Beet TV: NYT digital chief says About.com has ‘unbelievable margins’ from Google AdSense

Beet TV reports:

“About.com, the online network of special interest communities, enjoys ‘unbelievable margins’ from Google AdSense, said Martin Nisenholtz, who heads digital operations at The New York Times Company, which owns About.com.”

“He says that companies who create low cost, highly verticalized and contextualized content will get ‘very rich’ from AdSense. He adds that AdSense does not perform well for New York Times news coverage.”

Nisenholtz makes the comments in the video below (reference to AdSense at 2:45 in the clip):

Full post at this link…

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Beet TV: Time.com managing editor on why long-form journalism doesn’t work on the web

Time.com managing editor Josh Tryangiel in a video interview with Beet TV: he describes online news tactics, why print style journalism doesn’t work well on the web, and reveals that 95 per cent of Time.com stories are original to the web.

(Hat-tip Crikey.com.au)

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CNN.com sees 400 per cent traffic spike by Tuesday afternoon

This from Beet.TV, an interview with CNN.com and CNN International. By 3pm US time, the sites had received 88 million page views this afternoon, three to four times more than on an average weekday, executive vice president of CNN News Services Susan Grant told Beet.TV. In this clip:

• CNN.com Live (with has four simultaneous live streams), had generated 1.6 million views domestically and internationally – seven times higher than an average full day.
• Grant expects today’s (Wednesday’s) traffic to be even higher.
• Grant said that election day concerns were centred on the site’s capacity to handle the traffic, but that it was coping fine so far.
• Grant also discusses CNN’s mobile offerings and its live video feed available through AT&T and Sprint.

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National Geographic is embracing user-generated content with photo and music sharing

In an interview with Beet TV, the senior VP, for online content and development at National Geographic, Rob Covey, said that user generated content plays a central role in the publication’s multimedia coverage.

• Users can share their videos on the user-generated video hub Everyday Explorers, which was recently released in beta, and built with online community builder KickApps.
• User can upload photos to the ‘My Shot, Your Shot’ photo-sharing community and share music on the World Music Hub
• More interactive elements are in the pipeline …

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Online media consumption up by seven per cent, as a result of financial strife

Yesterday, Beet TV flagged up that a record number of users seeking online media information led to a seven per cent spike in traffic for Akamai, the delivery network which carries the internet flow for NBC, the BBC, Reuters and other news sites.

The current economic turmoil, hurricanes and the presidential campaign has helped boost the need for online information. At their peak, Akamai were registering 3.7 million requests per minute.

The spike follows a trend for online news sites doing well in times of financial strife: last month site traffic ‘exploded’ at the FT.com, as a result of the drop in share prices.

The need for information was felt on Wall Street, coinciding with a redesign of the Wall Street Journal Online. “Monday set an all time record of two million visitors”, a Wall Street Journal spokeswoman told Beet.TV.  Traffic on Tuesday was nearly as high.  “These are pretty big numbers, considering monthly unique visitors are 17 million,” she said.

The irony is that financial disaster, hurricanes and presidential elections seem to be a good thing for the world of online media.

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