Over at Techcrunch they reported yesterday that the New York Times are now receiving nearly a quarter of their total revenues from online advertising.
The New York Times announced third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were down 17 percent to $571 million. Of that advertising revenues decreased 27 percent to $291 million, and the online advertising portion was down 8.2 percent to $68 million.
Last quarter, advertising revenues declined an even steeper 32 percent, and online advertising was down 15.5 percent. So maybe this is the first step on its way back to positive territory. Here are the year-over-year declines in online advertising revenues for each of the past four quarters.
Annual Decline In Internet Advertising Revenues
4Q08: -3.5%
1Q09: -6.1%
2Q09: -15.5%
3Q09: -8.2%
Another interesting data point is that because its print advertising revenues are shrinking at a faster rate than its Internet advertising revenues, the Internet portion is actually a bigger percentage (23.5%) of the New York Times’ total advertising revenues than it was year ago (when it was 18.6%).
I have been a firm believer that print business will slowly leave only the major players in each market and all the smaller business will have to move online or close. However, with these latest figures I now think even the major players could be in big trouble!
Cisco Systems has announced today that its buying Norway’s Tandberg video communications business for $3 billion.
The deal should enhance Cisco’s own TelePresence business where it sells room-sized video conferencing systems that make you feel like you’re talking to people in the same room. These systems costs hundreds of thousands of dollars each but executives feel they can use them to save on travel costs. Tandberg is one of the chief rivals in the business and it makes specialized software for managing the conferencing systems and managing the connections between them.
This new deal is going to put a lot of pressure on Hewlett-Packard who have a very strong video conferencing business with their Halo product. In theory, video conferencing creates a lot of Internet traffic, which in turn helps Cisco’s core business of selling networking gear.
Cisco has bought 40 companies over the past five years, according to the New York Times. In the past week, merger mania has erupted, with Dell buying Perot Systems for $3.9 billion and Xerox buying ACS for $6.4 billion.
With Digg currently being rumoured to be in talks with Microsoft for an acquisition, I thought I would check out and see how the Digg competitors are fairing. One of Diggs’ main competitors is Mixx, now Mixx has been gaining a lot of traffic of late, but I still have a lot of problems with their site compared to Digg.
It seems like everytime I go to Mixx the site isnt function right. Today I headed there to promote a few of our articles, but I could barely launch the site and when I went to submit an article it wouldnt even load the page. So with all the growth, funding and syndication deals, how come Mixx still isnt up to scratch?
The New York times reports that Getty Images is now up for sale. The world’s biggest supplier of pictures and video to media and advertising companies, has put itself on the auction block and could fetch more than $1.5 billion, people briefed on the situation said Sunday.
Getty was founded back in 1995 and current has a catalogue of 3.2 billion images and 4 million unique visitors to its website each month. These figures make the company very lucrative. Goldman Sachs was hired to advise it on a potential sale and Getty has already attracted several potential buyers, mostly private equity firms, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and others.
Bids for the company are due to be finalised by the end of the month. A sale is not assured, but with this high end company being up for grabs, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few private equity firms join forces to finalise a sale.
