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journalist math
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Journalist Math
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journalist math
journalist math
ABC News grossly overestimates Twitter's reach
ABC News's thesis that "Everyone Is 'Tweeting'" is quickly disproven — in the latest article on Twitter from ABC News. It begins with the obligatory anecdote about James Buck, the Berkeley student briefly jailed in Egypt:[W]ith help from the Egyptian bloggers who received the message and alerted his university and the U.S. Embassy, Buck walked out of the police station a free man. His translator Mohammad was left behind.Mohammed Maree, who made the mistake of getting anywhere near a protest with a cocksure Berkeley J-schooler, is still in jail. And I doubt Buck's continued tweets will be much help in freeing him. Because hardly anyone outside San Francisco's self-involved startup circles uses Twitter, and an email or text message would have been just as effective at saving Buck while leaving Maree stuck in a cell. (Photo by James Buck)
journalist math
Founder of music startup Muxtape learns art of obfuscation from his master
Interviewing Muxtape's Justin Ouellette for Listening Post, Eliot Van Buskirk asked "How many users are there at this point? How many muxtapes?" Ouellette's response — "more than the population of Germany, less than the population of Japan" — puts the number between 82 million and 127 million users. Compete.com puts the number around 52,000. Ouellete might have been joking, but Van Buskirk published the numbers without comment. And remember, with Ouellete and his Muxtape partner Jakob Lodwick, whom Barry Diller fired from his post as founder of online-video site Vimeo, you can't judge what's actually going on based on what they say. More »
journalist math
How Alibaba.com boosted Yahoo's quarter -- and why Wall Street's yawning
Yahoo beat analyst expectations for its first-quarter revenues by $30 million, $1.35 billion to $1.32 billion. Its net income, at $542 million, was considerably higher than Wall Street had hoped for, too. But $401 million of that profit came from a noncash gain, Yahoo's take from Alibaba.com's initial public offering, from which Yahoo profited because it owns 39 percent of Alibaba Group, Alibaba.com's parent company. Investors have taken this caveat into account, bidding Yahoo's stock slightly down in after-hours trading. Commenter WagCurious wants to tar and feather Yahoo CFO Blake Jorgensen for including these gains in Yahoo's quarterly revenues. But one-time gains like this are a well-understood phenomenon, and there's nothing unusual about Yahoo's treatment of it. If nothing else, Wall Street understands making money from buying and selling pieces of companies.
journalist math
Google orders up 1,788 Googlephone apps for just $2,800 apiece
There's no real market for applications written for Google's Android cell-phone operating system — the sad, software-only remnant of the abortive quest for a Googlephone — but Google's trying hard to create an artificial one. Participants in Google's Android Developer Challenge submitted 1,788 Android programs. In May, Google will award 50 semifinalists $25,000 apiece. Eventually Google will pay out $5 million in prizes, or about $2,800 per entry, according to quick bit of math. Why not actually make a Googlephone? That seems easier. (Photo by Kai Hendry)
journalist math
Marc Andreessen's egg-shaped head, CEO's rack distract Fast Company writer from Ning's vanishingly small business
Here's what you really need to know about Ning, according to Fast Company writer Adam Penenberg. Its chairman, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, has an egg-shaped head. Its CEO, Gina Bianchini, who posed for Fast Company's cover in a tank top, is a "hottie." And Ning, a provider of websites for niche social networks, is poised to hit "critical mass" and "no one can stop it." Two out of those three statements were factchecked. More »
journalist math
Watch this YouTube video 1,000 times, and its creator will earn 80 cents
After Yuri Baranovski's Web TV series Break a Leg reached two million views on YouTube, Google cut him a $1,600 check. In advertising math, that translates to an $0.80 CPM, or cost per thousand views. Taking what NewTeeVee knows about YouTube's partner program, disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget suggests that YouTube charges advertisers a CPM between $1 and $3.20 and gets to keep between $0.25 and $2.40. The equation's solution: On 3.4 billion YouTube views in January, Google grossed between $850,000 and $2.72 million. Taking the higher estimate, YouTube will have paid back Google for its $1.65 billion acquisition price in another 607 months.
journalist math
How Google could sneak its way to a major Yahoo deal
To fend off Microsoft, Yahoo is conducting a test with Google to have the latter broker ads for Yahoo's search results. The notion: Google will be so much more effective at selling ads than Yahoo that it will raise Yahoo's revenues, and therefore boost its value well beyond Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer. The test is supposedly "limited," covering only 3 percent of Yahoo's search traffic. But Mike Stoppelman, a former Google engineer, thinks that the deal may be more far-reaching than Yahoo or Google would like you to think. More »
mahalo
Calacanis reveals journalist roots with extra-clever math
Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is an entrepreneur now, but back in the 1990s, he ran a publication called Silicon Alley Reporter. And sometimes, his journalist roots show. Like during this recent interview with The Deal when Calacanis explained who uses Mahalo. Seems 80 percent come from one place and 80 percent from another. Watch for when reporter Mary Kathleen Flynn nods in a big way, as if to say, "Makes perfect sense to me."When people come to the site, I think its it's probably 80 percent the use case of Wikipedia and 80 percent the use case of a traditional search engine like Yahoo or Google.Below, Calacanis explains the perfect sense of his figuring. Those prone to motion sickness should proceed with caution. More »
journalist math
If you round up, Larry Page turns 40 today
Born on March 26, 1973, Google cofounder Larry Page turns 35 today. Maybe wife Lucy will get Larry some jewelry to match Sergey's. (Photo by dannysullivan)
journalist math
SXSW Interactive's $2 million haul
It's been years since I attended SXSW Interactive. The conference swelled and shrank with the dotcom boom; if conference attendance is a meaningful indicator, things are booming again — at least for the organizers. A veteran of the conference circuit laid out the math for me: There are roughly 8,000 attendees this year. Of those, about 5,000 are paid — panelists, media, and a host of other people get in for free. Those who pay are shelling out anywhere from $325 to $450 apiece. (Full disclosure: I'm attending free as a panelist, though I would otherwise have applied for a press pass.) My back-of-the-envelope calculation puts SXSW Interactive's take somewhere in the range of $1.6 million to $2.2 million. That barely covers the event's costs; most of the profit comes from sponsorships. Still, $2 million in 5 days? Startups would kill for that run rate.
layoffs
Nortel firing 3,100 people, hiring 1,000 cheaper ones
Nortel, the second-rung maker of telecom equipment, is losing money. In an attempt to stop doing that, the company is firing 3,100 workers. Of course, that's not how Nortel PR is spinning it. The AP reports: "The company said it plans to cut about 2,100 jobs globally and will shift approximately 1,000 additional jobs to lower-cost areas." Even with our mere powers of journalist math, we can calculate that the company is really firing 3,100 employees and hiring 1,000 more for lower pay — a likely euphemism for "shifting jobs overseas."
journalist math
Gawker Media firing stuns press corps into innumeracy
For the liberal-arts majors who still dominate the ranks of reporters, simple multiplication is a daunting task. Which is likely why Radar and Silicon Alley Insider have contributed 419 words about the firing of Gawker reporter Maggie Shnayerson, yet failed to answer the essential question: How much was she making? The answer is simple, based on publicly available information: More »
layoffs
Did Yahoo save $14 million by skipping bonuses?
A tipster corrects our math. Severance pay and "related cash expenditures" will cost Yahoo a surprisingly low $25 million — because the company may not pay annual bonuses on March 14 to its 1,000-plus laid-off employees. The savings may range as high as $14 million, he estimates. Bonuses are always awarded at the discretion of managers — and why would they give a bonus to someone no longer with the company? More »
journalist math
