They all seem pitched toward the same mythical viewer, presumably the one prized by Internet advertisers, whose mind appears to be occupied with a sticky mix of celebrity gossip, blockbuster movies, video games, zombies, action sports and news of the weird.

– Mike Hale of the New York Times, writing about new channels on YouTube

MicroHoo is funky!

At least according to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on the Silicon Valley search giant’s first-quarter earnings conference call about its recent financial performance.

Yahoo’s results showed a continued worrisome revenue growth stall, due in large part to a search advertising fall-off, and a still-turning turnaround.

Yahoo reported revenues of $1.06 billion, down six percent from a year ago, on net earnings of 17 cents a share, down 28 percent.

The results were essentially in line with Wall Street expectations.

2:03 pm PT: The call started right on time, as per usual. Maybe they can’t get search right anymore, but Yahoo execs sure know how to start an analysts’ confab.

Bartz started off the call, noting “overall, our turnaround is proceeding on schedule.”

Well, the schedule of a three-toed sloth, I suppose, but it’s on schedule!

Bartz is too smart, though, and quickly noted the problems with search revenue declines, related to its search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft.

Still, she then used the unusual term “funky comparisons” to dismiss the key issue.

But isn’t she the one who struck the funky deal with Microsoft that has resulted in these funky comparisons and these even funkier search advertising revenues?

Just askin’!

Bartz proceeded quickly to noting Yahoo’s advances due to technology improvements, which showed a doubling of impressions to big events such as the Super Bowl and the Oscars.

It’s a good point, since Yahoo–for all its troubles–is still a huge traffic driver, including serving up 1.3 billion page views for the Oscars.

Bartz talked about monetization and said a lot of other stuff, but got to the finances quickly.

“Search was a mixed bag,” she said flatly. You can say that again–but not in a good way.

Bartz tried to put a good-news spin on it, but had to admit that “on the downside [Microsoft's] adCenter is not seeing strong RPS,” she said.

That’s revenue per search and a key number that Yahoo had thought would be better by now.

Bartz noted that the paid search markets internationally will be delayed until MicroHoo gets its act together.

Good idea!

2:16 pm: CFO Tim Morse took over to go through the numbers.

“We had good display momentum around the globe,” he said.

But search was, um, bad. It underperformed, but Yahoo had that guarantee from Microsoft to pay out, which Morse called a “financial floor.”

Morse pretty much read the press release from here on out.

2:24 pm: Bartz was back talking up the huge audience Yahoo has abroad. And it is true–the Yahoo brand is a golden one globally.

Also video consumption is up too, as it is across the Web, in terms of views and time spent. Yahoo’s “Primetime in No Time” got 500 million streams in the quarter.

Bartz turned to mobile, which is weak no matter what she said about the laudable Livestand. It’s one of many in a very competitive market.

Same for social, which Yahoo has essentially abdicated to Facebook. That said, Yahoo has tried to weave social within its myriad of sites and it gets it, especially compared to the socially awkward Google.

Bartz summed up that she hoped everyone gets that profitability and revenue growth were on track to get better, promising more at the investor day in May.

2:30 pm: Q&A time!

The first question is about display growth. It’s a softball, since display was up.

The next is about other revenue growth areas to come.

Bartz–who seemed not so prepped for such an obvious question–ticked off shopping, travel and uuuuuh….

Morse jumped in and talked about making internal connections, which I also did not understand.

An analyst then wanted to “dig into” search problems. I’d say it’s time to call in Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel!

Relative to RPS, Bartz acknowledged it was low and everyone was studying the issue. There is a plan, apparently. Again, Bartz was maddeningly vague.

I missed the next question and then it was back to search.

Bartz was not getting too specific about search, but would say video advertising was going to do well.

She did note that Yahoo expected a dip in Q1 related to search revenue, “but the dip went a little lower than we expected and lasted a little longer than expected.”

Bartz said she had recently sat down with Microsoft execs to go over the problems. How much would I have liked to have been a fly on that wall!

The next question was about video and it turns out Bartz loves the babbling babies too! I knew we had something cool in common.

