Yearly Archives: 2007

iPod sales drive Apple’s billion dollar profit

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Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2007 first quarter, ended December 30, 2006. The Company posted record revenue of $7.1 billion and record net quarterly profit of $1.0 billion, nearly double last year’s profit. These results compare to revenue of $5.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $565 million, or $.65 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.

Apple shipped 1,606,000 Macintosh computers and 21,066,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 28 percent growth in Macs and 50 percent growth in iPods over the year-ago quarter. [Podcasting News]

“It’s just a fad. I can go down to Target and get a perfectly good MP3 player that will do everything an iPod will do and only pay $30. And why do a need an MP3 player when I can listen to music for free on the radio?”

Put me down for $5K

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Dave Winer passes along an idea for persuading George Bush to leave office early.

“We all contribute to a fund, that hopefully would contain a lot of money, say $150 million. If Bush resigns on the first day, he gets the whole $150 million. Every day he waits, the fund goes down by 10 percent, so there’s a real incentive for him to act quickly. On Day 2 it’s worth only $135 million. On Day 3, $121.5 million. And so on. It’s kind of a simplified version of Deal or No Deal.”

Get A Mac: Surgery, Sabotage, and Tech Support

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Get a Mac In the first new Mac ad, PC is getting surgery in order to receive all sorts of upgrades to run Windows Vista. Tech Support involves the PC receiving a camera upgrade (via masking tape to the head) so that he can do important business things like videoconference, only to find out that Macs come with built-in iSights now so they don’t need to upgrade. In Sabotage, the PC has decided to sabotage the commercial altogether and replace the Mac with another actor who says everything the PC wants him to say. [Infinite Loop]

The men and/or women responsible for writing these commercials are the very same people that played Keep-Away with the fat kid’s hat a lunch time in the 7th grade. Until he cried.

iPods no threat to radio?

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Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0:

“Every so often someone in the radio industry trots out a study which says iPods really aren’t that threatening to the radio industry’s long-term health and welfare. ‘Folks get tired of maintaining them,’ they will say. ‘They’re just a new form of Walkman,’ say others.”

And the radio industry has (apparently) spent a bazillion dollars promoting HD radio. Check out the Google Trends graph posted as one of the comments.

Everything might turn out roses and sunshine for Radio but it won’t be because of HD.

Cabin Fever: Day Three

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Heeere's Johnny!We’ve been iced in since late Friday and even the dogs seem ready for us to get out of the house. We’re tapped at the top of our very steep hill which, like everything else, is covered in break-a-hip ice. No loss of power and net access has allowed both of us to work. I plan to rappel down the hill and hitch to work in the morning. This happens every four or five years, providing a horrifying glimpse of what retirement must be like (shudder). No thanks.

Making money with news web sites

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Graeme Newell –the president and founder of 602 communications– is a consultant “who shows cable and broadcast teams how to effectively market and tease their shows.” We’re talking TV here but his ideas for increasing revenue from news websites apply equally well to all media.

Most broadcast web sites are money pits. Still, there are a lot of companies making serious money on the web. These are entrepreneurial pirates who have a bloodhound’s ability to sniff out revenue models that actually work. All of these moneymaking sites share some common traits and business characteristics.

Lesson #1 – Web moneymakers are entrepreneurs, not businessmen.
Lesson #2 – Businesses making money on the web are typically small.
Lesson #3 – A 30 year old is considered ancient.
Lesson #4 – Moneymaking web sites focus on niche content.

If one of the Learfield Grownups called me in tomorrow and asked me for a strategy to make money with our news websites… I would point them to Mr. Newell’s lesson plan.

I searched (in vein) for his article on the 602 COMMUNICATIONS website. I hope Mr. Newell doesn’t mind me posting it (after the jump). Emphasis (bold) is mine. [Thanks, Bob Priddy]

Continue reading →

Bloggers take on talk radio hosts

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A San Francisco talk radio station pre-empted three hours of programming on Friday in response to a campaign by bloggers who have recorded extreme comments by several hosts and passed on digital copies to advertisers. This article at NYTimes.com explains and I posted on this when it first came up.

For a dozen years (a long time ago) I co-hosted a one-hour daily call-in show. We did silly shit and almost never got into politics. But we picked the topics for the most part and if the water had gotten too hot, we’d have just stopped taking calls.

That bloggers can now record what we say and send those recordings to our advertisers, urging them to stop advertising on our show… well, that just changes the rules of the game. Big time. Nothing gets a station manager’s attention like a cancellation from a sponsor. “We can always find a new talk show host. Sponsors? Not so easy.”

Your politics will dictate who’s “right” in the story above. But like it or not, yesterday’s “broadcast” is today’s “conversation.” And sometimes it’s all shouting.