his FX show (and you should), the fact that he both employs and detests Twitter won’t surprise you. His summary, via his interview on Conan O’Brien Thursday night: “I kinda hate it. I think it’s awful. I have Twitter just so I can tell people what I want them to buy, and give me money.”

Here’s the two-minute version:

And if you’ve got 10 minutes (remember, if you live in the U.S., you get a bonus hour tonight), here’s the whole interview. And here, via the New York Times, is more on his plan to stream his next concert from his own site, passing over not only pay cable but Netflix and iTunes, too.

This Conan O'Brien Siri Ad Barely Qualifies as a Parody

Peter Kafka — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:45:49 +0000

Really, this one, via Business Insider, seems more like a documentary — pretty sure some of these scenes are word-for-word replays of Siri queries I’ve witnessed in the past few days. (Warning: 30-second pre-roll before minute-long clip.)

Conan Lists His 25,000-Square-Foot TV Studio on Airbnb for $3

Tricia Duryee — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:33:50 +0000

Late-night TV comedian Conan O’Brien has listed his “cozy and charming” 25,000-square-foot Burbank, Calif., studio on Airbnb, the site that obviously helps rent out just about any type of housing to anyone.

Conan announced the stunt during his show, lauding the 25 LCD TV monitors (no HBO), a fully stocked kitchenette with intern and a shower shared by the four members of the house band.

It is available Oct. 10 to 13 for $1 a night for a total of three bucks.

The studio, which can accommodate up to four guests, lists sleeping accommodations, such as “celebrity-rubbed” sleeper sofas and an air mattress that needs repair. Linens are included, although it’s recommended bringing your own for undisclosed reasons.

What else? There’s free Wi-Fi, and it’s great for families!

Recently, Airbnb instituted a $50,000 guarantee in case anything goes wrong during a stay, but I’m not sure if that would cover the havoc that someone could create on a TV set that once filmed such classics as “The Goonies” and “Karate Kid Part 2.”

Conan declined to say whether the guests will be featured on the show, but you can pretty much bank on it. Jokes TBD.

Exclusive: Groupon's Mason Tells Troops in Feisty Internal Memo: "It Looks Good."

Kara Swisher — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 22:02:13 +0000

Facing a barrage of negative press about its upcoming IPO, Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason took up a pen to counter critics of the social buying service.

Especially under scrutiny has been the Chicago-based Groupon’s accounting of its finances — along with worries that its torrid growth is slowing — both of which Mason addressed in detail in a pugnacious email memo to his thousands of employees.

Specifically referencing a recent article speculating that the daily deals site was running out of money, Mason said, in part:

“While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.”

Mason also took on the controversial ACSOI — or adjusted consolidated segment operating income — metric that Groupon used in its initial filing and later stepped back from.

“The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state — we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics,” wrote Mason.

Mason also took some aim at competitors, such as LivingSocial and Yelp, in the email.

As for the public offering, which is expected next month:

“If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.”

Then again, that is exactly what a dad-to-be would say about his baby, whatever it looked like.

Mason, when asked about the memo, declined to comment.

There is a lot more than that, so here’s Mason’s full email for all you pencil pushers to peruse:

Dear Groupon,

This weekend, I did a Google News search on our company — my first in awhile. The first story that popped up was called The Fall of Groupon: Is the Daily Deals Site Running Out of Cash? I laughed when I read the headline (in the car by myself, weirdly). First — with this article, the degree to which we’re getting the shit kicked out of us in the press had finally crossed the threshold from “annoying” to “hilarious.” Second, I was struck by the irony — I had just finished a board meeting last Wednesday saying this to myself: I’ve never been more confident and excited about the future of our business.

I realize that this sounds like the kind of thing that CEOs say when they’re trying to pep people up. First of all — I’m all about not pepping people up. If you don’t believe me, just ask my fiancée, Jenny “why don’t you ever say anything nice about me” Gillespie. Want another example? Look at the magazine covers in our lobby, which are there to make you sad by reminding you of the impermanence of success.

I’m going to spend the rest of this email explaining why I’m so excited. You need some ammo to argue back against your blog-reading “friends” (silently argue in your mind, that is — you can’t actually say any of this yet), and I’ve been told that the “what have you ever done with your life that’s so great?” rebuttal isn’t working as well for you guys as it has for me.

While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.

I’ll summarize my excitement with four points: 1) Growth in our core business is strong 2) Our investments in the future — businesses like Getaways & NOW — look great, 3) We are pulling away from competition, and 4) We’ve built a great team that I would pit against anyone. In other words, all the stuff that one would want to look good? It looks good.

Many of the long-term unknowns of our business are becoming known, and we like the answers. I will now elaborate in a level of financial detail that will give Jason Child a stomach ulcer.

1. GROWTH IN THE CORE BUSINESS

Thanks to a tremendous effort by our sales team, August in the U.S. is shaping up to be a pivotal month. It appears that will revenues grow by about 12% over last month (which is a lot), while we cut our marketing expenses by 20% in the same period.

Beyond their obvious goodness, these numbers are important because they answer one of the main criticisms thrown at us in the past few months, relating to a metric we put in the S-1 called ACSOI (adjusted consolidated segment operating income) to help people understand how we think about marketing expenses. The reason everyone in the world seems to hate ACSOI is that it makes us look magically profitable by subtracting a bunch of our customer acquisition marketing costs from our expenses. The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state –we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics. I think it’s worth going deep on this one more time — brace yourself.

Our internal forecast shows two different types of marketing: what I’ll call “normal marketing” — which is NOT excluded from ACSOI — and “customer acquisition marketing,” which is. The way Groupon spends on marketing is unique in three ways:

1. We are currently spending more than just about any company ever on marketing — in Q2, we spent nearly 20% of our net revenue on marketing, while a typical company spends less than 5%. Why do we spend so much? The simple answer is “because it works.” But thats only part of what makes our situation special.

