If you've been noticing a little bit less of SpongeBob on Nickelodeon, Snooki on MTV, or Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central, it's by design: Viacom is squeezing more commercials into every hour of programming. That's the bad news. The worse news is that it's not working.
With all the sturm und drang surrounding Facebook's upcoming May IPO, few media outlets are giving much oxygen to the IPO of online review hub Yelp, due March 2. It will give Yelp a market cap of around $800 million -- and the company isn't even profitable.
After reading the breathless media coverage about the rumored $2 billion Yelp IPO, I have one question: Does the online-review site make money? None of the articles made any mention, but profitability is the issue that should be first on investors' minds.
The Better Business Bureau's slogan is "Start with Trust" -- but not so fast. It seems the go-to source for consumers looking for unbiased reviews has some inherent conflicts of interest: It has been taking money to give businesses higher ratings.
Glenn Beck's show still has higher ratings than all of its 5 p.m. cable competitors put together, but it has been losing viewers at an alarming rate. And it's got fewer -- and less prestigious -- advertisers than "The Situation Room" or "Hardball with Chris Matthews." Will Fox pull the plug?
MTV's controversial new teen drama Skins won't set any of its young viewers on the road to ruin, and it isn't pornographic. It is in bad taste, and MTV must have known would offend some audiences. Still, with 3.26 million viewers for its debut, Viacom is getting exactly what it wanted from the show -- publicity and viewers.
Oprah Winfrey's new cable network is commanding some of the highest ad prices on cable, and it justified those rates with its heavily watched debut. Now, OWN will have to prove it can maintain its viewership levels throughout the year.
GM's stock price rose as much as 2.5% in trading Tuesday after several brokerage houses began coverage of the stock, with several issuing upbeat initial ratings and hefty price targets. GM still faces a hard road forward, but Wall Street generally sees success ahead.
The new show "Sarah Palin's Alaska" attracted a record number of viewers for its debut on the TLC network Sunday night. According to Nielsen figures, 4.96 million viewers watched the show, double the average viewership for the channel's Sunday prime time shows.
A day after Moody's Investors Service announced it was putting Ireland under review for a possible downgrade, Fitch Ratings lowered the country's credit grade to A from AA-. Fitch's downgrade was prompted by the government's announcement last week it is pledging more money -- as much as %u20AC50 billion -- to save Ireland's banks, in addition to uncertainty over the country's economic recovery.
MTV's third-quarter ratings had its largest-ever year-over-year jump for its target 12-to-34-year-old audience, reflecting strong ratings from the Viacom Inc. unit for shows such as "Jersey Shore" and "The 2010 MTV Video Music Awards."
The mortgage-backed securities meltdown whose effects still haunt our economy sprang from a simple cause: The rules of the game gave big incentives to every player involved to ignore the problems and keep collecting their fees. And despite financial reform, those rules haven't changed much.
CNN is sick of being the punching bag of the cable news world. Explaining why the network replaced the head of CNN U.S., CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton cited what he described as unfair press coverage focusing on CNN's declining ratings, while ignoring its growing profitability.
CNN president Jonathan Klein has been hard at work this year remaking the network's primetime lineup, its most important programming block. But whether or not his effort proves successful, he won't be around to find out.