Maybe Jeff Weiner will keep heading down the path Pulse was headed: Trying to figure out how to create mobile magazines filled with other peoples’ content, and how to sell ads against the eyeballs that stuff collects.

And LinkedIn already has a small but growing advertising business — its “marketing solutions” group, which includes traditional ads, generated 27 percent of its revenue last quarter.

But my hunch is that Weiner thinks LinkedIn can do a lot with Pulse without spending much time on ads at all.  For instance, what would it look like if LinkedIn sold an iPhone app, or bundled an app with its premium subscriptions, that integrated LinkedIn’s database with other people’s content?

Well, it would look a lot like the one created by LinkedIn content boss Dan Roth — back when Roth ran Fortune Magazine’s digital editions.

Here, let Roth show you himself. It gets particularly interesting at the 50-second mark:

Back in 2011, Roth had to work very hard to find the resources at Time Inc. to produce a fairly rudimentary app. (Disclosure: I know Dan. He’s a good dude.) Imagine what he could do at a company with real digital resources.

Now we might find out.

As far as the bad news … we’ll get to that. But let’s stay upbeat for a minute, and I’ll try to generate more optimism for you.

Start with some charts, via Google Finance.

Here’s what happened to AOL stock after the company split off from Time Warner, just like you’re set to do:

And here’s what happened to Time Warner Cable shares when that company did the same thing:

And for good measure, let’s mash them together:

So, on the whole, not too terrible. Two companies that Jeff Bewkes didn’t want weighing down his cable and movie business, and they’ve done okay once he cut them loose. AOL shares are up 62 percent since the split.** Time Warner Cable is down 21 percent, but shareholders have gotten another $6.41 per share in dividends, so things are a bit better than they look here.

Let’s continue to stay upbeat, and channel the talking points you’re likely to hear in months leading up to the split:

• Hey, just because this is Plan B for Jeff Bewkes doesn’t mean he doesn’t want this to succeed. Time Warner, after all, will end up owning a chunk of the spun-off company, so it has a vested interest in this thing working.
• And, seriously, this could be good for Time Inc.! After all, in the last few years the thing has just been in stasis/shrinking mode, and no one cared. Now they’ll have to care, and maybe the newco will go do some serious re-orging and perhaps some investing, too. After all, it’s good enough for News Corp.!

And all of that is potentially true. Or at least truthy. Or something.

Alas:

• Jeff Bewkes doesn’t care about Time Inc., and investors don’t either — they’ve wanted him to dump it forever. If they haven’t priced the spinoff into the share price already, they will do so immediately, and then that will be that.
• It’s hard to imagine any scenario where Time Inc. is able to navigate the print-to-digital shift effectively. But it certainly won’t get its best odds as a public company made to answer to the Street’s quarterly demands. And even if, say, a deep-pocketed and semi-benevolent benefactor materialized to buy the thing, Bewkes wouldn’t sell, because of the tax hit that would generate (the spinoff will be tax-free for shareholders).
• For better and worse, the News Corp. spin (which is set to include this website) is going to be steered by Rupert Murdoch, a man with a lot of money invested in the company’s perfomance, and even more ego tied up in it. Time Inc. will be run by … someone, and they’ll get a nice paycheck and some options for their effort, but no one expects them to work a miracle here.
• And that’s what Time Inc,. stripped of Time Warner’s corporate shield, will need to turn around. It has the classic analog/digital channel conflict, where the latter is the only way out, but the former generates all the cash. And that’s hard enough to deal with at the most nimble and most flexible companies. This one, shoved out of the nest and into the market without any kind of cushion, seems set up to fail. I hope I’m wrong.

*Des Moines is nice enough, by the way. But the Meredith/Time Inc. culture clash stories you heard were very true.
** True, AOL has fired a lot of people since it went its own way. But that’s going to happen at Time Inc., no matter what. And, yes, the stock’s rise has a lot to do with a $1 billion patent sale, but let’s stay positive!