2. Our marketing — at least the customer acquisition marketing that we remove from ACSOI — is designed to add people to our own long-term marketing channel — our daily email list. Once we have a customer’s email, we can continually market to them at no additional cost. Compare this to Johnson and Johnson, McDonald’s, or most other companies. If I’m a Johnson, and I’m trying to sell you a box of Band Aids, I have to keep spending money on commercials and magazine ads and stuff to remind you about how sweet Band Aids are, even after you’ve bought your first box. With Groupon, we just spend money one time to get you on our email list, and then every day we email you a reminder of the sweetness of our metaphorical Band Aid. There is no cost of reacquisition — that’s unusual (and we created ACSOI to point that out). If Johnson wanted to follow the Groupon strategy, he would have to start a free daily newspaper about bandages and then run Band Aid ads in it every day.

3. Eventually, we’ll ramp down marketing just as fast as we ramped it up, reducing the customer acquisition part of our marketing expenses (the piece that we remove in ACSOI) to nominal levels. We are spending a ton now because we’re acquiring as many subscribers as we can as quickly as we can. We aren’t paying attention to marketing budget (just marketing ROI) in the way a normal company would, because we know that even if we wanted to continue to spend at these levels, we would eventually run out of new subscribers to acquire. So our customer acquisition spend drops severely to reflect the fact that eventually we’ll run out of people we can add to our email list. We view this internally as a very large one-time expense and then our job forever after will be to continually convert these subscribers into customers and to make sure our customers keep buying from us. Ongoing, the normal marketing dollars we spend are not something we would remove from our internal calculation of ACSOI.

I tried my best to explain this simply, but it’s not lost on me that if you actually understood this, you probably had to read it three times. It’s not easy stuff. It’s much easier to assume that we’re goons. So people can be forgiven for being suspicious. In fact, feel a little bad about how downhearted the critics will be when we don’t turn out to be a Ponzi scheme — those are good impulses for journalists to have, and I hope our non-evil ways don’t destroy their spirits.

Anyway, there’s a reason that I just went on about ACSOI. One of the questions that skeptics ask is, “when you ramp down marketing, won’t revenues stop growing as well? Aren’t you just buying growth?” Over the past several months we’ve been consistently reducing our marketing spend and yet revenues are still increasing at a significant pace. In Q1 of this year, marketing represented 32.3% of our net revenues. By the end of Q2 it had fallen to 19.4%. And it has continued to fall over the past several months all because we’ve been investing in our own long-term marketing channel — our email list.

Internationally we see the same trends — marketing is down, but revenues are up — every country is either losing less or making more. Even in young markets like Korea, where we’re still making massive investments, we’re seeing unprecedented growth. We started building our Korean team this January, despite the presence of two competitors that were larger than any we’d previously battled from behind. Thanks to the brilliant execution of the Korean team, we are set to be the market leader within months. We’ve never had a country grow as fast as Korea!

What about our joint-venture with Tencent in China? Did you read the article that Gaopeng’s CEO has kidnapped the first born children of all our employees and is putting them to work building a laser beam he’ll use to slice the moon in half? It turns out that that one isn’t true either. China is definitely a different market, but every month we inch closer to profitability. As has been our strategy in launching other countries — Germany, France, and the UK, included — our China growth strategy was to hire quickly and manage out the bottom performers. So far, that strategy has improved our competitive position in China from #3,000 to #8. Will we one day reach the dominant status we enjoy in most (come on, Switzerland!) other countries? It’s too soon to tell, but there’s no question in my mind that we’re building a business that will be around for the long haul.

2. NEW BUSINESS LINES ARE BOOMING

Travel and Product are enormous opportunities. After only a few months, they’re already making up 20% of revenue in some countries. We sold $2M worth of mattresses in the UK — in one day! Groupon Getaways will do $10M in its first calendar month — which you might think is awesome, but we’re actually disappointed with those results because we know how much better we’ll be doing soon.

While there’s still a ton of work to do, Groupon Now! continues to see weekly double digit growth. The model works and I believe it will play a major part in the future of our global business as more merchants and customers join the marketplace.

3. WE ARE PULLING AWAY FROM COMPETITION

If there’s a question I’ve received from Groupon skeptics more than any other, it’s, “how will you fend off the competition — especially massive companies like Google and Facebook?” I could give a dozen reasons to bet on Groupon, but it’s impossible to predict the future or the actions of others. Well, now the sleeping giants have woken up — and the numbers are showing that what was proven true with literally thousands of other competitors is just as true with the incumbents of the Internet: it’s kind of hard to build a Groupon. And since anyone with an Internet connection can track the performance of our competitors, I can be more specific:

Google Offers is small and not growing. In the three markets where we compete, we are 450% of their size.

Yelp is small and not growing. In the 15 markets where we compete, our daily deals are 500% of their size.

Living Social’s U.S. local business is about 1/3rd our size in revenue (and smaller in GP) and has shrunk relative to us in the last several months. This, in part, appears to be driving them toward short-sighted tactics to buy revenue, like buying gift certificates from national retailers at full price and then paying out of their own pocket to give the appearance of a 50% off deal. Our marketing team has tested this tactic enough to know that it’s generally a bad idea, and not a profitable form of customer acquisition.

Facebook sales are harder to track, but are even less significant at present.

My point is not that our competitors will fail — some may actually develop sustainable businesses, or even grow — after all, local commerce is an enormous market. The real point is that our business is a lot harder to build than people realize and our scale creates competitive advantages that even the largest technology companies are having trouble penetrating. And with the launch of NOW, I suspect our competition will have an even harder time in light of the natural barriers to entry that are needed to build a real-time local deals marketplace.

4. OUR TEAM

This is the fluffiest of the four points, but maybe the most important — we’ve built a global team of hungry entrepreneurial operators and seasoned executives that rivals any team I know of. Almost every day, I find myself in a scenario where I silently think, “I can’t believe I got this person to work for me — that failure of judgement is perhaps their single flaw.”

I point out the team because while today the business is strong and it appears we must endure success for awhile longer (despite its impermanence), we will inevitably be challenged with issues we didn’t predict — and when that happens, the quality of our team will be a deciding factor in our ultimate long-term success.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I wrote this email because when I read some of the press this weekend, I realized a rational person could read this stuff and wrongly conclude that we’re in trouble. The irony is hopefully clear: We’ve never been stronger.

