Archive for September 16th, 2007
In one line, Brightcove sums up what it’s not. “We are not trying to become the next YouTube,” said Brightcove VP of marketing and strategy Adam Berrey. Brightcove is moving its one-year-old video portal from Brightcove.com to Brightcove.tv so the company can focus more on its white label on-demand platform for content owners. Brightcove.com will be dedicated to its media publishing tools — an area that has seen a lot of growth recently with clients such as Dow Jones, the Washington Post and Fox Entertainment.
September 16th, 2007
PaidContent is reporting that the cable giant is buying Seattle-based BuddyTV, a TV fan site that combines original content with community. “It seems likely that BuddyTV will be used in conjunction with Comcast’s Fancast.com site, as well as Fandango, which it acquired in the earlier this year,” reports PaidContent. No price has been disclosed.
September 16th, 2007
I literally gasped when I read this figure: Click Forensics says 15.8% of all clicks on ad networks was fraudulent in Q2 2007. The study used data from more than 4,000 advertisers - and showed the click fraud rate rose 1% from the previous quarter. Google’s”click fraud czar” Shuman Ghosemajumder told Forbes that he doesn’t buy those numbers, and brushes off talk that Google benefits from fraud. “Auditors like Click Forensics estimate the amount of click fraud that’s being attempted, not how much is going undetected and is charged to advertisers,” Ghosemajumder said. “We have a very direct financial incentive to detect bad publishers–the ones engaged in click fraud–and remove them from the system.”
September 16th, 2007
On the heels of NBC’s tussle with Apple over distribution of shows in iTunes (LR archive) comes news of another possible battle on the horizon: “We have a pretty limited relationship with Apple and we’ll see how it goes,” News Corp. president and CEO Peter Chernin told the UK’s Royal Television Society convention (via Reuters) “I assume it will be prickly and dicey and contentious like all negotiations are and like all negotiations should be.”
Apple tells Reuters that the News Corp. deal is not up for renweal soon — so it’s uknown why Chernin is making noise right now.
September 16th, 2007
This is a little different spin on my previous post, but this time we’re looking at the websites for this season’s critically acclaimed shows. You would think the big shows of the season will have the best websites, right? Rick Ellis from AllYourTV reviews the sites and shows us if on-air promotion time correlates to a better site.
September 16th, 2007
Crosscut Seattle, the upstart regional news site, goes on the attack against newspapers in Washington and Oregon. As it critiques newspaper sites in the land of Bigfoot, it brings up some great “why are you doing this?” points
- Many of the sites hold back the bulk of their print content until some arbitraliy set deadline. For some papers it is midnight - but in one example, stories from the paper don’t hit the web until noon! (that’s the Eugene Register-Guard if you’re keeping score at home).
- Other sites make you pay to view content if you aren’t a dead-tree subscriber.
- Most newspapers limit one of their greatest assets: photography. You get “postage-stamp” pictures or none at all in many cases.
- Some sites are getting agressive with blogs, but aren’t doing more than posting press releases and little irrelevant nuggets
One online editor, Mark Briggs of the Tacoma News Tribune battled back (Crosscut’s Chuck Taylor chastised Briggs’ paper for posting news late in the morning) - calling Taylor’s reporting “superficial.”
September 16th, 2007
A Yahoo employee inadvertently invited New York Times writer Brad Stone to a new service called “Yahoo Mash.” Writes Stone:
It’s no fun to be teased. I followed the link to mash.yahoo.com, which bounced me to a username/password page, titled Yahoo Guesthouse, where my Yahoo login information did not work. I pointed this out to the Yahoo employee, and he replied cryptically over e-mail: “Yeah, I jumped the gun on inviting you. Not yet open to the public… Soon…”
A Yahoo PR spokesperson later said the service - whatever it is - is still in the alpha phase. Stone adds gravy to his blog entry with a list of Mash-possibilities.
Update: Now NYT and others are now getting a preview. “(It) is quite an homage to Facebook, but it adds one significant new wrinkle: users can edit each other’s profiles, redecorating, changing information, and adding features. Think the Wikipedia version of a social network,” reports Saul Hansell on NYTimes.com.
September 16th, 2007
