Wanda Expands Global Theater Reach as AMC Pays $929 Million for Nordic Cinema

Acquiring the group is part of Wanda Chairman Wang Jianlin’s stated goal of owning 20% of the world’s movie screens. He believes that will give his company significant negotiating power in discussions with the world’s leading film distributors, most notably the six Hollywood majors. Prior to the Nordic deal, Wanda controlled some 12% of global screens through AMC and its separately listed Wanda Cinema line, which has cinemas in China and also owns Australia’s No. 2 operator, Hoyts group.
http://variety.com/2017/film/finance/wanda-expands-global-theater-reach-as-amc-pays-929-million-for-nordic-cinema-1201966877/

Emperors and beggars

Apr 29th 2010

 

Newspaper articles are expensive to produce but usually cost nothing to read online and do not command high advertising rates, since there is almost unlimited inventory.

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Content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content, in contrast, aim to produce content at a price so low that even meagre advertising revenue can support it.

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Demand Media's approach is a “combination of science and art”, in the words of Steven Kydd, who is in charge of the firm's content production. Clever software works out what internet users are interested in and how much advertising revenue a given topic can pull in. The results are sent to an army of 7,000 freelancers, each of whom must have a college degree, writing experience and a speciality. They artfully pen articles or produce video clips to fit headlines such as “How do I paint ceramic mugs?” and “Why am I so tired in winter?”

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The articles are copy-edited and checked for plagiarism. For the most part, they are published on the firm's 72 websites, including eHow, answerbag and travels.com. But videos are also uploaded onto YouTube, where the firm is by far the biggest contributor.

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In March [2010], Demand Media churned out 150,000 pieces of content in this way.

December 3, 2013

The idea with Demand was to marry two businesses: domain name registration and low-cost content production. The foundations were the acquisitions of eHow.com, a provider of how-to tutorials, and eNom, a domain-name registration service provider.
Early on, Demand used eNom’s 1 million generic domain names (such as “3dblurayplayers.com”) to serve up relevant ads to people searching for specific topics. These “domain parking” pages were immensely profitable, generating north of $100,000 per day, according to a former Demand exec who requested anonymity. “That’s $35 million-$40 million per year without doing any work,” the exec said.
But the tactic was fundamentally a bait-and-switch. Users landed on the pages expecting to find information on a subject and instead found an ad.

http://www.economist.com/node/16010291
http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-the-rise-and-fall-of-demand-media-1200914646/

Vice Media Traffic Plummets, Underscoring Risky Web Strategy

March 21, 2016
The irony of what’s propelling this precipitous decline is a controversial practice that Vice, as well as other digital publishers, engage in online that’s actually aimed at inflating traffic numbers.
The inventory that Vice makes available to media buyers is actually a combination of its own website, Vice.com, and a collection of other Web properties Vice doesn’t really own or operate, such as ModernFarmer.com and ThePlaidZebra.com. Comscore enables this arrangement by allowing one publisher to essentially sign away its audience to another publisher through a document known as a “traffic assignment” letter. These pacts are typically struck by smaller publishers lacking advertising sales infrastructure; in exchange for turning over their traffic, they can have their inventory represented by a bigger entity with better access to a wider range of marketers.
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While reach-hungry publishers like Vice aren’t hiding these partners from advertisers, these ad buys are considered the digital equivalent of mortgage-backed securities: mixed in with the premium inventory is lesser-quality placements.
http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/vice-media-traffic-plummets-underscoring-risky-web-strategy-1201733673/