Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Apple has announced that people have downloaded 5 billion items — and counting — from its iTunes Music Store. The online emporium features more than 8 million songs, 20,000 TV episodes and 2,000 movies. (Mediaweek/Billboard 6/19) (

In April, Facebook caught up to MySpace in worldwide unique visitors (actually nudging past it with 116.4 million unique visitors versus 115.7 million for MySpace). Now the worldwide comScore numbers are out for May and Facebook continues to blow past MySpace with 123.9 million uniques (up 6 percent), versus 114.6 million for MySpace (down 1 percent). Facebook also boasted more pageviews worldwide (50.7 billion versus 45.4 billion). Maybe MySpace’s redesign which just went live this week will pick things up for them again. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/20/facebook-blows-past-myspace-in-global-visitors-for-may 6/20)

(Below) Well, here’s an interesting way of addressing the competition.

The rise of Facebook did MySpace a favor by galvanizing the social network, says News Corp. president and COO Peter Chernin. Facebook spurred MySpace into change, culminating in a major redesign this week. “We owe a great debt to Facebook. It knocked us on the head.” (Iwantmedia 6/20, http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/38479/News+Corp+COO+gives+thanks+to+Facebook.html 6/20)

Google may have some unlikely allies in defending its proposed partnership with Yahoo: the very advertisers that critics say may be hurt by the deal. “It’s simpler to reach people if the access to the marketplace is controlled by fewer sources,” claims one marketer. (Iwantmedia 6/20, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aC75mgm67PNc 6/20)

MTV Networks’ virtual worlds at vMTV.com are giving fans a chance to pick their favorite of six up-and-coming bands in the “Battle of The Bands II” contest. Music fans decide which band will have a shot to move on by campaigning for votes and throwing in-world parties and events. Competing through June 22 are 2*Sweet vs. Desoto Jones. (Cynopsis 6/20)

Yahoo! announced the global availability of two new email domains – ymail.com and rocketmail.com – to give users a better chance at creating an email address or Yahoo ID they like. (Yahoo Mail, still the leading web-based mail service, has some 260 million worldwide users, which means most users must resort to cryptic combinations of names and numbers.) (Cynopsis 6/20)

Tribe Pictures is producing an original web series debuting Monday called Get Fit with Alyson sponsored by Nintendo and starring Alyson Stoner (of the upcoming Disney kids movie Camp Rock.) Each 3-minute webisode sets out to inspire teens to live a more active lifestyle (such as trying new games on the Wii Fit device). Additional content will be featured exclusively on the Nintendo Channel, accessible only through broadband-connected Wiis. (Cynopsis 6/20)

These children scare me much like the children on the Mickey Mouse Club did. . .  Could Alyson be the next Britney?  For her, I hope she’s more of a future Christina.

The Associated Press says it has “had a constructive exchange of views with interested parties in the blogging community about the relationship between news providers and bloggers.” The news organization and the Drudge Retort blog consider their contested matter “closed.” (Iwantmedia 6/20, http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003819095 6/20)

Internet Advertising Revenue rose by 18.2% year-over-year during Q1 08 according to the latest IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers revenue report. However, growth slowed slightly from Q4 of last year when revenues totaled $5.9 billion, the highest ever recorded. (Cynopsis 6/20)