The Wall Street Journal, citing those all-knowing “people familiar with the matter,” said the DOJ might approve the deal as early as next week. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has pledged to operate Motorola as a standalone company, and so the government’s main focus on Google has been whether or not it will use the patents acquired from Motorola in an offensive fashion.

Mobile rivals are already complaining that Google plans to uphold Motorola’s patent-licensing strategies on what have been deemed “essential” patents by asking for a royalty rate above what they consider fair as well as its willingness to leave the threat of an injunction on the table, which other companies have pledged not to employ for standards-essential patents. The report said regulators will watch closely to see how Google uses the Motorola patents post-acquisition.

And in related news, the DOJ plans to approve the $4.5 billion purchase of Nortel’s patent portfolio by a group of mobile companies that included Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and Research in Motion (NSDQ: RIMM), denying Google a chance to solidify its patent holdings for far less money than it will pay for Motorola. That event prompted Google to open talks with Motorola and to lash out at its rivals for playing the patent game more effectively than Google.

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On one hand, the company posted impressive growth in its TV, cable and movie businesses. These segments resulted in a $210 million year-over-year quarterly earnings increase and adjusted earnings per share of $0.39 which is better than the $0.34 analysts had predicted.

At the same time, the company announced a 43 percent decline in its publishing business and a quarterly charge of $87 million related to the UK phone hacking settlement.

On an afternoon earnings call, News Corp executives said that about 85 percent of the charge was for lawyers and advisers and the rest for legal settlements. They added that they could not go into details about future settlements but that the “priority is to make this right.” The company says it spent $104 million in 2011 on costs related to the investigation.

The hacking-related charges were not included in the publishing category where the company’s UK and Australia newspapers are experiencing collapsing revenues. The company also said it expected income from its UK newspapers to drop $150 million in the coming year.

Publishing reported second quarter segment operating income of $218 million, a $162 million or 43% decrease compared to the $380 million reported a year ago, reflecting lower advertising revenues at the Australian newspapers and the integrated marketing services business, as well as the absence of contributions from the closure of The News of the World in the U.K.

Analysts, however, appeared less interested in the scandal than in the company’s surging TV and entertainment businesses. The strong performance in these segments was driven in part by the popularity of Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News, FX cable and hit movies like Rio and an Alvin and the Chipmunks.

News Corp also enjoyed strong results from its affiliate BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) which posted improved quarterly income of $174 million compared to $109 million one year ago.

The company also said it expects a reinvigorated performance from Dow Jones as a result of a new CEO, a strong brand and new digital platforms.

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Time Warner’s filmed entertainment division grew 7 percent in the fourth quarter, bringing in $3.9 billion in revenue.

The disc rental delays, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes told investors, “have enabled our titles to significantly outperform competitive titles without a window.”

Warner Home Entertainment recently extended from 28 to 56 days the delay in which it makes its movies available for rental on Netflix. It’s also trying to extend Redbox’s delay to 56 days, although the kiosk chain is resisting. “We’ll keep working to extend the window for kiosk owners and brick-and-mortar chains,” Bewkes said.

Time Warner’s growth was also spurred by its networks division, with subscriptions to HBO and and carriage fees for channels like TNT leading to a 5 percent growth in revenue to $3.5 billion.

For the entire year, Time Warner reported an 8 percent uptick in revenue to $29 billion and 7 percent growth in operating income to $5.8 billion.

Bewkes cited the HBO Go streaming initiative as a growth driver for the conglomerate’s subscription business, which also grew 5 percent in the fourth quarter.

He used the call to urge major cable carriers including Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) to make HBO Go available through connected TV devices including Roku, noting that greater accessibility to premium cable content will make consumers less likely to cancel their cable subscriptions in favor of over-the-top programming services.

“Not allowing the consumer to access premium content on any device they choose actually increases the relative value of over the top services that really offer the same programming at a later window,” Bewkes said.

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For the year, the company swung to a £75.9 million net income from a £141.4 million loss a year earlier, as annual revenue rose three percent to £4 billion.

Virgin doubled sign-ups to its new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) PVR, now at a total 435,000 - but, though it increased its TV subscribe base between October and December, it lost 0.4 percent of its TV subscribers compared with the previous year.

The TiVo box is a big improvement from its predecessor but is still suffering from some quirks, still doesn’t offer some baseline features its predecessor did (like BBC Red Button) and is slow to roll out promised over-the-top services except for Spotify.

