Online Display Ad Market To Hit $8.6 Billion, Yahoo Will Dominate

From Online Media Daily - GET READY TO PAY MORE for both premium and remnant display ad inventory. JP Morgan is forecasting the U.S. graphical ad market to hit nearly $8.6 billion this year--a 20% increase from 2007, with much of that cash flow being driven by costlier CPMs. What's going to fuel the price spike? According to analyst Imran Khan, the 4% growth in CPMs will stem from a cocktail of factors, including less abundant (and possibly devalued) offline inventory, improvements in behavioral and geographical targeting, and the increased use of ad exchanges.

Khan said that local broadcast and cable inventory will be "tight" in 2008, as presidential campaign ads will absorb many of the available spots, and the increasingly scattered TV market will contribute to more ad dollars shifting online. And we expect newspapers to continue to bleed circulation and ad revenues to the Web.

Meanwhile, Web publishers will get better at monetizing their inventory via improved targeting, migration to ad exchanges and sites like social networks increasing the number of ads per page. In 2007, some 83% of graphical inventory was sold for less than $1/CPM, according to Khan--so if a publisher improves its yield even by a few cents, it can have a tremendous impact on revenues. | Read full article

Scripps Launches Web Site For Shuttered Newspaper

From Media Daily News - IN WHAT MAY BE A first for American newspapers, a new Web site is being launched to continue the reporting of an expired print newspaper--The Kentucky Post, closed by E.W. Scripps at the same time as its sister publication, The Cincinnati Post. In another twist, the new Web site--KYPost.com--will be hosted by WCPO-TV, a Scripps television property in Cincinnati, drawing heavily on the station's video news for online content. The ad-supported site will focus on breaking local news, traffic advisories, sports scores and schedules, and weather in northern Kentucky communities, including user-generated content. It will be directed by managing editor Kerry Duke, previously the project editor for the paper's print edition. | Read full article

In Restless Pursuit of Craigslist’s Success

From The New York Times - MICROSOFT tried. Google tried. Now it’s eBay’s turn to see if it can dethrone the Web’s most spectacularly successful underdog, Craigslist.

The Kijiji unit of eBay, a free classified ads service covering 13 countries online, was introduced in the United States in late June, and has already achieved modest success in some important markets, including New York. Its vice president and general manager, Jacob Aqraou, said it would market itself far more aggressively in 2008, and was further refining its service in hopes of putting a dent in Craigslist’s huge market-share lead. | Read full article

On eBay, Some Profit by Selling What’s Free

From The New York Times - While scouring eBay for interesting Christmas presents a while back, I found and bought a DVD of a film made in 1954 about my home town of Doylestown, Pa. After it arrived I went searching for more information about it — and found the entire film, available as a free download from the nonprofit Internet Archive.

It turned out that the eBay seller had simply downloaded the movie file, burned it onto a DVD and stuck it in the mail. And he was doing the same with a wide range of other public-domain material: military truck manuals from World War II, PowerPoint presentations on health matters from government doctors, vaudeville shorts from the late 1800’s. | Read full article

Netflix Partners with LG to Bring Movies Straight to TV

From The New York Times - Netflix, the DVD-by-mail company with more than 7 million customers, has a new strategy that may one day make those red envelopes obsolete.

The company wants to strike deals with electronics companies that will let it send movies straight to TV screens over the Internet. Its first partnership, announced Wednesday night, is with the South Korean manufacturer LG Electronics to stream movies and other programming to LG’s high-definition televisions.

The partnership will extend a novel feature from Netflix, announced a year ago, that allows paying subscribers to watch any of 6,000 movies and television shows on its Web site free. But that service can only be accessed with a personal computer.

Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, said he hoped to strike other such deals and that Netflix would soon be viewed as a movie channel that might appear on a myriad of devices. | Read full article

Web Playgrounds of the Very Young

From The New York Times - Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set.

Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster Web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children’s entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts to build virtual worlds for children. Media conglomerates in particular think these sites — part online role-playing game and part social scene — can deliver quick growth, help keep movie franchises alive and instill brand loyalty in a generation of new customers.

Second Life and other virtual worlds for grown-ups have enjoyed intense media attention in the last year but fallen far short of breathless expectations. The children’s versions are proving much more popular, to the dismay of some parents and child advocacy groups. Now the likes of the Walt Disney Company, which owns Club Penguin, are working at warp speed to pump out sister sites. | Read full article

Wal-Mart cancels movie download service

From The Globe & Mail - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. quietly cancelled its online video download service less than a year after the site went live, a company spokeswoman said on Thursday.

Wal-Mart shut down the download site after Hewlett Packard Co. discontinued the technology that powered it, Walmart.com spokeswoman Amy Colella said in an e-mail. She added that it will not look for another technology partner.

HP spokesman Hector Marinez said the company decided to discontinue its video download-only merchant store services because the market for paid video downloads did not perform “as expected.” He noted that the Internet video business remains uncertain and is changing rapidly. | Read full article

Apple plans on-demand movie service

From The Globe & Mail - Apple Inc. is preparing to announce next month the long-rumoured launch of a movie rental service through its online iTunes Store, as well as a groundbreaking licensing deal of its anti-piracy technology — moves that could dramatically boost the appeal of digital movie distribution.

News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox is one of the first studios that has agreed to make its films available for rent digitally through iTunes, according to a Financial Times report Thursday that cited unnamed sources.

Apple also has agreed to license for the first time its copy-protection platform called FairPlay so the technology would be built into Fox DVD releases, allowing users to easily transfer the movies from the disc to a computer or an iPod for playback. | Read full article

A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age

From Slashdot - I've spent seven years working as a writer and editor for Slashdot's parent company. During this time I've been to at least a dozen mainstream journalists' and editors' conferences where the most-asked question was, "How do we adapt to the Internet?" You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers, that by now most of them would have figured out how to use the Internet effectively enough that it would produce a significant percentage of their profits. But they haven't. In this essay I will tell you why they've failed to adapt, and what they must do if they want to survive in a world where the Internet dominates the news business. | Read full article

ewmark Denies Craigslist Is Killing Newspapers

From Slashdot - Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld has an interview with Craig Newmark about the history of Craigslist and it's growth over the years (it's now expanding into foreign-language markets — it recently created several Spanish sites in Spanish cities). He also disputes the notion that Craigslist is responsible for dismantling newspapers' revenue models. Rather, he blames niche-classified sites like autotrader.com and Monster as well as newspapers' unrealistic profit expectations in the new media world: 'Newspapers are going after 10% to 30% profit margins for their businesses and that hurts them more than anything. A lot of things are happening on the Internet that never happened before because the Internet is a vehicle for everyone. The mass media is no longer only for the powerful, and that's a huge change for the entire newspaper and news industry." | Read full article