Now, users will be able to share articles, leave comments and play fantasy sports on Yahoo by signing in to accounts they’ve created on Facebook and Google. They won’t have to create a Yahoo profile or associate their Facebook or Google ID with an existing Yahoo one (though a Yahoo account is being created in the background that’s associated with the other site’s credentials).

Other properties included in the new login regime (or lack of a regime) are Yahoo! Finance, as well as pages for users to rate movies, music and restaurants. (Obviously for some properties, like Yahoo! Mail, users will still need to plug in Yahoo-specific credentials to create a full-fledged Yahoo ID.)

The beleaguered company is playing this as a move toward openness. And there is some precedent for the move. Yahoo had previously allowed users to log in to Flickr using OpenID logins from Google, and had partnered with Facebook to give users an option, through Facebook Connect, to integrate their accounts on the two sites and send information back and forth between them.

But this latest announcement is different from Facebook Connect; what Yahoo is now offering is a wholesale substitution of another site’s account system. Yahoo for a long time had the coveted advantage as a Web portal of having a large percentage of its visitors logged in at all times to a consistent account across all its properties; that doesn’t seem to be a top priority for the company anymore.

Which is why this qualifies as news: Financial commentary site Seeking Alpha is going to start paying some of its writers.

The seven-year-old site, which relies on a pool of several thousand contributors to stock it with chatter about stocks and anything else you can trade, will now offer them a chance to get paid for their work. It’s a one-size-fits-all rate: $10 for every 1,000 page views a story generates, as long as the story doesn’t appear anywhere else on the free Web.

That’s not going to make any of the site’s writers rich. Seeking Alpha CEO David Jackson says “it’s possible” that his most popular writers could generate a couple of thousand dollars per month, but most are going to make much less.

Jackson, on the other hand, is potentially on the hook for a decent-size bill.

Quantcast pegs his site’s daily page views at around two million. Not all of those views come from contributors–Seeking Alpha’s free transcript service, for instance, is popular and useful, and I assume the site gets a decent chunk of direct traffic. But if, say, half its page views were from volunteers who now want to get paid, that’s an outlay of $1,000 a day.

But why pay anything at all? Jackson’s longtime strategy has been to get people like newsletter publishers and money managers to give him free stuff, and offer them exposure/leads in return. Why change now?

You can read Jackson’s explanation of the move, along with some other details, in a letter he’s distributing to his writers today. But maybe he’s just following this sound advice from the Joker:

Dear Seeking Alpha contributor,

I wanted to let you know personally about three new initiatives that have rolled out on SeekingAlpha.com this morning:

1. Sharing revenue with contributors

I’ve always viewed Seeking Alpha as a partnership with our contributors: you provide us with outstanding articles, and we invest heavily (we now have over 70 employees) in technology, web design, editors and traffic partnerships to get your ideas in front of a large and valuable audience and drive customer leads to your business. But we’ve always known that some of our contributors don’t have businesses we can drive leads to, and that many contributors would appreciate additional direct income from their articles.

We’ve spent over a year building a direct sales team, and our readership has hit an all-time high and continues to grow (see: http://www.quantcast.com/seekingalpha.com). As a result, we can now share meaningful revenue with contributors: you’ll earn $10 for every thousand page views to articles which are published by Seeking Alpha and given to us exclusively (i.e. they don’t appear for free elsewhere on the Web). We call payment for exclusive articles our “Premium Partnership Program”. It’s on an article by article basis, so there are no contracts or forward commitments, and if for any reason you don’t want to receive payment yourself, you can pick a charity to receive your earnings instead. And if you don’t want to give us exclusivity for articles, nothing will change from the way we publish your articles now.

2. Upgrade to our leaderboards and reputation system

We’ve introduced a new reputation system and set of leaderboards, called “SA Opinion Leaders”. You’re now ranked by page views (trailing 90 days) to your articles according to the themes you write about. For example, if some of your articles are tagged “Media”, you automatically appear in the Media Sector leaderboard and are ranked by the number of page views you received to those articles. You can appear in multiple leaderboards, determined by the themes your articles are tagged with. Additionally, if you’re ranked in the top 5 for any theme, that information is displayed on your articles and also on your profile page.

