But if you’ve got an offer, you can go ahead and contact Allen & Company, the media banker hired by Associated Content late last year.

Associated Content looks and acts a lot like Demand Media, the Santa Monica-based “content mill” that’s drawn a lot of attention in the last year or so–though both companies bristle when you compare the two. It’s also thematically related to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s push to automate the production of content at that company.

That’s why Armstrong worked very hard to buy Associated Content last summer, as Silicon Alley Insider reported. I’m told a deal in the $90 million range was all but done, but ultimately nixed by Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, who wanted Armstrong to buy stuff on his own dime after AOL (AOL) spun out from the media giant.

AOL is free and clear now, but it doesn’t have a bankroll for big acquisitions. Earlier this year, the company spent $36.5 million on video platform StudioNow, but AOL execs have said they can’t and won’t spend any more than that on acquisitions for some time.

So if Associated Content, which is backed by Canaan Partners*, Softbank and Armstrong himself, wants an exit in the near term, it will have to look elsewhere.

Like where? Prior to bringing on Allen, the company flirted with Yahoo (YHOO), which has yet to do much M&A in the Carol Bartz era, but will one day. And sources says CEO Patrick Keane has even chatted to Demand Media, his company’s chief rival, about the possibility of a combination.

Another possible route: Conventional media outlets, some of which are already using the start-up to help fill their Web pages with cheap content.

Alternately, the company can stay solo and hope its story becomes more attractive as time goes on. People close to Associated Content say it’s on a $15 million run rate, up from $4 million earlier in the year. ComScore pegs the company’s audience at 10 million unique visitors (though as usual in these cases, the company says it has many more, and Quantcast puts the number at 20 million).

Associated Content declined to comment.

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Polaris as an investor in Associated Content.

In a TPS report filed today (TPS here referring to “tweets per second” and not “Test Program Set” from the movie “Office Space.” Ha ha, what a funny coincidence.) Kevin Weil of the Twitter analytics team points out that tweets grew 1,400 percent last year. He also notes that the 50-million-tweets-per-day figure does not include posts generated by accounts that have been identified as sources of spam.

Further evidence that the microblogging service has pushed through the growth ceiling it hit last fall. As I noted last week, the latest metrics from comScore (SCOR), show Twitter.com with 73.5 million unique visitors in January, up eight percent from the 65.2 million who visited in December 2009.

That’s the thesis behind Clicker, a would-be TV Guide for Web video, which has raised an $11 million B round led by JAFCO Ventures, with participation from earlier investors Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The funding follows an $8 million round announced last fall that was actually raised in 2008.

I assumed the money would be targeted to build up a sales and marketing team for the 32-person company, which launched in October but has no revenue to speak of. In fact, CEO Jim Lanzone says the money will go in the start-up’s bank account for now.

“We didn’t need the money yet,” he says. “But we had multiple firms interested, and we had the opportunity to pick the best one for us and get it done. It was kind of a no-brainer.”

Clicker is a clever Web video play because it takes advantage of Web video’s popularity without getting clobbered by the cost and copyright problems that have felled start-ups like Joost and Veoh.

Clicker doesn’t have to pay to produce or stream Web video because it doesn’t make or host its own clips, though it will run embedded clips from other services. And it doesn’t have copyright problems because it only indexes professionally produced stuff. (Here’s Katie Boehret’s review from last November.)

The service doesn’t have significant traffic yet–comScore (SCOR) reports 226,000 unique visitors in January, though Lanzone says his internal numbers show 750,000–but it is getting a warm reception from the traditional TV business, which likes the idea of central hub for “legitimate” content.

And the industry needs one if it’s going to get users to embrace its “TV Everywhere” strategy. Again, viewers shouldn’t care if they’re watching “The Pacific” on Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO Go or via Comcast’s (CMCSA) Fancast–they just want to find the show.

That’s an impressive spike and one that continues a three-month streak of gains that began last November after a worrisome period of stagnation between September and October (click on chart and table below to enlarge).

Hard to believe that comScore’s measurements for January 2009 showed Twitter.com with an estimated six million visitors. With 67.5 million more just a year later, the site’s annual growth rate is a jaw-dropping 1,107 percent.

[Image Credits: comScore, Scarletbits]

The deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter, involves a three-year traffic agreement under which Monster will become the provider of career and job content on the Yahoo (YHOO) homepage in the U.S. and Canada.

Obviously a smart move for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, who has been trying to narrow the company’s focus to its core portal business–most recently by selling email technology provider Zimbra to VMware (VMW).

Now, if only Bartz can unload Yahoo Games and Yahoo Shopping.

The release, below.

Monster to Acquire HotJobs Business and Enter into Multi-year Traffic Agreement with Yahoo!
NEW YORK & MAYNARD, Mass., Feb 03, 2010 —— Monster Worldwide, Inc. (MWW 16.42, +0.38, +2.37%) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Yahoo! HotJobs, a leading online recruitment website, from Yahoo! (YHOO 15.46, +0.29, +1.91%) for $225 million in cash. Monster and Yahoo! have also entered into a three year commercial traffic agreement, to take effect upon the closing of the acquisition, in which Monster will become Yahoo!‘s provider of career and job content on the Yahoo! homepage in the United States and Canada. The traffic agreement calls for performance based annual payments calculated by clicks and expressions of interest, subject to annual floors and ceilings. In addition, the traffic agreement provides Monster with an exclusive right for a period of time following the closing of the acquisition to negotiate similar traffic agreements with Yahoo! properties on a global basis, including countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, subject to certain limitations.