Virgin TV customers are now averaging 90 million VOD views per month on their set top boxes through a combination of recordings and hosted on-demand services, exceeding a billion total in 2011 (up 14 percent from 2010).

The company’s strategy is to cater to what it says is growing, voracious demand for digital entertainment and information - in part through its TiVo box and in part by increasing speeds of its broadband service, with which it has a competitive advantage against most copper-wire services by virtue of being fibre optic.

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The plants will remain operational now for “smartphone product customization.” The news comes amidst unconfirmed reports that the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the release of the next model.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) says that the transfer will result in the loss of 4,000 jobs in total, and the reductions will take place through the end of 2012.

Nokia does not outline how much the move to Asia will mean in terms of money saved, but this is a decision that has been some time in the making: these were plants that were spared in the last round of cuts under CEO Stephen Elop.

Since then, Nokia has reported yet more declines in its smartphone shipments, mainly around its legacy Symbian platform. The company is now gradually moving to making more of its smartphone portfolio based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Now, Nokia says that the move is being made to put the manufacturing bases closer to where the different components are being made for those smartphones. That is a move we have seen from many other companies—and was the subject of a series of stories recently concerning Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in China and the role of Foxconn in that business.

The move to make these plants focused on customization, meanwhile, points to some focus that Nokia does seem to maintain on its software and services for its devices—a crucial part of the company’s differentiation as it moves more and more to a platform being used by its competitors as well. Others that make Windows Phone devices include Samsung and HTC.

The news comes amidst other reports about Nokia that claim the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the next model comes out.

Symbian is gradually being phased out for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, but Nokia had originally said it would support the OS until 2016, and that could still be the case even if it stopped making devices based on it. Nokia transferred the operation of Symbian to Accenture last year.

A spokesperson from Nokia told paidContent that the article was “speculative at best” and would not comment on device rumor or speculation:

“As we have previously said Symbian continues to be an important part of our portfolio and going forward it will play a more focused role as we accelerate our transition to Windows Phone,” he said. “We remain fully committed to the platform through 2016, which means on-going software support as we go forward.”

The company is currently rolling out an update to Symbian, Belle, and the devices remain popular in the Middle East, Russia and India, even as they have lost out to Android-based devices, Apple’s iPhone and even RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) in other markets.

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The site clocked a whopping 99 million unique browsers in January, it said, citing its own Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) logs - 77 percent up from the previous year and 15 percent up from the previous month. It is not yet profitable, thanks to growth investment.

Relative to its burgeoning audience and relative to rivals, Mail Online’s income has often appeared small. Though actual figures were not given on Wednesday, Mail Online and stablemate Metro.co.uk together made £19 million through 2010/11, according to a previous disclosure. But that is partly because, unlike peers, DMGT reports the sites’ results separately from a whole set of supporting classifieds sites that make the bulk of its digital money and which make Mail Online look small in isolation.

Those classified sites - including Jobsite, Motoring.co.uk and the Digital Property Group - appear to be recovering from the economic downturn’s battering they faced in 2011, with eight percent quarterly revenue growth and a “solid performance” from the property sites, DMGT says.

Across formats, revenue for Associated Newspapers, the national division in which the Mail sits, is now stable compared with last year, helped by the digital growth off-setting a “weak” print ad market.

But, in DMGT’s Northcliffe regional newspaper division, revenues fell nine percent because the publisher has moved some daily titles to weekly and because ad revenue is a tenth below 2010 rates. The publisher finds itself hiking cover prices to make up for lost sales and continuing to cut costs - it lopped off 12 percent of costs in the last year, including shedding three percent of its staff.

DMGT’s real engine is B2B, not consumer, information, whose revenue rose three percent.

Digital circulation and advertising revenue growth of 51 percent from the previous year came thanks to Future having pushed 65 of its titles to iTunes Store upon Newsstand’s launch early in October.

The result is finally an encouraging sign of light at the end of the tunnel for legacy media businesses which have spent years attempting to transition their efforts from analogue to digital.

Future CEO Mark Wood: “We are starting to see a significant change in the shape of the business as our digital innovation enables us to reach entirely new consumers in global digital markets.”

Future’s UK revenue for the quarter still fell by two percent, but that was mostly from the loss of a separate customer publishing contract, Future reported in Wednesday’s interim earnings disclosure.