The next question is about Japan and the possible deal to sell off Yahoo’s ownership of Yahoo Japan!

Morse said diddly, except “we continue to make progress.”

A question about display and possible content verticals.

Verticals Yahoo is interested in, according to Bartz: Entertainment, lifestyle, women, gossip.

“The things people really want to do, they want to disappear,” said Bartz, which was an interesting way of putting it.

Yet another question in what was beginning to feel like an endless call.

It was about Right Media, Yahoo’s advertising exchange. Cleaning it up, etc.

The next question is about communications, as in email.

Bartz even sounded bored and messed up a few words. “I’ve had too many Diet Cokes,” she joked.

Personally, I am considering disappearing into some content, since there is yet another question.

It’s–no surprise–an RPS question!

Funky!

Search guarantee payments from Microsoft are in place for another four quarters. Thank goodness.

Bartz got more detailed about the problems. There is some kind of prediction issue, which she said Microsoft is working on.

Now a local advertising question and its relationship with Facebook.

Bartz grabbed this one by the horns, noting you don’t have to run to the social networking powerhouse to get you a social ad!

It’s about branding with a social component. Which would be, um, Facebook, which was part of Yahoo’s Chrysler campaign referenced by Bartz.

A question about daily deals.

It’s growing, but more at Groupon and LivingSocial, which Morse does not mention.

Finally, the last question.

Another gigantic softball on engagement and Yahoo’s new content platform and some mobile deets query about whether Yahoo can make it there.

Bartz said she was working on it. As to content, Bartz said stats show big lifts.

“The good news is that it’s all in the right direction,” she said.

Up would certainly be good.

Designed to offer consumers content based on their interests, Livestand is a sort of personalized digital newsstand for tablets. It will feature content from Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News, Flickr and celebrity gossip site OMG, and it will customize that content according to user preference as well as time of day. “Tablets are great for a laid-back experience, but most magazine content remains trapped online,” Irving said this morning . “But consumers don’t want a digitized magazine. They want rich media, they want connections beyond just commenting.”

Which is what Yahoo is trying to give them in Livestand. The platform will be integrated with Yahoo! Finance as well as Yahoo! Mail, and it will support content sharing and commenting. “We see this as the next generation of Yahoo and we’re putting the full force of Yahoo behind it,” Irving said.

The hope here, of course, is that this will play well with advertisers dissapointed by shallow digital experiences. “You don’t exactly curl up with your PC, the way you do with a magazine,” said Irving. “With Livestand, brands can finally match the intimacy that magazines once brought to their audiences.” That means offering them ads that adapt and respond to user interaction and the tools to create “a TV-like ad experience.”

Yahoo Livestand will debut on iOS and Android in the first half of 2011. No word yet on subscription pricing.

Wacky actor Mel Gibson has been the gift that keeps on giving to online gossip sites, with a string of ever more controversial episodes in his personal life.

Well, a new movie, “The Beaver,” about a man going crazy and the beaver puppet that returns him to mental health, is not going to help much to make anyone think Gibson is sane.

View the trailer below and you’ll see why he seems to inhabit the character fully.

Enjoy:

Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming movie “The Dilemma,” minus a joke that used the word “gay” in a negative manner.

Universal Pictures replaced the original teaser trailer after there were protests about it. In it, actor Vince Vaughn said: “Ladies and gentlemen, electric cars…are gay.”

With the recent spate of bullyings of gay teens that have ended in tragedy, such a move is probably wise and not too surprising.

More surprising was the video below it, in which gossip blogger Perez Hilton vowed to stop being so mean on his popular Web site.

Since a lot of his repertoire consists of nasty drawings and comments scrawled over photos, along with cruel nicknames for celebrities, it will be interesting to see how this change impacts his dubious success.

Here are the videos:

That’s not much of a surprise, given the relentless marketing campaign by the makers of “The Social Network,” which opened wide last Friday. It has garnered terrific critical acclaim.

Still, BoomTown was quite surprised to see a mention of the film on one of my favorite celebrity sites, TMZ.com.