“HotJobs with its significant customer base plus the traffic agreement are an ideal complement to Monster’s innovative recruitment solutions and global reach,” said Sal Iannuzzi, chairman, chief executive officer and president of Monster Worldwide. “These agreements, combined with Monster’s career Communities and our recently introduced 6Sense(TM) semantic search technology, will bring substantial new benefits for employers seeking more qualified candidates and job seekers searching for more relevant opportunities across a wider range of industries—globally.”

“Bringing together Monster and HotJobs creates even greater access and opportunities for both recruiters and job seekers,” said Hilary Schneider, EVP, Yahoo! (NSDQ: YHOO). “The transaction with Monster enables us to continue to provide an important service to our users through the traffic agreement. Yahoo! remains focused on its core businesses and delivering exceptional experiences to users, partners and advertisers.”

Monster believes that the acquisition of HotJobs and the traffic agreement with Yahoo! will provide a number of benefits to jobseekers and employers, who today have more diverse competitive choices than ever before, and a value to all of its stakeholders, including its shareholders. These include:

Anticipated increase in job matches and search efficiencies–By bringing more diverse job and career opportunities, tools and resources together in one place, employers and job seekers will enjoy greater convenience and more precise search results and better matches with Monster’s patented 6Sense(TM) search technology and other innovative products.

Expected expansion of job seeker pool for employers–Monster will be able to offer its employers a significantly larger pool of candidates across diverse geographies and industries. Based on Media Metrix comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) reporting, last year HotJobs averaged 12.6 million unique visitors per month.

Expected expansion of the number of job postings across industries for job seekers–Through the combination of Monster and HotJobs job postings, job seekers will have access to more job opportunities in one place in those industries currently leading job creation, including healthcare, finance and insurance, retail, manufacturing, information and wholesale trade.

Broader reach anticipated for recruitment advertising through additional media alliances and reseller agreement–With the addition of HotJobs’s network of more than 600 daily and weekly newspapers, Monster’s alliances with local papers will grow to a total of approximately 1,000, giving Monster reach in all 50 states. The additional newspaper alliances, through their online and print classified ads, will further Monster’s current strategy of connecting job seekers with smaller, local businesses, particularly in healthcare, education, and skilled and hourly job categories.

Yahoo! will continue to manage its broader Newspaper Consortium (NPC) partnership, including providing both search and display advertising, content distribution, and its ad-serving platform, to newspapers in its NPC.

The transaction is subject to clearance under Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act and other customary closing conditions. The transaction is currently expected to close sometime during the third quarter of 2010, subject to regulatory review. Monster expects to realize operating synergies from the acquisition and currently anticipates the transaction will be breakeven on a pro forma full year earnings in 2010 and accretive thereafter, inclusive of the costs incurred under the traffic agreement.

Stone Key Partners LLC and Bank of America Merrill Lynch acted as financial advisors to Monster in connection with this transaction. Allen & Company LLC provided a fairness opinion to Monster’s Board.

The Web’s dominant traffic counter is in the midst of overhauling its traffic-counting system in response to years of complaints from publishers who insist that their traffic has been undercounted.

Turns out, the publishers were often right.

ComScore’s old data, for instance, say the Huffington Post attracted 9.95 million unique visitors in December. But its new numbers peg HuffPo’s December traffic at 20 million uniques.

The difference is that comScore’s (SCOR) old system tracked small panels of users and extrapolated their traffic patterns across the Web. But its new “hybrid” system uses panel data along with records generated by actual visits to the site, counted via tracking cookies. Publishers that cooperate with comScore (SCOR) agree to let the company “tag” every Web page on their sites.

“This is a much much better, much more methodologically rigorous way of doing this,” says Linda Abraham, comScore’s chief marketing officer.

ComScore has been rolling out the new system for months and says it can now use it to report on 25 percent of the 50 biggest sites on the Web. Another 50 percent of the top sites have agreed to work with the system, Abraham says.

ComScore lets publishers who are already clients participate in the program for free. But it will charge everyone else $10,000 a year, which the company says helps cover the cost of new servers and other equipment it needs to process the new deluge of data.

UPDATE: Some more detail on comScore’s fees, which generated a Web flare-up after this piece ran. Abraham notes that comScore’s set-up fee is $5,000, which she says covers implementation costs and gives publishers access to its data for six months; comScore charges publishers who want to keep receiving reports an additional $5,000 for each subsequent six-month period. However, Abraham notes, “If you choose not to purchase report access, you are free to do that, and we’ll continue to report you as hybrid, free of charge, as long as you continue to beacon correctly.” For more from Abraham, see her response to Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis’s criticism; here’s the company’s blog post on the subject.