Now, for some, the reality may be dawning that, despite many digital products reaping owners dimes rather than dollars when compared with print equivalents, publishing them at scale can nevertheless return a company to pre-digital revenue growth rates.

As paidContent reported in January, Future’s free container apps for its tablet editions have been downloaded nearly 10 million times since Newsstand’s October launch, generating individual sales of over 430,000 magazines during the period.

Forty percent of tablet edition sales are subscriptions, but some of them may be short-term renewals.

“Print sales will be challenging, but we expect digital revenue to maintain a vigorous growth rate,” the company added in its market disclosure on Wednesday.

In the U.S., Future has been more challenged by the more rapid evaporation of print magazine circulations. But, after the board jettisoned CEO Stevie Spring and its finance director in October, replacement Wood has tackled the problem by selling Future’s U.S.-facing music magazines for up to $3 million and by committing to launch U.S. versions of its Radar web portals, starting with TechRadar. Cost cuts have now offset U.S. revenue falls, Wood reports.

The company did not specify print circulation trends.

In figures released this morning, McClatchy announced earnings of $0.49 per share which surpassed analyst predictions of $0.35. Total operating income for the quarter was $90.3 million, compared to $89.3 million a year ago.

Overall, it appears McClatchy’s deep cost-cutting and ongoing debt reduction have resulted in a stable business operation that is being supplemented by successful online investments. Dividends from these investments, which also include CareerBuilder.com, together contributed $28.8 million to McClatchy’s net income in 2011. The company also reported strong growth in its daily-deal product.

Despite this good news, McClatchy faces the same race against time as other newspaper chains which are losing print revenues faster than they can grow digital ones. While the bottom line of papers like the Miami Herald and El Neuvo Herald are improving and circulation has stabilized, print advertising fell by about 5% in the quarter.

Another sign of concern for McClatchy and other newspaper chains is sluggish growth in digital advertising. Sales in the category actually declined 2% in the quarter for McClatchy but this reflects the fact that many digital ads were sold as a bundle with print ads. McClatchy said pure digital sales increased 7.5%. Overall, though, digital still accounts for less than a quarter of the company’s ad revenues.

McClatchy’s share price was up 15% to $2.59 in mid-morning trading.

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For Lagardere, which operates several imprints including the flagship Hachette, e-books grew to make up six percent of total 2011 publishing sales. In the October-to-December Q4, that was 20 percent in the U.S., 10 percent in UK.

Hachette’s total U.S. book sales revenue grew 12.8 percent thanks to strong bestsellers withstanding Borders’ bankruptcy. But even Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, for which Hachette has some territorial rights, did not stop UK sales slipping 4.5 percent - something Lagardere blamed on the collapse of Australia’s Borders operator, REDgroup.

Lagardere said the U.S. sales growth was “despite the impact of e-books, which generate lower net sales per unit but higher margin”. It did not specify sales numbers by volume.

In contrast, the publisher reported: “In France, new e-readers were launched in the autumn but have not triggered a breakthrough in the market yet.”

Lagardere group revenue fell 0.2 percent (like-for-like), with stable performances from its magazine and TV businesses and from its print news distribution business, plus 10 percent growth from its talent management division thanks to the upcoming Euro 2012 and Olympic Games events.

But Lagardere forecasts a profit fall of up to 12 percent for the full year. And it said the worsening economy plus an expected poor autumn performance from its talent management division and a dip in shares of its Canal+ TV company will force it to record full-year impairment losses of around €900 ($1173.78/£745.29) million.

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The Dublin- and Rome-based company is buying Cidade Internet, a Brazilian portal which publishes 10 popular websites and other blogs inluding Fofocando, Automovel and Das Marias.

Formerly known as GoAdv, Populis operates the Nanopublishing and Blogosfere blog networks, has built up through acquiring Italy’s Blogo.it network from Dada, Germany’s Mokono network. It also owns Excite Europe, the Better Deals repository of user-created consumer guides and the Koego blog platform. In all, the company sels ads against the thousands of articles contributed by its hundreds of users each month across what is now a portfolio of several hundred websites.

Brazil’s consumer internet economy is taking off, with online ad spend surpassing that in the UK in 2011 (source and more data: IAB Brasil).

Cidade’s properties will be fully integrated under the Populis banner. Populis is gaining Cidade’s Rio and Sao Paulo offices, intends to open another this year and add 30 staff.

