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ONE of Australia's leading advertisers believes proposed media reforms would inflict Australians with the same limits on the free press as Russia and Cuba.

Harold Mitchell today told a Brisbane audience the reforms proposed by the Independent Media Inquiry were "crap", designed by people who did not understand free choice.

"Firstly, they believe that there should be no freedom of the press, but, you know, through all the centuries the greatest way a society can ever continue is by having a free society," Mr Mitchell said.

"You control thoughts and it just won't happen."

Mr Mitchell is founder of Mitchell & Partners and executive chairman of Aegis Media Pacific, a company that buys commercial space on all media for some of the world's biggest brands.

He is also the expert chosen by the federal government to advise on how more philanthropists can be encouraged to donate to the arts.

Mr Mitchell told the QUT business leaders forum that some of the reforms proposed by the inquiry could have an equivalent effect to jailing newspaper editors who offended vested interests.

He said: "Now, what sort of a world are we living in when that would be a notion we should have?"

The report by retired judge Ray Finkelstein, QC, presented last week to the federal government, proposes sweeping regulation of newspapers.

It urged the government to set up a taxpayer-funded body to regulate all of Australia's news and current affairs across all media: a statutory watchdog to set standards and handle complaints.

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Media reforms 'as bad as Russia, Cuba'

A number of recent studies have shown that social media services like Twitter and Facebook are one of the largest sources of traffic for news sites, and the BBC has now decided to aggressively test the limits of this dynamic by launching the BBC News Control Panel on Facebook.

The Control Panel requires that you first "like" the BBC page on Facebook, after which you are presented with a menu of options that allow you to customize your Facebook news feed by topic, news show, or correspondent.

Explaining the reasoning behind the move, BBC News product manager Gareth Owen said, "Fewer than 50 percent of the 8 million-plus visitors to the News website every day see our front page and the rest arrive directly at a story, video page or section index Almost a quarter of a million individual users start their BBC News website journey via a link on Facebook every day."

Apparently not everyone is a fan. Not long after the BBC announced the new Facebook feature, several BBC fans voiced some rather strong opposition to the feature.

A BBC user named Chris offered the most detailed critique saying, "Sorry, but while I appreciate that many people come in from Twitter or Facebook, and while I think it is reasonable for the BBC to add sharing buttons and the like, I strongly dislike the idea of the BBC spending its resources building applications specifically to promote a proprietary, privately run platform and one moreover whose revenue comes from attempting to monetise its users personal data and activity records."

For now, the BBC says this is just a beta product, but the execution and ease-of-use of the feature suggests that a lot of thought went into the Control Panel.

A number of news organizations, like the Washington Post and Yahoo News, have launched Facebook-centric apps that allow users to automatically share with their friends the stories they read. Facebook says this is an easy way to keep your friends up-to-date with your interests, though critics have argued that it is ruining sharing.

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BBC Launches 'News Control Panel' on Facebook

BEIJING, March 8, 2012 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Ku6 Media Co., Ltd., ("Ku6 Media" or the "Company", Nasdaq: KUTV) a leading internet video company in China, today announced unaudited financial results for the fourth quarter of and full fiscal year ended December 31, 2011.

Background

In 2010, Ku6 Media (formerly known as Hurray!) completed a series of transactions including acquisition of Ku6 Holding Limited in January 2010 and disposal of its wireless value-added services ("WVAS") and music businesses to Shanda Interactive Entertainment Limited ("Shanda") as well as acquisition of online audio business from Shanda in August 2010, and became a company focusing on online advertising business on its online video platform of http://www.Ku6.com. As a result, the operating results of WVAS and recorded music were presented as "Operating Results of Discontinued Operations" in the income statements.

Highlights

Business results

Total revenues, representing advertising revenue from online video portal operation, were $4.42 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, representing an increase of 4.5% from $4.23 million in the third quarter of 2011 and a decrease of 34.7% from $6.77 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

In the second quarter of 2011, the Company started to generate revenues from performance advertising using a system called Application Advertisement ("AA"). The performance advertising revenue was realized through an affiliated advertising agent. 79.2% of total revenues in the fourth quarter was from this source, as compared to 72.3% of total revenues in the third quarter of 2011.

