The lessons
from Facebook's IPO
Other shorts: Hearst intern sues over lack of pay
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Feb 2, 2012
The lessons from Facebook's IPO
Facebook's inner workings have always been a bit of a mystery, "The Social Network" aside, but yesterday's initial public offering filing offered some insight into the company that has an astounding 845 million worldwide users. The first lesson is that Mark Zuckerberg is firmly in charge. He controls 57 percent of the company's voting power and has the authority to name his own successor if he's still running the company when he is about to die. The second lesson is that the company is heavily dependent on advertising. Eighty-five percent of its revenue last year came from ads. Interestingly, most of its advertisers do not have long-term contracts, and so one of the company's potential downsides is that ads could dry up suddenly. Lesson three: Users are highly engaged. It has an average of 2.7 billion likes and comments per day, and an average 250 million photos posted per day. And lesson four: The social networking site wants to raise $5 billion in capital from this IPO, to use in part to fend off competitors like Google+, which now has 90 million users. It's expected to be valued around $100 billion.
Hearst intern sues over lack of pay
The fashions that line the pages of Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen may be the fruits of illegal labor practices. A former unpaid intern at Harper's has filed suit against Hearst, accusing the company of violation federal and state wage and hour laws. Recent Ohio State graduate Xuedan Wang, who worked at Harper's from August to December 2011, claims that Hearst is using unpaid interns as a substitute for hiring entry-level employees, taking advantage of their eagerness to gain experience by making them work 40-hour weeks without pay. Wang says she worked 40 to 55 hours per week at Harper's. She and her lawyers are seeking to make the lawsuit into a class action, allowing the hundreds of other unpaid interns at Hearst to join. Hearst says it offers academic credit for internships, which are billed as educational experiences, and interns are aware of the lack of pay when they sign on.
News Corp.'s case of the deleted email
How's this for suspicious? The smoking email in the
case against James Murdoch, who has long claimed that he did not know about widespread hacking allegations at News International's News of the World until 2010, was deleted last year during a routine IT upgrade. The email, sent in 2008, included claims that employees at the tabloid were routinely hacking voicemails to get their scoops. It's been cited as evidence that
Murdoch was not telling the truth during his testimony to Parliament last year, when he said he was unaware of the hacking allegations until two years ago. Lawyers for News Corp. related the deletion of the email as part of the Parliamentary inquiry into media ethics that hatched after NOTW shut down last summer. The email was KO'd last January when the IT department initiated an email stabilization and modernization program, News Corp. claims. A hard copy of the email surfaced last year, raising questions about what Murdoch knew and when he knew it.
Programming notes: CBS slates 'NYC 22'
On April 15 CBS is going from Miami to New York. At 10 p.m. that Sunday night the network will premiere
"NYC 22," a new cop drama executive produced by Robert De Niro and created by former "The Wire" writer Richard Price. The series will replace "CSI: Miami" in the Sunday 10 p.m. timeslot after that show ends its season on April 8, leading out of "The Good Wife." Meanwhile, in other programming, Discovery Channel on Feb. 13 will premiere "World's Toughest Trucker," a new reality competition airing after "American Chopper." On March 4 Lifetime will bring back new episodes of "Army Wives" at 9 p.m., followed by the reality series "Coming Home" at 10. Sometime this spring CNN International will debut "Amanpour," a new series hosted by former "This Week" host Christiane Amanpour. The news show will air at 3 p.m., with a repeat at 5 p.m. Spike TV has ordered a 12-episode second season of "Flip Men," about a pair of guys who flip foreclosed properties. And Showtime has picked up a second season of new comedy "House of Lies," which premiered its first season on Jan. 8. The network has also ordered a sixth season of "Californication" and a third season of "Shameless."
Newspaper web sites draw 111 million users
There is a small silver lining for newspapers as they continue to
lose print readership: their web sites continue to grow. In the fourth quarter of last year newspaper web sites averaged more than 111 million monthly unique visitors, according to Newspaper Association of America analysis of comScore data, an increase of more than 6 million versus the same quarter a year earlier. Also, average daily visitors were up nearly 15 percent, and the time they spent on newspaper web sites increased as well, by 14 percent. Overall, 63 percent of adult internet users visited newspaper web sites in the fourth quarter, including 60 percent of people age 18-34. All of those numbers are encouraging, but the question for publishers of course is how to best monetize that audience. The NAA notes that some papers have tried unique strategies in their efforts to build and maintain audience, such as The New York Times' fashion-focused app and an app for local ticket sales from The Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
|
|
|
