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Interactive ad company 24/7 Media has scooped up a rival, Real Media, for $2 million. The combined company will be known as 24/7 Real Media and will be the No. 2 online ad network. CEO David Moore of 24/7 Media will lead the new company. The deal gives 24/7 Media much-needed financing from Real Media’s majority owner, Swiss ad firm PubliGroupe, which will lend the new company as much as $7.5 million. Within the past year, 24/7 has undertaken two rounds of layoffs; officials aren’t saying when the combined company will turn a profit. In acquiring Real Media, 24/7 Media is following the example of arch-rival DoubleClick, which recently purchased L90, among other, smaller internet ad networks. DoubleClick had been eyeing Real Media, but the deal fell through.
Napster pushes its launch back, again
Former music-trading network Napster was supposed to relaunch this fall. But that’s not going to happen, the company announced Monday. Due to kinks in working out its new business model, the launch won’t happen until sometime in the first quarter of next year at the earliest. Napster faces numerous roadblocks on its road to becoming a subscription-based service. The main hurdle is rounding up the music that would be available. Napster had a deal with its partner, Bertelsmann, and the other record labels, to offer music files for a fee, and those fees would go in part to the labels and artists. But now, with the launch of other upstart music-swapping networks, the Department of Justice is looking into the music industry’s foray into online music vending and whether it violates antitrust statutes. Napster has had a bad year. After the courts deemed that it facilitated piracy, it was shut down. And late last week it announced its first-ever layoffs.
MTV lets listeners in on music, if they buy
In a move meant more to energize hardcore fans of big-name music artists rather than attract users of free music download sites like Morpheus or Aimster, MTV.com is offering unlimited streaming of new albums for two weeks, as long as users pay $14.99 for the album upfront. The concept was christened with Stevie Nicks’ “Trouble in Shangri-La” through VH1.com last spring. MTV won't provide sales numbers, but her record did start out at No. 1 on the Billboard Internet album chart and in the top 10 for the regular Top 200 chart. While the effort is not geared toward introducing new talent or encouraging new fans to sample the music, it does prime wired fans for the release. “It works incredibly well to get the core fan base energized,” says Nicholas Butterworth, president of MTVi, which handles sales on both VH1.com and MTV.com. Another recently featured album was Lenny Kravitz's "Lenny." Pop star Britney Spears's “Britney” is up next.
Dot.com deaths accelerated this month
Fourteen consumer-oriented internet companies went out of business in the month of October, almost three times the number that shut down in September, according to data from Webmergers. So far this year, 491 dot.coms have cratered, and 716 have gone under since January 2000. Thirty-three internet companies filed for bankruptcy this month, a negligible increase from September, which saw 32 file for bankruptcy. In the third quarter, the assets of 162 dead dot.coms were sold, at an average price of $13 million apiece. The uptick in bankruptcies in October, according to Webmergers, is the result of a rough economy worsened by the Sept. 11 attacks, in addition to the fact that investors are engaging in a little year-end housecleaning.
NYT Digital launches fee-based baseball site
The New York Times has stepped up to the plate with another fee-based content site. “Glory Days: Baseball in New York 1947-1957” is a premium web site featuring more than 100 pages of multimedia, photos and articles chronicling the era when the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants reigned over baseball. The content includes biographies, photos and stats for legendary players such as Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and others, in addition to audio tracks from interviews with New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson. Much of the material comes from The New York Times’s own archives. Unrestricted access to the site costs $9.95 a year. The site also peddles various memorabilia items, such as a coffee-table book called “Encore: The New York Yankees’ 25th World Championship” and “Subway Series” T-shirts and caps.
Lambshop.com, so very cute
They’re the hottest virtual pets since Tamagotchis, but they’re much, much cuddlier. Japanese schoolchildren from the town of Amagese on the island of Kyushu are “adopting” New Zealand lambs as pets. School kids in the New Zealand town of Westport, which is Amagese’s sister city, are helping to raise the lambs, and the Japanese children are picking them out over a web site, www.lambsonline.co.nz. The young New Zealanders post messages “from” their fleecy charges, in addition to maintaining a web site for each adopted lamb. The little sheep have monikers such as Curly and Motley. Other lamb names, such as Luncheon and Lambchop, allude to New Zealand’s status as one of the world’s leading producers of lamb meat. The fate of these lambs has not been announced.
October 31, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
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