Posts Tagged ‘com’

As the National Hockey League season reached its approximate midway point and drew closer to its All-Star Weekend, the league took the time to skate a victory lap while boasting about its online accomplishments.

Unique visitors to NHL.com are up 25 percent versus the same point last season, while video starts are up a whopping 128 percent. And average monthly unique visitors to NHL.com and all 30 team Web sites reached a record 21.2 million.

Subscriptions to the broadband version of NHL GameCenter LIVE were up 24 percent compared with last season. And e-commerce was strong, as well, with gross sales on Shop.NHL.com up 12 percent versus the previous season and the site posting its second-highest gross-sales day ever on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, with Black Friday sales up 153 percent compared with last year.

As far as social media, Likes on the NHL Facebook page were up 633 percent compared with last season, reaching nearly 1.3 million, and the league’s Twitter followers totaled 483,000, up 133 percent. The NHL said Facebook is the No. 1 source of referrals to NHL.com (excluding search engines), and Twitter referrals were up 271 percent. The NHL Winter Classic annual New Year’s Day outdoor game reached No. 6 in global trending on Twitter Jan. 1.

On the mobile front, the league has seen more than 1 million global mobile downloads this season, and NHL GameCenter is the No. 1-ranked sports app in the United States and Canada.

When the snow storms keep coming, you can either curse and complain about it, or take the opportunity to make some money off it. AccuWeather.com will attempt to do the latter by exploring advertising opportunities in its new iPhone app, Snow Days by AccuWeather.com.

The app’s Snow Days Forecast factors in a variety of winter-weather events including snow, ice, and extreme cold, as well as their potential impact on road and travel conditions, to calculate the likelihood of school closings using a five-day, five-point scale ranging from very likely to very unlikely.

AccuWeather.com said it is offering advertisers top-of-page, 300×50 banner ads that can link to more information on both the weather and the products being touted.

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Changes aplenty were announced by IAC Thursday morning, as Barry Diller (left) removed himself from the CEO spot, remaining with the company as chairman and senior executive; a match was found in Match.com CEO Greg Blatt (right) to succeed Diller; and Liberty Media swapped its equity stake in IAC for all of the capital stock of a wholly owned IAC subsidiary that includes properties such as Evite and Gifts.com.

Blatt has been CEO of Match.com since early 2009, after spending more than five years in various senior-management posts with IAC — executive vice president, general counsel, and a member of the office of the chairman. Prior to IAC, Blatt was executive VP, business affairs and general counsel at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and he also served as an associate at New York-based law firms Grubman Indursky & Schindler and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

Liberty had been tied to IAC and its previous incarnations since Diller joined Silver King Communications in 1993. In the transaction announced Thursday, Liberty traded some 12.8 million shares of IAC stock — approximately 8.5 million class-B shares and 4.3 million shares of common stock, representing some 60 percent of total votes — for all capital stock in the previously mentioned subsidiary.

Diller now owns shares representing about 34 percent of the total vote classes of IAC stock, and he was granted the right to exchange up to 1.5 million additional shares of common stock he may acquire within the next nine months for an equal number of class-B shares, potentially boosting his voting control to 41 percent.

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CNN launched a redesigned CNNArabic.com aimed at covering the Middle East and north Africa, as well as Arab-speaking communities worldwide, and bringing the site in line with the design, look, and feel of flagship CNN.com and CNN International.

CNNArabic.com now provides its users with the ability to connect with Arab-focused blogs and Facebook forums, including a weekly roundup of the most important and interesting ones; the latest regional business, sports, and entertainment news, including daily market reports, weekly wrap-ups, and profiles of Arab athletes; and updates on CNN regional programming including Inside the Middle East, Inside Africa, Marketplace Middle East, and Marketplace Africa.

The redesigned CNNArabic.com makes its debut one year after the cable news network launched CNN Abu Dhabi, making it the first Western news organization with a permanent broadcast and production hub in the region.

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msnbc.com vice president of ad sales Kyoo Kim spoke about putting the fork in page views during a session at PubMatic’s Ad Revenue 2010 conference at The Times Center in New York Thursday, paidContent reported.

Kim said that when msnbc.com underwent its redesign in June, one of the main concepts was that “page views were dead” as a metric for advertisers, as they don’t take into account the various content elements, such as stories, abstracts, photos, videos, and social-network sharing, according to paidContent, so msnbc.com made the decision to focus on single pages only.

He added, as reported by paidContent:

The idea we had was, “What if we only serve an ad if it appears in the users’ browser window?” But when I thought about that, my initial worry was, “Crap, what’s that going to do to our inventory?”

We saw a real jump in its unsold inventory submitted via RTB (real-time bidding) platforms. On individual ads, we’ve seen CPMs (cost per thousand views) jump anywhere from 30 percent to 300 percent.

One of the things that online ad salespeople used to say was that we could tell you something that TV and print couldn’t — whether a consumer has seen your ad. It’s time we lived up to that promise.