The new system doesn’t necessarily generate a traffic boost. AOL’s (AOL) Living channel saw its numbers decline by two percent in the new system, for instance, and its radio site saw traffic drop by 20 percent. AOL’s overall traffic, though, is up nine percent by comScore’s count.

Hybrid measurement is particularly kind to small Web sites and those that generate a lot of traffic from users who visit while at work. Both categories have always been difficult for comScore to measure using panels.

TheStreet.com (TSCM), for instance, has watched its traffic shoot up 86 percent under the new system, to 3.3 million uniques. That’s still much less than the site itself reports–in its last quarterly filing, the financial network reported an audience of 8.1 million uniques.

The fact that comScore is tracking some Web sites using the new system and the rest of them with the old one will make things a bit sticky for some time. The company has stopped releasing its monthly Top 50 list until May, when it says it will have moved almost all participating sites into the hybrid system.

But some sites won’t end up working with comScore at all, which means that comScore will measure them with its old panel methodology. At some point, the company will be presenting apples-to-oranges numbers when it compares different sites.

Does any of this really matter? Yes and no.

Ad buyers do pay attention to comScore rankings when figuring out where to place their money, even as Web publishers have presented their own, higher numbers from their own server logs. For some sites, the new data will make their pitches more compelling.

On the other hand, this does nothing to solve the real problem facing most publishers: They can’t sell ads against all of their inventory, no matter who’s counting it. And a measurement system won’t ever be able to help with that one.

CBS (CBS) says it will stop doing business with the ad networks, which are ubiquitous on the Web, and will offer access to its audience of 60 million unique visitors solely via its own salesforce.

AdAge’s Michael Learmonth says CBS, bolstered by its 2008 purchase of CNET, is the biggest publisher on the Web to cut off the hundreds of networks that try to match publishers and ad buyers.

Sounds right to me. Because while lots of people like to complain about ad networks, almost everyone uses them.

Other big publishers that have cut off ad networks entirely include Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner Networks, the Gawker Media blog network and…not many others.

The ad network debate in a nutshell: Anti-ad network types argue that handing over inventory to the networks gives publishers a short-term boost because it allows them to sell ads they wouldn’t move on their own. But doing so trains buyers to avoid buying higher-priced inventory from the publishers themselves, which means that stuff gets harder to sell in the long run.

The counterargument: What are you people smoking? Ad buyers should be trying to reach their target audience at the lowest possible price. And trying to fight that impulse is like fighting gravity.

Still, there is a larger movement afoot to try to at least sell some inventory at higher prices, even if that means leaving dollars (or pennies) on the table.

That’s one of the cornerstones of Aol CEO Tim Armstrong’s strategy, and it’s what Yahoo (YHOO) is trying to do as it reshapes its Right Media platform. See also: Firms like 5to1, which say they can turn publishers’ low-rent “remnant” ads into more valuable stuff.

The countermovement, though, is at least as strong, as ad buyers and brokers use technology to move more and more inventory at ever-more “efficient”–i.e., cheap–prices. See: Google’s (GOOG) relaunched DoubleClick exchange and the one that Microsoft (MSFT) intends to roll out next month.

Spanfeller’s departure comes amid a flurry of bad news for finance publications. In April, Condé Nast pulled the plug on Portfolio, its business magazine and Web site, after a very expensive two-year run. Earlier this week, publisher McGraw-Hill (MHP) announced that it was shopping BusinessWeek, and observers are floating the notion that the company may end up giving the magazine away to anyone who wants to take on its annual losses.

Time Warner’s (TWX) Fortune magazine has also been battered by the recession, which has been particularly hard on the finance, auto and luxury-good companies that business publications have traditionally relied upon. And Forbes itself has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since last fall.

In a memo to the company’s employees, Forbes CEO Steve Forbes praised Spanfeller for building out the company’s Web property, which says it receives 18 million unique visitors a month.In the aftermath of the dot.com crash, Spanfeller helped turn Forbes.com, which the family-owned company was close to shutting down, into a powerhouse.

But Forbes’s plan to take the Web property public earlier in the decade never panned out. And once Forbes sold a 40 percent stake to private equity investors Elevation Partners three years ago, plenty of Forbes employees, including me, had speculated that Spanfeller would look for a job that promised a big payout. That said, it wasn’t that long ago that Spanfeller was the victor in a power struggle with Jim Berrien, the former publisher of the Forbes print edition.

The news was first reported by AOL’s Daily Finance. Here’s the company memo from CEO Steve Forbes:

To: All Hands

From Steve Forbes

July 16, 2009

Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com has decided to step down from leading our website after nine years. In the entrepreneurial spirit that Forbes has always championed, Jim will be setting up his own media management company.

Describing his future plans Jim said, “The world of media has changed rapidly in the past 10 years and the velocity of the change promises only to increase going forward. I’ve had a great run at Forbes and have been deeply involved in the breakthroughs and transformations between traditional and digital media.  Now I see a huge opportunity to have my own media management business that will help other traditional media companies make the most of their enormous prospects in digital venues, taking all I have learned here in the past decade and applying on a wider horizon. Forbes.com has truly been a truly wonderful ride and I am deeply in debt to the Forbes family for letting me be a part of it.”

