March 12, 2009
February 27, 2009
Right Brain Search, 1000 Festival Channels, and Twitter Top 1000
We’re moving at light speed.
- Festival Preview has released embedded video play – essentially enabling 1,000 video channels. It’s addicting.
- Right Brain Search lets you find, learn from photos and videos, and chat with relevant twitters on any topic.
- Twitter Top1000. Find, learn from the best of social media captains, and talk over twitter.
- Media Life – Top1000. Find, learn about the media leaders, and talk over twitter or facebook.
October 29, 2008
October 6, 2008
Ebay Spends More Than $1.2 Billion To Buy BillMeLater And DBA.dk, And Lays Off 10% Of Employees
eBay Firing 1000 (Finally), Needs To Fire More
eBay (EBAY) is finally acknowledging its new reality and cutting its global workforce by 10%
(1000 employees plus temps and open job reqs). The company got fat during its salad days, and now that buyers and sellers are fleeing to Amazon, Google, et al, these cuts are long overdue. Unless the company can rapidly begin to reaccelerate gross merchandise sales, moreover, more cuts should follow…
Ebay Spends More Than $1.2 Billion To Buy BillMeLater And DBA.dk, And Lays Off 10% Of Employees
It’s a big day for eBay and CEO Jon Donahoe. The company is laying off 10% of its workforce, or about 1,000 employees plus several hundred temporary positions. They will take a $70 million to $80 million restructuring charge around the layoffs, they said.
And they’ve made two acquisitions: Denmark’s DBA for $380 million and Amazon-funded BillMeLater for $820 million in cash and approximately $125 million in outstanding options.
Regarding the two acquisitions: We covered dba.dk, Denmarks’ leading classifieds site, earlier this morning. BillMeLater, the larger acquisition, is a service that let’s ecommerce partners issue instant credit to buyers. You enter your birth date and last four digits of your social security number online, and it does a credit check on you in three seconds to determine whether you are worth the risk. Bill Me Later pays the merchant, and sends you a bill. The company has raised a ton of cash - at least $272 million - from Amazon, Azure Capital Partners, Chase Paymentech, Crosspoint Venture Partners, First Data Corp., and others…
September 16, 2008
Sarah Palin A Huge Hit On ABC, And Even Bigger On The Web
Surprise! SNL Sarah Palin Parody Getting More Views On NBC.com Than On YouTube
We know NBC U (GE) and YouTube (GOOG) are working hard to stop video piracy. Good news: it’s working! Well, sort of. So far, NBC.com is getting more views for Tina Fey’s parody of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live than pirated versions on YouTube, but just barely.
NBC.com: 2,304,539 views (according to NBC)
YouTube: 2,038,058 views (according to TubeMogul)YouTube is busy taking down clips as they’re posted. We clicked on several and got the familiar “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC Universal.” But they can’t keep up, and have no claim over clips of news coverage of the skit.
The stats don’t include any views on Hulu, where the SNL clip has become the most popular TV clip of the month. That could mean more people are watching on Hulu than on NBC, but Hulu doesn’t report metrics so hard to say. But it does mean NBC is making ad revenue for at least 50% of those viewing this video clip in the Web, which in itself seems like an achievement.
Sarah Palin A Huge Hit On ABC, And Even Bigger On The Web
Last week ABC got the interview of the month, and it has been making the most of it. It has milked Charlie Gibson’s grilling of Sarah Palin across five shows over two nights: “Nightline,” “Good Morning America”, “20/20″ and two episodes of “World News.” By our unofficial count, ABC has shown parts of the chat to some 35 million people.
Last week, we noted that more people watched the interview on YouTube than ABCNews.com. This week, a new question: Did more people watch Gibson and Palin on the Web than they did on ABC’s TV broadcasts?
The answer is a definitive maybe. If the Web hasn’t won already, it probably will soon.
ABC is furiously taking down pirated clips of the Palin inteview from YouTube as fast as they go up. Still excerpts of the interview have soaked up 35.6 million views on YouTube since last week, according to Tubemogul, which noted that dozens of illegal clips are going up and coming down each hour.