By trying to operate so strongly in non-English languages, Populis claims to avoid the “Demand Media clone” tag - complementarity that could ultimately make for an exit to such a group.

The Charles Zhang-led company, which operates the Sogou search site and Changyou online gaming business, saw Q4 online advertising revenues grow 51 percent from a year earlier to $101 million, including a 248 percent rise for Sogou to $23 million.

Co-president Belinda Wang: “In 2011, the internet population in China exceeded 500 million and we witnessed a continuing trend where marketing spending by brand advertisers has been shifting from offline to online.”

The trend is lifting more than just Sohu. According to iResearch, 2011 Chinese internet advertising revenue rose 57.3 percent to surpass newspaper print advertising on 51.19 billion yuan ($8.11 billion), according to iResearch, which predicts 100 billion in online ad sales in 2013.

Sohu’s operating profit fell 26 percent to $49 million on higher video investment.

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The company is gearing up to start inserting “featured stories” into people’s mobile feeds—effectively, marketing-led posts—which could start appearing as soon as early March. The date and news of the launch comes from the FT, which cites several people familiar with Facebook’s planning as its source.

Since filing its S-1 for an initial public offering last week, there has been a lot of speculation on how, exactly, mobile will fit into Facebook’s money-making picture longer term. The company was very sober in its description of its mobile business—usage is growing faster than even desktop engagement, but there’s no money in that growth yet, it admitted.

That was something of a bum note in a document that otherwise dazzles with its growth story to date.

If the FT report is true, it could mark the first step in Facebook’s strategy to change that and start to make marketing dollars out of its 425-million active mobile users, and take a portion of a mobile ad market that is going to top $2 billion in the U.S. alone this year.

Facebook still has a long way to go before its mobile presence—via the mobile web and apps—is a mirror, or even enhanced, version of what it offers on the desktop. However, it does look like there may be also some developments underfoot there as well, in the form of app buttons appearing on Facebook’s mobile web site.

Meanwhile, the news of “featured stories” appears to be a development on a story from last week, which quoted Paul Gelb, head of mobile for agency Razorfish, saying that his company was trialling rich-media mobile advertising with Facebook.

Facebook may well be looking into more classic display ads for its mobile interfaces, but in any event Gelb later clarified that he was referring to “rich media featured stories”, not ads.

But if featured stories are what are in play here, Facebook gave nothing away in its own statement to paidContent: “We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform,” a spokesperson said in an email.

Even so, the past few days are not the first time that the subject of Facebook mobile sponsored stories have come up: in December, Bloomberg also noted that Facebook would launch such a service in March 2012.

Facebook has already taken over in markets like the U.S. and UK in terms of having the biggest share of revenues in online display ads, so it seems like a no-brainer that it would take that pole position into the mobile sphere. However, issues over privacy, and the basic lack of real estate on a mobile screen have been some of the gating factors in Facebook taking up the mobile marketing opportunity more aggressively.

When Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s global VP of marketing solutions, spoke at paidContent’s Advertising conference in September 2011, she highlighted Facebook’s caution in this mobile:

“We are holding ourselves to as high a standard as possible on mobile,” she said. “I don’t rule mobile out, but we are working hard to figure out what the right model is. We haven’t figured that out yet.”

As we noted at the time, check-in deals have been the one exception to that so far: when a user is in a location where Facebook can deliver a relevant offer, those deals are pushed to users. But if that has driven revenues to Facebook, it was not enough to merit a mention in the S-1 form.

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Briefing Media, a budding B2B start-up founded by former Incisive and Nexus executives, is buying the assets, including Farmers Guardian and Pulse, for £10 million, funded by the GCP private equity fund.

• Medical division (London): 33 staff, Pulse, Practical Commissioning, websites, the NAPC conference and the Mental Health Forum.
• Agriculture division (Preston): 57 staff, Farmers Guardian, Dairy Farmer, websites.

The two divisions made £12.1 million in 2011 revenue, UBM said, without disclosing their profitability or otherwise.

In a number of verticals, Briefing Media has ambitions to aggregate online stories from around the web using an automated semantic publishing platform, topped by a few analytical articles of its own. So far, it operates in one vertical, with a rough ‘n ready-looking site about B2B media themselves, and is operating its own conferences and the new British Media Awards.