Cost of revenues was $4.23 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, representing a decrease of 22.8% from $5.48 million in the third quarter of 2011 and a decrease of 66.1% from $12.46 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. The change of content strategy since the second quarter of 2011 fromlong-form professional content to UGC is the main reason for the decrease in cost of revenues. As a result, gross profit was $0.19 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, as compared to a gross loss of $1.25 million in the third quarter of 2011 and a gross loss of $5.70 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Operating expenses were $4.38 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, representing a decrease of 61.2% from $11.28 million in the third quarter of 2011 and a decrease of 55.2% from $9.77 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. Fourth quarter operating expenses include a $0.98 million favorable adjustment due to increased forfeitures of equity compensation awards caused by greater than anticipated headcount reductions in the Company's strategic transition.

Operating loss was $4.19 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, representing a decrease of 66.6% from $12.53 million in the third quarter of 2011 and a decrease of 72.9% from $15.46 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

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Ku6 Media Reports Unaudited Financial Results for the Fourth Quarter and Full Year of Fiscal Year 2011

ONE of Australia's leading advertisers believes proposed media reforms would inflict Australians with the same limits on the free press as Russia and Cuba.

Harold Mitchell today told a Brisbane audience the reforms proposed by the Independent Media Inquiry were "crap", designed by people who did not understand free choice.

"Firstly, they believe that there should be no freedom of the press, but, you know, through all the centuries the greatest way a society can ever continue is by having a free society," Mr Mitchell said.

"You control thoughts and it just won't happen."

Mr Mitchell is founder of Mitchell & Partners and executive chairman of Aegis Media Pacific, a company that buys commercial space on all media for some of the world's biggest brands.

He is also the expert chosen by the federal government to advise on how more philanthropists can be encouraged to donate to the arts.

Mr Mitchell told the QUT business leaders forum that some of the reforms proposed by the inquiry could have an equivalent effect to jailing newspaper editors who offended vested interests.

He said: "Now, what sort of a world are we living in when that would be a notion we should have?"

The report by retired judge Ray Finkelstein, QC, presented last week to the federal government, proposes sweeping regulation of newspapers.

It urged the government to set up a taxpayer-funded body to regulate all of Australia's news and current affairs across all media: a statutory watchdog to set standards and handle complaints.

View post:
Media reforms as bad as Russia

Keynote Systems, the expert in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring, monitors the top 10 UK social networking sites on a monthly basis and analyses how these sites perform compared to their competitors. By Robert Castley.

The performance of the social networking sites monitored this month slipped, both in terms of availability and speed, when compared to January. Friends Reunited, Hi5 and Bebo all failed to load in less than two seconds, with Bebo bringing the average right down with an average response time of 16.34 seconds for February. Facebook continued to be the fastest site to load by almost half a second, with an average time of 0.69 seconds.

Bebo also struggled with availability this month, with an average success rate of 94.67%. However Hi5 was the poorest performing site in February, with a success rate of only 81.47%. This means that almost 20% of people trying to access the site this month were met with loading issues.

The new social networking site, Pinterest, has been hitting the headlines a lot this month. Experts are claiming that sign-up for this site has been far faster than for Twitter and Facebook in the first year. This demonstrates that there is still a considerable appetite for new social networking sites, and so its clear that existing sites need to up their game when it comes to performance in order to compete with new sites.

About the author

Robert Castley has been solutions consultant at Keynote for over two years. Prior to working at Keynote, Robert worked as a Professional Services Consultant at a document management company, Macro 4, where he worked on developing custom web interfaces. Robert is passionate about web performance and optimisation and has over 10 years of web development experience. One of his proudest achievements is developing one of the worlds most popular Open Source Content Management Systems to the masses Mambo, which now lives on as Joomla!

About the company

Keynote Systems is a global leader in Internet and mobile cloud monitoring. It provides companies with solutions for continuously improving the online experience. Founded in 1995, Keynote provides testing, monitoring and measurement products and services for any enterprise including online portals, e-commerce sites, B2B sites, mobile operators and mobile infrastructure providers. Keynote products and services help companies improve customer experience in four areas: Web performance, mobile quality, streaming and real user experience testing.

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Performance of social networking sites – Index from Keynote Systems for February 2012