Brought to you by Olympics

Olympics are coming, and with it BBC News. Guardian Newspaper is reporting that Chinese authorities stopped blocking BBC News in English. The BBC website in Chinese is still blocked, but many find ways around the blocs. China has 210 million citizens with internet access, but most do not speak English.

But this is not an end to Chinese censorship. Last week, Guardian reports, China blocked all foreign coverage of disturbance in Tibet. Yahoo, Guardian and YouTube were all affected. Guardian described it as a “deliberate act of unacceptable censorship.”

Even though, censorship is still strong, but allowing Chinese citizens to access BBC is a small step in the right direction.

Paranoid searcher

Yesterday, as I was nonchalantly browsing through the Internet looking for ethical dilemmas to write about, I stumbled on myself. I literally did. There was a website, www.veromi.net that gave me indigestion. The website had me, it had all my addresses and my “potential roommates,” which included my parents and my husband. The website had all my places of employment.

I began to think that Internet does give us access to the world of information, but the trade off is ourselves. I use google.com about two hundred or more times a day. I look for everything from doctors ratings to jobs online. However, recently I found out that Google has the worst privacy practice out of top online destinations. A report came out in 2007 by London-based Privacy International, which assigned Google the lowest grade in privacy. The group described Google in the following terms, as the company “comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility in privacy.”

The other companies that were surveyed, including Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL did not reach the same “height” as Google to “achieving status as an endemic threat to privacy.”

Google responded by saying that they aggressively protect the privacy of their users. But do they really?

Maybe in our new Brave World my searches will be sold along wit my address and “roommates.”

Reuters profits tumbled 13% to $542 million

Paidcontent.org analyzed operating results from Reuters. Here are bits and pieces of their analysis:

The operating profit was up 14% to ($579 million), and revenue was up 1.5 percent to ($5.16 billion). Reuters media division generated $341 million in revenue, grew 6%. The growth Reuters says was fueled by ‘strong growth in online syndication and advertising.”

Tom Glocer said in his analyst presentations “This is the last we’ll do as a standalone entity ... It feels like Chinese new year here today. The results are a fitting end to this chapter in the Reuters story.”

Glocer said that the new ThomReuters will be a 90% digital business.

http://www.paidcontent.co.uk/entry/419-earnings-reuters-07-profit-dips-on-home-strait-to-thomson-merger/

Long Tail of BBC through iPhone

BBC had struck a partnership with iPhone to make its iPlayer TV content available on iPhone. The service offers on-demand shows, which aired within the last seven days. The service is still for UK customers only.

Many others news and entertainment content providers are courting Apple. More on this to come…

Tribune company marriage between TV station and newspaper:

Sun-Sentinel and WSFL-TV, in South Florida are merging into one entity. TV station will move into newspaper newsroom.

"This strategy is unprecedented in a major U.S. market," Sun-Sentinel President and Publisher Howard Greenberg said in a news release. "This gives our print, broadcast and interactive operations the opportunity to work together to develop unique content and programming in a variety of areas. Plus, with this combination, there will be no better way for advertisers to reach more people with a consistent message."

Tribune said that with the merger of two entities it would have better market coverage and increase efficiency for advertisers.

I am sure that this is only the first out of many unifications between TV and newsroom sister properties.

23% growth in online spending

eMarketer lowered its forecast predictions for online ad growth to 23%. A downward revision from Novembers forecast of 28.5%. The revision is than due to a recession. Through 2012, eMarketer predicts robust growth in rich media/video advertising, from 9.7% share in 2007 to 18.5% in 2012.

David Hallerman, a senior analyst with eMarketer said that the popular websites on the Internet will have problems monetizing their traffic, "for example, the most popular sites in social networking where the amount of traffic and the amount of ad dollars don't match up. Maybe they won't," Hallerman said.

"While a foundering economy will certainly affect online ad spending, accounting for the revised estimate, the Internet will support continued ad spending growth even as other media may falter," an eMarketer statement says.

The growth in online spending still outpaces all other media spending, and traditional properties will likely shift more resources into this growing market.

CNN is the top media property

Nielsen-Netratings, released February ranked unique visitors on news sites. CNN Digital Network, which includes Sports Illustrated topped the list with 37MM UV’s, followed by Yahoo!News that had 35MM UVs. I did some digging and the whooping number of UVs can be explained by the search optimization that CNN is doing with the help of Inform.com

1. CNN Digital Network - 37,181,000 - 0:40:11
2. Yahoo! News - 35,274,000 - 0:23:10
3. MSNBC Digital Network - 34,013,000 - 0:29:50
4. AOL News - 21,119,000 - 0:36:14
5. NYTimes.com -18,975,000 - 0:33:29

January numbers for comparison:
1. Yahoo! News - 36,074,000 - 0:23:58
2. CNN Digital Network - 35,598,000 - 0:41:58
3. MSNBC Digital Network - 35,410,000 - 0:30:00
4. AOL News - 23,732,000 - 0:31:12
5. NYTimes.com -20,461,000 - 0:35:47