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/mikeledray)

The company has decided to spin off its entire Time Inc. magazine group, it said Wednesday, giving up on talks with Meredith Corp. over the proposed merger of most of their titles.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Two years later, the magazine changed its name to Better Homes and Gardens, today one of the biggest-selling titles in the U.S. and a core product of Meredith Corp., the Iowa-based TV and magazine firm still controlled by the Meredith family. It is now poised to merge with most of the glamorous Time Inc. publishing empire that Mr. Luce built into international fame.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Lisa Sharples told employees at Allrecipes’ Seattle headquarters on Thursday that she would be leaving at the end of March to spend more time with her children. No replacement was named, but I’m hearing that a search is under way for a new leader.

A company spokesperson did not respond immediately to emails seeking comment.

It has been a year since Meredith Corp., which is best known for its old-line magazine business, acquired Allrecipes from Reader’s Digest Association for $175 million. The website is now one of Meredith Corp.’s largest online properties, and as such, may be standing out as Meredith looks to combine its company with Time Warner’s publishing assets, including Time Inc.

In 2007, Sharples joined Allrecipes from Classmates.com, where she was VP of marketing. Since joining Allrecipes, the brand has expanded internationally and today is in 23 countries and a dozen languages. Prior to Classmates.com, Sharples co-founded Garden.com, where she was chief marketing and merchandising officer.

A source familiar with the situation says Sharples will be missed, and credited her with keeping the company’s “culture fun, young and not corporate.”

Jeff Bewkes

People have been wondering for a long time when Time Warner would sell off Time Inc. And for a long time, whenever anyone asked CEO Jeff Bewkes or senior management about the publishing company, they’d inevitably say something like “we like it, we’re keeping it.”

But when analyst Jessica Reif Cohen asked CFO John Martin the same question back in September, he gave a different answer, and people in and outside of Time Inc. took notice. Here’s the excerpt of their conversation at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s media conference (I’ve highlighted  a few key parts):

Cohen: In June, News Corp announced plans to separate the publishing business and other small entities from the core media and entertainment franchises. In the second quarter, Time Inc., reported, or your publishing unit reported revenue down 9%, advertising was down 7%, subscription revenue 11%. I mean this is not really a great numbers, so they really kind of dragged down the overall company growth. I mean, would a separation of Time Inc. from your cable network and studio business make sense at some point?

Martin: I wouldn’t rule anything out at some point, but I don’t think it’s exactly synonymous Time Inc. to whatever News Corp’s decision was with respect to particularly newspapers. I mean, Time Inc. is a company that is dealing with nationally branded environments and transitioning to digital and there’s a lot of commonality between the strategy and the issues that we’re facing in our TV and home entertainment businesses as there is in our publishing businesses – probably more commonality now than there has been in the past.

Having said all of that, I would also – I think it’s fair to say we’re disappointed with the results at Time Inc. It’s being driven by the industry, not by the performance of the management, and so we’re proud of the management’s execution against what is a really, really difficult industry backdrop, but I would say – and I think our past is an indicator of this, given what we’ve done with Time Warner Cable and AOL – is that our job is to figure out how to value maximize. And so I wouldn’t rule anything out in the future, but right now, we are working hard and Laura Lang, the new CEO and her team, is working hard to figure out how to meaningfully transition that business to be a multi platform branded environments business, where we’re going to have to continue to obviously make sure that the costs match up against the revenue trajectory as well.

We’ve got a lot of great things going on at Time Warner, and we’re really proud of and while we’re proud of the performance of our publishing unit, within the publishing industry, I think it’s fair to say that we’re disappointed with the secular dynamics in publishing right now.

Translation: We’re in the TV and movie business, and we happen to have a publishing company. We’ll say good things about our publishing company, but please notice that we’ve already sold off our cable pipe business and our Internet business. Meanwhile, we’re going to have to cut costs.

Last week, Time Inc. took care of the cost-cutting part. So today’s report, from Time Inc. publication Fortune, that Time Warner is talking to a “serious buyer” about offloading most of its Time Inc. titles, including People, shouldn’t be a huge surprise.

Since we’re all speculating about buyers, let me suggest that you certainly don’t have to be in the publishing business to be interested in buying most of Time Inc.

The magazine industry is in trouble, but the world’s biggest magazine publisher still makes a lot of money — $420 million in operating profit last year. Wouldn’t be shocked to see a financial buyer who thinks they can cut more costs and pocket a lot of the profit. [UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Meredith, the publisher that puts out titles like Better Homes and Gardens, is the mystery buyer. Still think that "non-strategics" will take a looksee.]