Of course, because it is gossip-saturated, TMZ featured it as one of its naughty regular features called “Who’d You Rather?”

As in…well, you get the point.

This time they pitted Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg against the Winklevoss twins in a “Facebook Fight.”

“As part of the movie ‘The Social Network,’ twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss claim their Harvard [University] classmate Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea and created what is now this little website called Facebook,” TMZ wrote.

Also surprising, as you can see from the screenshot above, given what hunks of dudeness the Winklevii clearly are, is that Zuckerberg seems to be attracting one-third of the votes compared with their two-thirds.

And since there are two of them, the billionaire social networking wunderkind could be considered tied with the brothers!

Sweet justice after the slamming the Winklevii have been giving Zuckerberg in the media of late, even though they had signed a confidentiality agreement after their first $65 million settlement with him?

The Winklevii are trying to have that overturned and are inexplicably going for more, of course, which should keep the themes of the movie resonating for a while.

That will also be true if “The Social Network” garners some award nominations, especially the Oscar.

Also interesting will be to see if the movie will perform well this weekend or will drop off. It’s so far proved popular in the big cities on the coasts and in Silicon Valley, but now it has to go wide to make some real dough.

But, for sure, it will be on television eventually. Today, the FX cable network said it had bought the broadcast premiere rights to the movie.

Hence, today’s brief flurry of reports echoing Radar Online’s scoop that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was “seriously considering stepping down” for “personal reasons.”

The story, which was published early this morning, is not true. And it was ignored until lunchtime on the East Coast, when the Drudge Report picked it up. At that point it became open game for a host of smaller sites, which picked it up with varying degrees of credulity.

Radar has since reversed the story, noting that it “has obtained new information that Justice Roberts will NOT resign. The justice will be staying on the bench.” The site has yet to update its headline, though, which is still trumpeting its “exclusive.”

Radar is a media gossip site/magazine that has gone through several permutations over the years. In its current incarnation, it’s an online-only property owned by American Media Inc., the people who bring you the National Enquirer, among other properties.

But while the Enquirer has a history of getting some big political stories right over the years, Radar doesn’t. It generally sticks to stuff like photos of the “Jersey Shore” dudes taking off their clothes. Probably a good strategy going forward.

The twist is that while Peter Lauria is leaving his gig at the New York Post where he covered media moguls, he’s staying in the business. He’s moving across town to The Daily Beast, where he’ll become a senior correspondent with the same beat.

There are two big differences here. Instead of working for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS)–which also owns this Web site–Lauria will be working for Barry Diller, via his IAC (IACI) conglomerate. The more important change is that he’ll have the ability to publish more than once a day, which the Post has been loath to do on its Web site (which makes no sense).

Asked for comment about the move, Daily Beast Managing Editor Edward Felsenthal sent me a link to this item from the Post’s Page Six gossip section:

Harvey Weinstein doesn’t like everything written about him in The Post. Peter Lauria, who covers media for our business section, has gotten under the movie mogul’s delicate skin. When a reporter for another publication mentioned “Inglourious Basterds,” the hit replenishing the Weinstein Co. coffers, Harvey joked, “Peter Lauria. He’s the inspiration for ‘Inglourious Basterds’…we were thinking who were the bastards that we know, and he was the No. 1 bastard.”

High praise!

What hasn’t kept pace with the technical innovation is the recognition that people need to engage in civil dialogue. What we see regularly on social networking sites, blogs and other online forums is behavior that ranges from the carelessly rude to the intentionally abusive.

Flare-ups occur on social networking sites because of the ease by which thoughts can be shared through the simple press of a button. Ordinary people, celebrities, members of the media and even legal professionals have shown insufficient restraint before clicking send. There is no shortage of examples—from the recent Twitter heckling at a Web 2.0 Expo in New York, to a Facebook poll asking whether President Obama should be killed.

The comments sections of online gossip sites, as well as some national media outlets, often reflect semi-literate, vitriolic remarks that appear to serve no purpose besides disparaging their intended target. Some sites exist solely as a place for mean-spirited individuals to congregate and spew their venomous verbiage.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Seems likely, according to recent reports. And it makes plenty of sense.