Briefing Media regards the acquisitions as “a new chapter” for it, but it’s one UBM is glad to be shutting the book on. Together with the recent sales of its French medical publishing business, its UK titles for the pub industry and others, it has now off-loaded much of its classic B2B portfolio for £25 million since January 2011, leaving it focused on data-driven products, large conferences and marketing support services.

Briefing Media’s Rory Brown: “We see great opportunity in specialist business media markets but recognise that our world is evolving & we need to adapt with it.”

Briefing Media’s Neil Thackray: “This acquisition gives us both the scale and market opportunity to accelerate that ambition ... This will be the first but not the last acquisition we plan to make.”

For as long as Facebook has been running its Facebook Credits program—the virtual currency that users can redeem on games and other content peddled through Facebook’s network—it has been letting users top up those Credits using their mobile phones. It does this in partnership with companies like (reportedly) Boku and (definitely) Zong, the payments company bought by eBay’s PayPal last year. Users can also top up their Credits via PayPal and credit cards.

It’s not known how much, exactly, is purchased via the mobile channel today, but it is an example of how mobile is actually already driving significant revenue for Facebook. “Facebook Credits make a lot of money through mobile phones,” enough that Zong was “growing very fast last year” because of Facebook purchases, according to Frederic Court, a partner with Advent Venture Parnters, one of the VCs that backed Zong before the eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) buy.

This is because while sometimes the mobile payments were actually more expensive than a PayPal or credit card transaction, they are often a lot quicker to do, especially if you are in the middle of a game. And, as with other mobile-based payment options, they appeal to those who don’t have or want to enter card details.

Commissions on those Credits netted Facebook $557 million in revenues in 2011. (Facebook writes in the S-1 that the “other fees” that it designates on the same line as Payments was “immaterial.”)

At this point, Facebook doesn’t take any commission on Credits that are purchased via mobile: that service—which uses the premium SMS channel to send a code to a user to redeem Credits on the main site, and then charges the amount directly to the user’s mobile bill—already has some other parties taking a cut, including the provider (eg Zong or Boku), the mobile carrier and even another processing middleman. Rather, Facebook’s cut comes in the form of a commission on the payments, similar to what Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) takes for transactions on its App Store. That fee is 30 percent.

Could Facebook eventually take more control of its payments, and potentially cut out some of those middle people? Probably not soon, in Court’s opinion. “Zong brought something to Facebook that it didn’t know how to do, and it became very deeply integrated,” he said. “I don’t see them starting to do what Zong does, which is connecting hundreds of operators.” Then again, he added, “When they have a worth of $100 billion with $10 billion on the balance sheet they can do pretty much anything they want.”

What’s interesting is that as Facebook starts to expand some of the other functionality on its mobile platform, that will also open up a lot more opportunities in terms of mobile transactions as well.

As Facebook enables and opens APIs to get publishers to build apps for its mobile platforms (via the web and apps), “Facebook will make sure those are monetized,” he said. “I have no doubt Facebook will be making money on mobile games and other content given the engagement and scale on mobile. There is an amazing opening there.” Paying for Credits that will actually get used on the device itself, he said, will be “even more natural.”

Facebook in the S-1 said it had 425 million monthly active users accessing the social network via mobile devices, with that number outpacing the growth of overall subscribers.

“Credits is a wallet that you can top up in all kinds of ways,” he said. “Facebook has created its own currency and has imposed that on anyone offering digital goods on Facebook.” If anything, that currency might have a life outside the platform, to to buy things outside of Facebook.

But even with the opportunity for Credits, Court doesn’t see this eventually overtaking revenues from whatever advertising Facebook plans to put on its mobile services “for a very simple reason,” which is down to how those games are played today. “If you look at Zynga, only between two and three percent of people who play actually pay. The rest play for free. Tt will be the same for Facebook on mobile, with only a fraction spending money,” he predicted. “With advertising, 100 percent of the population is exposed.”

Even though Facebook has listed “no mobile ads” as one of its risks on the S-1, it could be playing its cards very close to its chest: the last few days has been a lot of speculation already about how soon Facebook will launch those mobile ads.

Razorfish (via Digiday) says that it is already working on a pilot for rich-media ads for the social network.

The blog Inside Facebook, meanwhile, has put its money down on sponsored stories to be the “most likely” first stab at mobile advertising on the site, with running a mobile ad network the second-most likely option. (That’s one that we explored a bit yesterday as well.)

