Study: 0 percent
would pay to use Twitter
Other shorts: Univision settles payola case for $1M
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Jul 27, 2010
Study: 0 percent would pay to use Twitter
There have been plenty of studies saying that people are unwilling to pay for content they're now getting for free, but this may be the most telling one yet. Exactly zero percent of the nearly 2,000 people surveyed by the Center for the Digital Future at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism said that they would pay to use a micro-blogging site like Twitter, despite the fact that nearly half have used the site. The report concludes that it will be extremely difficult to get internet users to pay for something they have used for free in the past, based on those results. Of course, ad-supported sites didn't get great feedback, either. While just over half said they'd prefer ads to having to pay for content, 70 percent said web advertising is annoying and half said they never click on ads. The study also found that 82 percent of Americans are now online, the first time the number has ever surpassed 80 percent, and they average 19 hours online per week.
Univision settles payola case for $1 million
You don’t hear as much about payola—pay for play--as you used to, but it’s still very much around, as witnessed by an agreement reached between the feds and Univision to settle a three-year old case in which employees at Univision radio stations allegedly took payments from record promoters to play certain songs. Univision has agreed to pay a $1 million fine while denying any knowledge of the payoffs, which apparently took place at Univision Music Group, which has since been sold. In a statement, the company says: “The actions of these employees were undertaken without the knowledge of anyone at Univision outside of UMG.” As part of the agreement, Univision Radio has agreed to cap the size of gifts its employees can receive. The investigation was conducted by the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. Payola was rampant in the radio business up through the '50s; then, in 1960, the nation’s top DJ, Alan Freed, to many the father of rock ‘n’ roll, was indicted for accepting a $2,500 gift from a record promoter. He was charged under a commercial bribery statue; laws against payola were passed later. The case ended Freed’s career and broke him as a person. He died five years later, broke and an alcoholic.
President Obama appearing on 'The View'
ABC's "The View" has booked a guest so big it prompted Barbara Walters to return to the studio. President Barack Obama will appear on the daytime talk show this week, taping an episode tomorrow to air on Thursday. This will be the first time a sitting U.S. president has guested on "The View," or any daytime talk show, for that matter, and the show's panel plans to ask him about the economy, the BP oil spill and his family life in the White House, among other topics. Co-host and executive producer Walters will appear in studio for the appearance, her first time on camera since having open-heart surgery in May. Walters did make a brief appearance on the show earlier this month via telephone from her home. Obama has appeared on "The View" twice before; his last visit was in March 2008, when he was still a U.S. Senator.
Director's Holocaust comments drop like a Stone
If Oliver Stone wanted to stir up a little free publicity for his upcoming film, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," he probably could have sent star Shia LeBouf on a press tour. Instead Stone is getting plenty of attention, intentional or not, for comments he made to the Sunday Times of London about Adolf Hitler and Jews, six months after telling television critics that "Hitler is an easy scapegoat" while hyping his upcoming Showtime history miniseries. Stone told the Times, "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people" and then went on to criticize Israel's effect on U.S. foreign policy and mention "the Jewish domination of the media." Not surprisingly, Jewish groups were outraged. "Oliver Stone has outed himself as an anti-Semite," said a statement from the American Jewish Committee, while bloggers eviscerated Stone's comments. Stone apologized yesterday and said he regretted his comments, saying in a statement, "Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry. The fact that the Holocaust is still a very important, vivid and current matter today is, in fact, a great credit to the very hard work of a broad coalition of people committed to the remembrance of this atrocity – and it was an atrocity."
Hearst: Predict our newsstand sell, win $25K
Here's an interesting approach in these times of slumping newsstand sales: Pay someone to tell you how to fix the problem. Hearst Corp. will award $25,000 to anyone who can suggest how to make its newsstand strategy more efficient. Hearst and the Direct Marketing Association's Analytics Council are sponsoring the Hearst Challenge, a competition in which teams will predict magazine's sell-through rate, or percentage of copies distributed to newsstands that end up actually being sold. The contest kicks off on Oct. 14, and participants will be given historical samples of newsstand data from 10 publications and 10,000 stores, with the goal of coming up with a framework that optimizes the contribution of each newsstand location. The top three entrants will present their ideas at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference in Miami in December, and the one that most closely predicts final store sales will be given the $25,000 grand prize. The contest will run in lieu of the NCDM Analytics Challenge, an annual competition held by the DMA.
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