PaidContent.org has taken its first investment, reports BuzzMachine. The sum was said to be ‘less than $1m’ according the WSJ and Rafat says he will make more than $1m in ads this year. Investor Alan Patricof says:
“To start a magazine today would cost a minimum of $15 million to $25 million, and you have to spend through three or four years of losses,” Mr. Patricof said. With blogs, “the economics are a lot better.”
According to Jeff Jarvis senior BBC editors will be going public on their own editors’ blog today, in a further example of media accountability.
The Virtual Handshake Blog Shawn Gold, SVP, MySpace: Marketing in a Networked Culture:
MySpace has 100m users projected by July
84m registered users, 2m new registered users per week (size of Houston), 48m unique visitors per month in US
2nd most popular site for content consumption on the Internet, as defined by page views. 29000 indie film profiles. 1.8m music profiles.
#1 video viewing site
#1 referrer to Google – 8.19% of Google’s traffic
42% of YouTube viewing is happening on MySpace.
iBlogBusiness is a new business blog directory which aims to help people find blogs on specific industries. Sounds a bit like the start of business publishing 2.0.
A study by Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Chancellor Professor of Marketing at UMass provides some insight from a fairly large number of well-establised bloggers. Among the advice:
The report (pdf) is here.
WSJ.com reports that Google has begun trials of free streaming videos.
“Google’s move is a key test of how online ads can finance consumer access to premium video content on the Web, the way TV commercials have supported broadcast television for decades. It could impact the efforts of companies such as Apple Computer Inc. to charge users fees to access popular videos from the Internet. If successful, the video advertising could eventually develop into a significant new extension of Google’s ad system that generated over $6 billion in revenue last year,” it says.
Right Media operates the first open media exchange for the interactive advertising industry. Buyers and sellers, interconnected on a common platform, seamlessly trade more than two billion impressions on the Right Media Exchange daily.
As the Internet grows up the news industry is being forever changed says the Washington Post in an article about the challenges and opportunity of the new media space.
Feeds 2.0 is an RSS aggregator with personalisation built in. It claims to watch what you read and then deliver more of what you are interested in.
A new company called Mashery founded by Orel Michels, former VP Business Development for Feedster, has been given first round funding.
“Our Mashery will be a resource for developers, API providers and mashup users. Over the next six months, we will release a range of services that will make it easier to develop, deploy and use mashups and other “user generated services”, says Michels on his blog.