MediaPost's Catharine Taylor has a fun profile of the Comcast Twitter guy. You'll remember that Comcast got a lot of positive play in the blogosphere when Comcast solved an outage for super-blogger Mike Arrington after first learning of it via Arrington's Twitter complaints.
The cable operator got a lot of kudos for using this cutting-edge microblogging platform to search for customer complaints, although some folks thought that Arrington only got the company's attention because...he's Arrington. But Frank Eliason, the Comcast employee who under the name Comcastcares scans Twitter for complaints (and who posted a comment on my blog entry about the incident) told Taylor that he helps out any customer in distress.
Eliason says he natrually gravitated toward Twitter, but at least one Comcast executive assigned the customer service specialist to follow Twitter for potential customer service problems (and, I suspect, to nip budding PR nightmares in the bud among Twitter's elite blogger users.)
BTW, I found out about this article because Catharine Taylor tweeted me to let me know about it.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:14 PM | Print | Comments (0)This little bit is perhaps not worthy of a blog post, but for some reason it's been sticking with me all day since I listened to Time Warner's Q1 08 earnings call. During the Q and A of the call, UBS analyst Michael Morris threw a curve ball at the TW management team by asking which executives were responsible for approving AOL's $850 million acquisition of UK-centric social networking site Bebo.
At the time of the deal, some folks speculated that AOL was paying an unheard-of 160 times cash flow for the presumably attractive but still tiny social networking service. Bebo reportedly generated only $20 million in revenue and $5 million in cash flow during 2007, although with a rumored $15 billion valuation on Facebook, $850 million might seem reasonable.
Thanks to Seeking Alpha, a transcript of the exchange is available (although the transcriber spelled Bebo "Beebo"). I've edited the exchange as follows:
Michael Morris: And then second of all, just going back to the Beebo acquisition, can you talk a little bit about the due diligence on that acquisition? What level of management is involved in the approval of an $850 million acquisition? And also, can you provide any financial data around it? You know, what’s your outlook for revenue, returns -- anything like that would be helpful. Thanks.
...Specifically back to Beebo though, the due diligence around that acquisition, I mean, what -- how high up the management chain does that go in terms of being approved?
Jeffrey L. Bewkes: I don’t understand that.
John K. Martin Jr.: Well, I’ll just take a shot. There was --
Doug Shapiro: Well, it’s really two different concepts. There’s the diligence that is actually done at Beebo, which was performed by AOL with some Time Warner supervision. And then there is the approval process which went all the way up Time Warner.
Jeffrey L. Bewkes: You mean who -- did I approve acquiring Beebo, is that the question?
Michael Morris: Exactly.
Jeffrey L. Bewkes: Yes.
John K. Martin Jr.: And it also received board of director approval.
Jeffrey L. Bewkes: And the board, right.
Is Morris taking names for a shareholder lawsuit or something? The subtext to Morris' question was all too obvious to listeners even if TW management was initially thrown off-guard. Morris was asking whether some idiotic lower echelon executive had been given free rein to spend 160 x cash flow to buy a third-tier social networking service without top management's approval or...whether the top executives themselves are idiots.
Time Warner announced this morning that it will completely spin off its cable unit, a move that has been widely anticipated since CEO Jeff Bewkes took over the company at the beginning of the year. Combined with the decision to jettison AOL's access business, which Bewkes said this morning will be completed by the end of Q2 08, Time Warner is now on its way to becoming a pure content play.
"We think the content brands that we've got in our networks, in our publishing titles and in some of our AOL stables are very strong and with an operating management that knows how to succeed and compete vigorously in the market and we think we can put fairly reliable strong growth performance into the remaining businesses of Time Warner," Bewkes said when asked about Time Warner's long-term strategy during the company's earnings call today.
Not slated for jettisoning is one of Time Warner's weakest properties, AOL, presumably because of its prospects to someday reap the reward of a flush Internet ad market and, perhaps, its strategic importance as Microsoft angles to make a hostile bid for Yahoo!. Despite AOL's truly weak Q1 08 performance, Bewkes said that AOL's Platform A ad strategy is working and he's optimistic about future growth.
Still, even he hinted at problems at the perpetually ailing unit. "We were not satisfied by the performance of display advertising on our owned and operating inventory," Bewkes said (owned and operated inventory is the most lucrative for AOL.) "We didn’t integrate our Platform A acquisitions fast enough and that created a sales channel problem."
Time Warner's TV networks, led by TNT, CNN and HBO, were the bright spots at the company during the quarter, with revenue rising 10% year-over-year to $2.7 billion and operating incoming advancing from $860 million to $874 million.
Time Warner Cable was also a strong performer during the quarter -- the jettisoning of TWC probably has more to do with Bewkes' programmer background at HBO and his resulting dislike for the capital-intensive, messy business of cable distribution than it does with the inherent growth prospects for cable. For the first time in four quarters, Time Warner Cable post net basic subscriber gains, adding 55,000 customers during the quarter to reach a total of 13.3 million basic subs.
High-speed data, digital and telephony growth continued at decent levels. TWC added 304,000 net new high-speed customers, down 15% from the net adds for Q1 07 but up 46% sequentially. TWC ended the quarter with 7.9 million high-speed customers, representing 30% of homes passed.
Digital service advanced by a net 261,000 new customers during the quarter, a run-rate down 6% year-over-year but up 61% sequentially. At the end of the quarter, Time Warner had 8.2 million digital customers, representing 62% of all basic subscribers.
Digital telephony grew by a net 275,000 subscribers (although Time Warner elminated around 9,000 analog phone customers), a growth rate up 18% year-over-year but down 4% sequentially. By quarter's end TWC had 2.3 million telephony subscribers, representing 13% of homes passed.
Total revenues for TWC grew by 8% year-over-year and 2% sequentially to $4.16 billion. Cash flow advanced by 7% year-over-year to $1.4 billion, while free cash flow soared by 51% to $339 million.
(Download our spreadsheets detailing Time Warner Cable's current and historical financial and operating data here. The download is free although registration is required.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:26 PM | Print | Comments (0)Despite hype generated by the release of Comscore data last week showing increased traffic to AOL sites, the troubled Time Warner unit continued to shrink away during Q1 08, according to trending schedules (PDF) released by Time Warner this morning in conjunction with its Q1 08 earnings results. Revenue for AOL was down 23% year-over-year and 10% sequentially to $1.1 billion. (Download our spreadsheet that contains key financial and operational data for AOL for Q1 06 to Q1 08.)
AOL continued to lose its dial-up customer base, losing 647,000 subscribers to end the quarter with 8.7 million customers. (Just two short years ago, AOL had nearly 19 million subscribers and three years ago, this number neared thirty million.)
Even with a big boost in reported traffic (affirming the comScore numbers), ad revenues for AOL were flat year-over-year and declined sequentially. Total ad revenue was $552 million, up only 1% year-over-year but down 11% year-over-year.
At the same time, however, page views rose 19% year-over-year and 7% sequentially to 52.5 million even as unique visitors stayed stable at 110 million (down from 111 million in Q1 07 but up from 109 million in Q4 07). The number of monthly page views per unique visitor rose by 20% year-over-year to 159.
So, with page views on the upswing, what happened to ad revenue? Obviously AOL cut its ad rates or failed to sell as much inventory at desired prices as it had hoped or both. Domestic ad revenue less traffic acquisition costs on a CPM basis dropped 29% year-over-year and 27% sequentially to $5.56.
Time Warner will hold its earnings call at 10:30 a.m. ET and we'll get more insight into AOL's disappearing act.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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