Time Inc. corporate parent, Time Warner, disclosed the number as part of its guidance for its 2013 financials.

Restructuring charges aren’t new for Time Inc., because the publisher has been downsizing itself for years. In 2012, the company racked up $27 million in restructuring charges, up from $18 million in 2011.

Time Inc.’s Q4 numbers help explain why CEO Laura Lang is cutting some 500 jobs: Revenue was down 7 percent, to $967 million, and ad revenue was down 4 percent. But the publisher is still the world’s biggest, and it still makes piles of money: Operating income was down 3 percent, to $200 million.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes may have more to say about the future of his publishing unit during his call later this am; I’ll listen in.

Happy Super Bowl weekend! In case you missed them and are bored waiting for the kickoff, here are the top 10 stories on AllThingsD from the week of 1/28:

1.) Twitter Hacked; 250,000 User Accounts Potentially Compromised

2.) BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

3.) HBO Go Is Coming to Apple TV. Why Isn’t Everything Coming to Apple TV?

4.) PSA: Unlocking Phones Without Carrier Permission Becomes Illegal on Saturday

5.) Time Inc. Braces for Layoffs This Week [Update: They happened -- here's the memo too]

6.) Twitter’s Vine App Doesn’t Have a Porn Problem. It Has a Porn Discovery Problem.

7.) iPhone Users Rack Up the Highest Carrier Bills

8.) Sales Talks Fell Through, So Ad Exchange AdBrite Shuts Down

9.) The Next Step for Computing: The Storage Fabric

10.) Apple Announces iPad Maxi

Here’s the memo from CEO Laura Lang:

Today we are beginning the painful process of reducing our global staff of 8,000 by approximately six percent. I first want to thank the people who will be leaving us for their years of hard work and dedication to the company. They are so much more than Time Inc. employees. They are good friends and trusted colleagues with whom we have worked closely. Losing them is going to be very difficult for everyone. They come from all areas of Time Inc. across our locations — both domestic and international. I am grateful for their service and I know you join me in wishing each of them all the best.

With the significant and ongoing changes in our industry, we must continue to transform our company into one that is leaner, more nimble and more innately multi-platform. To make this change, we need to operate as smartly and efficiently as possible to create room for critical investments and new initiatives. These reductions are part of this important transformation process.

I know the coming days and weeks will be hard and I want to thank you in advance for your patience as we work through this period.

Laura

If you’re one of the publisher’s 8,000 employees, the good news is that many people I’ve talked to seem to believe that an earlier report (which I’ve repeated) of up to 700 layoffs may be too high, and that the total may end up closer to 500. Then again, no one has offered a definitive headcount.

The other consensus opinion is that the cuts will affect just about every corner of the company, and most of its magazines (it publishes 21 in the U.S.).

But there are plenty of other Time Inc. employees who don’t work at a particular title, and centralized departments like research and HR will be affected, too.

Bottom line: The cuts will be big, and they’ll be the most significant move CEO Laura Lang has made in her first year on the job.

No comment from Time Inc. PR.

I don’t have more details about the coming cuts. But the Time Inc. employees I’ve spoken to seem to put great stock in Keith Kelly’s report from earlier this month, which predicted that up to 700 of the publisher’s 8,000 employees may go in this round.

If so, that will eclipse the company’s last big round of layoffs, in 2008, when former CEO Ann Moore cut about 600 jobs. Those layoffs, and subsequent cost-cuts, have allowed Time Inc. to stay profitable as the magazine industry contracts.

But the top line keeps dropping: In the third quarter of last year, Time Inc generated $840 million in revenue, down from $1.1 billion in 2008. Meanwhile, parent company Time Warner has continued to evolve into a cable TV conglomerate.

New CEO Laura Lang has been on the job for a year, and has pushed her company to look for new revenue streams, including digital deals; last year, she brokered an agreement to sell iPad subscriptions via Apple’s iTunes store.

No comment from Time Inc. or parent company Time Warner.

