YouTube Will Be a $1.3B Business in 2011

YouTube has grown up fast of the last several years, with more than 35 hours of videos being uploaded every minute. And with the firm monetizing more than 2 billion video views each week, the amount of money YouTube makes is accelerating dramatically, with one analyst estimating that the video site could top $1.3 billion in revenues this year, according to a posting by Ryan Lawler at gigaom.com.

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney gave an update on the YouTube forecast as part of his “Updating The Long Thesis – Five Key Updates” research note issued this morning. In it, Mahaney estimated that YouTube revenues were approximately $825 million in 2010, and are expected to grow to $1.3 billion in 2011 and $1.7 billion in 2012.

At the same time, the amount of money that Google actually takes home after deducting the revenue share from its partners will grow from $544 million in 2010 to $876 million this year and $1.1 billion in 2012.

Read more here.

Freed Times Journalists Give Account of Captivity

The Libyan government freed four New York Times journalists on Monday, six days after they were captured while covering the conflict between government and rebel forces in the eastern city of Ajdabiya.

Turkish Ministry photo

According to a story by Jeremy W. Peters at nytimes.com, they were released into the custody of Turkish diplomats and crossed safely into Tunisia in the late Monday afternoon, from where they provided a harrowing account of their captivity.

Like many other Western journalists, the four had entered the rebel-controlled eastern region of Libya over the Egyptian border without visas to cover the insurrection against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. They were detained in Ajdabiya by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi.

The journalists are Anthony Shadid, The Times’s Beirut bureau chief, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting; two photographers, Tyler Hicks and Lynsey Addario, who have extensive experience in war zones; and a reporter and videographer, Stephen Farrell, who in 2009 was captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan and was rescued by British commandos.

After The New York Times reported having lost contact with the journalists last Tuesday, officials with the Qaddafi government pledged that if they had been detained by the government’s military forces, they would be located and released unharmed.

Read more here.

Report: CBS News Top-Performing Media Site

MSNBC Most Improved

CBS News was named the top media Web site in 2010, followed by Yahoo News and The New York Times, according to an annual report rating sites based on actual Web performance rather than content.

According to Mark Walsh at Online Media Daily, the awards handed out by Gomez, a unit of Compuware that specializes in Web optimization, are based on three basic criteria: how fast a home page loads, how reliably it loads, and how consistently it loads across different locations, networks and times of day.

As part of its ongoing benchmarking, Gomez monitors more than 3,000 Web and mobile sites with more than 20 million tests conducted on a network of 150 Internet backbone locations and 150,000 desktop computers across the U.S.

In addition to media, Gomez named best-performing sites in several other categories.

Among them, Regions Bank had the top banking site; Fidelity took top honors among online brokers; United Health had the top health site; consumer electronics dealer Newegg was tops in retail; and Delta was No. 1 among airline sites.

MSNBC was cited as the most improved media site, improving its page load time 39%.

Read more here.

Local Ad Spending Will Shift Toward Daily Deals

Local online media is set to undergo a transformation. Advertisers will make a steady shift to digital media spending. There will be “tremendous” daily changes in where ad dollars go. And the deal-a-day industry is poised for strong growth, reports Bill Kirtz at NetNewsCheck.

BIA/Kelsey executives made those predictions Monday morning to kick off the Interactive Local Media East conference in Boston.

Mark Fratrik, vice president for the local media consulting firm, sees continued overall revenue growth this year, as consumer confidence and ad spending increases.

Movement from traditional media such as newspapers to interactive/digital media will continue, he said, with annual digital media ad spending reaching $42.5 billion by 2015 -- almost double its 2010 revenue. Fratrik referred to the company's “U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast (2010-2015)” released this morning.

Fratrik said he is intrigued by the question of whether newspaper paywalls, such as the one erected by The New York Times last week, will stem that medium’s decrease in advertising shares. While The Times may be able to weather the decreased in advertising dollars with circulation revenue, "It will be interesting to see how -- and if -- other papers will be able to make that up," Fratrik said later.

He’s also “fascinated” by the growth in online couponing, noting the recent deals between Groupon and a movie premiere. He sees the deal-a-day industry poised for strong growth as it expands to include more kinds of offers.

Businesses will shift more and more of their ad spending from vehicles like direct mail to daily deals, Fratrik said.

Read more here.

Also Must Read:

NETNEWS CHECK: Study: Digital Ad Revenue To Hit $41B By 2015.

NYTimes.com Goal: 300,000 Paying Customers

A debate over a paywall raged in the New York Times newsroom for months before executives settled on a flexible pricing strategy. The publication hopes that adaptability will mitigate the problems the newspaper had with a previous paid-content model.

The On Media Blog at POLITICO provides an inside look at the debate over whether to charge readers for access reveals that company insiders hope to accumulate 300,000 online subscribers in the first year and that if necessary, the publication can turn off the paywall.

“Let’s imagine there’s a horrifying story like 9/11 again ...We can — with one hit of a button — turn that meter to zero to allow everyone to read everything they want,” said Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. to a Times reporter.

The Times paywall will activate in the United States on March 28. It is already live in Canada. The Times will limit browsing on its homepage to 20 articles per month, but Sulzberger’s statement makes it apparent there is some wiggle room depending on the circumstances. Users accessing the site from outside links will be able to read those linked articles in full.

A previous experiment in paid-content was discontinued in 2007 after executives decided the program was holding back the paper from increasing its advertising revenue.

Read more here.

Kurtz Notes Lack of Media Skepticism Over Libya

Howard Kurtz, the host of CNN’s “Reliable Sources”, used Sunday’s show to express concern over the media coverage of international airstrikes on Libya, which began Saturday.

