In Other News…Van Natta Out as MySpace CEO
Question: How long does it take for a new CEO of a social media falling star to get his walking papers these days?
Answer: If you are Owen Van Natta of MySpace it takes just about 9 months.
Wow, I wonder if the time went quickly? It seems like just yesterday that the announcement of the former Facebook executive’s hiring was the start of a new era at MySpace that would make its climb back to the top of the social media heap. Instead the only news the site seems to generate is just how poorly it has performed and how much of waste of money and time it has been for News Corp. who acquired the company back in 2005 for $580 million.
The Wall Street Journal (that’s a News Corp. property that actually makes money and has some traction) reports
“While this may be a surprising turn of events for some of you, I am absolutely confident that this change is best for all parties involved and–most importantly–the MySpace business,” Jon Miller, News Corp.’s chief digital officer, said in an internal memo.
Mr. Miller, who oversees MySpace, hired Mr. Van Natta last April as part of a shakeup that saw MySpace founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson reassigned to different roles.
Mr. Van Natta, a former Facebook Inc. executive, was hired last year to turnaround MySpace, which has suffered from sagging advertising revenue and stagnant Web traffic.
“In talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time,” Mr. Miller said in a statement Wednesday.
Mr. Van Natta couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
By most accounts it appears that the infighting amongst the leadership at MySpace was pretty intense. Van Natta’s reputation as a tough negotiator may have been why he was hired but the rest of his reputation according to former co-workers was around his short fuse. Combine that kind of volatility with egos and the pressure to make something happen with a dying property and you have the makings of some serious fireworks.
So now that MySpace has once again put themselves in the headlines for more negative reasons is there any hope? Well, one sour note is the report from News Corp. executives that MySpace is falling short of minimum traffic levels that it has in place for a $900 million deal with Google. Not good.
But enter Rupert Murdoch who tried to spin his way through his thoughts on MySpace
“It’s not yet where we want it,” News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said about MySpace in an earnings call last week. He added that Web traffic had shown signs of stabilization. “We believe the stability points to progress the new management team has made to repositioning MySpace as the prime place where people share thoughts and ideas about music, entertainment and other popular content.”
No problem, Uncle Rupert, and the then the sugar plum fairies will come down and dance and all will be fine with the world. Things are not likely to get better any time soon. With all the talk of connecting social networks when is the last time that a list included MySpace?
Coupons Fast Becoming Online Faves
The move to trying to save more money online should come as no surprise to anyone for all the obvious reasons. With those reasons being so obvious we won’t belabor the point here (btw, for those wondering, the economy still kinda sucks). What is happening though, is the shift from the printed coupon to the online coupon is very real and is creating the same commotion in the heated online v. offline world as the news debate is. After all, many papers are clinging to the fact that their Sunday circulations remain OK because of the perceived savings offered by the coupons.
NCH Marketing Services, a subsidiary of Valassis Communications is reporting an increase of 30% use in traditional coupons with an additional $600 million in savings by consumers. Unfortunately, we often measure just how hot an industry is by how many lawsuits it generates.
This past summer, Valassis won a $300 million verdict against News America Marketing (NAM), a subsidiary of the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp. It accused the coupon powerhouse of trying to monopolize supermarket advertising.
In July, following the verdict in Michigan’s Wayne County Circuit Court, NAM president Chris Mixson said the decision “rewards a company that turned to litigation as its business strategy rather than compete.” He said evidence barred by the court would have made a case that Valassis tried “to induce collusion when it announced its new pricing policy in a public investor call.”
So as with most things, the offline world is busy navel-gazing in court while the online business is preparing to move in take control.
While those two titans of paper coupons duke it out, another battleground is emerging. Although a study by Experian Marketing Services, a global information services company, assessed that 70% of households still clip coupons from newspapers, beleaguered print media companies are starting to lose their once tight grip on the market to online competitors.
NCH says online coupon distribution rose 41% during the first 9 months of 2009 and RedPlum.com saw coupon prints from the site jump 51% so far this year. At year-end 2008, online coupons represented 4.8% of all coupons redeemed in the U.S., compared to 6.3% by mid-year 2009.
I am still amazed at how slow and plodding the offline world is in most sectors when it comes to seeing the competitive threat that online services are. Hey, all of you folks in the printed coupon business here’s your wake up call. Google purchased AdMob to get into this business. And to prove they are serious
Google has begun issuing 100,000 window stickers to businesses in more than 9,000 cities and towns. Each window decal has a unique bar code that can be scanned with the camera feature of most mobile devices. The code will then immediately load the browser with information about the business and allow access to related coupons and offers.