And while we’ve refrained from defending ourselves publicly, you’ve continued to create our best defense, with every department innovating new practices that are taking our business to the next level. Thanks for staying tough, determined, and agile throughout this process. For now we must patiently and silently endure a bit more public criticism as we prepare to birth this IPO baby — a breed for which there are no epidurals. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.

I’ve been as candid as possible — hope this sheds some light on things. Reply with your questions if anything remains unclear. Amidst all this, I hope you remember what we’re doing here — we are making history together. I guess you don’t get to build something that reshapes the local commerce ecosytem without getting a few bruises. I’m so proud of the work we’re doing, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to work on what I think is the best thing that’s happened to small businesses since the telephone We’ve invented something that is catalyzing millions of dollars of local commerce every single day in 45 countries and fills the lives of millions of customers with unforgettable experiences — it’s pretty remarkable.

Looking forward to getting this behind us!

Andrew

P.S.: I almost forgot to address the nonsense about us running out of money in the article above. If you apply the same logic used in the article, you’d have concluded long ago that companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart were running out of cash too. Both have often had payables far in excess of their cash. Finance geeks call this a working capital deficit. It’s normal, manageable and a lot of folks actually believe it’s good thing and would kill to get paid from their customers long before they have to pay their suppliers. We are generating cash, not losing it — we generated $25M in cash last quarter alone, adding to the $200M we had before. In other words, we’re doing the opposite of running out of money.

Speaking of “it looks good,” here is Conan O’Brien with a Tourette’s version of Mason’s new catchphrase:

YouTube Is Six Years Old and Huge: Three Billion Views a Day

Peter Kafka — Wed, 25 May 2011 13:00:10 +0000

Last year YouTube made a big deal of its fifth birthday, with a special Web site, special messages from the likes of Conan O’Brien, etc.

This year’s commemoration is more muted. Basically, just a blog post that notes that the site is really, really big.

How big, you ask?

YouTube users are now uploading 48 hours of video a minute. That’s up 37 percent in the last six months, and 100 percent in the last year. YouTube says the increase comes in part because it’s easier than ever to upload stuff, and in part because YouTube has started embracing lengthy live streaming sessions.
YouTube users are now watching more than 3 billion videos a day. That’s up 50 percent from the last year, which is also a huge leap, though the growth rate has declined a bit: Last year, views doubled from a billion a day to two billion in six months.

But if you really want context for YouTube’s growth, go back and check out what it was doing in its first year: In December 2005–when Lazy Sunday first hit, and the site had become a mainstream success–viewers were watching 2.5 million videos a month.

And since we’re going back in time, here are three historically important YouTube videos:

Here’s the first clip ever uploaded to the site, back in April 2005, from little-known co-founder Jared Karim:

And here’s the clip uploaded by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in October 2006, announcing that they’d sold the site to Google:

And here’s Tillman the dog, a 2007 video that showed up in Apple’s early iPhone commercials, and ended up becoming shorthand for the site’s user generated content.

Viral Video: Team Coco Explains What Happened to Myspace

Kara Swisher — Thu, 12 May 2011 18:18:07 +0000

This is very funny from Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco–except not to the folks at Myspace (who could actually use a good laugh right about now):

Twitter Really, Really Likes TV

Peter Kafka — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:50:34 +0000

Hey! It was Twitter’s fifth birthday yesterday! I remember hearing about that somewhere.

Ah–here’s one of the places I heard about it: Conan O’Brien’s newish show, where co-founder Biz Stone popped in for a chat. (O’Brien, you may have heard, is really into Twitter these days.)

Stone, who is on TV a lot, is good at it, too.

Stone’s appearances are fun, but Twitter’s real embrace of TV is happening a little bit offstage, where the company is working hard to get itself integrated into TV shows.

It’s still unclear exactly what TV can really mean for Twitter, but the company is smart to try to get itself into the industry, whose $70 billion-plus in annual revenue still makes the Web ad business look puny.

Twitter’s media blog, for instance, is touting Comedy Central’s use/promotion of the service during its kinda-unwatchable Donald Trump roast.

Comedy Central ran a Twitter hashtag on the bottom left corner for the duration of the show, prompting people to use it, which helped make the term appear on Twitter’s “trending” list, which presumably prompted more people to check out the show.

That’s a cool virtuous cycle, though I wonder if that’s a novelty that goes away. More important: Even if that strategy works long-term, how does Twitter turn Comedy Central’s use into revenue?

Still, if the Twitter team can convince the networks–and their advertisers–that Twitter helps bring more eyeballs to shows, and/or helps keep them there, then that’s going to be worth a lot, to someone. Twitter just has to figure out how to get a slice of that.

Conan Releases Even More Offensive Groupon Commercial–Oh the Frugality!

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:02:17 +0000

Now that Conan O’Brien is joking about Groupon’s Super Bowl commercial, maybe people can start to relax.

But yesterday, the Internet was up in arms about Groupon’s commercial, which uses the situation in Tibet to sell a half-price plate of fish curry. The Chicago daily-deals site has since pulled the spot and backpedaled, saying it was also trying to raise donations for the cause but didn’t make it obvious enough.

Last night, Conan revealed an even more over-the-top version involving the Hindenburg disaster and a discount on a Blimpie’s sub sandwich. It ends with “Oh the Frugality.”

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo on Platforms, Reliability and Independence at D@CES

Peter Kafka — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:49:28 +0000

Twitter has crossed the threshold from Web novelty into something substantial. Now Dick Costolo’s job is to turn it into a business–one big enough to justify the sky-high valuation investors have given the messaging company.

He’ll talk to Kara Swisher about the company’s efforts to sell advertising on the service, and if we’re lucky, he’ll give us a glimpse of his improv comedy roots, too. Don’t be shy, Dick!

Dick starts off by insulting Kara’s vest. “Matador casual,” he calls it. Good one! Kara responds by asking him why he’s hanging out at CES.

[ See post to watch video ]

The same reason everyone else is, Dick says: To talk to industry people. For example, he’d like to get device makers to preload some features like “Fast Follow.”

Kara wants to know if Dick would like a “Twitter button” installed on phones. No, says Dick. But he’d like Twitter to work the same way on different platforms.

So how do you make that happen?

Dick: We’re assigning a product team to make sure that this happens.