Update: Razorfish’s VP of mobile, Paul Gelb, has made a correction on how his comments were portrayed in the Digiday story (via Twitter): his agency is not working on any mobile ad buying with Facebook. “In the interview I was referring to rich media featured stories, not paid ads,” he said.

A Facebook spokesperson, via email, added the following: “We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform.”

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A New York Times executive mentioned the move on the earnings call Thursday. On the call, Chief Financial Officer Jame Follo said advertisers were enthusiastic about the idea of making both the tech and health blogs more attractive to a business-to-business audience. In the case of Bits, launched last November, the company is aiming to challenge the preeminence of the Wall Street Journal’s ‘All Things D’ among technophiles.

The call followed the release of earnings this morning that showed ongoing declines in NYT Co.‘s overall revenues and profits.

On the call, Follo also pointed to a series of features designed to entice users to pay for digital content. These include one-click subscriptions in iTunes, free Kindle and Nook access for subscribers, and group accounts for corporate and educational users.

In response to analysts’ questions about the company’s announced 20% quarterly increase in digital subscribers, Follo said the total number of 390,000 included figures for online readers of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe. About 57,000 of the subscribers came via e-readers (this figure doesn’t account for new holiday subscribers).

The new Boston Globe site, which was launched in October, has 16,000 subscribers while the IHT has about 10,000.

Follo added that while many new subscribers were offered a 99 cent introductory rate for the first month, the “conversion rate is very strong.”

The company also enjoyed its first increase in home delivery in five years. In 2012, it raised subscriber prices by 4% and newsstand prices by 50 cents.

Despite its growing online subscriber base, the NYT Co still faces significant strategic challenges as print advertising declined 7.9% from the same quarter a year ago. Analysts also expressed concern about the dismal showing of the company’s About.com unit where digital revenues fell by 25% and overall profit by 67%. Executives said the decline was due to a fall-off in prices and click-through rates and by About.com’s content being downgraded in Google’s search algorithm.

Chairman and chief executive officer Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., said the company is still in the early stages of a search to replace former CEO Janet Robinson who was fired in December.

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Nick parent company Viacom reported a 65 percent drop in profits for its fiscal first quarter to $212 million. The drop was largely attributable to a 3 percent fall in ad sales in the company’s cable division, which accounts for nearly 80 percent of Viacom’s stock price. Analysts say the key reason is that Netflix has been siphoning away viewers from Viacom’s perennial children’s TV powerhouse, Nickelodeon, which saw double-digit ratings drops in the October-December period.

Dauman, speaking to investors following Thursday’s earnings release, dismissed that theory, suggesting the ratings decline stemmed from a methodology problem on behalf of TV ratings arbiter Nielsen.

Nickelodeon is traditionally a star performer in Viacom’s profitable TV networks division. Top Nickelodeon series including SpongeBob SquarePants and iCarly have been streaming on Netflix since April 2009. However, with viewership for kids 2-11 declining 14 percent during the three-month period, a number of equity analysts have suggested that during the crucial pre-holiday periods during which kids are away from school and traditionally watching Nickelodeon, they were streaming Nick shows on Netflix instead.

Dauman said Viacom officials have been monitoring the number of Netflix streams for their shows, and their numbers didn’t increase dramatically during the period in question. “It certainly does not account for the ratings drop that we saw,” Dauman said.
Viacom officials believe most of the ratings problem has to do with Nielsen’s “sampling” of its Nickelodeon audience and has asked the ratings company for a re-count.

The debate over Netflix’s role in this matter comes as analysts are widely speculating that traditional media outlets catering to kids are going to be the first to experience big audience drops related to emerging platforms. On Tuesday, for example, BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield suggested the kids DVD market – previously thought to be relatively immune to digital erosion – is in the most danger.

“We increasingly believe the family/kids DVD segment is actually the movie industry genre most exposed to digital substitution, as subscription streaming platforms offer so much family content to stream online anytime, anywhere across a wide array of devices,” Greenfield wrote on his blog.

In addition to ratings declines at Nick, Viacom’s earnings were also impacted by the $379 million it had to set aside to deal with an arbitration matter related to the video game Rock Band.

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Axel Springer, which publishes Bild and is led by CEO Mathias Döpfner, says it has made a “minor investment” in the site.

But it is also becoming a “strategic marketing partner”. It is pledging space for Airbnb’s listings in its web and newspaper properties. Its own Immonet real estate marketplace site has got an “exclusive” German partnership with Airbnb in Germany.

