I was wondering how long it would take for this to land on YouTube (I saw it air here in Seattle). Perhaps she was celebrating the fact she just landed her own show. UPDATE: Paula’s publicist tells TMZ.com that the reason for her odd behavior was because the station had “…technical problems with the satellite and her sound was dropped not once but twice. Paula was in a small room by herself with only a cameraman. Paula was distracted and confused by the station dropping the sound. She did not know what was going on.”
The ninth media group to join the Yahoo ad consortium, Morris Communications will add its 27 newspapers to the mix. That brings the total to 215 newspaper sites. “We will be reaching a huge audience that extends way beyond our current newspaper websites,” said William S. Morris IV. A story in the WSJ earlier this week said Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune are preparing to launch their own ad network. Press release on the Morris-Yahoo deal below…
It’s been a busy week between CES and MacWorld for the media industry. I’ve listed the five biggest industry stories of the week below, ranked in order of their potential impact:
Backfence, provider of hyper-local media sites, is undergoing some tough times. CEO and co-founder Susan DeFife has resigned, and the company has had to lay off some staffers. How many people were let go is a bit of a mystery. Paid Content had originally reported that 12 of the company’s 18 staffers were let go. Backfence disputes the number, but won’t quantify it. Backfence received $3 million in venture funding in 2005, but apparently hasn’t found the right ad model yet. Writes Amy Gahran: “…finding a sustainable way to financially support local news content is a thorny issue. Personally, I don’t think conventional advertising can continue to shoulder most of that burden, in any media.” Terry Heaton adds: “It’s a tricky proposition, to say the least, but I think efforts that don’t do well have difficulty, because they’re trying too hard to build something that’s already there. Aggregation is the key, not content creation.”
ClickZ’s monthly hitwise top search terms list is out for December, 2006. The top search terms in the broadcast media categories are “cnn,” “msnbc” and “cnn.com.” But the top non-media-provider-name search is “Britney Spears.” In fact, Britney’s the only search term in the top 10 that isn’t the name of a media provider. The top blog search for a non-site-name was “Perez Hilton.”
Even though people are hypersensitive about online security, it turns out they are still willing to provide their personal information for the right experience. “The 2006 Choicestream Personalization Survey” (PDF) found out that people will provide a site their demographic information if that site will give them the right personalized experience. There is a huge age gap in this preference. From ClickZ: “When age is taken into consideration, personalization preferences skew younger. Sixty-nine percent of 18 to 24 year olds lean toward sharing personal data in exchange for services, compared to 8 percent of those 50 and over.” As has been said by people smarter than I, personal information is online currency. (Note: Choicestream is in the personalization solutions business.)
The ninth media group to join the Yahoo ad consortium, Morris Communications will add its 27 newspapers to the mix. That brings the total to 215 newspaper sites. “We will be reaching a huge audience that extends way beyond our current newspaper websites,” said William S. Morris IV. A 