For starters, it’s what the Time Warner (TWX) gossip powerhouse is already doing. See: Tiger Woods, of course. Or more recently, coverage of NFL player Chris Henry’s death.

It’s also something that Harvey Levin’s operation is uniquely suited to do. Blogs like Sports By Brooks and Gawker Media’s Deadspin are excellent repositories for R-rated commentary on sports and periodically break a story themselves. But in general, they either don’t or can’t spend the resources on the grim digging and scooping that TMZ specializes in.

And the conventional media outlets, which depend on the sports leagues for access and/or licensing rights, are loath to dip too deeply into this stuff. They are also likely worried about spooking advertisers, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue for TMZ’s existing product.

My only request: If there’s a companion TV show, can we please dump the “Harvey Levin and his producers sit around the news room and kibbitz” conceit? Don’t like that one bit.

Since Bing only debuted at mid-year (and launched at the D: All Things Digital conference too), BoomTown is willing to cut it some slack.

Until the Microsoft (MSFT) search service revealed on its blog last night that Perez Hilton–the irksome entertainment gossip blogger–beat out “Transformers” hottie Megan Fox and “Twilight” hottie-er Robert Pattinson for the top celebrity searched using Bing in 2009.

Clearly, its algorithm needs some tweaking by real people.

Bing is the first of the top search lists to come up for 2009, to be followed soon by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

“If you’re curious how we determined the top searches, we analyzed billions of search queries and developed the list based on searches made with Bing,” wrote Bing GM Danielle Tiedt.

“Not surprisingly, we saw a lot of folks using Bing for quick access to favorite sites like Facebook, MSN, YouTube and Craigslist. We also saw a lot of more complex searches such as product related queries in which people used Bing to help decide what MP3 player to buy and travel searches to help find the best deals on a tropical vacation.”

But this time of year, it is mostly about the lists, so Bing noted that Michael Jackson–no surprise–was the top trending topic, followed in order by: Twitter, swine flu, stock market, Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze, Cash for Clunkers, Jon and Kate Gosselin, Billy Mays and Jaycee Dugard.

In other words, Bing users are celebrity death-obsessed, econalypse-worried, plague-wary people who cannot be without information about the worst married couple ever.

The not-so-sexy video clips, which Gawker published last month, involve “Grey’s Anatomy” star Eric Dane; his wife, Rebecca Gayheart; and former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche. How did Gawker get their hands on them?

“Well, obviously we paid our contributor (and from the traffic, you can suppose quite handsomely!),” Denton told the the New York Times’s David Carr this morning.

I followed up with Denton, via IM, and he wasn’t much more forthcoming than that. But he did confirm that his blog network gave the money to Mark Ebner, who describes himself as an “award winning investigative journalist” who “has repeatedly positioned himself in harm’s way.” Ebner also runs the gossip site, Hollywood Interrupted.

Denton wouldn’t say how much he paid Ebner for the video, and I haven’t been able to reach Ebner himself. But I have a hunch that Ebner hasn’t received as much as, say, a Condé Nast freelancer can get for a feature piece.

The math: In the old days (last year) Denton was paying $7.50 for every 1,000 views, but he has likely reduced that rate as Gawker’s traffic has grown. Even if he kept that rate the same, Ebner would be getting $22,500 for the three million views the clip has generated to date. That’s nice money, but not life-changing.

But Denton is paying above and beyond that for the clip: Rather than posting it on the likes of Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, which likely would have taken down the video by now, he’s serving up the clip himself. Which means he’s paying every time someone views it. And now, he has legal bills, too.

What’s Denton in for, so far? He won’t say. But here’s the half-serious quip he used to conclude our IM chat: “Hey, this news business is expensive!”

Although top public and private high schools abound in her affluent area of Palo Alto, the 17-year-old originally applied to the online school because she and her parents thought it looked both interesting and challenging. She enjoyed the academics but eventually found she was lonely. She missed the human connection of proms, football games and in-person, rather than online, gossip. The digital clubs for fashion, books and cooking involved Web cams and blogs and felt more like work than fun. Last winter, Ms. Ray left the online school and enrolled at a local community college for a semester.

