ChasNote

Silicon Alley Insider’s Chart of the Day, based on recent Harris Interactive data.

David Carr’s point of view from his column in today’s NY Times:

“Setting aside the execution risk of such a plan, it’s difficult to tell how serious Mr. Murdoch is, given his history of grand statements that were only that. Perhaps he was making an unsubtle effort to change the subject during a bleak earnings call for News Corporation: fourth-quarter operating income, adjusted for certain items, dropped more than 30 percent and after taking $680 million in charges, mainly from the unit that houses MySpace, the company reported a net loss of $203 million.”

Gotta be. I mean, it’s just insane to think Fox News and its other content brands can compete with all the quality news out there that’s free.

My reading selection for this holiday break: Michael Wolff’s The Man Who Owns the News — how Rupert Murdoch built his father’s Australian newspaper company into today’s most important global media empire over the past 35 years. When he moved to New York in 1974, it was a time when “there are no real national news outlets. The New York Times is a metropolitan paper. The Wall Street Journal is a specialty business publication. USA Today does not exist. CNN does not exist. Cable television and cable news do not exist.”

That’s a quote from Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, in today’s NY Times.

“On a conference call last month, Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer for the News Corporation, toned down the grandiose expectations for social networking advertising and acknowledged that selling spots on personal profile and group pages is not easy.

“Social networking represents an ‘entirely new form of Internet activity,’ Mr. Chernin said.

“When MySpace’s parent, Fox Interactive Media, announced a three-year, $900 million advertising pact with Google in 2006, analysts started placing big bets that social networking would be a major new revenue stream. While the Web is becoming more social, it is hard to wring profits from it.

“Indeed, the balloon of unrealistic prospects is losing air. The attitude change was first detected at the end of January when, one year into its $900 million pact with MySpace, Google said that social networking inventory was not earning money as well as expected. (More recently, Google said the situation was improving.)”

Silicon Alley Insider looks at Nielsen numbers to determine ABC has taken the #1 spot among websites attached to the broadcast networks, where — according to SAI — the CPMs can be as high as $70.

Another powerful data point from JPMorgan’s Nothing But Net report:

“While portals were once dominant, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft only accounted for ~29% of minutes spent online in August 2007, down from 42% in August 2002. Meanwhile, blogs, online gaming, and social networking websites have experienced double to triple digit Y/Y growth rates in page views. This fragmented audience not only makes it more difficult for advertisers to reach their target audience through only a few publishers, but also makes it difficult for publishers to attract advertisers given their limited scale. We believe that companies that can aggregate traffic through the development of ad networks or partnerships will be more successful in driving growth in 2008.”

The broadcasts networks are considering canceling the star-clad “upfront” events in favor of block-and-tackle sales calls with top advertisers, according to the NY Times:

“with the writers’ strike now looking as if it may extend into the new year, threatening the normal timetable for developing prime-time series, every major network is pondering the elimination of the big, garish upfront shows — which cost $3 million to $5 million a year.

“Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Universal, is the most vocal, willing to say publicly that his network is contemplating junking its upfront event. For NBC in recent years, that has consisted of unveiling the new lineup before a packed crowd in Radio City Music Hall, and a canape-and-drinks party in and around the skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza.

“‘In light of the changing business environment, we are looking very seriously at not doing the extravaganza part of the upfront process,’ said Mr. Zucker, who acknowledged that he has been thinking for some time that the upfront shows have outlived their usefulness and cost-effectiveness. ‘Once we make it, it is not a one-year decision,’ Mr. Zucker said. ‘We do not make it lightly, and obviously we are going to consult with our advertising partners.’

“Mr. Zucker emphasized that NBC would still take part in the actual selling part of the upfront, where deals are made with advertisers to pay set prices for time on network shows. He said that the process remained ‘the best mechanism’ to do business for new network schedules.

“Those deals — the networks took in more than $9 billion in last year’s upfront — would simply be made after much smaller presentations in much smaller settings for much smaller groups of ad buyers. It would become, Mr. Zucker said, more like ‘a personal call’ on advertisers, much more the way most cable networks have sold in the upfront: small concentrated sales efforts.”

I bet that’s a relief for programming execs like Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, who has had to dance with stars at previous upfronts.

I’m surprised to see the relatively small audiences Nielsen Online reports for the Big Four TV networks. From PaidContent:

“Nielsen Online counts ABC in first place with 10.6 million unique visitors in October, followed by NBC with 8.1 million uniques, CBS (NYSE: CBS) with 6.1 million and Fox with 3.4 million.”

Even if you assume there’s no duplication of audience (unlikely), the four networks combined are reaching only 28.2 million monthly uniques online. FM doesn’t yet subscribe to Nielsen, but Comscore reports the 125 independent sites that made up FM in September 2007 (it’s closer to 140 now) reach nearly 42 million monthly uniques. More evidence that as audiences migrate from offline to online media, they aren’t necessarily loyal to their former offline brands.