This appears to be one of those deals that is more about mutual working benefit than future returns.

But Axel Springer is prone to investments.

It may have had to stump up considerably for Airbnb nevertheless - last summer’s $112 million investment in Airbnb by Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and General Catalyst reportedly valued the company at $1.3 billion.

But much of the value of the deal may be coming from Axel Springer pegging a monetary value against exposure it is committing the site, rather than straight VC money.

The NYT Co numbers, announced this morning, showed operating profit for Q4 declined to $106.6 million compared to $111.6 million for the same period a year ago. Revenues fell to $643 million, a 2.8% drop off.

The company’s earnings were $0.39 per share which is lower than the $0.41 analysts had predicted. The number reflects one-off charges, including severance costs tied to former CEO Janet Robinson who was forced out in December. Without the special charges, the company would have posted earnings of $0.45 per share.

In the bigger picture, the announcement reflects the familiar story of a newspaper property facing advertising declines that have yet to be offset by new digital dollars.

Revenue from print advertising fell 7.8% and digital advertising revenues dropped too—by 4.9%.

The drop in digital revenues would be a cause for alarm but for the fact that they stem from a drop in cost-per-click and display advertising at the About.com group.

If About.com is excluded, digital revenues at the New Media Group (which includes core properties like the Times) grew by 10% to $233.5 million.

Also encouraging is a 20% increase in digital subscribers which coincides with an expanded use of paywalls at the company.

Total paid subscribers to digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of The Times and the International Herald Tribune totaled approximately 390,000 at the end of the year. The Boston Globe equivalents had 16,000 paid subscribers.

The numbers did not reflect the company’s recent sale of its Regional Media Group of sixteen newspapers in the south. The sale will result in proceeds of about $150 million, including tax benefits, which the company is expected to use to further its digital strategy.

In morning trading, NYT Co shares were off about 1.3% to $7.57.

paidContent will have more analysis following an earnings call that is taking place later this morning.

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• Updated: NYT Mistakenly Sends Mass E-Mail Claiming Subs Have Canceled
• Janet Robinson Stepping Down As NYT CEO; Memo From Arthur Sulzberger
• New York Times Selling Regional Papers To Halifax Media Group

Flaregames of Karlsruhe, Germany, is taking €6 million, led by Angry Bird backer Accel, to “scale” the company, hire new talent and to to market its upcoming series of free-to-play mobile games.

“Our first focus is on getting fun, high-quality games to market, and reaching the mass-market as well as mid-core gamers with our line-up this year,” said founder Klaas Kersting (via release).

“The mobile games business will likely be larger than the social games business,” according to Accel partner Harry Nelis. The firm is planning five games by year’s end.

Separately, Tusjuegos, a Spanish portal for buying and downloading PC and Mac games, is taking €420,000 from Spain’s VentureCap and others, Loogic reports.

Spain is plagued by illegal downloading. Tusjuegos is aiming to ensure game buying, after the box era subsides, remains legal in the online downloading arena.

Jaime Ferrer has been installed as CEO of Tusjuegos parent ITnet.

Q3 net income swung from last year’s 72.3 billion yen profit to a 159 billion yen ($2 billion) loss, as sales dipped 17.4 percent. All divisions brought in fewer sales than the previous year.

Sony (NYSE: SNE) blamed the worsening global economy plus localised issues like Thai floods and the aftershocks in Japan’s post-tsunami economy…

What connected TV boom?
TV sales led the company’s declines, with revenue down 42.9 percent. But that’s partly because a Japanese government TV subsidy scheme had ended.

Games is Sony’s most resilient division - down only 9.7 percent.
But Sony said the business contributed to its overall losses because of the cost of re-promoting its previously hacked PlayStation Network and cutting PlayStation 3 price to head off Xbox.

Music can’t live on big stars
Sony Music Entertainment sales dipped 11.7 percent despite two big Adele releases.

Sony Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) is struggling against competition
Sales fell 15.7 percent because feature phone owners are moving to rivals’ smartphones. For the 2011/12 full year, sales are now forecast to be five billion yen (€50 million) below November’s forecast.

“As challenging as times are for Sony now, were it not for the strong leadership of Sir Howard Stringer these past seven years, we would have been in a much more difficult position,” Hirai said on his appointment.

“The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses - primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains.”