New York Times Chief Executive Janet Robinson, speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference on Wednesday, cited tough economic conditions, saying advertisers were less confident about making upfront commitments.
She said print advertising revenue was feeling the sharpest pinch, forecasting a drop of about 10 percent in the quarter. Digital advertising revenue is likely to be down 2 to 3 percent, she said.
The company said in July that advertising revenue was expected to decline in the 4 percent range.
Newspapers have been hammered by declines in advertising revenue for several quarters as marketers spend money in other media, especially digital. New jitters that the economy could face another downturn only add to the industry’s woes.
I will grant with a down economy and probably to get worse, a revenue drop off was in the cards. NYT won’t be the only industry leader to see this happening.
But sometimes it is what is not said that is critical –
She added she believed the paper was “in a good position right now” due to the paper’s Web subscription plan guaranteeing revenue from “a loyal audience” who “think the news that we have is worth paying for.”
Notice that there is not a smidgen of up sell that digital viewership is growing. None. Just “loyal”. I take that to mean that the results from the digital property is not growing at all or is in minor decline. Which is running counter to the trend. Amazon and B&N are cleaning house in the digital space. More likely the NYT online is having the same morbid results that HuffPo is having.
Not a good sign.
The copyright troll RightHaven LLC is about to expire. They have not filed any new suits in months, have laid off personnel and are awaiting rulings in two appellate districts. –
Righthaven chief executive Steve Gibson confirmed by telephone that his company has stopped filing new lawsuits, pending appellate rulings that could take months or even years to filter through the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“It certainly seems to be prudent to see how all of these cases come out in the wash,” Gibson said, adding that he still reserves the right to file new lawsuits at any time.
Taken together, the setbacks suggest the business model employed by Righthaven has imploded on nearly every front — making it difficult to envision Righthaven copycats or a solid Righthaven future.
“The cases continue to show that their business model is not a viable business model,” said Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has opposed Righthaven in court.
RightHaven’s claim is that ‘Is this really a fight over whether the blogosphere should be able to take people’s creative works and reproduce it?’, according to CEO Steve Gibson. Yes this was lifted from an article. So in a sense this post fulfills Gibson’s observation. Here is the oddity about claims like RightHaven. How far up the information chain do you go? Go beyond the newspaper, to the event(s). The fact that a reporter is on the scene does not the ultimate source of the story. That is reserved to the participants around the event. Say a reporter covers a public event, town council meeting. Paid for by the taxpayers as part of functioning government. Should the Las Vegas Review be permitted to profit off the event and declare it under copyright? How about an auto wreck on the freeway? Or the weather since they source most of it from taxpayer funded weather services?
We have fair use as a provision in law for a reason. Its a vehicle expected to be used to further the arts and sciences and inform the public. The Las Vegas Review has a right to their property which is the expression of the event, but not the event itself.
How about something more innovative than a law firm? How about a subscription service that is reasonable in price? A sliding scale starting at $20 and goes up based on the blog’s Google Analytics rating. It is delivered to the blog as a private RSS feed. Single use articles on a similar sliding scale starting at 50¢. Automated it would have garnered probably equal to what the net from the lawyers would be. A blog like Drudge, MichelleMalkin, etc could afford those kind of fee rates. The upshot is the standing of someone like the LA Review would have been stronger. They could point to the fact that there was an avenue to acquire the piece and the defendant decided to forego that option.
Hopefully with RightHaven’s demise the idea of legal troll as profit center will wane.
Kids, this is how they use to make books –
The days of the hot shot Linotype is long gone. As are the days of the flat plate press. That book you read today, the type is more likely to be toner rather than ink. But it is an interesting vid of a tech from the past.
HT: The Passive Voice.
Wall Street’s spreadsheet kids aren’t a patient lot. They’ve decided AOL is mortally wounded. So, they’ve been looking to sell while the company still has some value. There have been no takers. The conventional wisdom is that waiting won’t improve prospects, at least on the near horizon. The next best option for Wall Street is to sell the company off like a totaled car wreck – with the most valuable parts being sold peace meal, crushing the remaining carcass for scrap.
Ironically, the very same spreadsheet kids that want to cash out are major contributors to AOL’s demise. In the days of dial up, AOL was dominant. As broadband began to take market share, the company squandered an opportunity to move to new technology and/or to a portal while its user base was intact. That opportunity was nixed by a short sighted fund managers’ love affair with colossal dial up margins. Broadband and open content were seen as threats to this cash cow. It took a near fatal erosion of AOL’s customer base to finally bring change.
Apple has had an ongoing battle with Samsung over their Galaxy Tab being too much like the iPad. Well here is the most unusual angle. Samsung is throwing up a `prior art` defense against Apple from a most unlikely source — Hollywood.
Did you catch it? The items that looked like video screen IN the table? Well if you look closer that really is a pad like device with a flat panel screen and a few controls on the front. Another words, a black iPad.
Pretty thin gruel you say? Well I might tend to agree except for the fact that defenses for enforcement of patents has been thinner still in many cases. There is a chance that Samsung might prevail. If they do that opens up the iPad/tablet market by leaps and bounds. It would also deal Apple a mighty blow. This also raises an interesting question. If Samsung prevails what happens to many of the Motorola patents that Google bought? I suggest the reader refresh themselves with the old StarTrek series with any away team segment in it. Is that communicator a flip-phone Captain Kirk is holding? TOS was circa 1965, predating the first Motorola phone by nearly two decades. Its something to watch.
HT: Consumerist.
Folks the days of channel programming as a component of the entertainment complex is rapidly drawing to a end. You see I finally have a media box running XBMC operational. Not a real big shucks, for the geeky, but there is a considerable amount of configuration work that has to be done post install.
Some 600 channels delivered via the Internet. No channel provider need apply. All those channels are on-air programming. RTE1 & 2, BBC 1,2,3, SyFy, Several Russian channels as well which is delighting my wife.
But those are still channels Dog. Granted. But I can go over to YouTube and download free movies. Add them to my library. The same with several other feeds that can be found. Work is already afoot by the team to integrate XBMC with NetFlix. The short story of all this is, the free tech already exists to automate your viewing pleasure without spending a dime.
Like the networking and telephony fields, the intelligence is moving to the edge of the network for entertainment as well. Centralized channel deploys will be a thing of the past. A very smart movie studio is going to figure this out.
I could see a XBMC addon provided by the studio. You install it, enter your provided identity code and have access to that studios back list of movies for $5mo. $50/year to have access to the MGM or WB back list. I would go for it at that price. Don’t have to include DRM either. Codecs exist that lock the stream route so it can’t be copied without all the pain of true DRM.
You will excuse me, my wife wants me to turn up the volume.
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