SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.
"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."
And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."
The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.
And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.
"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."
It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.
"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."
FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.
The Walt Disney Company is discussing a deal to take an equity stake in Hulu in exchange for providing the video portal with ABC programming, according to a published report.
Citing unnamed sources, news blog PaidContent says that it's not clear how much of ABC's content would be involved, but a final deal could include ESPN, the sports cable behemoth that has been a goldmine for Disney.
Representatives from Disney and Hulu were not immediately available.
The talks between the two companies reportedly are "serious," but a final deal has not been reached, according to two of PaidContent's sources.
In the year since launching, Hulu has quickly risen to the top ranks of online video. The site is currently backed by News Corp., parent company of Fox and NBC Universal.
More to come
Buffeted by a steep drop in its advertising revenues, News Corp. on Thursday reported an 8.4 percent decline in its fiscal second quarter revenues and missed analysts expectations.
Revenues fell to $7.9 billion in the quarter ended December 31, compared with $8.6 billion for the same quarter a year ago. Wall Street was expecting the media giant to generate $8.39 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.
News Corp. posted a net loss of $6.4 billion, or $2.45 a share, during the quarter, compared with a net profit of $832 million, or 27 cents a share, a year earlier.
News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch
(Credit: Dan Farber/CBS Interactive)Excluding impairment charges, the company generated a net profit of 12 cents a share. Analysts, however, were expecting the media giant to post a profit of 19 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters.
News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said in a statement:
Our results for the quarter are a direct reflection of the grim economic climate. While we anticipated a weakening, the downturn is more severe and likely longer lasting than previously thought.
As a result, we have been taking actions to preserve a solid level of operational profitability and a strong balance sheet without sacrificing future growth. We are implementing rigorous cost-cutting across all operations and reducing head count where appropriate.
News Corp. shares were up 2.01 percent in after-hours trading to $7.60 a share. During the regular trading session, News Corp. posted a gain of 2.76 percent to $7.45 a share.
During the quarter, News Corp. reported an adjusted operating loss of $38 million from its "other" category, which includes Fox Interactive Media, as well as Fox's MySpace site. The decline in Fox Interactive was spurred on by, in part, by its launch of MySpace Music. Additional contributing factors included a growth in unique users and an internal expansion of Fox Interactive.
As Americans tuned into their computers during December, the number of online videos viewed jumped 13 percent over the previous month, according to a report released Wednesday by comScore.
In the U.S., viewers watched 14.3 billion online videos in December. That translates into nearly 150 million users watching an average of 96 videos each, comScore noted in its report.
The average viewer, meanwhile, spent more than a total of 5 hours with their eyes glued to the videos, which ran an average of 3.2 minutes. Hulu viewers, however, watched online videos that ran an average of 10.1 minutes.
(Credit:
comScore Inc.)
Sites that attracted the most unique viewers included Google Web sites, which captured the attention of 100,092 unique visitors, who watched an average of 59 videos each.
Google received a big boost from its YouTube site, which accounted for 99 percent of the 5.9 billion videos viewed from its Web sites, according to comScore.
Other sites that attracted a sizable following included Fox Interactive Media, which had 56,895 unique viewers in December who watched an average of 7.8 videos, followed by Yahoo Web sites with 42,761 unique visitors viewing an average of 7.7 videos.
The digital unit that oversees MySpace and Photobucket for News Corp. has laid off about 100 people, or 5 percent of its workforce, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Fox Interactive Media was formed in 2005 to oversee News Corp.'s digital holdings.
MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said last year that the social-network site has seen big gains in ad growth. But some of News Corp.'s other digital holdings don't appear to be faring as well. Staci Kramer at the blog PaidContent.org reported last week that FIM had plans to shut down its storage site, Flektor and that there were layoffs at sports site Scout Media--another FIM property.
A FIM representative declined to comment on the Journal's numbers but did not deny layoffs. A MySpace spokeswoman said there were no layoffs at MySpace.
Post updated 11:45 AM PST
Beet.TV has the scoop on Nielsen Online's tracking of video streams for September 2008. Yahoo Video streams surged 56 percent and unique users grew 35 percent month over month.
