Taylor and Jake flirt their way across New York. A Sports Illustrated model gets in a catfight. Celine Dion's husband describes his wife's numerologically perfect birth. Tuesday gossip is a windswept romance.
Forbes.com, the online arm of the right-wing business magazine, is offering to pay blogs to run a political ad supporting a ban on gay marriage. The price: $2.85 per thousand pageviews. The ad advocates the passage of Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative. The blogs in question are part of Forbes's Business and Financial Blog Network, an online-ad network which places ads sold by Forbes salespeople on independent sites. The network itself is run by Adify, an ad-technology company now owned by Cox, the media-and-cable-TV conglomerate. The ad won't run automatically, according to an email from Sharon Gitelle, who's listed on Forbes.com as a "membership" contact; bloggers must specifically choose it. Politics aside, a $2.85 CPM, or cost per thousand pageviews, is nothing to sneeze at in these tough economic times. Reached on the phone, Gitelle said, "I'm not talking to Valleywag." So we know this much: She's no dummy! Here's the email she sent:
Cox Enterprises announced today that the Austin American-Statesman is up for sale, along with 28 smaller papers across several states. This comes just after the Daytona Beach News-Journal was put up for sale, and the NJ Star-Ledger and Trenton Times have been threatened to be sold, and Dow Jones couldn't even sell the Ottaway chain of papers, though Tribune managed to unload Newsday, and not a second too soon. So who's the magical buyer that's going to step up and buy all these papers? Probably not would-be news mogul Sam Zell: Tribune Company's value has fallen by $20 million per day under his reign. Free Dunkin Donuts coffee with every newspaper business sold?
Andrew Fisher, the President of Cox Television and a former reporter and Emmy award winner, is currently locked in a nasty divorce battle in Atlanta-one that centers on allegations of Fisher's "sadomasochistic sex affair at the Mayflower Hotel in 2003." That's the same hotbed of sin hotel that played host to Eliot Spitzer's famous zoom-a-zoom-zoom and a poom-poom with call girl Ashely Dupre! The Atlanta media is strangely silent on this whole affair despite Fisher's big-shot position. A custody hearing is scheduled for next week, and the S&M evidence has been ruled inadmissible. Which is good for Mr. Fisher, except for the fact that the lawyers put out a press release about the whole sordid mess:
Cable copmany Comcast assured the FCC that the company's "network management" practices that involved blocking file-sharing traffic only affected heavy users during peak hours. However, tests found that the Internet service provider blocks such traffic for a majority of users all day, every day, as does fellow ISP Cox. [Torrentfreak]
The news of Adify's $300 million sale was likely the first time most had heard of the online-advertising company. The San Bruno startup was so obscure that Silicon Alley Insider, which first aired the rumor of a sale did not include Adify in its list of the 25 most valuable startups. The price cable-and-newspapers conglomerate Cox paid for the startup would otherwise qualify it for that list. Ad networks, which allow advertisers to buy and publishers to sell ads across multiple websites, have become faddish; and Adify, which allowed anyone to launch a network of their own, caters expertly to that fad.
