The Future of Pay Walls
With Rupert Murdoch’s mention yesterday of making consumers pay for all content, no matter the relative quality, e.g., WSJ, NY Post, Telegraph, Fox News, etc. has again paved the way for a heap of dicussion about “pay walls.” With the WSJ’s 1 million users bringing in $65 million per year, and the FT free-to-pay model working, Murdoch is trying to lead by supply, and see if demand and the rest of the competition accept the anti-free model. While this may momentarily resuscitate some of the publishing models, while recreating the cable model where free tv became paid, will it also curtail more voices or media navigators (read: niche blogs and news aggregators). Read more >>
Media & Entertainment CEO Salary Breakdown
Bernstein Research analyst Michael Nathanson broke out Media CEO and CFO compensation for 2008, with special attention on CBS and Fox, giving Disney a slight pass as its exec bonuses are tied to shareholder returns. The top six include the major studios minus Sony (Stringer, Pascal, Lynton, Wiesenthal), NBC Universal (Immelt, Zucker, Meyer), Viacom/Paramount (Redstone, Grey) and upstart Dreamworks (Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen, Snider) .
Via Broadcasting & Cable and Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily:
- CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, who was paid $31.9 million last year
- Disney CEO Robert Iger, who earned $30.6 million
- News Corp #2 Chase Carey, who could haul in $43.1 million over the next year
- News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, who took home $27.5 million
- Viacom’s Philippe Dauman, who was paid $23 million
- Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, who made $19.9 million
MySpace on the Bounty
No mutiny here actually, but we like the pun – today, MySpace’s COO and SVPs of Engineering + Product Strategy jumped off the boat. Noted as a “rising star,” 27-year-old Amit Kapur (MySpace’s COO) is leaving for a start-up after 13 months at the social network portal. In charge of global ops, it’s a fresh turn for Kapur; and a dynamic story of an acquired start-up supporting player turning into a new, untethered, start-up featured role. Think Googler turned Xoogler metaphor. Read more >>
Peter Chernin to Exit Murdoch’s News Corp., Who Wins?
We wouldn’t have predicted such a move with the succession plans of most studio heads being ‘muddled’ at best, but Rupert Murdoch (Innovator/Benefactor) has made a industry-loud judgment call. Based on Murdoch’s legacy plan for his son, James Murdoch, to take over from Chernin, News Corp. President & COO, this leaves Chernin with a 6-year production deal, $40M in severance and a number of other high-flying amenities. So, who wins? Chernin or Murdoch? More after the jump… Read more >>
Has MySpace become “MySpaced”?
On reading Techcrunch’s advance review of a WSJ reporter’s new tell-all book on MySpace, I updated my Facebook status with bewilderment that MySpace passed on buying Facebook for $75M in 2004. And I made a Freudian typo… Read more >>
Billionaire Benefactors Give More Than You Think…
In 2008, many of our national billionaires gave much of their fortunes away, involuntarily. From Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas and Macau casino billionaire who lost $24 billion ($24B) to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and the Google guys, last year was a very difficult year to amass. Now who’s to say that losing “a few personal billion” when you still have “a few” is an innovation problem – it matters when these entrepreneurs pull back on progress and humanitarian giving to stem private losses.
Per Forbes, Warren Buffet lost $16.5B, Gates was down $12.3B and Google’s Larry Page lost more than half of his g-trove: $11.9B. Read more >>