I didn’t realize The New York Times Company had a stake in a major league baseball team. Wonders never cease. But, as Silicon Alley Insider reports, the Boston Red Sox stake may turn out to be one of the more rewarding assets on the newspaper company’s books right now.

It turns out that The New York Times Company is looking for buyers for its 17.5 percent stake in the entity that owns the Red Sox. A price of $150-$200 million or so seems likely.

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Silicon Alley Insider reports that the Apple iPhone shows potential as an ebook reader. New York based ScrollMotion has begun selling ebooks for the iPhone via the iPhone store. These include bestselling titles from major publishers including Random House, Simon and Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, Penguin and Hachette.

Silicon Alley says the iPhone is unlikely to offer a more enjoyable reading experience than real books or even Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader. On the other hand, its size and portability may be just the thing for plenty of people. Peak-hour train travelers come to mind…

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Silicon Alley Insider has provided a nice summary of Google’s moves to boost revenues and cut costs over the last few months. And no, if you noticed more ads on Google’s search pages, it’s no accident.

Here are eight ways in which Google is driving revenues, followed by two ways it is cutting costs…

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As the number of people watching online videos rises… so too do expectations about the quality of those videos. That’s one of my take-outs from TubeMogul’s list of the 10 most popular web videos for 2008, based on total views.

Silicon Alley Insider reports that while the 10 most popular web videos of 2007 included several ‘amateur-created’ videos, 9 out of the top 10 for 2008 were professional videos. Eight of these were music videos and the one ‘amateur’ production was one of Barack Obama’s election race speeches.

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Silicon Alley Insider reports that due to the stock market crash, Mark Zuckerberg - the founder and owner of 20 to 30 percent of Facebook - is no longer a billionaire.

His stake is now worth a mere $400-600 million. It must be tough…

Source: Henry Blodget, “Youngest Billionaire In History (Mark Zuckerberg) Not A Billionaire Anymore,” Silicon Alley Insider, December 16, 2008

Doesn’t it feel like we’re back in 2000 and 2001? All the high-profile tech companies seem to be putting their ambitious growth plans on the back burner as they desperately seek ways to cut costs and become (more) profitable. And now you can add social news site Digg to the list.

Having failed to sell Digg to various potential buyers, Digg CEO Jay Adelson says the social news aggregator is no longer for sale and will now focus on building a profitable, independent business.

Apparently, Digg will aim to triple sales before the end of 2009 and turn a profit within 1-2 years. It will do so by:

• Cutting back on expansion plans
• Reducing costs
• Renewing its focus on increasing sales
• Inserting ads into RSS feeds
• Buying Digg ‘clones’ to expand overseas
• Adding new features to increase more clicks on the site

Source: Nicholas Carlson, “Jay Adelson’s Six Step Plan To Make Digg Profitable”, Silicon Alley Insider, December 2, 2008

Twitter CEO Evan Williams has indicated that Twitter will start making money in the first quarter of 2008.

The Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter has no intentions of raising further capital in 2009 and is in talks with ‘large consumer packaged good companies’ about its business model.

While we don’t know WHAT Twitter’s business model will be, Mr Williams has revealed some changes that Twitter has in the works.

Among other things, Twitter will allow Twitter friends to form groups for easier following, and will also make the micro-blogging service easier to use.

Fewer site outages would be nice too…

Source: Eric Krangel, “Twitter: Secret Business Model On Track For Q1”, Silicon Alley Insider, December 3, 2008

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry predicts Google’s revenues will decline over the next three years. He forecasts the company’s revenues will drop from $15.71 billion in 2008… to $15.23 billion in 2009… to $14.57 billion in 2010.

Chowdry’s pessimism derives from research indicating that the challenging economic conditions will impede Google’s online advertising business. Already, he says, the number of keywords sold by Google is down 2-5 percent, with bids on keywords down by as much as 20 percent.

