Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

After nearly two years as a company, Twitter has yet to bring in revenue. The micro-blogging site’s initial stab at making money likely will come by April, although it won’t be anything revolutionary, according to CEO Evan Williams. “We don’t like to make too big a deal of it.” (Iwantmedia 2/2, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/01/BUA215ITSO.DTL 2/1)

Video sharing site Metacafe touted phenomenal growth in 2008 reporting a year-over-year increase of 54% in worldwide users to 44 million overall uniques, citing comScore Media Mertrix data. (That’s even faster than YouTube‘s growth, according to comScore, which grew by 44.7% from a year ago.) Key initiatives for 2008 included teaming with content partners to enhance short form entertainment categories including TV clips, movie trailers, music videos and sports highlights; and expanding usage of its Wikicafe system, which entreats users and producers to improve video search functionality by a adding more tags and title descriptions to entries’ metadata. (Cynopsis 2/2)

Another class action pricing lawsuit was filed against Netflix and Wal-Mart alleging that the two companies have partnered to limit competition against one another, per Video Business. The suit claims that Netflix raised its monthly subscription price from $14.99 to $17.99 after reaching a truce with Wal-Mart, which had been offering its own monthly plan undercutting Netflix by $2. (Cynopsis 2/2)

Disney Channel is developing an online magazine about the fictional characters in the upcoming series “Sonny With a Chance.” The magazine, which will be called Tween Weekly, will be ad-supported and will launch on Feb. 8 to coincide with the premiere of the TV show. Multichannel News (2/2)

Yahoo! has discontinued its Ads in RSS service, which enabled network publishers to insert contextual advertising into syndicated content and get a piece of the action thanks to a revenue-sharing program. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/02/yahoo-stops-serving-ads-in-rss-feeds 2/2)

Social media marketing firm Vitrue announced its inaugural ranking of the top social brands for 2008 that are commanding attention and engagement within social communities online. The “Vitrue 100″ ranking analyzes online conversations on a variety of social networking, blogging, micro-blogging, photo and video sharing sites. Apple was the big winner as the iPhone earned the #1 spot as the most social brand, the Apple brand itself ranked #3, the iPod came in at #7 and the Mac legacy brand earned the #16 spot. (Cynopsis 2/2)

The Vitrue 100 – The Top Social Brands of 2008

1. iPhone
2. CNN

3.  Apple

1. Disney
2. Xbox
3. Starbucks
4. iPod
5. MTV
6. Sony
7. Dell

Source: Virtue