901am

New Media News Every Morning

National Lampoon gets into e-commerce business with JerkassClothing.com

By

National Lampoon, Inc. has acquired JerkassClothing.com, a company specializing in youth and college oriented t-shirts. This is the first e-commerce site acquired by the company, and follows a string of online acquisitions by National Lampoon.

The acquisition of JerkassClothing.com also represents National Lampoon’s new push into branded apparel and merchandise, and will help the company leverage its brand into merchandise sales worldwide. JerkassClothing.com will now be the primary retailer–both “bricks and mortar” or web based–to carry National Lampoon branded clothing.

Originally posted on December 11, 2008 @ 1:38 pm

Filed Under: Web

90 percent of American adults concerned with their personal info online

By

As part of its “Keep America Safe Online” campaign with television crime fighter and victim advocate John Walsh, CA, Inc. announced a survey finding a gap between online security awareness and safety precautions by teens, adults and seniors, with varying behaviors across regions.

Survey results showed that 57 percent of American adults fear their identity might be stolen online within the next two years, and 90 percent worry about the security of their personal information. In addition, 35 percent of teens leave their social networking profiles open to viewing by complete strangers. [Read more…]

Originally posted on December 11, 2008 @ 1:09 pm

Tagged secures $5 million in venture debt

By

Tagged Inc. has raised $5 million in venture debt that would allow the company to accelerate its growth and expand the services and features of its social discovery site Tagged.com. The venture debt was provided by Horizon Technology Finance and Leader Ventures.

“The additional funds will enable us to continue to support our growing traffic, which has increased by more than 500% this year,” said Greg Tseng, co-founder and CEO at Tagged. “Horizon Technology Finance and Leader Ventures are ideal partners for us as we scale revenues and profits in the coming year. The fact that we’ve been able to raise venture debt during the current credit crisis underscores the amazing progress our team has made, as well as the tremendous opportunity that lies ahead.”

Originally posted on December 17, 2008 @ 11:29 am

Newspaper joins Helium’s social publishing platform to provide hyper-local content

By

Helium has partnered with the Massachusetts-based Eagle-Tribune newspaper to provide hyper-local content and promote civil discourse for its readership. The Eagle-Tribune which is a subsidiary of Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. (CNHI), is the second newspaper to take advantage of Helium’s recently launched Media Solutions offering. More partners are expected to be announced soon.

Utilizing Helium’s freelance Marketplace, The Eagle-Tribune will be able to identify a stable of community stringers, who are compensated for contributing articles on a variety of topics ranging from wedding planning tips to great day trips with your kids, to seasonal gardening advice and concert reviews.

By engaging their audience in this way, The Eagle-Tribune aims to give “a greater voice to the people” that live in the paper’s market and can provide information that complements the paper’s editorial staff, said Getler.

The Eagle Tribune will also leverage Helium’s community engagement feature to facilitate reader comments around a new debate topic each week. The feature encourages readers to submit short articles in favor or against the topic at hand.

Originally posted on December 18, 2008 @ 12:01 pm

Filed Under: Web

It’s now 22 months of consecutive growth for AOL

By

AOL websites continued to see strong growth in November, extending year-over-year growth in unique visitors to 22 consecutive months, according to the November 2008 comScore Media Metrix report.

Unique visitors to AOL’s programming content sites grew 3% year-over-year to 54 million in November. In addition, page views climbed 66% year-over-year to 3.8 billion and engagement (total minutes) grew 33% year-over-year in November, showing AOL consumers are actively engaging with the sites. Advertising revenues on AOL’s programming sites have had double-digit growth year-over-year in Q3 2008.

In addition, the recently completely redesigned AOL.com, which opened the site to third-party content, e-mail, social networks and more, grew 14% in page views, 13% in unique visitors and 29% in total minutes, year-over-year.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 10:57 am