This feature appears to have popped up today, and there doesn’t seem to be any other details about the offer, like the number of days in advance that Newsstand buyers will get their iPad editions. I’ve asked Hearst for more information.

[UPDATE: A few more tidbits, via Hearst pr's Alexandra Carlin: She says the length of Newsstand buyers' headstart "varies", depending on publication, and that the offer applies to single copy sales as well as subs. As far as the deal's origins: "Apple suggested this initiative, and it’s a great offer they can provide to their newsstand users. We’re always working with our retail partners on unique ways to drive consumer sale and engagement."]

Right now, Hearst is the only publisher offering the option, for 22 of its titles. An Apple rep says it will be happy to let other publishers try the same thing.

This looks like the first time any publisher has tried an early digital “window” for their magazines, anywhere. Hollywood has recently warmed to the same idea when it comes to selling their movies online.

Bigger context for the tweak: Magazine publishers, who were once giddy about the prospects of selling their titles via the iPad, have sobered up.

The general consensus: Tablet editions are a nice revenue stream that in some cases brings publishers new readers, and in others helps them hang onto existing print subscribers, via online/offline bundles. But they’re not enough to save many publishers from the decline of their print businesses — a reality that Time Inc. staffers are bracing for as they get ready for long-reported and significant layoffs.

Earlier this month, Hearst Magazine boss David Carey told his employees that the company had reached 800,000 paid digital subscribers by the end of 2012. We’ll talk to him about where he goes next in a few weeks, at our D: Dive into Media conference. See you there …

That means Dow Jones’ business newspaper has joined thousands of other magazines and newspapers that market their stuff through Apple’s iTunes store — in exchange for giving Apple a cut of sales, and control over their relationship with their customers. (News Corp., which owns Dow Jones, also owns this Web site.)

The move is worth noting because up until now the Journal was one of the highest-profile print publishers that wasn’t selling app access via Apple. Earlier this year, Time Inc., which had been the most prominent holdout, also signed on.

The move means that Apple will retain 30 percent of all subscription revenue the Journal receives from “in-app” sales, and it will retain control of customer billing information like credit card numbers and billing addresses.

Like other publications, the Journal will be able to ask subscribers to submit their email addresses, a strategy that publishers say has been effective.

No comment from reps at Apple or Dow Jones. Sources noted that former Dow Jones president Todd Larsen, who left the company last summer, had opposed selling subscriptions via Newsstand.

The Journal will still be able to sell digital subscriptions, which include the use of its Apple apps, via its own Web site. It will retain all of the revenue and customer data for those sales.

The move also makes it much easier for Apple customers to become Wall Street Journal customers, since they can use their existing iTunes account to pay for the paper. And it makes it easier for them to read the paper, since Newsstand gives developers the ability to update their publications automatically via “background” downloads.

And you say you’d also like to read lots of articles from People.com on your iPhone, without going to People.com?

Voila! Meet People Magazine’s CelebWatch app, which will fit that very specific bill. And say goodbye to People’s old mobile apps, which got about 500,000 downloads over the last three years.*

Think of the new one as a very curated mashup of Twitter and People’s Web site, and you’ll get the basic idea.

This is the kind of app that will be very useful if you want to keep track of everything Rihanna says on Twitter, and everything People.com says about her (and other famous people).

But it won’t do you any good if you like to use Twitter for other stuff, like telling people what you had for breakfast, or tracking revolutions in Egypt, or anything else.

Even if you’re not a candidate for CelebWatch, the app is still worth noting for the strategy Time Inc. is using here: It’s selling access to the app  for $1 a month, or $10 for a year, and giving it away for free to People’s “all-access” subscribers, who are already getting print and digital bundles.

It’s the second part that’s more important. Time Inc. executives will be pleased if they see a few new dollars coming in from app sales. But what they really want to do is make their magazine subscriptions more valuable. Maybe throwing in something that costs other people a buck a month will help.

“We wanted to have a mobile pillar for the business we’ve already built out,” says Jennifer Ogden-Reese, who heads up consumer marketing for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment Group.

To spell that out: People, which has 2.4 million subscribers, is perhaps Time Inc.’s most important title. So if a modest app like this helps keep those numbers up, it’s going to gain a lot of stature.