Kara: And you’re talking to TV people, too? What’s that about?

Dick: Yep. Because mainstream TV viewing, more and more, they have a device in their hand when they’re watching TV. Like on “Glee.” The characters tweet while the show is on. [This baffles Kara.] When “Glee” starts, tweets per second for “Glee” shoot up, and stay up 100 times that level until the show ends, and then they drop.

That has interesting implications. Like, it takes the DVR out of the mix, because you have to watch in real time to make it worthwhile.

But we don’t know if all of this means Twitter while you watch TV, or Twitter actually on your TV screen.

Kara: Is it important for you to be on the screen?

Dick: We’re already on the screen. But we don’t know if that will be the mainstream experience.

Kara: We had Steve Levitan from “Modern Family” talking about how the Web doesn’t help him, but that he and his team like Twitter.

Dick: Sure! “I was having a conversation with Conan O’Brien, as one does” and he was talking about the importance of Twitter to him, and how the 140 character limit is the right length for a joke. It’s definitely the case that network TV people like Twitter, because it gives them feedback, like they’re in the theater, watching how the shows play out.

Kara: Keep talking about celebrities! I love celebrities.

Dick: Sure! The folks that we’ve hired to work with talent and agencies, etc., we think of those people has high-value publishers. They have a huge following. A lot of people are on Twitter just to hear what those folks have to say.

The interesting thing about the top 200 to 300 tweeters–a lot of them are musicians, actors, etc. LeBron James, etc. I think Lady Gaga is number one. But! They’re not all celebrities. There’s CNN Breaking News. And the New York Times. And other brands like Gary Vaynerchuk, who aren’t really that known outside that world.

And Twitter is disaggregating some of those businesses. Like a third of all the players in the NFL playoffs are using Twitter actively. And many players have more followers than their teams. [Here Dick explains football to Kara.] That’s fascinating.

Kara: Let’s go back to phones. Whats the most important device? Tablet? PC? Phone?

Dick: Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices. That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago. 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile.

But Twitter ought to work platform to platform. We want to be agnostic.

Kara: What about what’s coming out from Palm? Working with them?

Dick: Not yet.

Kara: What about games? Talking to those guys?

Dick: Yep. Like with Microsoft on their Xbox, you can see integrating tweets into people who have discussions on Xbox.

Dick: You lost interest in the answer to your question. [True!]

Kara: You’re so annoying.

[Some laughter. Not a lot, though!]

Dick: Anyway, the important thing for us is consistency across device to device to device.

Kara: Speaking of working consistently, how’s that going for Twitter?

Dick: Right. So, we raised a bunch of money. We’re hiring “tons of engineers and operations engineers” in the last year. We hired 100 people in Q4, out of about 350 total. And we’re working very hard on erasing our “technical debt.”

Kara: “That’s a great word for fuck-ups”

Dick: Anyway, we’ve got a guy assigned to this pretty much exclusively. And there used to be a tolerance for this, and now there isn’t. If someone fires a pistol next to your ear every hour, after a while you stop flinching when you hear it. It’s crucial that we do this, both for our users and our engineers, who shouldn’t have to get up at 3 am all the time.

Kara: Time for a vision question, which stumps Yahoo. What is Twitter? What is your vision?

Dick: “We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.”

See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose.

So some people meet girlfriends on Twitter. And other people get tickets to shows they like on Twitter. Etc.

And you don’t have to tweet to get a lot of value out of it.

Kara: What’s the percentage of people who just read Twitter, and don’t tweet themselves?

Dick: Rising. And we have to make that easier to do. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making that consumption experience much better.”

Kara: What’s your business plan?

Dick: To continue to raise money!

[hohoho]

Dick: I’m going to steal Jeff Weiner’s line. We’re a technology company that’s in the media business. Our business model is an advertising model [cough, cough, that's familiar! You're welcome!] So we’re selling ads, and we’re letting people promote their accounts, etc. And we really don’t have to do anything else. Our engagement rates on these ads are ridiculously high. When we saw our stats this last spring when we launched, the numbers were so big we thought we were measuring it incorrectly.

Kara: Is that a big enough business to be a standalone company and/or IPO?

Dick: It’s enough to be a standalone company.

Kara: Sell or IPO?

Dick: We want to be a standalone company. It’s my sincere hope. We’ve accomplished 1 percent of what we want to do.

Kara: You like to sell companies, though.

Dick. Yes, I had two companies that I sold. But that doesn’t mean we’ll sell this one. I’ve had two kids too. But I shouldn’t get a reputation for having kids.

Kara: What’s up with people buying and selling secondary shares of Twitter. It’s an issue for Facebook. What about you?

Dick: We keep an eye on it, and talk to employees about it. But I just think that there are other people that are focusing on it and paying attention, and I’ll let them talk about it. But I just don’t think about that stuff on a day-to-day basis.

Questions and Answers

Q: [sorry missed it].

But answer seems to be about whether Twitter is a platform company or not. Dick quotes Ev Williams by saying they’re not a platform company–they’ve had an API. They want people to be able build off Twitter and build into Twitter. Which requires a more robust API.

Kara has more questions. How do you look at yourself as a leader?

Dick: As a very bald leader.

Kara: But you’re very different than Evan.

Dick: Right. Two components. Three founders at company: Ev, Jack, Biz. They all come at it from a different angle. Jack thinks about simplicity and elegance and the mobile experience. Ev thinks about the user. Biz is “the protector of the brand and the guardian of the culture.”

Kara: He’e the guy who goes on Colbert.

Dick: And he’s great at it. Anyway, those guys are great. My focus is on operational greatness. I try to emulate operators like Ben Horowitz (Opsware) and Susan Wojcicki (Google).

Q: What’s up with that internal page rank for each user? asks Ben Parr from Mashable.

Dick: Your’re not exactly right. We play around with stuff like that. But there’s nothing robust that we would think of productizing anytime soon, and we don’t use it for things like resonance, which we use in ads.

Q: [Sorry, couldnt quite understand.]

Dick is talking about WikiLeaks in general, says there was something specific about WikiLeaks today that he can’t talk about. In general, he hates government mandates to keep things quiet. And he hates that a woman in China was punished for retweeting something. He reiterates Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information. “We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can.” The proof is that we’re banned in China. “We’re not going to sacrifice what we’re trying to do to, you know, get into this country over here.”