Tatyana Ray has spent most of her high school career in online school.

“Socially, it wasn’t working,” she says. “I felt I was missing out.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Last week, Yahoo (YHOO) unveiled the results of its latest makeover: the revamped home page. Carol Bartz, the company’s relatively new CEO, has said that Yahoo’s home page needed just such a makeover. After not changing significantly since 2006, the home page fits the role of a fashion don’t. And consumers, like family and friend observing the aftermath of a makeover, will either be overjoyed or nonplussed by the finished product.

Yahoo’s cleaner, streamlined home page emphasizes its ability to view content from other Web sites.

I’ve been using this new home page for over a week now and I can report that Yahoo followed one of the most important makeover rules by doing more with less. Gone is the busy screen saturated with advertisements and clutter. The new home page is clean and easier to absorb.

Favorite ‘Apps’

Yahoo’s home-page makeover goes beyond surface improvements. Its most useful feature is a list called My Favorites, which contains a variety of Web sites from within and outside of Yahoo. When your cursor hovers over one of these entries, which Yahoo calls “apps,” a pane opens with a preview of content from that site. This turns your Yahoo home page into an aggregator of information, bringing glimpses of information to you in one place so you don’t have to waste time navigating to other sites.

But if a greater number of these apps were more robust, you would be able to do more right within the hover pane, like watch videos or play a game. Currently, the hover preview pane only lets you see content, update social-network statuses and enter search terms, the results of which are shown on a new Web page.

This makeover comes at an interesting time in the world of online news aggregation. Competitors like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) incorporate data from all over the Web into iGoogle.com and MSN.com, respectively. And the concept of the home page as a starting point isn’t as popular as it once was: Many people now start browsing the Web by first clicking on a link in an email or in one of many social-networking sites, like Twitter.

Traffic Driver

Of course, Yahoo plans to use this redesigned home page to drive traffic to the company’s own sites like Shine, Answers, Health and OMG (a celebrity gossip site). These Yahoo sites make up half of the 65 apps designed especially for My Favorites. Yahoo says that its apps for other sites, including WSJ.com, were made by Yahoo and the outside company running the Web site. An ad runs on the hover preview page of each app and the revenue for this ad goes to Yahoo, not the content provider.

Yahoo will use your list of My Favorites apps to learn about what sites you use so as to target ads at users. This proved true for most of the ads I saw on my home page, but strangely, the AllThingsD.com app displayed ads for Mars chocolate and Del Monte fruit snacks rather than technology products.

Module Thinking

My Favorites is fixed on the far left of the Yahoo home page and a large search box sits prominently at the top of the home screen.

The top middle section of the screen shows a carousel of images and current news that Yahoo calls the Today Module; below this is the News Module, which houses tabs labeled News, World, Local, and Finance. The Local and Finance tabs can be customized by entering a ZIP Code and stock tickers, respectively. The Today and News Modules can switch positions if you click on a small arrow.

The revamped home page will serve as a starting point for the Yahoo Application Platform, or YAP. Sometime around late September, Yahoo will open its YAP (no pun intended) to software developers so they can make all kinds of apps with a variety of functions for the home page, not just apps that are tied to Web sites.

You can customize the home page for style or content changes if you sign on using a user ID and password. Changes should appear the next time you log in. But this didn’t work as well as it should. I set my page to display in a tangerine color, one of six colors offered for customizing the page, but the home page wasn’t tangerine-colored the next time I logged in.

Some Problems

I had trouble logging into my Gmail account using a special Gmail app, but this and the color problem were fixed by the time this column went to press.

Some apps didn’t work at all, like the Facebook app, which couldn’t connect to my Facebook account. Yahoo said the problem should be fixed this week.

The home page seemed to have a longer memory when it came to the list of My Favorites. I edited my list, adding more pre-made apps and creating some of my own using a built-in tool that lets you enter a Web site. Yahoo has preloaded icons for some popular Web sites such as cnn.com; otherwise, it will use a generic star.