You don’t need a printed coupon for that to work.
Google Offers Newspapers the First 5 Clicks Free to Keep AdSense Scrapers Alive
For this post, I need two volunteers!
Let’s take this announcement from Google:
…we’ve decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google’s Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!
And yes, you sir. The Financial Times report on how much news scraping exists on the web:
The study of 101,000 articles published by 157 newspapers found that more than 75,000 sites reused 112,000 almost exact copies without authorisation, and a further 520,000 articles in part…The study found Google accounted for 53 per cent of the advertising being run alongside unlicensed stories…
I will now combine these two articles into an incredible–or incredulous–observation. 
Is it pure coincidence that on the day News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch was in Washington telling the FTC about the need to reform "fair use" laws to prevent the "theft" of its content, Attributor pulls out some heavy numbers in support and Google decides to bend a little?
I think not!
Forget the fact that Bing is rumored to be courting the newspaper industry to dump Google, the search engine plans to lose a significant slice of revenue, if the publishing industry faces any kind of mass reform. Think about it, Google offers to change the "First Click Free" terms in order to save the AdSense revenue it makes from bloggers, and the more nefarious scrapers.
It’s a small sacrifice, right?
You’ve heard of the expression "an irresistible force meets an immovable object," right? News Corp. is about to meet Google head-on!
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Why a Deal With News Corp Would Make Bing the Trader Joe’s of Search
A confession.
Sometimes I use Bing.com.
Stop looking at me that way. I said I "use" Bing.com. I didn’t say I enjoy it! In fact, I "use" Bing.com when I’m shopping online and want to get the best price. Bing has a pretty cool shopping engine and I can get up to 10% cashback with its cashback program.
See, I "use" Bing.com.
The problem is, that use does not result in me using the search engine for any other task. And that is the issue I see with rumors that Bing is willing to pay News Corp and other news organizations to provide their content exclusively to the Microsoft search engine. The FT reports:
Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.
OK, so let’s say this deal comes together–which I really doubt–but let’s say it does. What will happen? I, and many others, will know that in order to read an article on the Wall Street Journal, we have to go to Bing.com and not Google. We conduct our search, read the article, then decide to keep Bing as our default search engine…go right back to using Google!
While Bing does need to get some exclusives like this, I just don’t see them being enough to fully switch the masses away from Google. If I know that my favorite bread is only available at Trader Joe’s, I’ll occasionally buy my bread there. The rest of the grocery shopping will be done at Harris Teeter…technically by my wife, but you get the idea. 
What do you think? Will deals like this convince you to switch to Bing? Forget you–you’re smart–will it convince the average search user to switch?
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Thoughts On A “Killer” Bing-News Corp Deal & The Myth Of An “OPEC For News”
It’s back, the prospect that Microsoft might try to make Rupert Murdoch happy by offering a “get listed with Bing” exclusive deal. Later, I’ll revisit the topic in a coordinated fashion. But for now, I’ve collected a number of thoughts I’ve put out on Twitter, in blog comments and elsewhere.
First, I’ll point readers back to [...]
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News Corp. Getting Ready to Get Ready
The end of what you ask? The end of the newspaper industry? Sure, why not? That’s an easy one and we talk about that probably way too much. The end of free content? Now we’re getting warmer. Earlier this week we told of Rupert Murdoch’s master plan (or is that disastrous plan?) to remove his News Corp. content from the search engines like Google. That’s pretty big talk. Crazy talk possibly but big talk nonetheless. So do you just make that kind of threat then wait and see or do you then draw the line in the sand? You know, set a date as to when this grand gesture will occur. Well, let’s not get totally crazy or at least clear on that one. That smells too much like reality.
So what am I driving at here? It’s the continued blustering of News Corp. about pay for content models. Now, they are talking about a sort of uprising that they will lead so that all media outlets will follow.
Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, said the media mogul was ready to block Google’s access to his sites soon and that the company would lead the media industry in this direction.
“There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate,” Mr Miller told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday. “It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online [by giving its away for free) so something needs to happen.
“I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.”
Soon. Well, that’s definitive. In an attempt to further clarify this threat of a pitchfork and torch uprising by the media industry Mr. Miller then gave the ominous threat of when this will all hit the fan.
