Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Yahoo announced it has ended talks with Microsoft regarding a sale, citing a meeting on June 8th in which Microsoft claimed it was no longer interested in pursuing the portal. As its share prices tumbled on the news, Yahoo announced a search partnership with Google enabling it to run ads provided by Google AdSense alongside its own search results or on non-search Yahoo web properties. Yahoo says the deal should yield $250-$450 million in the first year and as much as $800/year longer term. At that rate it will take about 15 years to make up for the $12 billion in lost value to shareholders when it first said no to Microsoft at $31/share. (Cynopsis 6/13)

It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/facebook-no-longer-the-second-largest-social-network 6/12)

Los Angeles based social network MySpace, which has 115 million monthly visitors worldwide (Comscore, April 2008), will be launching a redesign of its site next week. The first phase of the project, internally called “MySpace 2.0,” will launch on Wednesday June 18. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/redesign-a-first-step-in-bringing-order-to-the-myspace-chaos 6/12)

The Warner Bros. Television Group unveiled the next step in its digital content strategy, announcing ad-supported broadband video channels for TheWB.com and KidsWB.com to be distributed on a range of outlets from September including DailyMotion, Veoh, Joost, Sling Media and Tivo. The channels give a broader launching pad for its planned original online series beginning with Sorority Forever currently in the works. (Cynopsis 6/13) Mediaweek (6/12)

Comcast’s video site Fancast.com is featuring all 29 episodes of David Lynch’s cult favorite Twin Peaks, and starting Monday Lara Flynn Boyle will write a week-long blog answering questions about her experiences on that show as well as on David E. Kelley’s The Practice. Twin Peaks has enjoyed 9 lives on various channels and platforms over the years, including ABC, Bravo, NBCU’s Chiller and CBS.com.  More Friday the 13th viewing on Fancast includes Night Gallery and The Crow: A Stairway to Heaven. (Cynopsis 6/13)

This combined with the article below confirm the Fancast/Hulu wars.  I love a good web site deathmatch.  Let the games continue. . .

The crew over at Hulu must be gleefully fist-bumping each other this week as Hulu scored a key strategic and public relations coup in adding to its lineup two of Comedy Central’s most popular programs, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.” Though officially positioned as a test, Hulu still deserves big-time kudos as the deal is an endorsement of its value proposition. (http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/mobile.php?2008-06-13/Hulu-Out-Executing-Comcast-in-On-Demand-Programming-/&id=1876 6/13)

Facebook announced its second F8 Developer event earlier today, to be held in San Francisco on July 23, 2008. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/13/facebooks-second-f8-developer-conference-announced-how-will-they-top-last-years-facebook-platform-launch 6/13)

Top 10 Search Providers for April 2008, Ranked by Searches (U.S.)
Provider                     Searches (000)    YOY Growth   Share of Searches
1. Google                     5,109,444            35.4%            62.0%
2. Yahoo!                     1,446,410            -3.4%             17.5%
3. MSN/Windows Live       796,038           30.0%               9.7%
4. AOL                             352,039           -5.1%               4.3%
5. Ask.com                       171,545           35.8%              2.1%
6. My Web                          57,057          -16.0%             0.7%
7. Comcast                         46,156           31.0%             0.6%
8. AT&T Worldnet                28,059          200.9%            0.3%
9. NexTag                           21,996            25.4%            0.3%
10.My Way                          16,742          -37.6%          0.2%
Source: Nielsen Online, MegaView Search