Jim Breyer, a partner of venture capital firm Accel Partners, has been nominated for election to the board of directors of media conglomerate News Corporation, the company announced this morning.
Breyer will stand for election at News Corp’s annual meeting of stockholders on October 21, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. The company also said that directors Kenneth E. Cowley and Thomas J. Perkins – yes, that would be the founding partner of VC firm and Accel Partners rival Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – will step down from the board afterwards. → Read More
TrueCar, which helps people research new and used car prices and find local dealer savings, has acquired automotive social media company Honk.com, dubbed the ‘Facebook for car buyers’ in the news release.
Interestingly, Honk.com was co-founded by Tom Taira, who is also the co-founder and former president of … TrueCar.
News Corporation, an early investor in Honk.com, will retain an equity stake in TrueCar as part of the agreement. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. → Read More
James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch and currently Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, Europe and Asia, was interviewed on stage at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany.
Murdoch touched on everything from its relationship with Google and Apple, to paywalls for online newspapers, iPad applications and more.
These are my notes: → Read More
Back in June, News Corp put two more of its newspapers, other than the Wall Street Journal, behind a paywall: The Times of London and the Sunday Times. We kind of expected it to be a disaster, but now we actually have some results. The company announced that it signed up 105,000 paying subscribers, plus another 100,000 who were already subscribers to the print newspaper.
But what did the Times lose? According to comScore, the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site. → Read More
News Corp is on the verge of unloading another one of its digital businesses under Fox Interactive Media, the Fox Audience Network (FAN), to Los Angeles-based ad-optimization startup The Rubicon Project. The deal has not been signed yet and may still fall apart, but the two companies are in the final stages of negotiation, according to sources with direct knowledge of the deal. (Talks have been heating up over the past month). In preparation for the sale, or continuation as a standalone business, about half of its 300 employees were let go yesterday, most of them sales people. Rubicon is more interested in the ad technology.
If the proposed deal with Rubicon goes through, it will get certain assets including FAN’s ad server technology, its self-serve banner advertising platform called MyAds, and about 100 employees to help run those parts of the business. In return, News Corp will get about 20 percent of Rubicon’s shares. (When Fox Interactive Media disposed of Rotten Tomatoes, it structured a similar asset-for-equity swap with Flixster). The fact that the ad server technology is one of the key assets here is particularly noteworthy, given that Rubicon’s public posturing in the past was that the ad server is dead. → Read More
A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles about a supposed Facebook privacy breach. We and others noted that the article was complete rubbish. We also noted that the Wall Street Journal’s sister company, MySpace, wasn’t mentioned in the article – either as a disclosure of a conflict of interest or a discussion of whether MySpace was doing the same thing.
The WSJ was actually investigating MySpace, says a source close to the company, and were planning on publishing the information the investigation uncovered.
MySpace has had three different CEOs in the last two years, as well as a period where they were led by co-presidents. If you count Jon Miller, who runs the whole show, they’ve had four CEOs. Based on MySpace’s overall level of disorganization and constant leadership changes, we’re not surprised that the WSJ investigation landed on their doorstep, and discovered questionable privacy practices.
But the story was shelved. → Read More
I’m sort of scratching my head at the Wall Street Journal’s article (mostly behind a paywall) that MySpace is in negotiations over some kind of new search advertising deal.
“News Corp. is in discussions with Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. about replacing MySpace’s crucial search-advertising partnership with Google, which expires next month, according to people familiar with the matter,” says the WSJ, which is also owned by MySpace parent News Corp.
Well, yeah. Their deal with Google is ending. Supposedly in August, although the Google agreement I read said it ended in June 2010. Everyone knows MySpace has been trying to figure out a way to replace that $300 million/year in revenue. And everyone knows it isn’t going to happen.
But anyway, here are some interesting things that the WSJ left out of their article: → Read More
News Corp. has acquired Irata Labs, a small social software development studio based in San Francisco, the LA Times has learned.
The company, which builds games and other apps for social networks, has confirmed the deal to us and on Twitter (check out these tweets from Irata Labs CEO Chris Abad and co-founder and designer D. Keith Robinson). The terms were not disclosed. → Read More
Back in October 2009, Dow Jones debuted a premium business news site dubbed The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition in an attempt to get companies to pay up $588 a year for access to more personalized, business-related news and analysis.
This morning, the WSJ Pro Edition became available to consumers as well, at the exact same price point ($49 per month) although existing WSJ.com subscribers can upgrade for a discounted rate (+$25 per month). → Read More
News Corp. isn’t beating around the bush with its digital assets. Rotten Tomatoes has been sold off to Flixster. Photobucket went to Ontela. IGN had 20% staff cuts, and MySpace is dealing with co-presidents.
Fox Audience Network, the advertising arm for News Corp.’s digital assets has trudged stoically through all the drama. Under President Adam Bain the entity has grown and now powers the ads not only for MySpace and other News Corp. websites, but also a fairly robust set of third party partners.
Fox Audience Network is the 8th largest advertising networks according to Comscore, with nearly 150 million U.S. unique visitors a month. And it’s a close race. AOL is first with 185 million, and Google is second with 178 million. → Read More
Nobody is safe in the House of Murdoch, especially on the Internet side of the house. Yesterday, News Corp’s online games business, IGN Entertainment, announced layoffs to its staff. Cuts were pretty even across all parts of the company, and we’ve been able to learn that about 65 people in total lost their jobs, or roughly 20 percent of staff.
Joystiq was the first to get a hold of the layoff memo from president Roy Bahat, who wrote: → Read More
Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”
Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will. → Read More
News Corporation this afternoon announced financial results for the second quarter ended December 31, 2009.
Zooming in on the ‘Other’ segment, which houses News Corp’s Digital Media group, things are not looking too bright over there, in contrast to the rest of the business.
The business unit, which manages MySpace, IGN Entertainment, as well as the Hulu joint venture with NBC Universal, took a bit of a hit (again). → Read More
The Associated Press is yapping again about the “exploitation of news” by search engines, news aggregators and, well, the Internet itself. The CEO of the AP, Tom Curley, told a media industry powwow in Beijing:
We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost — to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.
I am temporarily lifting our ban on AP stories to make a point. The remarks seemed to be directed at Google, among others. But if you follow the link above, it will take you to an AP article hosted on Google. Is Google stealing it? No, Google already licenses stories from the AP, so it is already “supporting it.”
What’s really behind all the bluster is that the AP is in the midst of renegotiating a new licensing deal with Google, and is using vague public threats to try to get more money out of them. It’s really kind of sad. → Read More
As far as we can tell, the guy who’s going to be taking over MySpace along with the rest of News Corp.’s digital assets doesn’t actually use the site itself. We cannot locate a MySpace profile for Jonathan Miller, who will shortly become the CEO of Digital Media for News Corp.
We’re big believers in company executives eating their own dog food, and more often than not they do. But MySpace is a different story – every once in a while they announce new executives who don’t have a MySpace page at all. It’s always fixed promptly, but it’s a bit of an embarrassment.
News Corp., MySpace and Miller all either refused to comment or haven’t responded to our inquiries.
My guess is the MySpace team will be creating one for Miller shortly, assuming he doesn’t in fact have one. He could have an anonymous profile, but from what we’ve heard he doesn’t. We love Miller and think he’s an awesome choice for the huge job he’s about to take on. And now’s the time for him to start using MySpace. → Read More