*And if you’re an Android user, hang tight. People says your version is coming soonish.

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

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

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

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

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

Here goes:

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

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

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

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

Finally, Sellers gives her intro of Mayer.

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

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

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

Why not!

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

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

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

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

Therefore, its products need to be inspiring and delightful.

Daily delight! This is the buzzword.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Says Mayer: “Acute user need.”

I acutely need doughnuts. Does this count?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sellers asked about acquisitions.

Mayer: Mobilemobilemobile! (It worked before!)

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

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

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

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

No offense taken!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until then, Mayer’s mum. So to speak.

J2 runs a portfolio of cloud-based services generally aimed at consumers and small businesses, like eFax, Onebox and eVoice. The company says it acquired Ziff Davis, which runs Web publications like PCMag.com, ComputerShopper and Geek.com, so it can build on its “experience and significant interest in the digital media and online marketing space.”

Ziff Davis will add $60 million to J2’s 2013 revenue, the company said.

For Ziff Davis, the sale is the latest chapter in the publishing company’s complicated history. It started out as a publisher of hobbyist magazines, and became a technology powerhouse in the 1980s.

In 1994, owner Bill Ziff sold the bulk of his family’s company to Forstmann Little, and since then it has traded hands several times; in 2008, the company filed for Chapter 11, and started shutting down its print titles.

Great Hill, along with former Time Inc. digital group president Vivek Shah, bought the publisher in 2010.

Powers will run Parade Publications, the people behind the magazine many people still find in their Sunday newspapers. Parade is owned by Conde Nast parent company Advance Publications.

This is another one that falls in the “not a surprise” bucket, since Powers was brought in from Time Inc. by Mayer’s predecessor Ross Levinsohn, and most people in the company expect her to build her own team.

That said, Powers’s boss Michael Barrett is still on the job, for now.

PARADE NAMES YAHOO EXEC WAYNE POWERS PRESIDENT/GROUP PUBLISHER
New York, NY August 20, 2012 – Wayne Powers has been named President and Group Publisher at PARADE Publications, it was announced by CEO Jack Haire. Powers will oversee advertising sales and marketing efforts across PARADE’s properties and lead the company’s efforts to grow its print and digital offerings.
Powers will be moving from Yahoo, where he had been SVP of North American Sales since November 2010.
“We are thrilled that Wayne will be joining us,” said Haire. “He is a great leader and a proven innovator, with a tremendous background in print and digital advertising. Digital development will play a large role in the future of PARADE, and of the American newspaper business. With Wayne Powers on board, we are investing in that future. His leadership will be invaluable.“
PARADE is the most widely read magazine in America, and the company is poised for further digital expansion with PARADE Digital Partners, a growing network that includes over 580 newspaper websites. The partnership reaches over 50 million online users and provides valuable content and advertising to these local newspaper sites, the most trusted sources of news and information in their markets.
“The opportunities at PARADE are incredible,” said Powers. “The commitment to building this huge consumer brand across multiple platforms, while continuing to find more ways to build on our newspaper partnerships, is exciting.”
While at Yahoo, Powers oversaw Display and Search Sales, Marketing Solutions, and Training and Account Management for North America, and was responsible for guiding the company back to growth across their display and search businesses. Before joining Yahoo, Powers spent 12 years at the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, leaving as President of the Time Inc. Media Group. He began his career in the consumer packaged goods industry, where he held senior sales and trade marketing executive positions. He has a degree in marketing from Ohio State University.
PARADE Publications is a multi-brand media company that includes PARADE, which reaches 63 million readers each Sunday through over 640 of the nation’s finest newspapers. PARADE Digital is a unique content and advertising partnership combining the company’s digital assets with over 580 newspaper partner websites, reaching 53 million unique monthly visitors. Dash, the new food brand, was created in collaboration with Condé Nast properties Bon Appétit, epicurious.com and Gourmet. PARADE is a division of Advance Publications, Inc.

Reminder: Turner used to have a bunch of online sports inventory to sell to advertisers. But it recently had to give much of that to its corporate coworkers.

Last quarter, Turner handed back control of Golf.com and Sports Illustrated’s Web site to Time Inc., ending an unhappy arranged marriage between the two Time Warner units.