Jim has done a monumental job of bringing Forbes.com to the lead position in business websites, and secured Forbes.com as the must visit site for not only global business leaders but also anyone interested in the finest business reporting and analysis available. At present Forbes.com has 18 million unique visitors a month.

Along the way, Jim has overseen the development and growth of Forbes Digital, which includes Forbes.com, ForbesTraveler.com, Investopedia.com, RealClearPolitics.com, RealClearMarkets.com, Real Clear Sports, and Forbes Business and Finance Blog Network, which together reach 40 million unique visitors a month.

This immense growth on the digital side of the business was spearheaded, pursed, and led by Jim with enormous success. The digital world is still uncharted with few rules, and Jim’s intellect, creativity, and business acumen helped bring us our number one position. For this the Forbes family is very grateful and we wish him all the success in his future plans.

Since Elevation Partners partnered with Forbes three years ago, Jim has worked very closely with them on the growth and development and vision for Forbes.com.  Commenting on Jim’s departure, Roger McNamee of Elevation said, “Jim did a fantastic job leading Forbes.com. In an era when competitors feared it, Jim embraced and evangelized the internet, with huge benefits to Forbes and its audiences. We are grateful for his contributions over the past nine years.”

Jim will be staying through a transition period at least through Labor Day. Please join me and my brothers in wishing Jim all the best in the future, which he deserves.

In BoomTown’s bold quest to annoyingly stick a Flip digital video camera in the face of every Yahoo senior exec, this week I worked the last nerve of its CTO and EVP of Products, Aristotle “Ari” Balogh.

Actually, the 45-year-old Balogh is a very calm and pleasant man, especially considering the huge responsibility that has been foisted on him by CEO Carol Bartz to rejigger how Yahoo (YHOO) makes its products and services and deploy its technology in a more efficient, centralized and most of all, innovative manner.

It is actually a process that was started under the previous leadership, especially President Sue Decker.

But now, after a number of reorgs, a wide swath of Yahoo is under Balogh’s purview–from search to open initiatives to product development to trying to fix Yahoo’s big problem of never quite getting its innovations out the door.

To explain all this, Balogh sat down with me twice–he is clearly a glutton for punishment–to talk about where Yahoo stood as it sought to dig itself out of its long slump and reemerge as the potent Internet force it once was.

While he successfully avoided the questions about Yahoo’s talks to do a search and advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), he did talk about his view of its new Bing search service (well done, but can it scale?–which is an engineer’s favorite schoolyard taunt).

He also addressed the bigger question of how Yahoo can stay relevant in the fast-changing Web 2.0 world.

To Balogh, copying trendsetters like Facebook is not the answer. For example, he noted that Yahoo is more a place where consumers do “one-way” follows of things important in their lives rather than wanting another social-network service (which Yahoo has tried and failed at, actually).

“We’re not going to be another social network,” said Balogh flatly, agreeing that that boat has already long sailed without Yahoo on it with a significant product–Yahoo famously failed to buy Facebook, well before Balogh arrived in early 2008 from VeriSign (VRSN). “But we can be a place where people make and manage the important connections they have.”

How this will all play out is one of the most interesting questions in Silicon Valley because–even after all the turmoil–Yahoo remains one of the largest sites on the Web.

About 500 million monthly unique visitors enter its homepage and course through its vast site constantly, from its search pages to its massive email and instant-messaging services and its popular suite of content sites.

No one says Yahoo is not big–what everyone says is that it has missed many major and critical Internet trends as it has become mired in a management morass and external battles.

Now, with new leadership in place, observers are waiting to see what’s next.

In this regard, it is important what Balogh thinks since he is perhaps Yahoo’s only person who even closely resembles a Web product visionary now that former CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang has stepped aside and Bartz has taken up command.

While he typically shies away from the spotlight, he is not bashful about talking about Yahoo’s infamous lugubrious development process.

“We have pockets of great technology that we have to really put back together into a coherent infrastructure,” said Balogh. “We have to get the basics right and focus on those core daily experiences that make Yahoo extraordinary.”

That is easier said than done, especially when changes impact so many consumers and, of course, the bottom line. Choosing what key trends to attack is harder for a large public company like Yahoo, which has a lot to protect in its current businesses.

“There will always be a battle between new ideas and monetization,” said Balogh. “The question is how much do you push that line back and forth?”

That fine line will surely be tested with the rollout of its new homepage in the fall, a long project that has been codenamed “Metro.”

“It is not a radical departure, but we have given users more power to do what they want and also serve as the best of Web versus that is already inside of Yahoo,” said Balogh of the new homepage. “With technology, it is always a push-pull.”

Here’s my video interview with him, talking about all this and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090702/yahoo-product-head-and-cto-ari-balogh-speaks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090701/an-hour-and-14-minutes-on-applecom-wow-try-spending-that-on-dell%e2%80%99s-web-site-without-falling-asleep/ http://allthingsd.com/20090701/an-hour-and-14-minutes-on-applecom-wow-try-spending-that-on-dell%e2%80%99s-web-site-without-falling-asleep/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:20:48 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=20541 Here’s an interesting metric: Apple’s Web site last month drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. The number of Apple (AAPL) visitors was more than double that of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which drew 21.9 million people, and triple Dell’s (DELL), which drew 16.8 million. May visitors to Apple’s Web site spent an average of an hour and 14 minutes on it.