Q: How will you work with brands in the future, vs. advertising?

Dick: Our promoted suite of stuff doesn’t simply let advertisers use a giant bullhorn. This stuff has to be organic. “It almost is like a quality-assurance program.”

[Some context for what Dick wouldn't talk about: Feds Subpoena Twitter Seeking Information on Ex-WikiLeaks Volunteer].

Dick is now talking about Twitter and international growth and language. Twitter is growing fast in the U.K. but not in Germany. Why is that? Because German has really, really long words. “There’s a bunch of stuff we want to do, and have to do” just to make things usable in those languages.

Last question, from Kara: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen at CES?

Dick won’t give a one-word answer. CES is a “quantum conference.” Some years are transformational, some are incremental. “This seems like it was an incremental year.”

And we’re done! Thanks all for your patience. We’ll have video up over the next few days, which should help fill in the gaps left by my lousy note-taking.

Viral Video: Team Coco Is Back (Though Bullet-Riddled)

Kara Swisher — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 08:10:52 +0000

Here is the very funny opening video for the premiere of late-night host Conan O’Brien’s new talk show on TBS.

It’s got a “Godfather”/”Mad Men”/Larry King tone.

Exactly.

The first line of O’Brien’s monologue was about his Web popularity: “Thank you and welcome to my second annual first show. Yes, I know what you guys are thinking–’Hey, it’s the guy from Twitter.’”

It is indeed, and BoomTown could not be more thrilled he is back on television:

Conan O'Brien's American Express Ad: 2 Minutes, $1 Million

Peter Kafka — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:30:20 +0000

Just in case you weren’t clear on this: Conan O’Brien’s new show starts tonight.

Also, Conan O’Brien has embraced the Internet.

With that out of the way, we can now enjoy O’Brien’s latest digital foray. This American Express ad isn’t technically a new-media event, since you’ll start seeing the spot on good old-fashioned TV today. But given that Amex has bought out the front page of YouTube, odds are very high that you’re going to encounter the clip on Google’s site, or somewhere else on the Web:

Worth noting: While the ad is timed to run in conjunction with O’Brien’s debut on TBS, note that there’s no explicit tie-in. The WSJ reports that Amex paid O’Brien–and not TBS owner Time Warner–”more than $1 million” for his services.

Conan O'Brien Keeps Courting the Internet. Next Up: 24 Hours of Live "Coco Cam."

Peter Kafka — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:07:57 +0000

Conan O’Brien didn’t really embrace the Web until he was just about out of his last job at NBC. But now he’s in a well-documented digital bear hug: O’Brien and his team use Twitter, Tumblr and viral videos to promote the man and his new show on Time Warner’s TBS.

The newest venture–a 24-hour live “behind the scenes” Webcast, produced in conjunction with Google’s YouTube (another recent Conan ally).

It kicks off at 1 pm ET today on O’Brien’s YouTube channel, and it’s pretty self-explanatory. But if you want to read about it, you can check out this YouTube blog post, or just watch this clip.

Viral Video: Coco's Back

Kara Swisher — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:51:29 +0000

With only a few weeks to go till the debut of his new late-night talk show on TBS, Conan O’Brien is taking his marketing to the Web.

And it’s very explosive, both personally and in a crazy stunt kind of way, as you will see in the two videos that the television funnyman has released in the windup to his November 8 launch.

The popcorn was a nice touch.

Enjoy:

Conan O'Brien Really, Really Wants Some Twitter Followers

Peter Kafka — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:43:08 +0000

I follow Conan O’Brien on Twitter. So do 1,677,799 other people.

But that’s not enough for O’Brien. Or, more likely, it’s not enough for Time Warner’s (TWX) TBS channel, which is paying big money to bring O’Brien back to TV next month. In any case, someone is paying Twitter* to make @TeamCoco a “Promoted Account”–one of the first that Twitter has rolled out today.

Here’s what that looks like (via my “New Twitter” homepage):

A little redundant, and I’m probably not going to follow two different Conan accounts. But whatever. It doesn’t have any material impact on the way I use Twitter, which remains both free and useful to me. (Except when it breaks, as it seems to have done just now.)

My hunch is that I’m going to feel the same way as Twitter starts to carve out increasing amounts of real estate for ads and other revenue-generating products on its platform. That’s what media companies do, after all.

And in fact, here’s another small ad move coming out of Twitter at the same time. It has moved up its “Promoted Trends” product from the bottom of its topics list to the top, where I’m more likely to see it.

Or at least it says it has: My Twitter Trends feature, which is set to “New York,” doesn’t show me any Promoted Trends at all. If and when they do show up, the fact that they’re up higher won’t make much difference to me, because I almost always ignore Trends in general.

And that’s the real risk for Twitter here–not that users will be turned off by ads, but that they’ll ignore them, just as they do throughout most of the Web. When’s the last time you clicked on, or even looked at, a Gmail ad from Google (GOOG)?

*It is possible that no one is actually paying Twitter to promote TeamCoco, and that the company is throwing it in as a promotional freebie, as it did in some cases when it rolled out “Promoted Tweets.”

Viral Video: It's Co-nan!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:50:35 +0000

Earlier this year, the travails of late-night television talk show host Conan O’Brien and his epic battle with the inept suits at NBC became a gold mine of Internet-fueled comedy mayhem.

Well, Team Coco is back in November on TBS, and it has a name.

And it’s a good one, as you will see in the video below.

Enjoy:

Viral Video: Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy

Kara Swisher — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:09:49 +0000

Here’s a video of comic Louis CK, in an appearance with television talk show host Conan O’Brien, which was flagged to me by Tech N’ Marketing blogger Hillel Fuld as the all-time funniest.

And it indeed is, due to Louis CK’s perfect riff on technology, in which he correctly notes “everything is amazing right now and nobody is happy.”

My fave part is his observation of how impatient people are with their cell phone connections: “It’s going to space, can you give it a second to get back from space?”

Well said, especially with all the various controversies around Apple (AAPL), Facebook and more.