Permanent Apps

Two apps are permanent fixtures at the top of the My Favorites list: One shows a list of all Yahoo sites and the other shows Yahoo Mail. Everything else can be deleted, added and moved around in the list. One of my favorite apps was for Epicurious.com, the food and recipe site. When I hovered over the Epicurious app, images of food with recipe names appeared in the hover preview pane. One click on an image sent me to the Web site for the full version of the recipe.

After adding many of my own apps to My Favorites, I wished Yahoo had a one-click tool for converting my browser bookmarks into apps. Yahoo says this is something it hopes to introduce in the future.

Mobile Rollout

This week, Yahoo started rolling out a mobile Web site made to run on the iPhone’s Safari browser that coordinates with the more robust version of the home page. I used this Yahoo home page on the iPhone and liked that it immediately pulled up the My Favorites list I had carefully constructed on my computer. Similar offerings will soon be available for other mobile devices.

The new Yahoo home page is a refreshing way of bringing content to you rather than you chasing around the Web looking for it. The My Favorites apps need a little more power to be truly useful and to encourage people to use the Yahoo home page every day, but Yahoo hopes to solve some of that problem in a couple of months when it opens the site to developers.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com edited by Walter S. Mossberg

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090728/yahoo-renovates-its-home-page/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090710/who-says-the-web-doesnt-pay-gawker-boss-nick-denton-says-hell-shell-out-for-salacious-stories/ http://allthingsd.com/20090710/who-says-the-web-doesnt-pay-gawker-boss-nick-denton-says-hell-shell-out-for-salacious-stories/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:31:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9152 Got a great story, but don’t want to write it yourself? Drop Nick Denton a line: The Gawker Media boss says he’s going to start opening up his checkbook occasionally for people with amazing tales and pictures he can publish.

Denton disclosed his new policy, which isn’t really a new policy but a revival of an old policy, in an interview yesterday with Nieman Journalism Lab. He’s tried this a couple of times before: Last year he experimented with paying readers $7.50 for every 1,000 page views they generated via submissions. And in 2007, he offered a bounty of $10,000 for anyone who could land an “unretouched” version of an image that ended up on the cover of a women’s magazine, and paid out for this shot of Faith Hill.

I followed up with Denton this morning and he told me that he hasn’t fleshed out his plans yet–they’re “half-baked” right now–but they’re likely to be of the Faith Hill variety: Payouts to winner of contests, sweepstakes, etc.

Paying for tips, interviews and exclusives is standard practice outside of the U.S. The U.K.’s Daily Telegraph, for instance, paid a source that helped it break the expense account scandal that’s been roiling that country’s Parliament.

But it’s supposed to be verboten for “respectable” American media, though that self-imposed standard has been eroding for some time. It’s increasingly common, for instance, for TV news operations to pay big “licensing fees” to sought-after interview subjects, purportedly for access to family photos and videos.

Paying for tips is also old hat for newspaper tabloids. And TMZ, Time Warner’s (TWX) gossip powerhouse, has made it well-known that it will pay for tips. It’s a very good bet that the Web site has been writing many checks during the past couple weeks of the Michael Jackson frenzy.

Ultimately, Denton says, he’d like emulate the TMZ model. “I’d love to have their reputation–as the place you go if you want to make a buck.” Dream big!

TMZ boss Harvey Levin talks about his pay-per-tip policy in this interview with Kara Swisher:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090710/who-says-the-web-doesnt-pay-gawker-boss-nick-denton-says-hell-shell-out-for-salacious-stories/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090501/who-shot-valleywag-gossip-bloggers-thomas-outgoing-and-tate-incoming-speak/ http://allthingsd.com/20090501/who-shot-valleywag-gossip-bloggers-thomas-outgoing-and-tate-incoming-speak/#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 04:20:43 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13062

Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell always controversial Valleywag gossip blogger Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of GE (GE) unit NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.”

There, the 37-year-old Thomas will run a site that focuses on news from around the San Francisco region, with a mix of national stories. But, sources said, he is still going to continue to drill down on tech too, so those burned before by him should not relax too much.