Not much of a surprise here, I suppose, given the level of anticipation that typically accompanies the release of a new iPhone. Nielsen says “anticipatory buzz” for the iPhone 3GS was near-deafening. “The new iPhone 3G S sent blog mentions up 1,226 percent week-over-week on June 8, the day of the announcement. After the initial announcement, buzz dipped but again picked up after the phone became available to consumers on June 19, with blog mentions more than doubling compared to the week prior.” The chart, below (click to enlarge):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090701/an-hour-and-14-minutes-on-applecom-wow-try-spending-that-on-dell%e2%80%99s-web-site-without-falling-asleep/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090626/old-michael-jackson-story-traffic-snarls-the-web-new-michael-jackson-story-look-at-our-traffic/ http://allthingsd.com/20090626/old-michael-jackson-story-traffic-snarls-the-web-new-michael-jackson-story-look-at-our-traffic/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:30:59 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8687 Remember all those stories about Web sites buckling under the weight of all that Michael Jackson traffic? Here’s the flip side, now being promoted by those same Web sites: Look at all of our Michael Jackson traffic!

I’ve seen stories touting big traffic spikes at Time Warner’s (TWX) TMZ, which broke the story; Wikipedia, which apparently was flooded with Wikipedians squabbling over the details of Jackson’s demise; and Gawker, which lives for this sort of thing. At some point, the man-bites-dog story will be a site that doesn’t report a huge spike in Jackson traffic.

In any case, here’s the latest one I’ve seen: Yahoo (YHOO) boasting that Jackson’s demise has been its good fortune. Here are the data, per Yahoo PR:

Yahoo! News:
· Yahoo! News set a record in unique visitors with 16.4 million UV’s in a day. Our previous record was on election day when we had 15.1 million visitors.
· Yahoo! News had 4 million visitors come to the site between 3-4 pm, setting an hourly record.
· Yahoo! News recorded 175 million page views yesterday, our 4th highest day after the Inauguration and Hurricane Ike.

Front Page:
· On our front page, the story “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the highest clicking story in our history. It generated a whopping 800,000 clicks within 10 minutes and news of his death saw 560,000 clicks in 10 minutes. Also, the news area on our front page experienced five times the amount of traffic it normally receives.

Yahoo! Music
· Yahoo! Music’s blog post on Michael Jackson has generated 21K comments in under a day.

UPDATE: Here’s some boasting from CBS’s (CBS) Web group. Happy to keep adding to this if anyone else wants to do a little chest-beating.

· Since the news broke, Last.fm saw a huge surge in users streaming music tracks by Jackson. On average, users were streaming 43,000 Jackson tracks per hour. The Michael Jackson artist page has received heavy traffic with more than 30 page impressions per second as fans log on to pay their respects to the pop icon. The traffic for the artist page continues to increase, and the site continues to see more than 45 times the normal traffic.

· TheInsider.com reported record traffic for June 25, with an increase that was close to double compared to the previous week. Prior to yesterday, the record for high traffic was held on May 5 when the site shared revealing photos of former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

· Within 12 hours of the announcement, CBS.com saw 100% aggregate growth over the same day last year as fans turn to CBS.com for breaking news about the tragedy, as well as to link to CBSNews.com and THE EARLY SHOW for their streaming coverage.

· CBSNews.com traffic tripled during the hour in which Jackson’s death was officially announced (3 p.m. PACIFIC/6 p.m. EASTERN) on June 25 as people turned to the site to learn more about the circumstances involving his death.

And yes, this is the third Michael Jackson post I’ve written today. Which gives me an opportunity to embed a third Michael Jackson video. This one is the intro to the “Jackson 5ive” animated series from the 1970s, procured by our eagle-eyed Beth Callaghan. Enjoy.

[Image credit: Library of Congress]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090626/old-michael-jackson-story-traffic-snarls-the-web-new-michael-jackson-story-look-at-our-traffic/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090522/college-humor-dudes-newest-product-an-amazoncom-prank/ http://allthingsd.com/20090522/college-humor-dudes-newest-product-an-amazoncom-prank/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 14:27:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7637 The smarter-than-they-look guys at CollegeHumor.com attract some seven million unique visitors a month, are making smart strides in Web video and have their own show on MTV. And when they’re not doing that, they monkey with Amazon.

That’s why this fine Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, available for as little as $9.78, became one of the online retailer’s most popular items in the last week. Prompted by a link at the IAC (IACI)-owned site, CollegeHumor readers bought up scads of the shirts, and filled Amazon (AMZN) with glowing reviews like these:

Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather…

This is the only t-shirt Chuck Norris wears. Wolves howl at the moon, and the moon howls at Chuck…

…So I’m looking for threads that say, “Hey baby…I’m real boss!” when I stumble upon this epic creation. The wolves spoke to me in a language all their own; it was like German, Mongol, and Bitchin all mixed together. I mean, one wolf howlin at the moon is major…but three???