We think this new reputation system has strong advantages. First, we’ve discovered that the number of followers a person has on Seeking Alpha (and, parenthetically, Twitter also,) doesn’t necessarily equate to reader engagement or influence. In contrast, the number of people who read your articles is a direct measure of reader engagement and thus your influence. Second, reputation is far more meaningful when measured in specific areas of expertise. So if you focus on media stocks, it’s far more valuable to know (and tell people) that you’re the number one on Seeking Alpha in the Media Sector than that you’re number 33 in some general ranking. We think that measuring real engagement and ranking contributors in categories will be valuable for contributors and — critically — valuable for readers.

3. Access to stats

You can now view detailed stats on Seeking Alpha, including total page views, page views by article, and page views by category. Additionally, you can track your page views and earnings for exclusive articles.

The future

Any major change carries risk, so why are we doing this? After all, churn in our contributor base is remarkably low, we’re about to add our 4,000th contributor, traffic is at an all time high, we recently crossed our 600,000th registered user, we have over 40,000 comments on the site per month, and our audience is of outstandingly high quality.

The answer is: this is about a vision. Investment research has been dominated by the sell side, but there’s a world out there of other people who have considerable knowledge and insight about stocks, options, bonds, ETFs and investment strategy. Whether you’re a fund manager, financial advisor, industry expert or a smart individual investor, we want to be the partner that brings that insight to light and unlocks value for contributors by offering exposure, reputation, customer leads and direct income. If this is successful, it should transform the investment research industry.

Thank you for your partnership with us, and wishing you a happy and prosperous 2011,
David

A bevy of dedicated apps and recently launched features for existing local apps now enable smartphone users to take pictures of memorable dishes and rate them or comment on them. Here’s a sampler of the current offerings:

We’ll get to the familiar names in a moment, but first is a new iPhone app from a Seattle-based start-up called Chewsy that creates a “social menu” (pictured at right) for any restaurant, based on user rankings. Created by Microsoft employees in their spare time, the app is focused on building out ratings and comments for menu items, and does not yet support pictures. Getting critical mass for menu items has got to be even harder than getting critical mass for restaurants, but the company has already launched in 11 markets.

At the beginning of this week, the geo-social crew at Foursquare started giving users the ability to add photos to check-ins, tips and venues. That has rolled out for both the iPhone and Android Foursquare apps, and includes photos from linked accounts on Instagram, Picplz and Foodspotting. The company said in a blog post, “Tips with photos changes everything. See dishes before ordering them, figure out if a venue looks fun, or easily identify a hard-to-find spot. More info = better exploration.”

Social media local reviews leader Yelp put out its first iPad app (pictured at left) on Monday. In a blog post describing the launch, the company said the best part of the app is “our marquee feature: a fancy, schmancy new photo search results.”

The next day, Urbanspoon (the company behind that app where you shake to seredipitously find a place to eat) put out a new release that allows diners to submit a photo and review of a specific menu item directly from the app.

Foodspotting, the leading pretty app for sharing pictures of and locating nearby food, just crossed 500,000 downloads of its iPhone version on Tuesday, and said an Android beta would be out before the end of the year. It raised $750,000 in seed funding last summer and just acquired a small food blogging start-up called Eat.ly.

The incredibly addictive Instagram, which is not focused on food but is a leading distributor of the latte still-life, announcedon Tuesday its iPhone app had been downloaded one million times. It is currently raising funding.

Taking this whole concept in a different direction, NTT Communications has said it plans to release a healthy-eating app in Japan next month that will allow diners to take pictures of the food on their plate and report how many calories it contains.

Are food pictures just a feature? Sure, but you could also say food is just a feature of restaurants.

Does tea with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway and 1990s rap legend MC Hammer sound too legit? What about spending the day harvesting crabs under the Golden Gate Bridge? Or maybe a hands-on coffee-crafting session with an expert barista?

Skyara, a buzzy little start-up has created a marketplace for people to sell experiences to folks who are looking to do something other than the same old thing.

“It’s sort of like Airbnb for experiences,” co-founder Dennis Liu explained, referencing another buzzy start-up.

He continued: “It’s one part Etsy, some Expedia and a little of Groupon built on top of our own robust scheduling platform.”

In practice, users log in and are asked if they want to purchase or provide a service. The providers are taken through a process of describing their offering, providing images, setting up times and providing enough personal info so the Skyara team can contact them and verify they are legit. Skyara takes a 12 percent fee on the transaction on the seller’s side.

The purchasers can currently browse or search through about 200 different experiences, ranging from a boudoir photography session (Skyara checked–the photographer is well known in the arena) to the less understandable half-hour of punching dozens of plastic inflatable clowns that someone has collected in an apartment.

