With Facebook’s Beacon ad targeting debacle a distant memory for most, Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tried a soft sell on publishers and marketers at Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference.
The social net is bent on growth—it just reached 400 million users—and Kendall’s message is that small local advertisers should follow suit. Local marketers, who generally strive for a more personal relationship to their customers, should feel an obvious affinity for Facebook. The social net’s message is that it sees advertisers and users fairly equally: they’re all part of the same ecosystem. Plus, there’s the way Facebook features like status updates and fan pages blend concepts of personal and professional marketing messages. “From the beginning, we weren’t going to do an ad product in the traditional interruptive way,” Kendall said. “We were going to make them in the same way we’ve used other features. We can create ads that are indistinguishable from content.”
Taking the podium during day two of Borrell Associates’ Local Online Advertising Conference, McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt described his mixed feelings of ease and discomfort standing there. On one hand, he was happy to be wearing jeans instead of the suit he usually wears for appearances before Wall St. bankers and analysts. The discomfort was due to the fact that he was a newspaperman speaking at an internet conference. He regained his contentment by channeling Darwin as he discussed the position of heading a newspaper in the digital age. “We don’t need to be the strongest to survive, we just need to be able to adapt, and that’s something we’ve proven we can do,” he said. During the course of 45-minutes, he also discussed his comfort with the ad-supported model for McClatchy, as opposed to the industry’s current interest in paywalls.
MySpace has begun rolling out 30-second audio ads, as the News Corp (NYSE: NWS). site continues its shift from a general social network to an entertainment showcase. The ads are being powered by CBS-backed TargetSpot. A rep for TargetSpot told paidContent that MySpace Music will place the audio ads alongside display ads. Specifically, the spots will be placed within MySpace’s catalogue of audio tracks. Eventually, TargetSpot hopes to attach ad support to the site’s e-commerce offerings, personal music players and user and artist playlists. But a rep said they aren’t there yet. TargetSpot promises that the ads won’t be too intrusive. The trade-off for MySpace Music listeners is that after the first listen, they will be able to listen to at least another 100 streams without hearing another commercial.
In case you didn’t get it the first few times, yes, IAC (NSDQ: IACI) Chairman and CEO Barry Diller still believes the search market will consolidate—and no, he isn’t trying to make it happen. He told analysts on the Q4 IAC earnings call: “I don’t know what form that consolidation will take but right now (but) Ask’s not for sale. We’re not selling it in any process and I expect that will continue.”
Diller did note that the changing competitive dynamics in the search business (ie Microsoft’s big push with Bing—which continues to drive up its market share) should help Ask once its search-advertising deal with Google (NSDQ: GOOG) expires in two-and-a-half years. “We’re in a better position now competitively than when we made the Google deal in that there is definitely another player that is certainly wanting to compete in as serious a way as you can and is putting large sums behind it,” he said.
Penton, the trade publisher, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The pre-packaged reorg, agreed by its lenders, will help it erase debt by $270 million. In addition, some existing shareholders will make a “significant new investment” in the company, which will provide additional working capital to fund operations and improve Penton’s overall liquidity. The agreement also provides for an extension of the maturity on the company’s senior secured credit facility through 2014. The company expects that it will finalize the capital restructuring and emerge from Ch 11 within 30 to 45 days.
Penton, based in NYC, is owned by PE firms MidOcean Partners and U.S. Equity Partners II, an investment fund sponsored by Wasserstein & Co. Penton said no change in ownership will happen as a result of this reorg, and there will be no disruption of its print, digital and event properties. Release after the jump. More details on the Ch 11 here.
Morningstar has done an unusual and small acquisition: it has bought financial blog Footnoted.org, for an undisclosed sum. The site, founded in 2003 by financial journalist Michelle Leder, pours over SEC filings and digs out various inside stories about companies. Besides the blog, it also has a premium service FootnotedPro which provides a deeper service for a fee.
