The Catalyst Code

Last week, The Capital Times, Madison Wisconsin’s 90-year old daily newspaper, stopped publishing the print version of its newspaper and announced that it will instead publish all of its news to the web. This move was made after it watched its circulation dwindle by more than half over recent years and its advertising revenue shrink […]

Mobile television hasn’t found a profitable business model just yet, mocoNews.net reports. The providers aren’t making much money even in Korea and Japan, where there are a lot of subscribers. Subscription-based services can’t generate enough revenue.
I agree with the article that we won’t ignite a catalyst reaction for mobile television until subscribers […]

The New York Times surprised analysts Thursday with a small loss instead of the anticipated roughly $24 million in quarterly profits. Today’s Wall St. Journal paints a miserable picture for the graying lady as well Media General and the Tribune on Page B1 (subscription only, see http://online.wsj.com for related news).
For anyone, including the billionaires […]

Google’s Q1 profits shot up 30 percent and beat the Street’s earnings estimates. This comes after all the hand-wringing about the reported dropoff in Google’s search-ad clicks reported by comScore. As I noted in What’s Down with Google? investors still seem to be figuring out what makes Google tick—lots of ingredients go into maximizing the […]

It used to be when you opened the New York Times to pages 2 and 3 there were a couple of things you could be certain of. There’d be the lead news articles on international events, and there’d be a Tiffany’s ad on the right hand side of page 3. This was a great […]

With Google’s stock down 40 percent since the beginning of the year you have to wonder whether some investors have misunderstood how Google makes money all along. Google’s stock too a big whack a few weeks ago when ComScore released stats showing that number of clicks the search-ad giant was getting were down. What the […]

Media companies are engaging in a bit of co-opetition as they form ad networks for selling advertising across member properties. (See the recent AP article Media Groups Share Content in Ad Deals.)
Sometimes competitors are getting in bed together because they figure, I guess, that they don’t want to lose the money for selling […]

Troubled online giant AOL just swallowed also-ran social networking site Bebo for close to $900 million. Given the volatility of the online ecosystem these days you have to give AOL credit for placing such as huge bet on a social networking site that mainly the Brits seem to love, and to Bebo for taking […]

Dinosaurs ruled the earth for 160 million years before a huge impact rendered them all but extinct. They never saw it coming – one day they were the dominant species; the next, they were all but gone. Ad agencies might just end up being the dinosaurs of modern business. The impact that has created […]

The latest WeMedia/Zogby poll citing that most people use the internet for their primary source of news and information is hardly a newsflash. We’ve been reading about the newspaper industry’s demise now for a couple of years as a result of fewer people reading the paper and therefore fewer advertisers using it to reach the […]