Can Your Station Turn Viewers Into Members?
For the nearly 700 people who came, KSAT San Antonio’s “Spooktacular” was just a nice way for the family to spend the Sunday before Halloween. But for the station, it wasn’t just about selling tickets to a community event. Spooktacular was another step toward a distant goal that skeptics might say doesn’t have a ghost of a chance: to develop an ongoing membership model for commercial TV stations. The concept is to identify loyal digital fans and “super-serve” them with layers of distinctive value that they will pay for. Now KSAT’s owner, Graham Media Group, is doubling down on the idea — and getting some help from Google to do it.
Google Falls Short On 3Q Profit
On Monday, Google parent Alphabet met growth expectations for its key moneymaking businesses — notably its advertising business, which reported revenues that increased 17% to $33.9 billion during the quarter. But Alphabet’s capital expenditures grew at the same time, rising to $6.7 billion in the period as Google continued to expand its headquarters and build data centers for its cloud computing business.
As tech companies try to make amends with publishers, Google changes its search engine to address an old complaint.
Jimmy Pitaro said today: “I have no idea if [Amazon, Google and Facebook] are going to be interested specifically in Monday Night Football, but I do believe that several new media companies are going to be interested in acquiring more NFL rights.”
Exclusives
Executives from seven newspaper companies lobbied Capitol Hill this week to urge Congress to pass the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” a bill that fights the dominance of tech companies like Google and Facebook in the digital content business.
Google has agreed to pay between $150 million and $200 million to resolve an FTC investigation into YouTube over alleged violations of a children’s privacy law, according to a person familiar with the matter. The FTC voted 3-2 along party lines to approve the settlement, sending it over to the Justice Department as part of the review process, the person confirmed. Details about other terms of the settlement were not immediately available.
Google announced on Wednesday that it would be creating a separate YouTube site to host videos for children, following accusations that the video-streaming site had been violating children’s privacy laws. The site rolling out this week will be a web version of the YouTube Kids app that has been around since 2015, Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.
The strong second-quarter esults from Google’s parent, which topped Wall Street expectations, should ease worries — provoked by a disappointing first quarter — that the company was slowing down after years of fast growth.
The Justice Department said it will investigate how internet giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google have accumulated market power and whether they have acted to reduce competition. Similar inquiries are underway in Congress and at the Federal Trade Commission, which shares antitrust oversight responsibilities with the DOJ.
A Tuesday afternoon panel of the House Judiciary Committee focused on whether it’s time for Congress to rein in these companies, which are among the largest on Earth by several measures. Central to that case is whether their business practices run afoul of century-old laws originally designed to combat railroad and oil monopolies.
The House Antitrust Subcommittee is holding the second of its two Big Tech hearings this week, hearing from the FAAG in FAANG, lacking only Netflix among the witness list and definitely meeting the criteria for the hearing’s title.
The automated tool allows advertisers to target display and video messages in response to live TV or real-world events. Marketers can set pre-defined triggers so ads run as soon as moments occur, and use Programmatic Guaranteed deals to secure connected TV sports inventory to build a deeper connection with fans.
Executives from Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google will testify before a House of Representatives congressional committee next week in a hearing to discuss the tremendous market power wielded by online platforms.
Google is in talks to help create a fourth U.S. wireless carrier, even as Sprint and T-Mobile struggle to get their controversial merger cleared with federal and state authorities.
Google is making a push to expand augmented reality and interactive capabilities to its content and advertising offerings. The company, while slow to incorporate immersive ads, is testing 3D and YouTube live-stream display formats in DV360, its programmatic ad platform.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust chief suggested Tuesday he’ll take a broad view of how competition is harmed when assessing whether big tech firms should be broken […]
The precipitating event for Silicon Valley’s regulatory reckoning? A change in our political beliefs.
The Wall Street Journal reports the Justice Department is gearing up for an antitrust investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, a move that could present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.
Google’s 1Q advertising revenue, its key moneymaker, grew by 15% to $30.7 billion — slower than investors had hoped. Its digital-ad rivals Facebook and Amazon, meanwhile, both reported strong earnings last week, adding to the investor surprise when Alphabet stumbled despite a strong economy.
Google Ad-Revenue Growth Slows
Alphabet’s first-quarter revenue missed analysts’ estimates, sparking concern that advertisers are shifting some spending from Alphabet’s Google subsidiary to digital rivals. Revenue from Google advertising rose 15% from a year earlier. That was down from 24% year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2018.
Amazon said Thursday that YouTube will appear on Amazon’s Fire TV devices and smart TVs in the coming months, but did not give an exact date.
At first blush, this seems like an injudicious omission by Apple. There’s a lot riding on the company’s new services, and its video subscription in particular. On closer inspection, though, Apple is making a calculated bet that it doesn’t need those Android phone users — or has other ways of reaching them that don’t require cozying up to arch rival Google.
Google and the McClatchy publishing company said Tuesday they will launch digital-only newsrooms to provide information to three U.S. communities that are currently news “deserts.”
Rupert Murdoch’s Australian media company is calling for the breakup of Google, saying the U.S. tech company wields too much power over news outlets and online advertisers.
Google’s massive footprint is only getting bigger in 2019. CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Wednesday that the company is building new data centers and offices and expanding several key locations across the U.S., spending $13 billion this year.
Critics are targeting Facebook and Google after a week of high-profile layoffs in the media industry, pointing to their dominance over internet ads as the reason news outlets are struggling. In all, about 1,000 media jobs were cut in the past week.
High-tech tools for immigration crackdowns. Fears of smartphone addiction. YouTube algorithms that steer youths into extremism. An experiment in gene-edited babies. Doorbells and concert venues that can pinpoint individual faces and alert police. Repurposing genealogy websites to hunt for crime suspects based on a relative’s DNA. Automated systems that keep tabs of workers’ movements and habits. Electric cars in Shanghai transmitting their every movement to the government. It’s been enough to exhaust even the most imaginative sci-fi visionaries.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google said on Monday it would shut down its Google+ social media service in April, four months ahead of schedule, after finding a software flaw for the second time this year that allowed partner apps to access its users’ private data.
Disney’s Direct-To-Consumer & International unit has reached a deal with Google for advertising technology in a bid to increase revenue across its vast digital footprint.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google said on Thursday it would make changes to how it handles sexual harassment claims, a week after thousands of its employees around the world walked off their jobs to protest its response to such issues.
Public databases that shine a light on online political ads — launched by Facebook and Google before Tuesday’s U.S. elections — offer the public the first broad view of how quickly the companies yank advertisements that break their rules.
Susan Molinari, who leads Google’s federal lobbying and policy efforts, is leaving her role amid growing scrutiny of the Silicon Valley giant.