Conan O'Brien's Awkward Parting Gift for NBC: An Emmy Nomination

Peter Kafka — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:30:55 +0000

Who knew Hollywood had such a wry sense of humor? But here’s the evidence: The TV industry folks who vote for the Emmy awards have nominated Conan O’Brien for a statuette.

As in Conan O’Brien, the former NBC employee whose brief stint as host of “The Tonight Show” ended badly, and expensively, for the network. It seems to have worked out okay for O’Brien, though–he got a very big severance check, an infusion of online adoration and, eventually, a well-paid gig at Time Warner’s Turner (TWX).

And while it would be a little, um, awkward if O’Brien actually won the Emmy for best “variety, comedy or music series” (he’s up against Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and “Saturday Night Live”), there is some upside for NBC here. The GE (GE) unit is broadcasting the Emmys in late August, and the potential car-crash nature of the award show might bring in some more eyeballs.

Here is where I’d show you a clip of the award-nominated show, but NBC has scrubbed O’Brien off of its site, Hulu and much of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So you’ll have to settle for this bit that O’Brien did specifically for YouTube, where he introduces his favorite viral clips.

Conan O'Brien's Awkward Parting Gift for NBC: An Emmy Nomination

Peter Kafka — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:30:55 +0000

Who knew Hollywood had such a wry sense of humor? But here’s the evidence: The TV industry folks who vote for the Emmy awards have nominated Conan O’Brien for a statuette.

Conan O'Brien's Angry YouTube Rant

Peter Kafka — Mon, 17 May 2010 12:00:42 +0000

YouTube is celebrating its fifth birthday by announcing that it is now generating a staggering two billion views per day. Context: In October, Google’s (GOOG) video site announced it had crossed the one billion views per day mark.

That’s a lot of videos! As usual, no word on financials, profitability, etc. But there is plenty of congratulatory back-slapping here and here.

Best part, by far: A brief anniversary message from Conan O’Brien, in which the comedian connects YouTube’s rise with America’s decline: “Nobody actually makes anything anymore. We’re all watching monkeys in propeller hats flush themselves down a toilet. And that’s why India is kicking our ass. And China, and pretty much everyone else. Switzerland, kicking our ass. Guam, way ahead of us.”

And he effectively sums up Web economics, or lack thereof:
“That’s not the point of the internet. It’s not to make money. It’s for someone you’ve never met, who’s a nerd, in Palo Alto, to make money.”

O’Brien also offers up his five favorite YouTube clips. Here are four of them. To see the fifth (something inscrutable and German) you’ll have to visit the site. If you’re time-pressed, definitely go with the cat.

Conan O'Brien to Host Late-Night Show on TBS

Sam Schechner and Lauren A. E. Schuker — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:37:19 +0000

Conan O’Brien will host a new late-night TV show on cable network TBS this fall, giving him a new platform on cable television less than a year after he left NBC in an acrimonious blowup.

Mr. O’Brien’s yet-to-be titled show will debut in November, and run four nights a week at 11 p.m. Eastern time.

The new show is a costly gamble for TBS, a comedy network owned by Time Warner Inc.’s (TWX) Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting.

Mr. O’Brien agreed to leave NBC in January after the network decided to abandon its low-rated experiment to put “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno in prime-time.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

How to Hoodwink Twitter (Hint: It's Easy)

Peter Kafka — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:00:46 +0000

How can you use Twitter to spread falsehoods? So easy! So many options! Here are three:

Make up a story about the death of a celebrity. Any celebrity.
Make up a story about Apple (AAPL). Any story.
Make up a story about Conan O’Brien and get the crowd at a Digg event to pass it along for you.

We saw the last one in action Saturday night at a South by Southwest event, when pranksters cooked up a stupid story about the unemployed talk show host, designed in part to promote a Web video studio.

This one didn’t get picked up by the mainstream press, but it did find plenty of takers for a while on Twitter.

CNET’s Daniel Terdiman, who happily participated in the hoax, describes it in great detail here. If you want the short version, here’s a video of the event’s genesis, provided by David Spark. Pretty simple stuff: Anyone can do it.

[Image credit: LiveFromAmsterdam]

Viral Video: The Conan Debacle's Final Score (Game Goes to Letterman!)

Kara Swisher — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:15:17 +0000

The snake finally ate its own tail in the long-running NBC debacle over the network’s mishandling of its late-night switcheroo, with a Super Bowl promotion for David Letterman’s “Late Show” on CBS (CBS) last night.

It starred Letterman, daytime talk show queen Oprah Winfrey and–big reveal–Jay Leno.

The bit was perhaps what will be the final joke in the humor-heavy mess around the cloddish game of musical chairs perpetrated by NBC management on the Viacom (VIA) television network’s late-night stars.

In the end, “Tonight Show” host Conan O’Brien was out, replaced by former “Tonight Show” host Leno, who had previously been replaced by O’Brien and whose own attempt at a show earlier in the evening bombed.

Of all the players, “Late Show” host Letterman has actually gotten the most mileage from the imbroglio, taking an endless number of dead-on shots at Leno, all of which portrayed him as the villain, including a high-pitched impression of him.

That mockery was on display in the short promo below, with the trio on a couch for what Letterman called the “worst Super Bowl party ever.”

It wasn’t.

Enjoy the video, as well as the 2007 promo it was based on with just Letterman and Winfrey.

Conan Who? NBC Disappears "The Tonight Show" From the Web.

Peter Kafka — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:01:36 +0000

Remember the whole Conan O’Brien/Jay Leno imbroglio from last month? Perhaps NBC wishes you didn’t. The GE (GE) unit has removed every episode of the show’s seven-month run from its NBC.com site, as well as Hulu, the site NBC owns with News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and Disney’s (DIS) ABC.

A little odd, given that a couple of days ago, the network was offering every single “Tonight Show” episode O’Brien had taped on NBC.com. But then again, everything about this story has been odd. NBC declined to comment.

