TKG Data and Analysis: A Weekly Recap

For this pre-conference week, here is a recap of news and views from the TKG blog in case you missed any posts. We hope to see you at DDC.

Sign of Times? Online Newspaper Vet Goes to TV
If you were running the online operations for Seattle Times Co., and were given the chance to run the Internet ops for a TV station group that includes a premier station in town, would you go? Nancy Bruner is doing just that. She’s run The Seattle Times sites for 10 years, where she and her talented team (including Patricia Lee Smith) launched NWSource, a groundbreaking newspaper shopping site. (read more…)

What Does the Marriage of IYP/IPTV Mean?
This week, as AT&T announced a milestone in IPTV subscribers, the first publicly available screenshots have begun to emerge showing the IYP module that can be found within the U-verse service package (Sebastien Provencher has screenshots). This brings up an interesting point about the way things are moving. (read more…)

AT&T’s Dennis Payne to Retire
After 33 years of working in the directory business, Dennis Payne has been a firsthand witness to the changes and evolution in the industry. Denny began working for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. as a directory sales rep in Kansas City when it was a division of the giant AT&T Corp. (read more…)

Jingle Networks, Nearing ‘Per Call’/Gross Margin Breakeven
Today, I had a brief call with George Garrick, CEO of Jingle Networks, which operates the service 1-800-FREE411. The Jingle team has been aggressively wringing costs out of the system for months trying to reduce the cost per call as much as possible. In some locales, where there are fewer advertisers, Jingle has removed the operator fail-over. This means the cost of fielding the call drops substantially. We have estimated this cost previously at less than $0.03 per call at volume. (read more…)

Analysis: Idearc’s Purchase of Localsearch.com URL
Idearc Media has purchased Localsearch.com from American Town Networks and will presumably use it as the foundation of a new local search destination to feed off its Superpages.com site. Under terms of the deal, Idearc is paying $3.3 million in cash for the URL and an unstated interest in American Towns itself, a 10-employee site that has morphed over the years into an event-driven, hyper-local site with a rich selection of publishing tools. (read more…)

Pronto.com Latest to Join Social Media Party
IAC-owned comparison shopping engine Pronto announced today that it will add new features that let users personalize and share information on products. This is also part of a general re-branding that positions social media as a key feature and point of differentiation within the online shopping world. (read more…)

Yellow Pages’ Shows Tell It Like It Is
Each year the ADP midyear convention and ADM annual meeting are held in the same location with the overlap of a giant industry-wide cocktail reception one evening and a joint general session the next morning. Since the Yellow Pages Association holds a board meeting before the cocktail reception, many of the industry leaders end up at this combined affair. What this does is give the annual attendee a chance to gauge the industry temperature. Each of these events had well thought-out agendas, executed smoothly with a clear call to action. The only disappointment was that attendance wasn’t higher. (read more…)

Online Video Advertising: Time Warner Gets in the Game
ScanScout, a company we wrote about two weeks ago, announced a strategic investment from Time Warner today. After speaking with CEO Doug McFarland, here are three points that summarize TW’s role. (read more…)

The iPhone: 1 Million Served
Just 74 days after it launched, and five days after Apple cut its price by $200, the iPhone sold its 1 millionth unit yesterday. It reached this milestone weeks before Apple had forecast, no doubt pushed over the edge by the many users who were previously on the fence because of price sensitivities. (read more…)

U.S. Mobile Advertising Forecast Released
The often-cited statistics about how many more mobile phones there are versus computers suggest we are on the verge of a market transformation akin to the early days of the Internet’s growth. While forecasters and pundits have touted the potential of mobile advertising for years, the U.S. market has failed to materialize. We believe this is about change. (read more…)