Amazon.com and eBay have enjoyed a solid year on Wall Street, thanks in part to a change in the way financial analysts and investors assess their performance, says The Wall Street Journal. Both are members of the Internet's Old Guard; as such, their growth is slower than other companies, prompting analysts to weigh metrics like operating margins and revenue per user more heavily. In fact, eBay and Amazon would have posted relatively weak second-quarter earnings by traditional Web standards. It's hard to expand an already-massive audience, but keeping hold of existing ones--and sucking more time out of them--is impressive for …

It's less than a month after NBC decided to pull its new season shows from Apple's iTunes, and the media giant's executives say they're just not worried about the companies' inability to come to an agreement on pricing. "We'd love to figure out something with Apple, but frankly, we have a lot of other alternatives," J.B. Perrette told Wired. NBC isn't alone; other big media companies may soon wake up to find out that they have leverage in their iTunes negotiations with Apple. Once upon a time (some two years ago), they needed Apple's distribution power to sell shows online, …