(Credit:
Nielson Online)
The month of September was also good for Google's YouTube, which had 12 percent growth in streams. Fox Interactive, MSN/Windows Live and Nickelodeon all had negative growth from August to September 2008, according to Nielsen Online.
It's unclear why Yahoo Video saw such a dramatic increase compared to other sites in September. CNET News has call into the company and Nielsen to check this out.
Update: A Yahoo spokesperson attributed the growth to contextual placement of the videos and traffic due to major news events. Yahoo had record traffic for Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News in September 2008.It would seem that sites with video related to the economy and politics would show some growth in September. Given the frenzied October financial meltdown and Obama-McCain face-off, October should be a strong month for growth.
See also: Jimmy Pitaro, head of entertainment and sports at Yahoo, discusses his division's video strategy with Beet.TV.
Updated August 27 at 4:14 p.m. PDT, with correction to Fox Interactive Media's ranking for the preceding month.
Fox Interactive Media grabbed the most market share among digital display ad publishers in the month of June, according to a report released Tuesday by ComScore Ad Metrix.
Fox Interactive, which owns MySpace, accounted for 15.9 percent of display ad views, or impressions, during the month of June, followed by Yahoo, which ranked second with 10.5 percent of the market. The results marked the third consecutive month that Fox Interactive has maintained a lead over Yahoo, since ComScore changed its methodology for counting ad impressions.
ComScore has since changed its methodology to a "filtered" methodology, in which house ads and small "chicklet" ads that are roughly the size of a piece of Chicklet gum were disregarded in the tabulation of impressions, said Andrew Lipsman, ComScore senior analyst.
That said, the remaining top five Internet publishers retained their ranking in the month of June, which saw a total of 329.8 million digital display ad page views.
AOL, owned by Time Warner, ranked third with 5.8 percent of the display ad market, Microsoft topped out at fourth with a 4.7 percent market share, and Google hit a distant fifth with 1.5 percent market share.
Fox Interactive relied heavily on MySpace for its ad impressions, which accounted for 51 billion of Fox's 52.3 billion ad displays. Yahoo, which racked up 34.7 million ad impressions in June, reached 130 million unique users with its ads. According to ComScore, Yahoo reached the most users over any other publisher.
Lipsman, meanwhile, cautioned that the June results are a snapshot, given comparable year-ago figures are not available due to the tabulation changes.
Stay tuned for July results...
It should come as no surprise, but Google sites officially continued to dominate the Web landscape in July, drawing more than 141 million unique visitors and placing Yahoo and Microsoft at second and third place, according to analyst group ComScore Media Metrix.
AOL took fourth behind the top sites, all of which were enveloped in discussions about acquisitions or partnerships this summer.
Fox Interactive Media, parent company of MySpace, was the fifth most visited group of sites, with a registered 88 million unique visitors. Facebook, on the other hand, landed at No. 16 with 39 million visitors. However, ComScore reported last week that Facebook is the fastest growing social-networking site.
The top 10 U.S. Web properties in July were rounded out by the big names in search, retail, and media: eBay, Ask Network, Amazon, Wikipedia, and CBS sites.
Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.
News Corp., the parent company of MySpace, announced its fourth quarter earnings Tuesday, beating Wall Street expectations on the strength of its television and film businesses.
News Corp. reported a net income of $1.1 billion, or 43 cents a share for the quarter ended June 30, a 27 percent increase over last year. Excluding one-time items, earnings rose to 35 cents per share, a cent higher than analysts had been expecting.
CEO Rupert Murdoch noted in a statement that the company was pleased with its growth, but noted challenges ahead.
"Although we clearly face more challenging macro-economic conditions in fiscal '09, we're well positioned to deliver continued, if somewhat less robust growth," Murdoch said.
MySpace and other Fox Interactive Web properties reported a 57 percent increase in revenue. The company noted that while operating profits increased five-fold on strength of advertising and search revenue growth at MySpace, operating income from Fox Interactive properties was down due to increased technical costs related to new Web site features and ventures.
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