Media - Internet

Internet users in the United States (US) are spending nearly half their online time visiting content, a 37 per cent increase in share of time from four years ago. Katrina damages. Quality content sites see a consistent pattern -- major news drives traffic spikes, but traffic remains consistently higher even after the event. Major news events such as Hurricane Katrina (above) and high profile...

Aug. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Yahoo! Inc., fighting Google Inc. for local advertisers, added more city-specific Web pages with information on movies, events and neighborhood restaurants. Yahoo Local will have a weekend section to help users in cities from San Francisco to New York find things to do, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said yesterday in an e-mail. The site also lets visitors add...

Washington - Many in the newspaper business have embraced the Internet warily. For all the promise the Web platform has, it also holds some big pitfalls. Yes, the online world offers potentially broader audiences and the promise of cutting costs by slicing into publishing and circulation expenses. But the free content model on the Web is particularly scary for newspapers. If the content online is...

NEW YORK Since Facebook opened its site to developers in May, it has been flooded with mini-programs that let users throw virtual food at one another, post movie reviews and share YouTube videos. The influx of applications, now up to over 2,800, is leading to the creation of ad networks designed to let developers profit from their work and help advertisers reach Facebook's growing user base...

Social networking sites worldwide have grown substantially in the past year, with some sites registering increases of as much as 270 percent, according to a study released by Internet measurement company ComScore Inc. Social networking behemoth MySpace.com attracted more than 114 million global visitors age 15 and older in June 2007, representing a 72 per cent increase versus year ago. Facebook...

“The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.” The site ran the 1,450-word column, which “fell into our hands,” in its entirety. In it, Mr. Goldstein proposed that his newspaper promote itself by following...

Stockton and Darlington may seem an unusual place to begin exploring the potential pitfalls of the digital revolution, but as the birthplace of the railway revolution, it provides a context for some alarming parallels to be drawn. September 1825 saw the first passenger steam train chug along the Stockton & Darlington railway line. In the period that followed, entrepreneurs flooded the market with...

Agence France-Presse (AFP) will syndicate its video service, AFPTV, to thousands of vertical websites. This follows a partnership deal with ClipSyndicate, a next-generation ad-supported video syndication network. ClipSyndicate’s website publishers search and publish fully licensed, authoritative video clips from respected providers, and receive a portion of advertising revenue. AFPTV, a major...

NEW YORK: The Associated Press will be ending its highly-touted “asap” service in October, E&P has learned. Staffers were notified this morning about its October 31 demise as a stand alone. It’s not known if any layoffs will come. About 200 newspapers subscribed to the service. It was launched in 2005 as a response to the growth of blogs and so-called youth tabs, and had 24 staff members. It...

Microsoft is “hellbent and determined” to become a “powerhouse” in the advertising business, according to CEO Steve Ballmer. As if to underline the point, Microsoft has just signed a deal to acquire an internet ad exchange. While financial information is yet to be disclosed, it has been reported that Microsoft has purchased adECN, a Californian internet advertising exchange platform. AdECN’s...