Why bother? If you have to ask, you’re probably never going to get the joke. More info via the Washington Post, including the most pertinent detail: As clever as the CollegeHumor dudes are, they neglected to actually figure out how to profit from the stunt themselves.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090522/college-humor-dudes-newest-product-an-amazoncom-prank/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090518/hearst-zombie-seattle-paper-doing-better-than-the-original/ http://allthingsd.com/20090518/hearst-zombie-seattle-paper-doing-better-than-the-original/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 18:29:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7475 I’m still on record predicting the demise of seattlepi.com–the online-only zombie version of the erstwhile Seattle Post-Intelligencer. My gut is that even though the Hearst-owned site has an edit staff 80 percent smaller than its predecessor paper, it still won’t be able to generate enough traffic and advertising to cover its costs.

But while Hearst isn’t ready to declare victory, it does say that the first two months of seattlepi.com’s life have been “encouraging.” Via a press release, Hearst offers up a bevy of traffic stats that show the site has grown even as its staff has shrunk. Hearst doesn’t offer up any info about revenue, but does say that its “sales and marketing team is highly energized.”

I sincerely hope so, and I sincerely hope it works. I still don’t get the math: Hearst says seattlepi.com is attracting 4.3 million monthly unique visitors. Chris Batty, who runs sales for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire, figures that traffic could support a staff of perhaps a dozen editorial workers at one of his sites–not the 20 or so that Hearst has working in editorial.

And bear in mind that Gawker’s titles have a national focus, not a regional one, which makes it much easier to sell than Seattlepi.com.  There may be a thriving business for regional/local online ads one day, and we’ve been hearing about the potential for many years. But it’s not there yet, and it’s not close.

Still, better to have Hearst says it’s encouraged than to have Hearst pull the plug after a few days.

Two months after becoming the nation’s largest newspaper to move to an all-digital news model, seattlepi.com’s year over year numbers show that it has more users this April than last April, when the Post Intelligencer was still publishing with an 80% larger staff, an amazing feat for an online venture with a newsroom of 20.

In April, its first full month of operation, seattlepi.com had 4.3 million unique visitors, up 1.6% from 4.2 million in April 2008 (source: Omniture). Total page views for the month were 37.3 million.

During the last week of April, the site broke its one-day unique user record since going online-only. There were 324,000 unique visitors on April 30—the 4th highest day in terms of unique visitors in 2009—breaking previous records set since going online only on April 29 (290,000) and April 27 (283,000). Total page views for those days were 1.5 million, 1.4 million and 1.5 million, respectively.

Two months into our online-only experiment, we are encouraged by this growth in visitors and expect our numbers to improve as we continue to establish new partnerships.

We get a lot of feedback from readers cheering us on and thanking us for continuing to bring them the local news and information they want and need. It’s great to see that not only have we not lost readers, we’ve actually gained new ones.

A new team of more than a dozen sales and marketing representatives and managers has been tasked with building advertising and marketing partnerships and creating a unique Seattle digital advertising agency.

Our sales and marketing team is highly energized to be working with such a vital and dynamic product. We will leverage existing partnerships with Yahoo!, Kaango, Metrix4Media, and others to create what is essentially a local digital advertising agency offering unique opportunities for business in the Seattle area and across the country. Advertisers and other partners understand that seattlepi.com is in an unrivaled, popular destination for news and information, offering tremendous value for exposing their products, services and brands to a large and very desirable audience.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090518/hearst-zombie-seattle-paper-doing-better-than-the-original/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090312/aol-gets-a-new-ceo-google-sales-boss-tim-armstrong/ http://allthingsd.com/20090312/aol-gets-a-new-ceo-google-sales-boss-tim-armstrong/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:40:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5183

Everyone who wondered why Randy Falco and Ron Grant were still running AOL gets an answer: Time Warner (TWX) was lining up their replacement.

Google (GOOG) sales chief Tim Armstrong becomes chairman and CEO of the troubled Web property, effective immediately.

The move is getting immediate cheers from current and former AOL employees I’ve talked to. The snap consensus is that anyone would have been better than Falco, a longtime NBC executive, and Grant, who was Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’s chief lieutenant before being elevated to his role as President and COO of AOL.

But they’re particularly happy to see a sales guy running the organization: AOL once had a much admired sales operation. But in recent years, the group has been roiled, as a series of sales chiefs came and went. (From Kara Swisher, here are more details on the shakeup, and an interview with Armstrong. And here’s some early betting on Armstrong’s replacement at Google — former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt has a lot of fans).

The current AOL sales chief, former Yahoo (YHOO) sales boss Greg Coleman, was installed just last month. He’s been deep into a reorg of his own.

It was desperately needed after AOL’s miserable performance in 2008, which concluded with a quarter that saw ad revenue drop 18 percent. But those plans may be up in the air now.

