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In News Corp.’s quarterly earnings call yesterday there was good and bad news for the media giant – although mostly bad. TV revenues grew, movie revenues were reasonable, however Murdoch’s online division, which includes the likes of MySpace and The Daily, lost a massive $165 million in the first three months of the year.
Although the specific losses from MySpace haven’t been detailed, the zombified social network continues to shed users and advertisers at an alarming rate. News Corp. is currently courting buyers for the site, which is reportedly commanding an asking price of around $100 million.
The other big loser in this division was Murdoch’s fancy iPad newspaper – The Daily. News Corp. says the publication – which is distributed as an app on the iOS App Store – has been downloaded around 800,000 times which, if you recall, was the magic number Murdoch believed was required for the endeavour to be profitable. It was mentioned in the earnings call that The Daily lost $10 million in Q1, so obviously something is amiss.
Clearly not everyone who downloads the app subscribes to the $0.99 per week newspaper – in fact given recent evidence only a very small percentage do.
At launch Murdoch said the operating costs of The Daily would be $500,000 per week, which would put their total operating costs for Q1 at $6 million – although they managed to lose almost double that. Presumably the other $4 million loss is through publicity or unseen costs. Let’s not forget this is on top of the $30 million already invested to get the newspaper off the ground.
I was hoping to gain a bit more insight into subscriber figures through these quarterly results but that would appear impossible, as The Daily seems to be going backwards. News Corp. COO Chase Carey says the outlet is “a work in progress”.
Via MediaMemo
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It’s another week in the books, and with most having last Monday off, the Week in Review is here to help you catch up on everything you missed!
As we get closer to the release of Need For Speed The Run on November 15th, we’re starting to reveal more and more cars. If you’ve pre-ordered the Limited Edition, you’ll now see that the 2012 Porsche Carrera S is part of the package! If you want to see the new Porsche in motion, check out the trailer.
Not only that, but we’ve added another raging bull to the stable of Lamborghinis in The Run. This week we unveiled the Lamborghini Miura SV, one of the first supercars ever.
When NFSDrew and NFSCoulter were in Germany, they took to the streets (literally the streets) of Cologne in some tricked out Go-Karts. You can see the results in the video here.
Team Need For Speed had Fredric Aasbo at Trax bringing home the victory during the UK and Ireland Drift Tour. He’ll be at it again this weekend in Ireland, so stay tuned to our Facebook page for all the coverage.
There’s also an awesome video of Matt Powers tearing up Las Vegas that is definitely worth taking a look at.
For all the D-Mac fans out there, he and Fredric just posted a driver blog as well.
Need For Speed World continues to grow, this week adding the legendary Skyline 2000GT-R and holding another Spot The Devs event! Furthermore, the Darius R8 is now available with in-game cash.
Lastly, if you haven’t checked out Burnout Crash! do it now! IGN gave a great preview for it and really enjoyed it. As a downloadable party-game, it’s an absolute blast (no pun). We’re going to have lots of info coming up in the next few weeks, but make sure you download it on September 20th, and in the meantime, check out the trailer.
As usual, another edition of the Need for Speed Podcast is available. The 96th episode is on iTunes, our RSS feed, and can be streamed from here. We have a full cast this week with a ton of updates on everything Need for Speed and a very questionable sign-off from NFSCoulter. Enjoy!