Christina Applegate Arriving To “The Late Show W/ Conan O’Brien”

Christina Applegate was all smiles as she arrived to the NBC studios to be on, “The Late Show With Conan O’Brien“. Are there any fans of her new show, “Samantha Who?“? I think the show is pretty funny and rather cute. I especially like the best friend who delivers some of the funniest lines.

WENN
Share [...]

Price Harry Out With Some Princesses

I’m sorry. When did Prince Harry become a man? Did I miss something? Like a decade? These pictures are actually confusing me. How old am I? Better yet, how old is HE? And how ODD it is to watch Prince Harry come out of Mahiki nightclub in London alongside Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. In [...]

New Kids On The Block Reunite

New Kids on the Block! New Kids on the Block! New Kids on the Block! New Kids on the Block! New Kids on the Block!
I’m sorry I just can’t get over it! How exciting was it to watch the New Kids on the Block talk about being back together on the Today show? HOW [...]

IAC’s launch of gaming site InstantAction imminent

 

 

IAC, the parent company of Ask.com, is looking to get into online gaming in a big way. According to Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org, IAC’s is looking to spend $50-100 million to build their new gaming portal, InstantAction into something that carries titles with “deeper” interactivity than the casual fare typically found online.

The site is currently looking for sign-ups for their beta phase, and it promises to deliver games that sit in the spot so far largely unexploited between casual online gaming and full-on console or computer games. From watching the demo video on the front page of the new gaming site, the games do look to be some of the most graphically complex I have seen that promise to run in-browser. It is probably safe to assume that a lot of that money slated to be invested in the new venture is going into resource management development.

IAC’s drive to build InstantAction in a sure hit surely stems from the conglomerate’s purchase last year of GarageGames. It doesn’t appear to want to make a small splash. But the timing seems odd for such a major development, what with all of the recent layoffs at the Ask search portal. It leaves one feeling a bit curious when a company with some outstanding corporate questions is seen throwing this much money at a fairly unproven product category.

...................................................................................................................... 

MyKinda heads for the deadpool

 

 

I just got word from MyKinda founder Lee Wilkins that he plans to shutdown the Eastern European blog network later today.

The network launched just last September and was being bootstrapped. 

Wilkins says the shutdown is temporary to ensure that money due to writers doesn’t continue to add up. The sites will remain down until, he says, “we redefine a more profitable sustainable business model.” The company had total expenses of about €319,000, with no advertising revenue to offset it. Wilkins capitalized the company with €175,000, leaving €144,000 or so in unpaid debts.

MyKinda joins the DeadPool for now. Hopefully we’ll see them relaunch down the road, and continue to cover tech and other news in Eastern Europe.

....................................................................................................................... 

Wedding website buys wedding magazine

 

 

You know the media world has been turned upside down when Websites start buying magazines. Today, the Knot, which operates the wedding site of the same name, acquired The Bump, a group of local magazines and maternity guides in 11 cities. Terms were not disclosed.

In an effort to reduce the natural churn of its audience (who needs to check a wedding site after the big day is over?), the Knot created other bookend lifestyle sites—TheNest for newlyweds, and TheNestBaby for new parents. So what does a Website need magazines for? The Bump is distributed in OB/GYN offices and could help channel readers to TheNestBaby. The Knot can also use it to sell combined print/Web advertising packages.

It’s got to do something to drive traffic. TheNestBaby barely registers on comScore, with only 171,000 unique visitors in the U.S. in January, compared to the TheKnot’s 1.8 million (which itself shot up in January after a few months of decline). Maybe print isn’t dead after all. I wonder if we are going to see more Web-buy-print deals, especially in niche media.

 .....................................................................................................................

Amazon offering user Generated Video Hosting

 

 

Amazon has quietly entered the video hosting and monetization game with Your Video Widget.

Your Video Widget allows any registered Amazon Affiliate to upload a video and then select products that can be displayed as the video progresses (demo above). Video content can be anything from a product review through to a holiday video, but there are some restrictions; users can not include a URL in the video, or feature availability, price, or alternative ordering/shipping information for any product in the video itself, on top of the usual porn and piracy restrictions. Users can pick any products they would like to be displayed, with Amazon suggesting only that they work better if they have some context to the video, and that no two products can appear within 10 seconds of each other.

Like all Amazon Affiliate related advertising, the ads served are paid as a percentage of generated sales, and are not offered on a CPC or CPM basis.

Maximum file size is 100mb, length 10 minutes, and accepted formats are avi, flv, mov, mpg, wmv.

Amazon Video Widgets do not come with a central portal where you are able to view videos YouTube style, so this product wont compete in that space. For those looking at new ways of monetizing their videos, be it either because they are unable to sign up to YouTube’s program, or are not getting good results from YouTube, Amazon Video Widgets provide another path to video monetization.

....................................................................................................................... 