In any case, here is the full press release from Time Warner about the firing of Falco and Grant, after the jump:

NEW YORK, March 12, 2009–Tim Armstrong, Google Senior Vice President, has been named Chairman and CEO of AOL, LLC, Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes announced today. Current AOL Chairman and CEO Randy Falco and President and COO Ron Grant plan to leave the company after a transition period.

In making the announcement Mr. Bewkes said: “Tim is the right executive to move AOL into the next phase of its evolution. At Google, Armstrong helped build one of the most successful media teams in the history of the Internet–helping to make Google the most popular online search advertising platform in the world for direct and brand marketers. He’s an advertising pioneer with a stellar reputation and proven track record. We are privileged to have him preside over AOL as its audience and programming businesses continue to grow and its advertising platform expands globally. He’ll also be helpful in helping Time Warner determine the optimal structure for AOL.”

Tim Armstrong said: “I’m very excited about the opportunities presented in leading AOL. AOL has a wide-ranging set of assets and audience. The company is well positioned to enhance those assets into a larger share of the Internet audience and advertiser communities. AOL and Google have been partners for years and I look forward to collaborating with Jeff Bewkes and his team as we explore the right structure and future for AOL.”

Mr. Bewkes added: “Randy led AOL in its transition from a subscription business to an audience business. Under Randy and Ron, AOL’s programming sites exhibited year-over-year growth in unique visitors for 23 consecutive months with many of its sites now in the top five of their categories. They also assembled Platform-A, the number one display ad network in the U.S. with a reach of more than 90%. They also aggressively cut costs as they restructured the Audience business portion of the company into three distinct operating units: People Networks, MediaGlow, and Platform-A. As Randy and Ron move on, they leave AOL with our gratitude and appreciation for remaking the company and bringing it to a new and promising level.”

Tim Armstrong was a member of Google’s Operating Committee and served as the president of the Americas Operations. Under the Americas Operations, Armstrong’s team managed publishers and advertisers’ relationships and platforms with some of the world’s most widely recognized media and agency brands.  Armstrong started at Google in the year 2000 and opened the first office outside of the Mountain View, CA headquarters.

Mr. Armstrong joined Google from Snowball.com, where he was vice president of sales and strategic partnerships. Prior to his role at Snowball.com, he served as director of integrated sales & marketing at Starwave’s and Disney’s ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures, working across the companies’ Internet, TV, radio, and print properties. He started his career by co-founding and running a newspaper based in Boston, MA, before joining IDG to launch their first consumer Internet magazine, I-Way.

Mr. Armstrong sits on the boards of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Advertising Council, and the Advertising Research Foundation, and is a trustee at Connecticut College and Lawrence Academy. He is a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s MediaNYC 2020 committee.  He is a graduate of Connecticut College, with a double major in economics and sociology.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090312/aol-gets-a-new-ceo-google-sales-boss-tim-armstrong/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090204/myspace-boots-pervs/ http://allthingsd.com/20090204/myspace-boots-pervs/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:27:54 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=12538

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090204/myspace-boots-pervs/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081212/sarah-palin-please-come-back-hulu-traffic-drops-in-november/ http://allthingsd.com/20081212/sarah-palin-please-come-back-hulu-traffic-drops-in-november/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:43:40 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2050 File under “interesting, but understandable”: After a flurry of election-related interest in October, traffic to red-hot Hulu fell off in November. Blame Sarah Palin–or the lack of her.

ComScore says that traffic to the joint venture between News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox and GE’s (GE) NBC fell 10.8 percent from October to November, dropping from 5.3 million unique visitors to 4.8 million. (Hulu’s PR team notes that ComScore’s separate “VideoMetrix” panel assigned a much bigger audience to the site last month: 24 million uniques. They haven’t put out November numbers yet but I’ll update when I get them).

ComScore (SCOR) says U.S. traffic at Google’s (GOOG) YouTube also dropped that month, but by a much smaller margin–0.006 percent. And since YouTube is a global property, those numbers are less telling. Hulu, meanwhile, is a U.S.-only site (much to the dismay of blog commenters).

Apologies for not figuring out how to show you this data in graph form–I’ll figure it out eventually. For now, click to enlarge.

This makes plenty of sense: Hulu was one of two places were you could (legally) see the “Saturday Night Live” Sarah Palin clips, which were huge sensations. The other one, NBC.com, dropped a whopping 50 percent–from 14.1 million to 7.2 million, comScore says.

And all sorts of Web sites that enjoyed a bump during the run-up to the election have tailed off a bit since then. ComScore says the Huffington Post, for instance, is down 20 percent– from five million uniques to four million. Presumably Oak Investment Partners was aware of that before it sank $25 million into the site last month.

Meanwhile, Hulu still shows impressive growth. If I could have figured out how to create a graph, you’d see that Hulu has still had a huge run-up since March, when it left beta.

Speaking of beta, video site/blog punching bag Joost has logged its first full month of traffic since its Web video player became open to the public. ComScore pegs traffic at 1.1 million uniques; the company says that its data, which include global traffic, show 2.1 million.

Those aren’t huge numbers–I can think of several text-only blogs, which cost a lot less to build and operate than Joost’s site, that garner more eyeballs than that–but they’re not terrible either. Still, Joost has a lot of ground to catch up if it wants to give Hulu a run for its money.

