By acquiring a 9.09% stake in Rotana Media, Rupert Murdoch continues to build News Corporation empire. Rotana Media is a pan-Middle East media group that sold about $70 million worth of stake to News Corp. Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, the multi-billionaire owner of Rotana has done deals with Murdoch in the past too. Talal is a 7% owner in News Corporation’s class B stock making him the single largest shareholder outside of the Murdoch family. [paidContent]
The F.C.C. is investigating the FOX game show “Our Little Genius” to find out if they gave potential contestants the answers to the questions. Wow, sounds like a Slumdog Millionaire moment. The parents of one of the children sent a letter to the F.C.C. alleging that a production staff member provided specific answers to about four of the questions. According to Section 508 of the Communications Act of 1934, it is illegal for anyone to give with intent to deceive the viewing or listening public, assistance that will affect the outcome. [NYT]
Twitter has surpassed 1 billion tweets per month. About 1.2 billion tweets were sent out in the month of January, averaging to about 40 million per day [Pingdom]. Twitter has also hired a new CFO. Ali Rowghani will be coming to Twitter from Pixar where he served as CFO [Mashable].
ComScore Buys ARSgroup
COMSCORE, Inc. (NASDAQ:SCOR) has acquired ARSgroup. ARSgroup is an ad research company. The financial details were undisclosed and the deal is expected to close in March. [paidContent]
GameFly IPO
GameFly is a Los Angeles based online video game rental company that has just filed a $50 million IPO on the NASDAQ Global Market. GameFly will trade under the symbol GFLY. Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Piper Jaffray, Cowen and Company, and William Blair & Company are the companies underwriting the deal. GameFly’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, and several other investors. The company launched in 2002. [SoCalTech]
Scrapblog Raises $2.5M
Scrapblog is a website where users can create online scrapbooks. The company has just raised $2.5 million from Steamboat Ventures, the VC firm owned by The Walt Disney Company. Scrapblog now has a total of $10 million in funding. [VentureBeat]
MySpace CEO Natta Resigns
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta has resigned after about 10 months on the job. “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,” stated News Corp chief digital officer in an internal memo [WSJ].
Imeem has been fined $1.77 million by a U.S. district court judge after the company failed to appear in court for copyright infringement. The lawsuit was filed in October 21 by The Orchard Enterprises.
Imeem decided to shut down after being sued before selling assets to MySpace for less than $1 million. The Orchard Enterprises told Imeem to pay them for profits made from music belong to labels or pay $150,000 per copyright infringement instance according to Liz Gannes of GigaOM.
A MySpace company spokesperson said that MySpace was not involved in the lawsuit personally. In that case, it is likely that MySpace acquired the assets that were not involved in Imeem’s lawsuit. Imeem’s technology acquired by MySpace will be rolled into MySpace Music.
Imeem raised a total of $35 million in VC funding from Sequoia Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Warner Music. Warner Music had also previously sued Imeem.
News Corporation and their subsidiaries along with the Denver Post and the Dallas Morning News might be pulling their stories from the Google search engine very soon. Microsoft is rumored to be in talks with News Corporation to partner on a deal that will add the stories into the Bing search engine and news website. The Denver Post, the Dallas Morning News, and The Wall Street Journal would charge for content and remove it from Google News.
Rupert Murdoch was interviewed recently on Sky News and he claimed Google was stealing content from his company. MediaNews Group Inc. CEO William Dean Singleton said that the Denver Post will block Google News when the Denver Post starts charging.
“There’s value in that traffic and I think publishers recognize that value,” stated Google News Head Josh Cohen. “The reason they’re not opting out is they’re getting something from that relationship.”
DirecTV Group Inc. (NASDAQ:DTV) has appointed Michael White as their new CEO. White previously worked at PepsiCo (NYSE:PEP) as the Vice Chairman. Interestingly White does not have much experience in the food and beverage industry so that makes the decision quite interesting for DirecTV. There is speculation that he will act as a “baby-sitter” for DirecTV until a take-over happens. AT&T and Verizon are both potential candidates for buying out DirecTV since they both partner with the satellite TV company.
DirecTV has 18 million subscribers and the company launched in 1994. The company is currently owned by The DirecTV Group which is a division of Liberty Media.
White will be taking the CEO position on January 1 and will be replacing Chase Carey. Carey will be leaving to join News Corp. as the COO and President. Shareholders and the DirecTV management team are currently discussing whether to spin off Liberty Media’s entertainment assets into a separate company. DirecTV used to be owned by News Corporation, but Liberty Media exchanged 16.3% of their stake in News Corp. and $625 million in exchange for DirecTV and three sports networks.
iMeem is a music and video streaming service that also has very popular applications on Facebook and MySpace. iMeem has over 50 employees working in San Francisco, California and the company started around November 2003. iMeem has close to $50 million in total funding since they started. Over 100 million people have used their service at some point and they have over 30 million registered users. Last year the company hired Montgomery and Co. to help find a buyer.
The reason why the acquisition hasn’t take place as of yet is because there is stakeholder approval pending. The amount for buying out the company is not expected to be high considering the amount of venture capital that iMeem had to take in for survival.
Once getting bought out, iMeem will more than likely be rolled into MySpace Music.
When you do a Google search using keywords on business or web companies, it is likely that you will find articles by TechCrunch, Mashable, Pulse2, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal on the top pages. This is because Google favors these online publications for providing users with valuable content. We benefit from people doing these searches and finding our websites and so do all the other blogs out there. That means more ad revenue for us. The more hits you get on the web, the more money you make. Its a simple formula. If Rupert Murdoch wants to remove The Wall Street Journal from Google, so be it. Thats less competition for us.
Personally I think it is an idiotic move for the WSJ to cut themselves off from Google since they supposedly receive 25% of their traffic from the search engine. However Murdoch would rather have a smaller amount of paid traffic than a larger number of people looking at content for free according to the interview. How will people find it if they don’t know it exists? Will cutting yourself from the world make people just give in and pay? It is highly unlikely because more people are starting to get their content online than pay for it. If you don’t believe me, ask someone that works for your local newspaper. I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan and The Ann Arbor News basically went out of business. The Ann Arbor News cut off the circulation to only Thursday and Sunday and changed their name to AnnArbor.com. Some of the staff members at The Ann Arbor News were absorbed into AnnArbor.com and the rest were laid off.
People may argue that they are willing to pay for content online assuming it is credible journalism. The Wall Street Journal has been a household brand for well over a century now so that proves that they are credible. But they started in a time when the invention of a computer was just a dream. Welcome to 2009, Murdoch. Its going to be a bumpy ride for print companies.
Imeem has been fined $1.77 million by a U.S. district court judge after the company failed to appear in court for copyright infringement. The lawsuit was filed in October 21 by The Orchard Enterprises.
