Last year I wrote about the well-propagated myth that over 1 billion people watch the Oscars. Today’s ratings numbers show that the billion viewer is way off the mark: US viewership of the Oscars this year came in at 32 million viewers, the lowest number ever. So unless 970 million people outside the US happened to be watching, the real number of viewers was probably less than 100 million. To make matters worse, many viewers who did watch probably Tivo’d the show, skipping the inane awards like “Best … Continue reading →

The Yahoo pink slips starting flowing yesterday – a rumored 1000 Yahoos cut. I got a text message from one of my friends at Yahoo with the succinct headline “Laid off.” I’ve been a Yahoo stockholder for some time, and I’m glad to see the stock price rising back into the $30/share range. And I suppose that laying off 1000 people will only further add momentum to Yahoo’s share prices. But as a regular guy who knows regular guys (and gals) who just got laid off by Yahoo, … Continue reading →

I know the Internet world is at a virtual stand-still waiting for yet more commentary on the proposed Yahoo and Microsoft merger, so here I am with my take! 1. It Should Have Been eBay. I still think an eBay-Yahoo merger would have been a better fit. There is a lot of overlap between MSN and Yahoo (search, email, portals) but there’s virtually no overlap between eBay and Yahoo. Imagine Yahbay – online auctions, comparison shopping, email, IM, portal and search – all in one company. Now that’s … Continue reading →

Late last year the FTC fined Adteractive over $600,000 for deceptive advertising practices. At issue were advertisements for FreeGiftWorld.com that promised free Ipods and other hot products, but in reality required consumers to fill out offers from advertisers (many of which required paying money) before getting the product. Long before the FTC settlement, Google aggressively purged such ads (known as “incentivized offers”) from the ranks of the AdWords search results. Adteractive, for example, went from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on incentivized ads on Google … Continue reading →