Last but not least! Here’s an excellent clip from the smart folks at the Onion. It’s a month old, but news to me. Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081212/sarah-palin-please-come-back-hulu-traffic-drops-in-november/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081211/who-said-web-20-was-rip-microblog-tumblr-raises-45-million-expectations/ http://allthingsd.com/20081211/who-said-web-20-was-rip-microblog-tumblr-raises-45-million-expectations/#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:00:52 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1979 Tumblr is exactly the kind of start-up that’s supposed to be gasping for air in today’s dismal economy: A trendy but niche Web service with a prominent founder and exactly zero revenue.

Instead, the New York-based company has just raised a $4.5 million Series B round that its CEO, 22-year-old David Karp, says will fund it for two and a half years. Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, which led the company’s first $750,000 round a year ago, also led this financing. My educated guess is that its investors now value Tumblr at around $15 million.

Tumblr is a “microblog” platform that is supposed to let its users quickly create nice-looking posts with a minimum of effort; it sits somewhere between Twitter and full-fledged blogs like Blogger and TypePad. It is popular with a relatively small but prolific user base: Its 500,000 users have created pages that draw 15 million unique visitors and 61 million page views a month, Karp says.

Money? Nope. Tumblr is free–and has no ads cluttering up its hipster vibe.

Way back in 2007, those kinds of numbers would have been catnip for the likes of Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO). Now, though, even deep-pocketed buyers aren’t racing to snap up revenue-free start-ups. But Karp says raising money from his previous investors was easy: “These guys came to us with a deal that made us incredibly comfortable.”

Karp says he’s going to start generating money in early 2009. Not by selling ads on his members pages–Karp thinks the site will eventually incorporate ads in some way, but not yet–but by selling users “premium” services, most of which he’s not ready to describe. He does promise they will be “really sexy.”

More practically, Karp points out that other Web services, like the WordPress blogging platform and Yahoo’s Flickr photo service, have been able to upsell many of their users with goodies like extra storage. He figures many of his users will pay up, too.

The new money means he’ll have time to prove his thesis. Karp has just doubled his staff–which means there are now all of six people on payroll. One of them, hired in September, is John Maloney, Karp’s former boss at Urban Baby, where he started his Web career. Maloney is now in charge of business operations.

The money also means there are heightened expectations. Karp has done much more than people twice his age (and has the press clips to prove it). But the newest funding round means his investors think the company will be worth as much as $50 million by the time he sells it or raises more cash. In order to prove them right, he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.

[Image Credit: David's Log]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081211/who-said-web-20-was-rip-microblog-tumblr-raises-45-million-expectations/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081201/just-another-cyber-monday/ http://allthingsd.com/20081201/just-another-cyber-monday/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2008 19:01:08 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8918

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081201/just-another-cyber-monday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081106/the-im-a-pc-variations/ http://allthingsd.com/20081106/the-im-a-pc-variations/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:00:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8003

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081106/the-im-a-pc-variations/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081106/the-im-a-pc-variations-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20081106/the-im-a-pc-variations-2/#comments Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:00:10 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=8003

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081106/the-im-a-pc-variations-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080321/arianna-bests-drudge/ http://allthingsd.com/20080321/arianna-bests-drudge/#comments Fri, 21 Mar 2008 08:24:45 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080321/arianna-bests-drudge/ Could it be a digital indicator that the Blue states are taking back ground from the Red ones–at least in cyberspace?

In February, for the first time ever, Arianna Huffington’s liberal political mega-blog and news site, the Huffington Post, has apparently surpassed the longtime mighty blog leader, Matt Drudge of the conservative/populist-leaning Drudge Report, according to recent traffic data reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online. (Both are pictured here.)

According to data from Nielsen Online, for example, the Huffington Post’s traffic–as measured by monthly unique visitors in the U.S., at home and work–has more than tripled since February of 2007, when it had about 1.1 million unique visitors; by February of 2008, unique visitors had risen to 3.7 million.

In that same month, the Drudge Report had 3.4 million (it had 2.75 million in February of 2007).

Data from comScore is different, as measurement data often is, but shows the same trend (see chart below). The Huffington Post jumped from 457,000 unique visitors in the U.S. at all locations, but had risen to 2.3 million in February of 2008.

For Drudge, comScore reported that it had 1.2 million unique visitors in February of 2007 and 1.6 million in February of 2008.

Of course, internal logs at both sites are likely to show much higher numbers than either comScore or Nielsen Online, by a factor of even four or five times.

Sources at the Huffington Post, for example, said that logs show 12 million uniques for the last month, which they attribute to the addition of new vertical sites within the main site, as well as an increased interest in political news and analysis.

In comparison, Drudge’s site notes it had 21.8 million visits in the past 24 hours. But the site does not define this figure, and it is not and cannot be compared to unique visitors.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with our traffic growth and look forward to continuing to build out our brand,” wrote Arianna Huffington in an email, asking about the traffic spike on her site.

(BoomTown sent an email to the Drudge Report’s contact email on its site late last night, asking for a comment about the data, and will post a reply if I receive one.)

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