NBC–at least, I’m assuming it’s NBC–has also been aggressive about taking down Conan episodes from Google’s (GOOG) YouTube. So here’s a legally sanctioned clip from CBS (CBS) employee David Letterman discussing the whole affair:

A minor UPDATE: A sharp-eyed commenter at Gawker notes that NBC hasn’t completely excised O’Brien from its site yet. It is still running a blog for the “Horny Manatee”, a long-running bit on the show. Note, in screenshot below, the reference to the now-defunct nbc.com/conan, the “official online home of all things Conan” (click image to enlarge):

Less surprising is news that O’Brien’s image has been scrubbed, Soviet-style, from NBC’s 30 Rock headquarters.

News Corp.: Conan's Not Coming to Fox Just Yet; Amazon's Ready to Bend on E-Book Pricing

Peter Kafka — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:41:33 +0000

Two interesting nuggets from a wide-ranging earnings call today:

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch tried to lower expectations that his Fox broadcast network would hire Conan O’Brien.
Murdoch hinted that his book publishing unit is in line to get a new deal on e-books from Amazon, just as Macmillan has demanded (as will other publishers).

On the second point, here’s my on-the-fly transcription and paraphrasing of Murdoch’s comments about Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL) and e-book pricing. It’s one of the most candid descriptions you’ll hear from a top executive about Big Media’s reluctance to embrace digital distribution at the expense of its existing system and revenue:

“We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….We think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books. We’re not against electronic books; on the contrary, we like them very much” because they cost us less to distribute, “but we want some room to maneuver.” The Apple deal…“does allow some flexibility and higher prices” though e-books will still be lower than print versions. And now Amazon is willing to sit down with us again and renegotiate.

UPDATE: Here’s a more complete transcript from Seeking Alpha:

We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99. They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books. We are not against [inaudible] books. On the contrary we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on. But we want some room to maneuver in it. Amazon, sorry Apple in its agreement with us which has not been disclosed in detail does allow for a variety of slightly higher prices.

There will be prices very much less than the printed copies of books but still will not be fixed in a way that Amazon has been doing it. It appears that Amazon is now ready to sit down with us again and renegotiate pricing.

Again, it’s impossible to stress how scarring the music labels’ experience has been for Big Media. And they’re determined not to repeat the experience. Their takeaway, though, seems to be that they can stave off digital distribution by keeping prices high and inventory relatively scarce. Hard to believe consumers are going to go for that.

Earlier

A first glimpse at News Corp.’s fourth-quarter earnings (which, due to the company’s weird fiscal calendar, is technically the company’s Q2 for 2010): Pretty good. And much better than a year ago (thankfully). After factoring out one-time charges, the company posted earnings of 25 cents on revenue of $8.7 billion.

The Street was looking for earnings of 20 cents on revenue of $8.23 billion, and analysts were also hoping the company would boost its earnings forecast, due in part to a bump from the ginormous success of “Avatar.” No word on guidance in the earnings release, though.

I’ll pick through the release for other worthwhile nuggets for the next few minutes. And then the real show begins at 4:30 Eastern, when the company’s earnings call–easily the most entertaining one in its peer group due to the censor-free presence of CEO Rupert Murdoch–begins. We’ll be looking for commentary on his battle/negotiation with Google (GOOG), upcoming content deals with Apple and the iPad, his thoughts on paid content in general, a dash of political commentary or two, and an update on the turnaround effort at MySpace.

From the release: A pretty nice quarter at most of the conglomerate’s divisions, including the previously battered broadcast TV and newspaper groups. News Corp. says print revenue at The Wall Street Journal was up five percent and ads on the Journal’s digital network were up 17 percent.

MySpace and the company’s other digital properties, shuffled into the “other” category, don’t get much of a mention, but don’t seem to have done much, not surprisingly.

But News Corp does mention that digital media earnings were down $32 million compared with a year ago, “principally due to lower search and advertising revenue.” And the company lost $29 million on “digital media dispositions”–i.e., the fire sale/giveaways of properties like Rotten Tomatoes and Photobucket.

Here’s the breakdown by segment (click table to enlarge):

Liveblog

CFO Dave DeVoe: “Extremely pleased” with the quarter.

Movies: Revenue up due to decent DVD sales (no MGM problem here). Also high costs due to “Avatar,” but big profits from the movie will be coming in during the next couple quarters.

Broadcast TV: Local ads are improving; the telecom, fast food, finance categories are all improving.

Cable: Revenue is up 18 percent. Affiliate revenue is up 21 percent (more money for Fox News subs), and there was a “single-digit” boost in ad dollars.

Newspapers: Journal dollars are up, operating costs down. Ad revenue got better as the quarter progressed.

Books: Revenue up, expenses down.

“Other”/MySpace: Digital media revenue down, but cost-cutting helped trim losses.

News Corp. is boosting its dividend by 25 percent.

Guidance: The company’s operating income growth rate is expected to grow from single digits to the high teens. Better than anticipated: Film group, TV and cable. But revenue goals for digital media, including MySpace, will take longer than anticipated.

Murdoch sings the praises of content. [I will not argue with him, for now]. “Avatar” is awesome, he says, a “harbinger of fundamental change in the industry.” Also really good: “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Fun to hear Rupe say “Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

WSJ is the No.1 paper in U.S. in terms of circulation, influence, quality. WSJ.com is a “digital model for newspapers around the world.”

Fox News Channel’s audience is both “loyal and lucrative.” Roger Ailes is doing an “admirable job” [translation: Bite me, Michael Wolff--the author of a recent Murdoch biography].

Last year, Murdoch says, News Corp.’s pay-to-play ideas sounded nutty, but now “the content clan has gathered around our ideas.” Consumers must pay and will pay “to be entertained and informed.” All those awesome new gadgets being made in China and sold at the Consumer Electronics Show need content or they’re worthless. Content, content, content. Get it? Content, content, content.

Murdoch says he’ll be wringing more dollars from cable operators. And “when it comes to online news, we’ll be changing that model too,” adding that News Corp. is in “substantive conversations with device makers on developing subscription models” to deliver content. And don’t forget about 3-D!

Not performing well but “long-term growth drivers”: Sky Italia satellite service. Also Sky Deutschland. And MySpace is “not yet where we want it.” In the last quarter, however, MySpace “started to see signs of traffic stabilization.”

Shout-outs for Chase Carey and other managers (but not by name).

Q&A

Question: How big a deal is retransmission consent in coming years? $40 million a month? $100 million a month?