Thomas has been running Valleywag since mid-2007. Its staff got pretty large for a while, until it was recently downsized and its content stuffed into Gawker, the flagship site of Gawker Media. The Valleywag site remains, though, and will continue to.

And it will now be the domain of deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate, Thomas’s replacement. The Berkeley resident, 32, has been the night editor for Gawker since early last year.

Interestingly, Tate was an intern for The Wall Street Journal’s California edition and also worked for tech-oriented publications like Business 2.0, Upside and the San Francisco Business Times.

Thomas is reportedly staying on at Valleywag through the middle of the month and then it will be Tate’s turn to make mischief with tech’s more puffed-up mandarins.

In an effort to scare Tate into steering clear of BoomTown, I invited the pair to All Things Digital HQ this rainy afternoon for a little sit-down to discuss where the controversial site has been and where it is going.

Here’s the video (and below it, a video interview I did with Thomas and then-Valleywag writer Megan McCarthy, when he got the job):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090501/who-shot-valleywag-gossip-bloggers-thomas-outgoing-and-tate-incoming-speak/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090415/finally-a-reason-to-bring-a-little-more-lindsanity-to-boomtown/ http://allthingsd.com/20090415/finally-a-reason-to-bring-a-little-more-lindsanity-to-boomtown/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:11:08 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12300

Look, BoomTown will admit it: I am riveted to the trials and tribulations of one former child actor moppet gone wild upon growing up.

I mean to say Lindsay Lohan, of course–or LiLo or La Loca Lohan or Lindsanity, as online gossip blogger Perez Hilton has dubbed her.

Whatever her personal turmoil, the troubled actress has been the patron saint of the Web’s gossip sites, as well as magazines and more, most recently for the spectacular and restraining-orders-all-around breakup she has had with DJ Samantha Ronson.

So where did Lohan go to get some control of the crazed situation back?

Why the Internet, of course, with a pretty funny video of a spoof of an eHarmony online dating ad that is now posted on the Web’s celebrity-comedy central, Funny or Die.

The video has had 1.6 million views there already, after just being posted yesterday. In it, Lohan references her Internet infamy.

“I’m an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur and I have single-handedly kept 90 percent of all gossip Web sites in business,” she says in the video at one point, doing a very good job, considering the topic, which only reminds us that she was once a very promising actress.

Then Lohan sums it up with a flourish:

“So, if you think you can handle a redhead with a little bit of sass, and by that I mean a redhead that’s crazy… I mean don’t pretend like you don’t know me, we’ve all read about it! We’ll crash a few parties, a car or two, but at the end of the day, I promise you, I never lose my Google hits–just my underwear.”

Google (GOOG) must be completely relieved by that news.

Here’s the video:

Lindsay Lohan’s eHarmony Profile from Lindsay Lohan

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090415/finally-a-reason-to-bring-a-little-more-lindsanity-to-boomtown/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090217/cat-fight-internet-style-perez-hilton-slaps-the-facebook-of-not-bff-mark-zuckerberg/ http://allthingsd.com/20090217/cat-fight-internet-style-perez-hilton-slaps-the-facebook-of-not-bff-mark-zuckerberg/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:36:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9891

In a BoomTown post last night noting that users should just get used to not having much control of their privacy and posted content online, in the wake of the controversy over Facebook’s terms of service changes, how could one leave out this gem of a digital diatribe on the issue by gossipmonger supreme, Perez Hilton?

In an item yesterday, Hilton–who has gotten into a lot of copyright infringement legal trouble himself–asked his fans to boycott the fast-growing social-networking site and claimed that Facebook “can license your personal pictures out to companies, make a shizzle of money and don’t have to give you a dime.”

Facebook could certainly use a shizzle or two, but that seems about as likely as people like Hilton laying off of Jessica Simpson for her alleged weight gain. (Speaking of which–Hey, Perez, let’s say we just blame the bad jeans and move on, shall we?)

Nonetheless, it is still kind of fun to watch as different worlds collide so perfectly.