When asked how long it would be before Mr Murdoch took the step to block Google, which every media company relies upon to send them high levels of web traffic, Mr Miller said it would be soon – “months and quarters – not weeks”
Pack up the plantation! They're going to remove themselves from the search engines in a couple of months or maybe like 6 or 9 or 12 months. I don’t know. Do you? Are you worried yet?
Even Murdoch himself is back-pedaling on his own claims about when this grand gesture might / may take place.
Last week Mr Murdoch warned that his plans to charge for access to content across all of his newspaper sites, by the end of next June, could now be delayed.
During a conference call to discuss News Corp first quarter financial results, the media magnate said he couldn’t promise to meet his own deadline – but did say it remained a work in progress and “we are all working very hard” on delivering the pay solution.
Oh for Pete’s sake! This is sounding more and more like the ramblings of a mad man than anything else. Why would you rile up the biggest boon to traffic that any news site has then be wishy-washy on the details and even throw into doubt if they have the nerve or, even worse, the backing of the rest of the media industry to pull this off? Also, in all of this talk they are confusing people about pay walls and search engine access. Will that happen together? Are they all part of the same plan?
Here’s the final piece that is interesting. News Corp. is even calling out the quality of the traffic that comes from the engines as inferior because it may be one time visitors. Excuse me? What if that one time visitor actually had never expressed real interest in your publication but through the engines landed at your site and thought “Hey, not bad. I’m gonna keep coming back.”? This quote from Miller says a lot
“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”
Ok, if you can survive without it then just do it already. Well, that wouldn’t be prudent now would it.
However, Mr Miller admitted News Corporation could not make the bold step alone but was prepared to lead other media companies in this direction. “We will lead. There is a pent up need for this. There has to be a resolution for the free versus pay debate otherwise we cannot afford to pay for things like news bureaus in Kabul.”
Looks to me like this whole thing is just keeping News Corp. in the news because there may not be any real news here since there is no plan and no definition coupled with vague threats and dates of even more vague threats.
I say do it and let’s see what happens. There’s no way to predict how this will play out and some game of cat and mouse will just tick off more people than it’s worth. As Henry Rollins shouted years ago “Don’t think about it …. Do it!” Amen.
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Would Someone Please Explain To News Corp How Google Works?
Yet another News Corporation executive is talking about Google, and yet again, I feel like they have no concept about how Google interacts with their web pages. Which is frightening, since they’re being very vocal about how they’re supposedly wronged by Google. Please, someone, give them a search marketing 101 course.
In the latest volley, News [...]
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Google To Murdoch: Go Ahead & Block Us
The long-running debate over Google and its impact on newspapers and journalism took another turn today when News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch said his company may makes its sites invisible to Google, and Google fired back by saying, in essence, bring it on.
It began with this interview on Australia’s Sky News (which Murdoch owns), reported [...]
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Google Falls Short for MySpace
There years ago, Google and MySpace signed a search deal. Google agreed to provide web, vertical and internal search and contextual ad sales for MySpace and other Fox Interactive Media properties and pay them $900M (guaranteed as long as Fox met its traffic requirements) in shared advertising revenue over the lifetime of the deal. But it looks like this year, the last of the deal, Google has fallen short.
But, says MySpace execs and owner Rupert Murdoch, that’s because Fox has failed to meet its traffic requirements. Meaning traffic is down on MySpace, just a few short years after they fell into the “Trough of Disillusionment” in the hype cycle (translation: the MSM turned on them).
And just how much are they falling off? Rupert Murdoch’s initial assessment on the recent earnings call was that they wouldn’t see any income from Google this year—a $300M shortfall. But the other execs on the line disagreed, saying that they’d probably fall short by $90-$100M.
And because MySpace/FIM (now Digital Media Group, but whatever) didn’t meet their “very high guarantees,” as Murdoch put it, it’s their own fault. Interestingly, at first the deal “calmed some analyst and investor nerves, and allowed News Corp. to claim MySpace was paid for and then some,” says paidContent. News Corp bought MySpcae for $580M in July 2005, and they have seen at least that much in revenue from the Google deal.
What do you think? Was this deal not the good idea it seemed three years ago? Or was this an unforeseeable circumstance?
Dissecting The AP & Murdoch Speeches Against Those Internet News Thieves
Associated Press president Tom Curley and News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch both made speeches yesterday in China that are being widely reported as an attack on Google. Having read through the actual speeches, I was surprised they weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. Below, I’ve highlighted key portions along with [...]
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