Chase Carey: No numbers, but it’s going to be a “transforming event.” We have two of top 10 distributors done, more coming. It’s a three- or four-year process to knock these deals out.

Q: Does this fix the broadcast model?

Carey: “Yes, I guess you could say simplistically, it fixes it.”

Q: What’s the timing on an “Avatar” DVD, and what about a sequel? Also, how do TV ads look this year?

Murdoch: For “Avatar,” we think about 60 percent of profits will be in the next six months. Which means the DVD will be coming “as soon as possible,” but the movie will stay in cinemas for a while because we’re doing huge dollars in theaters still. Sequel? “Very early talks about it. Jim has ideas for one. We haven’t come to any agreement with him….Being Jim Cameron, I wouldn’t hold your breath for an early one.” Asked about the economics of a future release (“Will you keep the same revenue split?”), Rupe sort of rumbles and growls and sort of doesn’t have much to say. “Ask anybody; it is very easy to drop a $100 million in a hurry on a film, and we’d like to lay off some of the risk.”

Carey: TV trends for this year are “positive.”

Murdoch: TV stations will be up 18 or 19 percent, but last year was terrible. We’re still down compared with two years ago. Hard to see more than a quarter in advance. In newspapers, it’s hard to see more than a few weeks.

[Missed a question on Sky Italia here.]

Q: What are growth prospects for cable networks? They’ve been driven a lot recently by new subscriber fees. How much longer can you get those boosts?

Murdoch: Overall, “we think we have great potential for growth. Quite a long way to go yet.” Look at how NBCU’s USA is growing.

Carey: In the U.S., we’re moving to “quality over quantity”–we can wring more out of foreign exchange, etc. Fox News is only getting more powerful; it has “great upside.”

Q: Regarding newspapers, what growth came from organic increase versus currency fluctuations?

The majority is from foreign exchange.

Q: Does your guidance assume that the “Avatar” DVD is coming in the next two quarters?

Murdoch: “Yes, but it won’t be 3-D” [which I don't think the analyst was asking about].

Q: Back to retransmission consent: You’ve been getting more and more money from cable guys. Why can’t you get $4 or $5 per subscription for Fox broadcast subs?

Murdoch: “We’re modest people.”

Carey: Hyuk, hyuk. Real answer: It takes time. “We try to approach this constructively. We’ve built businesses with [cable guys], we’ve built valuable cable channels” [translation: patience!]. We want to extract more without killing the cable guys.

Murdoch: That said, we’re asking for the same thing [for broadcast channels] that the cable networks are getting, which “certainly won’t kill the cable companies.”

Q: Please talk about value of film libraries (i.e., MGM). They’re generating big operating profits for cable now. How long will this last?

Murdoch: Regarding the MGM auction, “you can count us out of that one altogether” because others will pay more than we’re willing. And we’re not pursuing the Miramax catalog at all.

Carey: A film library by itself, without new stuff coming through, is a “depreciating asset.”

Q: On guidance: You say the ad market getting better, etc., but it sounds like you’re saying Ebidta growth is slowing.

Murdoch: “We honestly do not have any visibility about the last quarter.”

Q: On books/e-books/Apple, what’s going on with that?

Murdoch: We don’t like the Amazon model of $9.99….We think it really devalues books and hurts all the retailers of hardcover books. We’re not against electronic books; on the contrary, we like them very much, lower costs to us, but we want some room to maneuver. The Apple deal does allow “some flexibility and higher prices” though e-books will still be lower than print. And now Amazon is willing to sit down with us again.

Press Q&A

Q: What’s up with plans to charge for newspapers on the Web?

Murdoch: “Not ready to announce yet [long pause]. We won’t be ready yet to make an announcement.” A “lot of talks with a lot of people.” There will be more to say within the next two months, Murdoch adds.

Q: Are you still going to fall $100 million short on the Google deal?

Murdoch: Yes. People using social networks don’t use search a great deal. Facebook has seen this, too. It’s “really too early to make confident predictions…but from going down, we’re beginning to go up.”

Q: Can we get some details about Time Warner Cable (TWC) deal?

Nope.

What about Conan O’Brien on late night?

Murdoch: If the programming people can show us we can do it and make a profit on it, we’ll do it in a flash. I’m sure there have been conversations with Conan, but “if you mean real negotiations, no.”

[Missed two questions here.]

Q: Another late-night question: If you do go into negotiations with Conan, how do you placate your affiliates?

Murdoch: It’s a different deal than NBC. They screwed up 10 pm, which reduced the lead-in to local news. Our affiliates run syndicated programming at 11:30, though, so it will take time to adjust there.

Call ended. This one seemed short to me.

More or less redundant disclosure: News Corp. (NWS) owns this Web site.

NBC Droops, but Doesn't Blame Its Woes on Jay or Conan

Peter Kafka — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:35:31 +0000

Assuming that Washington cooperates, GE (GE) will be able to hand off NBC Universal to Comcast (CMCSA) in a year or so. Until then, though, it must briefly acknowledge NBCU in every earnings report, even though investors have no interest in it.

Especially with numbers like these: GE says NBCU’s Q4 revenue dropped four percent, to $4.3 billion, and operating profit declined 30 percent, to $602 million.

Were Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien’s ratings really that bad? Of course not.

NBC’s broadcast revenue was down 1.5 percent, but that was balanced by growth in the company’s cable properties, which were up eight percent. And not that I’m a Jeff Zucker apologist, but when pundits are castigating him for his late-night debacle, they really ought to point out that some parts of the company–the parts that Comcast wants, not coincidentally–have grown considerably during Zucker’s tenure.

In any case, GE blames this quarter’s decline on Hollywood: Its movie division has been low on box office hits, and its DVD group, like most other studios, has been sucking wind.

Here’s GE’s brief description of its business in charticle form (click to enlarge). Note the line about slow recovery in Web ads:

And here’s the best “screw you, NBC” clip I’ve seen from Conan this week. Which, as many Web commenters have noted, is not available on NBC’s Web site or via Hulu. But given that NBC has been fairly vigilant about pulling down unauthorized clips it doesn’t want on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, the network can’t be that upset about this one, which you can find all over the site: