The dispute between Gator.com and the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which led to a lawsuit in August, seems to have been resolved. Neither firm would speak with MediaPost today, but in a statement released yesterday, they said they have "tabled their ongoing differences" and that Gator would develop a new version of its Companion Pop-up banner that the IAB criticized in August. The Pop-up, which replaces publishers’ ads on websites with ads Gator sells, "infringes on the rights of Web publishers and does not protect consumers from unauthorized content," the IAB said in August (MediaPost, August 29). Jeff McFadden, president/CEO of Gator, said in the press release, "Gator has agreed to stop selling the Companion Pop-up banner in its current form. We will put this product on hold as we talk with IAB to co-develop a new version that is more publisher friendly, designed to create a revenue stream for them by monetizing unused banner inventory." He also said Gator would honor all ad contracts through the end of the year and re-launch the Pop-up early next year. The IAB seems to be elated at Gator's willingness to change, since it could lead to additional revenue for Web publishers. "I commend Gator for its willingness to develop a new version of its banner product that could provide direct revenue to our member companies," said Greg Stuart, the IAB's CEO. Gator.com is an "online companion" that helps users on the Web by filling in online forms, remembering login IDs and passwords and delivering price comparisons for shoppers. It claims to have 27 million installations. It sends related ads to online shoppers, which the IAB opposed because they replaced the ads publishers had sold. Gator had argued that the ads were legitimate because the users who downloaded Gator's software accepted its ads. Gator filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the IAB on Aug. 27 to protect the Companion Pop-up. The two have agreed to extend various deadlines in the lawsuit, enabling the companies to work together to develop a new Pop-up. The IAB, which holds its annual meeting next week at @d:tech, invited Gator to participate.
Action movies, highlighted by "Lethal Weapon 4" and Steven Seagal's "Fire Down Below," propelled TBS to an atypical first-place finish in the November primetime sweeps. With guns blazing, TBS harvested an average 1.7 million primetime households for the month, eclipsing women's cable network Lifetime -- the standard bearer during recent Nielsen books -- which wound up averaging 1.6 million homes in November. But Lifetime shot up by 26% over its rating in November 2000, while TBS climbed a modest 8%. ESPN finished third for the month, averaging 1.55 million homes, but the network was off by 2% from the previous November. Fourth-place USA averaged 1.4 million homes, growing by 3% from November 2000. Rounding out the top 10, in order, were Nickelodeon (down 1%), TNT (up 6%), Cartoon (up 6%), Fox News (up 27%), CNN (down 15%) and Discovery (down 2%). Among programming achievements, ESPN's Nov. 25 cablecast of the Chicago-Minnesota pro football game wound up delivering 7.44 million homes, the network's highest-rated NFL contest of the season. It was basic cable's highest-rated individual program for the month. TBS's "Lethal Weapon 4" on Sunday, Nov. 11, was basic cable's highest-rated movie of the month, with 7.4 million households. Three other Sunday movies on TBS finished in the top 50 programs for the month: "Fire Down Below" (5.9 million homes), "Pretty Woman" (5.5 million) and the made-for-TV movie "Invincible" (4.5 million). -- Reuters/Variety
Having struck Nielsen gold with its 2001 coverage of NASCAR races, Fox Sports has signed a deal that will give NASCAR control of nine hours per day of the Speedvision cable network's programming schedule.Under the umbrella title NASCAR TV, the 3 p.m.-midnight block will kick off Feb. 11, the date that Fox Sports officially relaunches Speedvision with a new name, the Speed Channel.NASCAR VP of broadcasting Paul Brooks said the block will consist of buildups and post-mortems to weekend NASCAR races, up-to-the-minute news and information programming centered on auto racing, talk shows and footage of classic races from the past.Speed Channel also will start scheduling events such as qualifying races and various regional races, many of them not now televised.NASCAR officials termed the arrangement with Speed Channel an unprecedented channel-within-a-channel strategy devoted to a single sport. "It's about as far as you can go without actually creating a brand-new 24-hour network," said one NASCAR insider.Fox Cable's affiliate-sales execs plan to use the NASCAR block as the highlight of a sales pitch to woo recalcitrant cable operators into taking on the Speed Channel, which reaches 46.5 million homes. That number falls well short of what a network with critical mass can generate. ESPN, for example, gets into 85.6 million.Fox Network and its siblings FX and Fox Sports Net have just completed the first year of an eight-year, $1.6 billion contract with NASCAR to cover the association's key weekend races from February to June.The broadcasts on the Fox Network reached an average of 19.9 million viewers for the period, a million more than watched the comparable broadcasts on ABC and CBS in 2000.Coming off these results, "the Speed Channel deal was a no-brainer," said Brooks. He's convinced that the year-round programming block on Speed Channel will serve as a massive promotional vehicle for the actual races on Fox and, during the second half of the year, on NBC and TNT, which are also finishing their first year of a six-year contract worth a combined $1.2 billion. -- Reuters/Variety