But according to Liu, the service has an almost three percent conversion rate from visit to actual sale on their Web site, including all the diluting traffic it gets from outside of the San Francisco area, Skyara’s only market so far.

He said that about 10 percent of all visitors do something valuable on the site, whether that’s offering a service, buying one, telling Skyara where they live and that they’d like to have the service there or signing up for updates.

An interesting wrinkle has emerged in the last few days, as Skyara has partnered with the ongoing UCSF Children’s Hospital charity challenge. This is where the current deal to meet Conway and Hammer came from–which you may enter to win by donating to the UCSF challenge. It brings the “experience sales” idea right back to its ancestral home–charity auctions.

Skyara came together as the brainchild of Liu and Jonathan Wu, former classmates at the University of Pennsylvania, who had moved to New York for jobs as business consultants.

They originally conceived of it as an Expedia for outdoor activities and brought on Steven Ou, the third co-founder, to help them build out the scheduling platform.

The trio was accepted into the i/o Ventures incubator this past March and decided to pivot into Skyara’s current “experience marketplace” model shortly before its first public demo in late September.

“It was like two weeks of fighting, but we decided to pivot because we’d all spent several weeks cold-calling outdoor activity businesses and it was really slow,” Liu said.

Wu, who now heads business development, explained that the founders were concerned that they were going to have an “Open Table” problem, referring to the restaurant reservation service.

“We didn’t want it to take 10 years to have it be really useful,” said Wu.

The whole team agrees that their growth model will be all about expanding into new markets, the first of which will be New York and Chicago. Skyara plans to raise capital to expand early next year.

Besides new markets, the company is adding tools to help people come up with ideas for experiences to offer, and to boost the community aspect of the experience, building a little more of Etsy’s users-as-both-buyers-and-sellers model to its service.

Said Liu: “I’ve met some incredible people on these experiences, and that should be a part of it.”

We spoke with the fresh-faced Skyara trio at Park Chow restaurant in San Francisco. Here’s the video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101210/for-the-person-who-has-it-all-skyara-sells-new-stuff-to-experience/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101019/ad-dollars-shrink-at-the-new-york-times-again/ http://allthingsd.com/20101019/ad-dollars-shrink-at-the-new-york-times-again/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:48:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24842

Three months ago, the New York Times seemed to have halted its advertising skid after a very long slide.

Perhaps it has started up again. Ad revenue dropped one percent during Q3: Digital revenue jumped 14.6 percent, but that wasn’t enough to counter a 5.8 percent drop in print ads–which CEO Janet Robinson had thought would move up again this quarter. This morning, though, she cited “uneven economic conditions” and “marketplace volatility.”

Meanwhile, circulation revenue dropped 4.8 percent, and the company’s overall revenue sank by 2.7 percent.

The Times isn’t terribly optimistic about the fourth quarter: It thinks prints ads may improve “modestly,” while digital will grow by 10 percent, which is a deceleration from both this quarter as well as the previous quarter’s 21 percent growth rate.

Here’s the full breakout for the Times’ digital properties (NYT.com, About.com, etc), which appear to be doing pretty well:

• Total Internet revenues increased 13.3 percent to $89.4 million from $78.9 million.
• Internet advertising revenues increased 14.6 percent to $78.3 million from $68.3 million.
• Internet advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 21.6 percent to $47.4 million from $39.0 million, mainly due to strong growth in national display advertising.
• Internet businesses accounted for 16.1 percent of the company’s revenues for the third quarter of 2010 versus 13.9 percent for the third quarter of 2009.

Meanwhile, the Times doesn’t have anything new to say about its plan to move its main Web site to a “metered model” pay wall next year. Perhaps we’ll hear something about it during the 11 am earnings call.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/ad-dollars-shrink-at-the-new-york-times-again/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100402/maybe-steve%e2%80%99s-right-maybe-netbooks-aren%e2%80%99t-better-at-anything/ http://allthingsd.com/20100402/maybe-steve%e2%80%99s-right-maybe-netbooks-aren%e2%80%99t-better-at-anything/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:31:58 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=38083 “Netbooks aren’t better at anything.” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that of the ultraportable machines earlier this year, and now it seems the market may finally be nodding in agreement.

In a report out today, research firm IDC reveals that netbook sales are slowing–significantly. Shipments to retailers in the first three months of this year are expected, when the final numbers are in, to have grown 33.6 percent to 4.8 million units. Which is substantial.