Leder will continue to run Footnoted, and Morningstar will make some content from the site available on Morningstar.com, the company’s investment website. Also, the site will move from footnoted.org to footnoted.com. Additionally, Morningstar will also offer Footnoted Pro to its individual investor, advisor, and institutional clients. More details in release.
The deal is likely less cash and more based on future performance, as Leder hints in her own blog post about the deal:
Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. couldn’t have made it more clear - the music industry wants to ween itself off its Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) dependency, and it will get do just that when iTunes comes under massive competition pressure from new unlimited and mobile services…
“Digital growth has slowed following iTunes’ introduction of a variable pricing model in April 2009,” he told analysts on WMG’s Q1 earnings call. “It couldn’t have come at a worse time,” Bronfman said. “(It was) agreed in summer of 2008 before the financial crisis even hit - Apple went through that price increase in April, but in the face of the worse recession since the Depression.”
IAC (NSDQ: IACI) bit an accounting bullet in Q4, taking a $991 million impairment charge for its search & media business—including Ask and excluding Citysearch. Without that after-tax charge and an unrelated write down for $12.2 million, IAC would have turned in earnings per share of $.20, an 88 percent drop from the same quarter last year but still beating estimates.(Q408 net last year was affected by a one-time pre-tax gain.) With those, IAC lost just over $1 billion, or $7.94 per share. Not to worry, it still has that $1.7 billion of cash waiting for just the right occasion.
Those are the eye-popping numbers—and we’ll have more about the reasons when Chairman and CEO Barry Diller meets with analysts later this morning. But that’s not the whole story for Q4. Revenue was up five percent to $367 million, while operating income before amortization rose 47 percent to $41.4 million on cost savings for the sales or shutdowns of businesses and better results from the Search and Match segments.
Forget the last 10 years of post-Napster industry annihilation - Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) is now seeing growing income from both music sales and music publishing - but only if you factor in overseas sales; the U.S. business is still in rewind...
—Music sales: October-to-December recorded-music income was 3.4 percent up from 2008 - but that’s because international sales, from where WMG gets most of its money, jumped 12.7 percent; U.S. sales are down 9.5 percent. Global digital income is up 10.3 percent from last year, “driven by continued strength in international download revenue”, and now makes up 22 percent of music sales (or 34.7 percent in the U.S.).
Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) still sees value in local newspapers, even if Guardian Media Group doesn’t. It’s buying GMG Regional Media - with its 32 newspapers and websites - for £44.8 million ($70 million), in a deal that had been expected and shows the very different strategies of the two companies...
The cash price is actually just £7.4 million, but Trinity is paying £37.4 million to get out of GMG Regional Media’s existing long-term print contract (after all, it already has its own presses). The announcement says the group made a zero operating profit for the 2009 full year and has gross assets of £8.7 million.
It’s not exactly a great leap from publishing an iPhone app to offering one on the soon-to-be-released iPad - not only will the former run on the latter; the skillset for developing the latter won’t be significantly different.
So publishers who have already found a degree of incremental revenue from iPhone are now looking for another increment from its bigger brother…
When Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) announced its Nook e-reader in October, the ability to pursue a dual in-store and online sales strategy appeared to be one of the clear advantages it might have over Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). But, as we first reported then, the chain didn’t plan to sell Nooks to go in all its stores for the 2009 holidays—and, as it turned out, the combination of demand and distribution issues kept the device from store shelves. Instead, most people who bought Nooks at B&N stores were placing online orders for delivery weeks or months into the future—not buying them for same-day use. I watched in one store as someone changed his mind pre-Christmas about buying a Nook because he wouldn’t get it until February.
But B&N says that’s all about to change now, at least in some stores. Hoping to get a retail boost from Valentine’s Day, the chain plans to stock most stores with Nooks by mid-week—even promising to update an in-store locator chart daily starting Wednesday. The popular themes in response to the news? Too little, too late or Nook meets Godzilla aka iPad and inevitably loses. Both are short-sighted.
3.5%
Met
Missed
Newsletter