By my math, the divorce cost Turner about $40 million a year in ad revenue, a deficit it’s trying to fill with Bleacher Report.

Here’s where I’m getting the numbers: Last week, Time Warner CFO John Martin told investors that the addition of Golf.com and SI.com improved Time Inc.’s advertising revenue by 2 percent last quarter.

That is, without those sites, ad revenues would have slipped 9 percent, from $508 million to $462 million, instead of falling 7 percent, to $472 million. That’s a $10 million gap.

It’s possible that $10 million is a quarterly anomaly. But assuming it’s not, that implies a $40 million annual run rate for those two sites. Now look at the reported $30 million that Bleacher Report is supposed to make this year, and the deal lines up quite nicely.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for thoughts on what the transaction says about low-cost Web “content creation,” let me suggest Mathew Ingram’s take, over at GigaOM.

The best thing Jeff Bewkes and company could say about Time Inc. is that the rest of the publishing business is doing lousy, too. And that new boss Laura Lang is getting a plan together after six months on the job. Oh, and they said that the numbers won’t look as bad next quarter, because they’ll be going up against easier year-over-year comparisons.

Still, the “environment here remains challenging,” CFO John Martin deadpanned.

Here’s a slightly deeper dive: Subscription revenues were down 11 percent, and ad revenues were down 7 percent. The ad numbers would have been worse if Time hadn’t retaken control of SI.com and Golf.com from corporate cousin Turner during the quarter — Martin said if you took away the bump those properties provided, ads would have been down 9 percent.

Lang can seek solace in the fact that digital ads in general fared better than print, which means they were about flat instead of drooping.

And Bewkes held out the idea that Time Inc. will increasingly be a digital company instead of a print one. Which is the reason he brought on Lang, the former head of digital ad shop Digitas, in the first place.

“It’s way too reductive to conclude that ‘publishing’ has a constrained future,” he said, touting the company’s recent iPad subscription deal with Apple.

This is technically SayMedia’s first round, led by investors New Enterprise Associates, along with Shea Ventures and Correlation Ventures. But that’s not quite the full story, since SayMedia was formed two years ago when Sanchez’ VideoEgg ad network acquired blogging platform Six Apart; those two companies had raised a collective $79 million, and some of their previous investors have re-upped in this round.

The new venture is primarily an ad network which reps a collection of sites with a reach of 400 million users. But in the last year, Sanchez has been bolstering that network by building and buying his own properties — generally niche sites with devoted audiences.

Last year, for example, he bought tech site ReadWriteWeb, home site Remodelista, and Dogster, which is about … well, guess. Sanchez says SayMedia’s own sites now account for about 35 million eyeballs, and that the company should be profitable on sales of more than $100 million this year.

Next up: Buying more sites to bolster his collection of “owned and operated” properties, with guidance from new president Kim Kelleher, who the company brought over from Time Inc. last week.

So far, SayMedia has focused on style, living, food and tech sites, and Sanchez says he’ll be able to add a few more in that vein. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity in fashion and beauty,” he says. “And we’re considering other stuff.”

The logic for the deal is that Turner has a small presence in online sports — it manages sites like PGA.com and NBA.com, but doesn’t own them — and Bleacher Report’s nine-million-plus visitors will help fix that.

But it’s worth nothing that, up until this spring, Turner used to have a much bigger presence in online sports, via an arranged marriage that didn’t seem to make either participant very happy: For the last couple years, Turner managed Sports Illustrated’s Web site on behalf of Time Warner’s Time Inc.

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is famously uninterested in corporate synergy, so I’m not quite sure why he thought having the cable guys sell ads for the print guys would work. And from what I could tell, no one on either side liked the deal. The guys who made the content for the site thought the ad guys didn’t do a bang-up job, and vice versa.*

But that pairing ended in divorce this quarter, and Turner’s sports group has said it was going to create its own “branded digital destination.”

Perhaps they’ve decided that buying is easier than building. As it turns out, Bleacher Report’s traffic matches up almost precisely with SI.com’s, according to comScore. Convenient! (Click to enlarge.)

 
*This dynamic, we should note, also exists at nearly every commercial Web site, everywhere.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)