Problem is, that’s not even close to the growth netbooks enjoyed during the same period last year, when sales spiked 872 percent to 3.6 million units.

Now obviously, an 872 percent growth rate isn’t sustainable. That said, the year-over-year drop IDC observes is precipitous enough to raise questions about the continued viability of the category, particularly given recent reports that manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL) are losing interest in 10-inch netbooks because of disappointing sales and the surge of interest in Apple’s (AAPL) iPad.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100402/maybe-steve%e2%80%99s-right-maybe-netbooks-aren%e2%80%99t-better-at-anything/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100209/mobile-data-traffic/ http://allthingsd.com/20100209/mobile-data-traffic/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:00:42 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=34567 It’s a truism that mobile data traffic these days is growing at an extraordinary rate. But that doesn’t make the findings of mobile data growth by Cisco (CSCO) any less dramatic. According to the company’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast, worldwide mobile data traffic could hit 40 exabytes by 2014, or 3.6 exabytes per month (see table below; click to enlarge).

3.6 billion gigabytes per month.

Astonishing. In the past year alone, the volume of mobile Web traffic spiked 160 percent to 90 petabytes per month. And it’s growing at a rate 2.4 times faster than global fixed broadband data traffic.

Interestingly, a lot of this growth is being driven by mobile video. Cisco’s study found that mobile video will represent 66 percent of all mobile data traffic by 2014, increasing 66-fold from 2009 to 2014. Something to consider as we wait for Apple’s (AAPL) iPad to arrive at market and for Apple to nail down that “Best of TV” iTunes subscription offering it has been working on.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100209/mobile-data-traffic/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100115/new-verizon-wireless-plans-available-monday/ http://allthingsd.com/20100115/new-verizon-wireless-plans-available-monday/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:30:44 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=32778 As expected, Verizon Wireless rolled out some new wireless pricing plans this morning, promising “simple, affordable convenience.” And the carrier does provide that if you’re a feature phone user with little need for a data package. Or an AT&T customer.

Verizon (VZ) dropped its nationwide unlimited voice plan to $69.99 a month from $99 and began offering a nationwide unlimited voice and text plan for $89.99.

But if you’d like a data plan to go along with them, you’ll be looking at additional fees–$9.99 for a 25-megabyte package and $29.99 for an “unlimited” one. The $19.99 data package option for 3G multimedia phones has been discontinued.

So what Verizon has really done here is cut the price of voice and raise, substantially, the price of data, as Pali Research analyst Walter Piecyk pointed out in a research note to clients this morning.

“This is 30 percent cut to voice and a 50% increase to data which effectively results in about an 8-10% effective cut to the more popular high-end rate plans,” the analyst explained.

“The rate moves appear to be trying to increase the perceived relative value of data,” Piecyk added. “There is in effect a price increase for data to $30 from $20, a level that most carriers have charged. Increasing prices is not a logical way to drive adoption but Verizon mitigates that increase with steep cuts in voice and appears to be using its industry leading position to move the perception on the value of data.”

One last point worth making here: Verizon’s new plans are more expensive than those offered by Sprint Nextel (S) and T-Mobile, but cheaper than AT&T’s–at the moment, anyway. The last time Verizon lowered its plan prices, AT&T (T) followed suit within a matter of hours.

The plans go into effect Monday, Jan. 18.

Below, some comparative tables on Verizon’s new pricing plans, courtesy of Pali (click to enlarge), and the official announcement:

VERIZON WIRELESS OFFERS SIMPLE, AFFORDABLE CONVENIENCE WITH NEW UNLIMITED VOICE PLANS
New Nationwide Plan Options Include Unlimited Talk and Text to Pair with Robust Data Plans on the Latest 3G Phones

BASKING RIDGE, N.J. – New monthly service plans from Verizon Wireless make connecting to the nation’s most reliable wireless network easier than ever. Beginning Jan. 18, customers may sign up for a new Nationwide Unlimited Talk plan that allows customers to call anyone in the United States for $69.99 monthly access or a Nationwide Unlimited Talk & Text plan to call and send text, picture and video messages to anyone in the country for $89.99 monthly access.

Nationwide Family SharePlans® will also have new unlimited options. Nationwide Unlimited Talk Family SharePlans will be $119.99 monthly access while the Nationwide Unlimited Talk & Text Family SharePlans will be $149.99 monthly access. All Family SharePlan pricing includes the first two lines of service. Standard text message rates will apply for customers on the Nationwide Unlimited Talk plans who do not sign up for a text messaging bundle.