Of course, Hilton’s Facebook app was still up last nigh, although it apparently only has 361 monthly active users, compared to SuperPoke’s sheep-tossing 6.3 million.

Not to be catty or anything!

In any case, here’s a link to the Hilton post and an image of it below (one can only dream that Perez will come after me with that digital Sharpie for lifting it!):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090217/cat-fight-internet-style-perez-hilton-slaps-the-facebook-of-not-bff-mark-zuckerberg/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20081210/more-not-bad-news-from-time-inc-peoplecom-booming/ http://allthingsd.com/20081210/more-not-bad-news-from-time-inc-peoplecom-booming/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:39:07 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1939 That was fun writing not-bad news from Time Inc. yesterday. Let’s try it again:

While it’s true that Time Warner’s (TWX) magazine unit is embattled, there are bright spots in the portfolio. Take People.com: The gossip magazine has always been one of Time’s strongest performers (good luck trying to find a discounted subscription). Now its companion Web site is, too.

The site boasts 8.6 million unique monthly visitors, per comScore (SCOR), up 36 percent in the last year, and generates a staggering 700 million page views per month–per Omniture (OMTR). Meanwhile, once-hot sites like TMZ.com (another Time Warner property) have tailed off.

Much of the credit for that goes to Mark Golin, the awesomely sharp and frumpy editor best known as the man behind Maxim magazine’s rise, way back in the late 1990s. He’s successfully broadened the site beyond just Britney/Paris/Lindsay news by adding features like a game channel, a shopping channel and the like.

One of the most successful expansions came via acquisition: When People.com bought Celebrity Baby Blog back in May, it was generating 6.9 million page views per month. Now it’s doing 30 million, Time execs say. And before my fellow journobloggers dismiss the work that the people at Celebrity Baby Blog do, ask yourself this: Did you know that Ashlee Simpson has named her kid Bronx Mowgli? Aren’t you glad you know now?

In any case, all those page views are translating into actual dollars–not digital pennies, as NBC’s Jeff Zucker would say. Time Inc. says People.com is now one of its 10 most profitable titles–that’s out of all of the company’s 174 properties, on or offline.

The company won’t attach numbers to that claim, of course. But given that Time Inc. generated $162 million in operating profit during a very lousy third quarter, you can get some sense of the property’s success. Now Time just needs many more just like it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081210/more-not-bad-news-from-time-inc-peoplecom-booming/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20070817/valleywag-wags-about-well-valleywag/ http://allthingsd.com/20070817/valleywag-wags-about-well-valleywag/#comments Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:24:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20070817/valleywag-wags-about-well-valleywag/ I had an entertaining lunch with Owen Thomas and Megan McCarthy, both of Valleywag, the Silicon Valley online gossip rag that is part of the Gawker Media blogging empire.

(Megan had asked for some advice about the fine art of covering parties–that is, making an interesting story where there is not one–since I started my career covering parties for the Washington Post.)

Thomas, whom I have know for many years, is the new managing editor of Valleywag, a gig he got in July after many years as an editor and writer at Business 2.0 magazine.

Here is a talk with him about the state of the blog and Valleywag’s focus under him, as well as an appearance by McCarthy, and more info after the jump:

[ See post to watch video ]

Thomas has a lot of digital experience, too, as a contributor to the legendarily snarky Suck site, and he was an early convert in the mainstream media to the inevitability of the digital space. His last job at Business 2.0 was as online editor for the Time Inc. title.

Thomas’s predecessor was Gawker publisher and impresario Nick Denton, in fact, who took over writing the blog after he sacked its first editor, Nick Douglas (who still writes posts regularly for Valleywag). Soon enough, Denton fired himself and hired Thomas.

In his post on the move, Denton said: “You see, Thomas isn’t just a veteran of business journalism, with excellent sources in the tech industry (most of which he will burn).”

And indeed, so far Thomas has been busy slapping around the denizens of Silicon Valley (including me for being too nice to Yahoo U.S. sales head Dave Karnstedt) with the newfound vigor of a man freed from the mainstream media.

Not everyone likes it, finding some posts too snarky and cutting, but everyone does seem to read it.

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