Some Christmas Stations Maintaining New Listeners

First glance at the February's 6+ PPMs seem to show ratings continue to settle in at the usual pre-Christmas music season trends. Hosever, some of the holiday music station are keeping some new listeners and are pacing ahead of last fall's results.

PPMs released today include: NYC, LA, Chicago, Philly, San Francisco,  Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston and Atlanta plus several other markets. To take a glance at the latest numbers, click here.

Also today, Arbitron released its March 2011 RADAR (Radio's All Dimension Audience Research) 108 Radio Network Ratings report. According to the newest data, approximately 74 percent of Persons 12+ heard one or more network radio commercials in an average week of the survey period, which is an increase of nearly 3.6 million versus the March 2010 report.

Additionally, RADAR 108 showed 74.8 percent of Persons aged 18+ (175,487,000 Persons) heard at least one network radio commercial, along with 73.9 percent of Persons aged 35+ (121,038,00 Persons), 77.4 percent of Persons aged 18-49 (104,483,000 Persons) and 77.6 percent of Persons aged 25-54 (98,497,000 Persons).

To view RADAR results, click here.

Why AT&T Bought T-Mobile

AT&T, criticized and even despised for its inability to keep up with growing mobile data usage, thinks it has found the solution to its network woes. And all it will cost the telecom giant is $39 billion and months (or even years) of regulatory hurdles.

Mashable's Ben Parr in an article posted at CNN.com rerports in a stunning move, AT&T has acquired T-Mobile USA for a whopping $39 billion from Deutsche Telekom. Along with acquiring approximately 8% of AT&T, Deutsche Telekom will also be gaining a seat on AT&T's board of directors.

The new combined entity, if it can garner regulatory approval, will be largest carrier in the U.S. by leaps and bounds. AT&T and T-Mobile USA combined have over 25% more subscribers now than Verizon (125+ million vs. 93+ million).

This acquisition isn't about subscriber bases, though; it's about improving AT&T's reliability and preparing it for the 4G era of wireless communication.

Read more here.

Opinion: Radio's Audience is Moving Online

What Are You Doing About That?
From Rob Green, for Radio Ink:

One of the famous sayings in poker is “you have to play the hand your dealt”. I think this applies to business, too, and particularly to radio today. Many years ago I worked for John Kluge of Metromedia fame. During an interview a reporter asked him what he thought about all of the fledgling international competition the US was facing at the time.  He replied that he was only thinking about the international opportunities. This is exactly the position radio finds itself in today regarding the rise of digital—concerned about how to beat this new competition and not focused on the new opportunities digital provides.

Radio seems to be playing a hand it was dealt long ago against competitors that are no longer relevant and playing defense in an unwinnable game.  Let’s not repeat what has happened to the newspaper industry.  Instead we need to focus on the vast capabilities and opportunities provided by digital.

At the Radio Ink Forecast Conference last November there was very little discussion about digital.  Folks, this is where your audience is going.  In fact, they are already there. Moreover, this is where the mindshare is, and why our industry valuations are low. Comparing radio to the newspaper industry, as many speakers at the Forecast conference did, tells analysts that the radio industry is living in the past. As a friend of mine told me a long time ago, momentum is really hard to get, but it is even harder to get back once you’ve lost it. Newspapers have long lost momentum and radio will too if it keeps looking backwards.

Read more here. 

Rob Green currently serves as the CEO of Abacast.

Face of Citizen Journalism in Libya Is Killed

Mohammad Nabbous set up an independent internet TV station in Benghazi

The death has been announced of Mohammad Nabbous, described as the "face of citizen journalism in Libya".

According to a posting at  guardian.co.uk, Nabbous was apparently shot dead by Gaddafi forces in Benghazi on Saturday.

Known as "Mo", Nabbous set up Libya al-Hurra TV, which broadcast raw feeds and commentary from Benghazi, on Livestream.



Andy Carvin, social media strategist at NPR, said on Twitter: "Mohammad Nabbous was my primary contact in Libya, and the face of Libyan citizen journalism. And now he's dead, killed in a firefight."

Sharon Lynch, TV station representative, said: "He touched the hearts of many with his bravery and indomnitable spirit. He will be dearly missed and leaves behind his young wife and unborn child."

Read more here.

NPR: The Music Powerhouse?

According to a story by Chris Richards at The Washington Post, the Washington-based news outlet has emerged as an influential powerhouse in a splintering music industry thanks to the growing popularity of NPR Music, a Web site that has connected with music fans by premiering new albums, streaming live concerts and landing exclusive interviews.

How big of a deal is NPR in the music world? Bertis Downs, manager of R.E.M., says NPR’s endorsement now carries as much cultural weight as an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” or the cover of Rolling Stone. “When we sit around thinking, ‘How do we get attention?’ — they’re at the top of the list,” says Downs, who recently helped R.E.M. get its new album streamed on NPR Music. “We know that’s where the audience is.”

The audience is growing. In 2011, NPR Music has averaged about 2.1 million unique visitors a month, putting the site somewhere between MTV.com, which pulled in 7.1 million unique visitors in January, and RollingStone.com, which drew just shy of a million that month, according to Nielsen.

Traffic on NPR Music has quadrupled since the site launched in 2007, and it currently accounts for about 14 percent of the eyeballs visiting NPR.org. And those figures don’t even include the millions of radio listeners who catch the audio features that NPR Music pushes to NPR’s various news programs.

But as the audience for NPR Music grows, it appears to consist of a demographic that’s actually shrinking: music fans who still buy music.

Read more here.

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THE HILL: WILLIAMS: Now it's time to defund NPR

The Sunday Funny

FLASHBACK: Larry The Cable Guy & Friends prank then-pres. George Bush at TWH.