With a technology industry being scolded about needing to help create rain, out comes a very pivotal website link that only verifies that the work of angels deserves recognition and rewards from those who profit from materialism.
SAN FRANCISCO -- Will November be a turning point in the movie-rental business online?
Blockbuster, which had built a prosperous corner-store footprint around the country before the Internet blossomed, appears to be turning that challenge into an opportunity as it extends its reach online.
In fact, fresh signs show that the number of potential customers entering the virtual doors of the nationwide video rental chain surpassed the number going to Netflix, which pioneered and dominated the DVD rental business on the Web.
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Blockbuster's Web site saw 9.3 million unique visitors in November, surpassing Netflix's visitors of 8.2 million in the same period, according to comScore Networks.
This is a far cry from Blockbuster's traffic in the same period last year. Back then, Blockbuster had 2 million unique visitors vs. Netflix's traffic of 9 million.
While November was a good month of traffic at Blockbuster.com, the question is whether the video-rental chain can sustain it.
This is especially a concern for investors when Blockbuster's mainstay offline business is under pressure, prompting the company to bid for Hollywood Entertainment as one solution to defend its movie-rental turf.
Soon, Amazon.com will also be entering the picture with a DVD-download business, according to Netflix. Amazon.com has not denied or confirmed that it has any plans. But recently, Amazon.com launched a DVD rental business in the U.K.
Additionally, it's unclear whether all the news-generated traffic resulted in customers. It may have just been an audience full of media and Wall Street investors conducting due diligence.
Dallas-based Blockbuster's increasing popularity on the Web coincides with its entry into the online DVD rental business, and subsequent series of hard-to-pass-up offers to customers.
This week, Blockbuster said it would waive its late fees. Blockbuster estimates late fees would have contributed $250 million to $300 million to operating income in 2005, but it expects the impact of the absence of the fees will be offset by higher revenue related to increased store traffic and less promotional and marketing activity, as well as an increased focus on operating expense management.
On Nov. 11, Blockbuster made a $1 billion bid for rival Hollywood Entertainment . Earlier this week, billionaire Carl Icahn disclosed he owns 9.97 million shares of Blockbuster, a stake of just over 5 percent of the company. He owns an 8 percent stake in Hollywood Entertainment.
On Oct. 18, Blockbuster said it was slashing fees on its monthly DVD rental service to $17.49. The move followed Netflix's drop in monthly subscription prices to $17.99.
On Nov. 23, Blockbuster and Roxio's Napster joined forces to give customers one month of digital music service and one month of Blockbuster's online DVD rental service. The card is worth $20.
Shares of Intermix Media shot up nearly 10 percent. Intermix Media owns and operates MySpace.com, a Web meeting place that's quickly gaining traction as a spot for networking and finding dates.
Intermix Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt told
Google won a legal victory Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that the Internet search firm could sell trademarked company names to marketers seeking to capitalize on other brand names.
U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema granted Google's motion to dismiss a trademark infringement claim brought on by auto insurer Geico, on the grounds of weak evidence.
"We are very pleased with the judge's ruling," said Google general counsel David Drummond. "It confirms that our policy complies with the law, particularly the use of trademarks as keywords."
Google's keyword business is the company's bread and butter. Some 170,000 advertisers bid on keywords to get to the millions of users querying Google, the dominant online search engine with 40 percent of the searches conducted. In the motion to dismiss the Geico case, Google wrote: "Imagine, for example, that Ford wants to target its advertising at Toyota customers. Ford goes to magazines such as Car and Driver and pays to have a full-page Ford ad face every Toyota review the magazine prints that year.
"Ford is aware that many of the readers of those ads go to those pages looking for information about Toyotas. After all, that is precisely the point: Ford wants to target its ads at its competitors' customers and prospective customers, and win those customers."
In response to the ruling, Geico's general counsel Charles Davies said: "The decision today left open the issue of whether the sale of Geico's trademarks by Google or any other search engine, in and of itself, violates the trademark laws or other laws. Geico will continue to aggressively enforce its trademark rights against purchasers of its trademark on search engines and against search engines that continue to sell its trademarks."
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Member Comments
asians have been much faster and compete about putting everything up front on the web. ad2.Club5678.com
for instance, or for the downloads of the games right on the website- is proof that AO is hot, but it is
falling short of it's potencial. although you can't have serious businesspeople downloading games and songs
when they need to think about serious matters, still- Blockbuster has a fighting sense for survival and that
is good for america film cities and hollywood especially. that is a great holiday return, to lift the confidence
level. so, americans can know the right things to do. but in terms of complexity theory- Korea really excels
in the website organization of download product. when you talk about consumer electronics show, immediately you see a huge room for just the cheap product that sells for 10 cents a piece. breaking systems all the way
down, is interesting. then building them to scale and span into new areas of growth, takes money into focus.
you don't want inflation because no one can afford it. you don't want deflation because there are too many
high tech. ways of determining how much to produce to fulfill demand. you don't have to over-produce and
then discount it down, flooding the market anymore. CES is the closest thing you come to God in the machine
as i see it. the other tech. shows are all way off. Figgures that people who don't understand real value
confuse the general trends, and cause disturbances.
As much as I like Netflix, postal mail seems to be a pretty archaic way to deliver digital content. At a certain point in time this delivery model becomes obsolete which makes me question why Blockbuster isn't trying to leapfrog Netflix rather than just follow it.
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