What’s more, Google is focusing more and more on cutting costs and boosting revenues. Over the last few months, the search giant has not only canceled plans to build a data center in Oregon, but has also cut expenditure on food, travel, contractors and Friday afternoon parties.

At the same time the company is aggressively pursuing new revenue opportunities, having opened up new ad channels including Google News, Google Maps, Google Image Search and YouTube.

Presumably, however, Chowdhry regards these moves as insufficient to avoid his predicted three year decline in sales.

Source: Nicholas Carlson, “Google Revenues To Shrink Through 2010″, Silicon Alley Insider, December 2, 2008

American Airlines has brought an action against Yahoo accusing it of trade mark infringement. Why? Because, not too long ago, when someone searched on ‘American Airlines’, Yahoo allowed ads by other companies to appear in the paid search results.

Hmmm… does that ring in any bells for any pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers? Like… alarm bells?

American Airlines sued Google over the same thing last year. The parties settled, however, so it’s not clear who’s likely to win this one. The Silicon Alley Insider indicates that Yahoo may be fighting a losing battle because of the murkiness of the law regarding concepts of “nominative fair use”, “commercial referential trademark use,” and other such concepts.

But for now, Yahoo ain’t settling, and Internet marketers - specifically those who run pay-per-click campaigns will want to keep a close eye on this case.

Sure, Yahoo has a major incentive to win - the more freedom it has to run PPC ads, the more money it will make.

Internet marketers, however, also have a MAJOR vested interest in the outcome. Whether you tend to side with American Airlines i.e. that not just anyone should be able to run an ad in response to a search phrase incorporating a trade mark… or you side with Yahoo and believe that you should have the freedom to run ads in response to people’s searches, regardless of whether or not those searches include trade marked terms.

Want to know how close to home this is? Consider everyone who runs ads using the name of some Internet marketing guru. What if that guru has obtained a trade mark for his or her name? If the case is decided in American Airlines’ favor then search engines will no longer be allowed to display ads in response to a ‘trade marked’ search phrase other than those of the trade mark holder or its licensees…

Which means – for better or worse - you can say goodbye to all those ads.

And just to clarify - we’re not talking about running ads that necessarily INCLUDE the trade mark in the ad. We’re talking about ads that say ANYTHING, but that have a link to a site that is not owned or affiliated with the trade mark owner.

Trust me – bidding on trade marked terms is rife. In fact, a little test using both Yahoo and Google (localized to Australian results) generated two ads by non-Amazon affiliated Australian bookstores.

Oh, in case you’re wondering why Google didn’t fight American Airlines over the same issue… well, I don’t know… but it may well be that Google was worried that the court would decide in American Airlines’ favor… which would create a legal precedent that it would have to follow in respect of other advertisers…

If only one company has a problem, why rock the boat and potentially lose a hefty chunk of business?

Source: Eric Krangel, “Yahoo Fighting American Airlines Search Ads Lawsuit. What’s The Upside?” Silicon Alley Insider, December 1, 2008, Silicon Alley Insider

Silicon Alley Insider doesn’t put it too nicely. According to Henry Blodget, “eBay’s core business continues to fall apart.”

Blodget attributes eBay’s declining traffic and revenues to the worsening economy. The rest of, however, is due to: “competition, overpricing, and the deterioration of eBay’s value proposition.”

According to Nielsen, October 2008 saw eBay attract 10 percent fewer unique visitors, 33 percent fewer page impressions and 19 percent less time per user than in October 2007.

Here’s the breakdown:

October 2007

• Unique visitors: 54,498,000
• Page impressions: 13,562,920,000
• Average time per user (hr:min:sec): 2:12:51

October 2008:

• Unique visitors: 49,213,000
• Page impressions: 9,139,905,000
• Average time per user: 1:47:26

A similar story of ongoing decline is painted by Google Trends for Websites. (And I used to think eBay was unbeatable…)

Source: Henry Blodget, “eBay Traffic Plummeting (EBAY)”, Silicon Alley Insider, November 25, 2008