The markets didn't react well to Google advertising figures

 

 

Google’s stock took a big hit today—still down 4 percent to $465—on comScore data suggesting that the click-through rate on its paid search ads is decelerating. As the chart above from Bear Stearns shows, the year-over-year growth of paid clicks on Google in the U.S. went from 37 percent in October to 0.3 percent in January. Since these are year-over-year numbers, seasonality is accounted for (there are more clicks in the months leading up to Christmas than after, but this January should not be flat with last January).

 

 

One explanation Wall Street analysts are putting out there today is that this could be an indicator that Google is not immune to the general economic slowdown. While a recession may be coming, that explanation is not convincing. Yahoo would have felt it as well, yet comScore reported a 15 percent year-over-year growth in paid clicks for Yahoo in January (to 242 million, compared to Google’s 532 million). Also, as Bill Tancer at Hitwise points out, traffic from Google to shopping sites is still above last year’s levels (evidence that paid clicks may actually be improving).

 

 

 

 

A more likely explanation is that Google is tightening the reins on clicks to combat click fraud and generate better clicks in general. Also the correlation between comScore’s click-through estimates and Google’s revenues has been highly inconsistent in the past. It definitely isn’t a one-to-one correlation. For instance, in the fourth quarter of 2007, comScore showed a 25 percent year-over-year paid click-through growth rate, yet Google’s actual U.S. revenues grew 46 percent. In the third quarter of last year, comScore showed a 48 percent growth rate for paid clicks, compared to an actual 58 percent growth in revenues. Sequential quarter-over-quarter comparisons are even more all over the map, according to calculations by JPMorgan.

.....................................................................................................................

Yelp raises $15 million fourth round, valuation $200 Million

 

 

Yelp, the popular local review site, has just closed a $15 million dollar round led by DAG Ventures, with a valuation of $200 Million. Yelp says that they will be using the money to expand geographically, add onto their sales team, and establish a second office in New York City. This is Yelp’s fourth round of funding, and has now taken $31 million since their founding in 2004.

Yelp is also boasting some impressive stats: 8.3 million uniques in the past 30 days and over 2.3 million reviews (with the 1 million mark being reached on May 2007). Yelp is in a competitive space with Citysearch, InsiderPages, and YellowBot.

With this latest round, DAG joins previous investors Max Levchin ($1 million, Summer 2004), Bessemer Venture Partners ($5 million, Q4 2005), and Benchmark Capital ($10 million, Q4 2006).

...................................................................................................................... 

Google heads under the sea with cable investment

 

 

Google has announced that it has joined a consortium to build a new trans-Pacific cable between Japan and California.

The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel and will initially increase Trans–Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second.

Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions, Francois Sterin, explains the deal:

“[Google’s] participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.

If you’re wondering whether [Google is] going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no. We’re not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer. Our partnership with these companies is just another step in ensuring that we’re delivering the best possible experience to people around the world.”

................................................................................................ 

Digg clone Yahoo Buzz launches

 

 

Yahoo launches Yahoo Buzz - a Digg-like site that takes stories from pre-approved news publishers (100 to start) and let’s users vote on stories and push them up to the top of the page.

Like Digg, the more users that vote for a story, via the embedded button or on the Buzz site, the higher the story goes on Buzz. But user voting isn’t the only factor in how well stories do. Yahoo is also looking at their search engine logs in real time to determine hot or breaking news. Stories on that topic will get an extra boost in the rankings.

But there’s another part of Buzz that will get publishers excited - every day a few of the most popular stories will also be featured on the Yahoo home page. Yahoo has been experimenting with linking to third party news directly from their home page since last year. In one case, the Buzz team told me, 2 million visitors were sent to Wired for a linked article in the two hours it was on the Yahoo home page. 2-3 stories from Buzz will go on the Yahoo home page daily.

Buzz has categories including entertainment, world news, U.S. news, sports, business, health, and travel. Images and video are also separate categories.

Of course, many publishers won’t be able to handle that kind of traffic flow. But Yahoo is also prepared for that. Smaller sites will only be linked on a fraction of the total home page views - in effect, Yahoo is turning down the firehose for those that can’t handle it.

....................................................................................................................... 

Glam raises $85 million

 

 

Brisbane, California based Glam Media reported an $85 million round of financing, their fourth, today. We first reported that Glam was looking to raise as much as $200 million in August 2007. 

The round was $65 million in cash and $20 million in debt, on top of almost $30 million they raised in three prior rounds. Investors included Hubert Burda Media, GLG Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Accel, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Information Capital. The valuation, as expected, was in the half billion dollar range.

The company, according to their original offering document is not yet profitable. They lost around $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue in 2007. 2008 projected revenues are $150 million and $40 million in profit.

Glam operates a number of small sites geared towards women. Glam.com is the main anchor with the largest reach among these properties, but other owned sites appear to be pure SEO plays like free-beauty-tips.com and celebrity-hairstyles.org. They also sell advertisements for other sites, which make up the vast bulk of its page views.

As an ad network Glam may find its margins squeezed as competition increases. Still, they control a lot of page views. Comscore reports that worldwide uniques across all sites that Glam sells advertising for had nearly 47 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views. That’s 4x the unique visitors and 11x the page views from a year ago.

 ......................................................................................................................