Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

What was a bad situation in November 2008 is starting to turn outright ugly – Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what’s worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook’s 276 million. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/23/facebook-hockey-sticks-while-myspace-languishes/ 3/23)

CBS fired all on cylinders with its multiplatform coverage of March Madness, tipping off tourney simulcasts on Thursday with record traffic. Broader distribution, heavy promotion and the addition of Silverlight 2-powered (and Akamai-served) HD-quality streaming this year helped drive 2.7 million unique visitors to the NCAA March Madness on Demand video player, a 56% spike from last year. Users consumed 2.8 million hours of live video and audio streaming, up 65% from 2008. (Cynopsis 3/23)

Amazon is beta testing its HDTV service as it gets ready to compete with Apple’s iTunes for television downloads for $2.99. Gigaom reporter Janko Roettgers googled around Amazon’s listings to discover unannounced pricing details. The New York Times/GigaOm (3/21)

Amateur video-makers are ensnared in a dispute between Warner Music and Google‘s YouTube over how the music company should be paid for non-professional clips that use copyrighted works. The dispute is causing thousands of videos to be yanked from the site. (Iwantmedia 3/23, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23warner.html?_r=1 3/23)

Advance Publications’ 174-year-old Ann Arbor (Mich.) News will follow in the footsteps of Hearst’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer by shutting down its daily newspaper and replacing it with an Internet news operation, AnnArbor.com. Job losses “will be unavoidable.” (Iwantmedia 3/23, http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090323/tc_afp/usmedianewspapersindustryinternetcompanyadvance 3/23)

Apparently, advertising on traditional television still works: Viewership on Hulu surged 55% in February, thanks to the video site’s Super Bowl commercials featuring “30 Rock” star Alec Baldwin, says comScore. That growth put Hulu at No. 2 of top-gaining properties. (Iwantmedia 3/23, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2343547,00.asp 3/20)

To help keep Ugly Betty fans appeased during the show’s spring hiatus, ABC.com premiered the first of six new short-form episodes of the web exclusive Ugly Betty: Mode After Hours series starring Michael Urie and Becki Newton. The initial six webisodes garnering over 10 million views, according to ABC. (Cynopsis 3/23)

Redlasso, the troubled video startup that was effectively sued into oblivion last year by major networks including NBC, Fox, and CBS, is back from the dead. The site has just closed a deal with Fox, allowing it to offer embeddable video content to bloggers for the first time since last July. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/23/fox-breathes-new-life-into-redlasso/ 3/23)

MyDamnChannel, home of the much beloved You Suck at Photoshop, has secured the rights to stream Pilot Season, one of the real gems to come from NBCU’s now defunct Trio network. It stars a wonderful cast of comedic talent including the promiscuous Sarah Silverman. (Cynopsis 3/23)

Online ad network Federated Media is launching ExecTweets, a real-time tool to help people find, follow and engage with leading business execs on Twitter. ExecTweets, which aggregates tweets into industry verticals, is produced with Twitter and sponsored by Microsoft. (Iwantmedia 3/23, http://blog.federatedmedia.net/archives/2009/03/announcing-exec.php 3/23)

Salesforce.com recently rolled out the Service Cloud, a customer service application that tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet from sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and then uses this information to better equip commercial customer service operations with useful knowledge. Salesforce has now connected Twitter to the Service Cloud, allowing customer service reps using the SaaS to access tweets from more than 8 million Twitter users. (http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/03/22/salesforce-puts-tweets-in-the-cloud/ 3/22)

Ad-supported, DRM-encumbered online music service SpiralFrog went dark on Friday just 18 months after launching, per CNET. SpiralFrog, which had output deals with only two of the four major labels, had trouble competing with better-established music streaming services. (Cynopsis 3/23)

comScore Top 10 Gaining Properties by % Change in Unique Visitors (U.S.)
Feb. 2009 vs. Jan. 2009
Total Uniques (000)         Jan-09     Feb-09     % Change  Rank by Unique Visitors
The Mozilla Organ.         14,161     22,851        61                 35
HULU.COM                      5,022      7,796        55                127
Wells Fargo                   11,724     18,121        55                 53
IRS.GOV                       14,663     22,068        51                 39
TaxACT                         5,883      7,771        32                130
Hallmark                        3,827      4,863        27                222
News International          4,040      4,902        21                221
Intuit**                      16,172     19,563       21                  46
H&R Block**                  6,073      7,269        20                143
Betawave Partners-Partial 3,582      4,279        19                245
Total Internet : Total
Audience                    191,863    192,187        0         N/A
Source: comScore Media Metrix
*Ranking based on the top 250 properties in February 2009.
**Intuit and H&R Block properties include non-tax related products
and services such as Quicken, Quickbooks, and H&R Block Banking Services

comScore Top 50 Properties (U.S.) – Feb. 2009 Unique Visitors (000)
Rank  Property  Unique Visitors     Rank       Property   Unique Visitors
(000)                                                   (000)
1   Google Sites           148,885     26   Target Corporation    26,961
2   Yahoo! Sites           144,304     27   Bank of America        26,148
3   Microsoft Sites        121,093     28   Time Warner             25,911
4   AOL LLC                105,016      29   Weatherbug Property 25,515
5   Fox Int. Media          84,632     30   Answers.com Sites     24,997
6   Ask Network             71,343     31   Demand Media          24,574
7   eBay                        67,474     32   United Online, Inc     23,860
8   Wikimedia Sites        60,892     33   Gorilla Nation            22,968
9   Amazon Sites            59,944     34   Expedia Inc              22,880
10  Facebook.com           57,375     35   Mozilla Organ.          22,851
11  Glam Media              51,121      36   Photobucket.com      22,606
12  Apple Inc.                 50,867     37   Gannett Sites            22,289
13  Turner Network          48,904    38   AT&T, Inc.                22,137
14  CBS Interactive         48,872     39   IRS.gov                    22,068
15  NY Times Digital        46,199     40   WordPress                22,015
16   Viacom Digital          44,346     41   JPMorgan Chase        20,800
17   craigslist, inc.           39,016     42   Real.com Network     20,407
18   Weather Channel      37,215     43   Shopzilla.com Sites   20,154
19   AT&T Interactive       35,324     44   CareerBuilder LLC     20,083
20   Adobe Sites              33,287     45   Everyday Health       19,942
21   Comcast Corp.          31,958     46   Intuit                       19,563
22   Wal-Mart                  29,415     47   Monster Worldwide    19,559
23   Superpages.com       28,956     48   iVillage.com network  19,433
24   Verizon Comm.         27,979     49   WebMD Health          19,339
25   Disney Online           27,615     50   NBC Universal           19,091
Total Internet : Total Audience      192,187
Source: comScore Media Metrix