Data Packages

The company also announced the expansion of the 25 megabyte for $9.99 per month data package requirement to include all Verizon Wireless 3G Multimedia phones, which gives customers quick access to Mobile E-mail, games and the Internet. The data package requirement was introduced last year with the LG enV® TOUCH and the Samsung Rogue™. Today’s announcement expands that list to include new activations of the LG Chocolate Touch™, LG enV®3, LG VX8360, Motorola Entice™ W766, Nokia 7705 Twist™ and Samsung Alias™ 2. The company expects to introduce a host of 3G Multimedia phones in 2010. The $19.99 data package option for 3G Multimedia phones has been discontinued.

Customers using Simple Feature phones (Mobile Web-enabled) will continue to pay $1.99 per megabyte or choose either the $9.99 or $29.99 data packages. The consumer data package for 3G Smartphones such as BlackBerry®, Windows Mobile® or Android devices will remain at $29.99 per month.

Prepaid Plans

Verizon Wireless will also offer customers new prepaid plans beginning Jan. 18. For those who prefer pay-as-you-go options, but want a no-holds approach to calling and texting, new Monthly Unlimited Prepaid plans will give customers the same great calling options as monthly contract subscribers for just $5 more per month. Prepaid Monthly Unlimited Talk is now available for $74.99 per month while contract subscribers pay $69.99 for the same unlimited calling option. Prepaid Monthly Unlimited Talk & Text will be available for $94.99 per month. The 450- and 900-minute Monthly Prepaid plans will also be available for $5 more per month than comparable postpaid plans.

Existing Customers

Today’s announcement will not have an impact on existing customer contracts, although customers may choose to move to any of the new plans. The company allows customers to change their service plans at any time without penalty or contract extension. To move to the newly announced plans, customers may go online to their My Verizon accounts at www.verizonwireless.com or contact Customer Service at 1-800-922-0204.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100115/new-verizon-wireless-plans-available-monday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091014/is-bluetooth-on-its-way-out/ http://allthingsd.com/20091014/is-bluetooth-on-its-way-out/#comments Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:42:09 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=26602 The inexorable march of technology made wires and cable obsolete in the wake of Bluetooth and may soon do the same to the short-range wireless protocol. The Wi-Fi Alliance this week announced Wi-Fi Direct, a new short-range wireless standard capable of performing many of the same tasks as Blutooth, but at Wi-Fi speeds.

Essentially, Wi-Fi Direct turns supporting devices into access points, allowing them to connect to one another without joining a traditional network. They’ll support typical Wi-Fi ranges and the same data-transfer rates, which in the case of 802.11n is some 30 times faster than the three megabits per second for Bluetooth.

“Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn’t available,” Wi-Fi Alliance Executive Director Edgar Figueroa said in a statement. “The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise.”

And Bluetooth inevitably less so. Especially since Wi-Fi Direct will be available as a software upgrade for existing Wi-Fi devices. Why wait around for high-speed Bluetooth, which itself will rely on Wi-Fi for high speed data transfers, when you can use Wi-Fi Direct for your personal area network?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091014/is-bluetooth-on-its-way-out/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090724/pre-analysts/ http://allthingsd.com/20090724/pre-analysts/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:23:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=22153

Now this is just getting silly.

Pali Research says sales of the Palm Pre are slowing. RBC’s Mike Abramsky says they aren’t and claims 325,000 to 375,000 have been sold to date, ahead of his expectations.

Citing some decidedly unscientific poll data, Jesup and Lamont analyst Kevin Dede suggests the device is plagued by build-quality issues and a high exchange/return rate, potentially 40 percent. Abramsky says it’s between two and three percent and calls BS on the build-quality issue.

“Most buyers appear delighted with their new Pre user experience,” Abramsky said in a research note Friday. “Pre satisfaction appears higher than legacy Palm devices (e.g., Treo), affirming improved execution from the ‘New’ Palm, including engineering, manufacturing, quality and process improvements.”

So, Pre sales are slowing. Or, they’re not.

And exchange/return rates are high.

Unless they’re not.

And these analysts are on point.

