It’s starting to look like members of the Screen Actors Guild may be heading for a strike like the recent Writers’ strike. Studios have suspended talks with the Screen Actors Guild after three weeks of negotiations. One of the main reasons for the breakdown in talks is that actors balked at a studio proposal that […]

Advertisers are spending more at niche, or “long tail” web sites, and less at large sites, according to figures from PubMatic, a advertising service for publishers. The PubMatic AdPrice index shows that, while average ad rates are falling, rates at niche sites are actually on the rise. eCPMs (effective cost per 1000 ad impressions) for […]

U.S. Internet users viewed 11.5 billion online videos in March 2008, a 13-percent gain versus February and a 64-percent gain versus March 2007, according to figures from ComScore. All Your Views Are Belong To YouTube In March, Google Sites ranked as the top U.S. video property, with more than 4.3 billion videos viewed (38 percent […]

Though we haven’t seen any official announcement from AT&T, its site is already touting 3G iPhone coverage and free wireless access at the company’s 17,000 hotspots. The AT&T site now touts 3G support for the iPhone: Data Access In order to use data such as email, Google Maps, YouTube videos and web browsing, AT&T recommends […]

The Wall Street Journal reports that Warner Music Group losses increased in the fiscal second quarter as the company continues to struggle with a drop-off in sales of compact discs as consumers shift toward digital music. The company remains “excited about the long-term prospects for our business”, according to Chairman and Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman […]

We’ve reported previously that newspapers are losing advertisers to Internet media, that young people are abandoning newspapers for Internet media and that newspaper revenue is tanking. The result of these trends is that the value of traditional newspapers is in a freefall: Avista, the PE-fund that bought the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for $530 million in late […]

Universal McCann has published a new report that suggests that new media is rapidly becoming mainstream media around the world. The comparative study looks at social media trends through three “waves”: Wave 1 – September 2006 Wave 2 – June 2007 Wave 3 – March 2008 Research highlights: Social media is a global phenomenon happening […]

CNBC has published a great interview by Maria Bartiromo with Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt. In the interview, Schmidt says that figuring out how to make money off YouTube has become the company’s top priority: Bartiromo: Let me ask you about YouTube and MySpace. YouTube has these phenomenal growth rates. What do you think is […]

Author Clay Shirky gave a speech at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008, that touched on his idea of the social surplus – the vast quantity of people’s time that is being freed up to do user-generated media, Wikipedia and other useful things as they move their attention from television to the Internet Along […]

Digital music sales will represent 40% of all music purchased worldwide by 2012, according to the research firm In-Stat. Digital music downloads represented 10% of the total worldwide music market in 2007, up from 6% in 2006. Factors contributing to this growth include the global expansion of broadband, continued demand for single-track downloads, and expanding […]