Unless, of course, they’re not. Too bad it’s impossible to tell without official numbers from Palm (PALM) or Sprint (S).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090724/pre-analysts/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-far-better-at-analyzing-derivatives-than-youtube-infrastructure-costs/ http://allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-far-better-at-analyzing-derivatives-than-youtube-infrastructure-costs/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:06:16 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=19696
YouTube may be losing money, but it’s not losing nearly as much as some claim. Certainly not the $470 million that Credit Suisse projected in April, citing massive infrastructure costs. According to IT research outfit RampRate, a more realistic assessment of YouTube’s operating loss for 2009 is $174 million, nearly $300 million less than Credit Suisse’s estimate.

Why the discrepancy? RampRate says Credit Suisse vastly overestimated YouTube’s bandwidth, storage, and data center costs. Worse, it failed to account for Google’s peering agreements, which significantly reduce Internet transit costs by exchanging traffic locally with other large networks. RampRate figures Google (GOOG) pays for about 27 percent of YouTube’s bandwidth. It trades for the remaining 73 percent through peering deals.

Beyond this, Google finds savings in other ways. It’s likely able to negotiate a lower rate for 27 percent of YouTube bandwidth it pays for simply by virtue of the sheer amount of business it’s able to bring to the table. And it keeps hosting costs low by maintaining servers in out-of-the-way locations. Says RampRate, “Regardless of what you may hear, YouTube costs are a fraction of any other company running similar operations. Most of Google’s bandwidth is free or near-free; its hardware is cost-optimized; and its data center costs are mostly committed or sunk.”

If that’s the case, why didn’t Google take issue with Credit Suisse’s (CS) projections? Why does it allow this perception of YouTube as money pit to persist? Well, silence is golden, is it not? “Any appearance of profits leads to more draconian revenue share demands from partners and additional lawsuits from owners of unlicensed content,” Ramprate explains. “An apparent loss deters this behavior, making it eminently advisable for Google to let rumors of YouTube’s losses grow and compound….

“The trail for this strategy was blazed long before YouTube. Apple’s poor-mouthing of iTunes served it exceptionally well for years in holding back the tide of higher revenue share demands (even as labels privately suspected the service was much more profitable than reported). The apparent stability and maturity of the business finally culminated in recent price increases. Google can only hope that its run with YouTube lasts as long as Apple’s luxury of $.99 pricing.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-far-better-at-analyzing-derivatives-than-youtube-infrastructure-costs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090326/itunes-069-bargain-bin-to-debut-on-april-7/ http://allthingsd.com/20090326/itunes-069-bargain-bin-to-debut-on-april-7/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:00:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=15489 April 7. That’s when the 99-cent-per-song rate that iTunes first set in 2003 will finally end, says the LA Times. On that day–and not April 1 as Apple originally claimed–the company will introduce a new tiered-pricing plan that will see it peddling songs for 69 cents, 99 cents, and $1.29, according to popularity.

In the past, Apple (AAPL) has said that many more songs will be priced at 69 cents than at $1.29. But that 69-cent bargain bin is viewed as little consolation to some who question the wisdom of introducing what amounts to a 30 percent price increase with the economy in recession and online piracy an easy option.

Said Nine Inch Nails manager Jim Guerinot, “Wouldn’t it make sense to try to price it cheaper instead of squeezing the handful of people who are still willing to pay for music?”

Perhaps. But when has the recording industry ever done anything that made sense?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090326/itunes-069-bargain-bin-to-debut-on-april-7/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080923/what-color-is-happened-to-your-parachute/ http://allthingsd.com/20080923/what-color-is-happened-to-your-parachute/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:10:42 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=5492 Looking over the latest unemployment figures, Silicon Valley’s technology bust early this decade no longer seems such a distant memory. In another unsettling economic sign, the unemployment rate in Silicon Valley rose for the fourth consecutive month in August to reach a four-year high. Unemployment in Silicon Valley reached 6.5 percent last month, up from a revised 6.4 percent in July and 6.0 percent in June, according to the latest data from the California Employment Development Department.

The last time the unemployment rate was this high was in July 2004, following the dotcom bust. Seems even the high-tech world is becoming more fiscally cautious as the economy crumbles around us. We’ve seen layoffs at Yahoo (YHOO), Motorola (MOT), Applied Materials (AMAT), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Sun (JAVA), Nortel (NT) … even Google (GOOG), which announced the first major cuts in its 10-year history.

What was it Mark Twain once said? “By the Law of Periodical Repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again and again–and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s, and each obeying its own law.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080923/what-color-is-happened-to-your-parachute/feed/ 0