Yesterday's funeral and memorial service for Michael Jackson was the third biggest Web event of the year, failing to be as big as news of Jackson's death, or Barack Obama's inauguration, Peter Kafka reports. Akamai, which operates a content delivery network, says it delivered 2,185,000 "live and on-demand streams" yesterday-far less than the 7 million-plus streams it delivered during Obama's inauguration. Facebook, which incorporated live video streams from CNN, E!, ABC and MTV, says that one million users posted 800,000 related status updates during the event, with the overwhelming majority coming from CNN. By comparison, there were …

Is Facebook losing its cool factor? According to estimates provided by Facebook to advertisers that were archived for trafficking by iStrategyLabs, college and high school users of the site have declined in absolute numbers by 20 and 15%, respectively, in just six months. At the same time, the number of Facebook users aged 55 and over has jumped from under 1 million to nearly 6 million in the same time period. As Read Write Web's Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, this means there are more Facebook users over 55 today than there are high school students using the site. "Facebook cannot be …

Facebook will be making billions of dollars in revenue in just five years, Facebook board member and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen tells Reuters. He adds that the social network could top $1 billion in revenue this year if it pushed harder on selling advertising, but that it was more important for the company at this stage to grow its user base and market share, rather than worrying too much about making lots of money. "This calendar year they'll do over $500 million," Andreessen said in an interview. "If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they …

How are video games faring in the global recession? Analysts will point to declining year-over-year sales, but a new study from The Nielsen Company, called "The Value Gamer: Play and Purchase Behavior in a Recession", shows that there is more to the story. For example, the number of hours that gamers are playing is at an all time high; they have also increased their purchase of used games to record-breaking totals, as well as subscriptions to video game rental services by mail. "Taken together, these trends point to gamers' continued engagement with the category even as their budgets have come …

Slide, the social networking application maker of well-known apps like Super Poke, is doubling down its revenue efforts on higher premium advertising like brand sponsorships in the $500K range, Om Malik reports. However, the realignment means the company will slash its advertising sales force and reassign existing members to new roles. The company announced the pending changes in a brief email sent out earlier today. Slide has raised over $58 million in several rounds of funding and is valued at $500 million. In a previous post, Malik noted that while advertisers are pushing more …

Christine Varney, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust at the DOJ, is reviewing handset makers' exclusive contracts with carriers-in particular, AT&T's monopoly control over Apple's iPhone, The Wall Street Journal reports. As Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget says, "one suspects that Google lobbyists are somehow involved." According to the report, the DOJ is now reviewing whether large U.S. telecoms like AT&T and Verizon Communications have abused the market power they've amassed in recent years. Exclusive contracts with handset makers, in which wireless carriers may be hurting smaller competitors by locking up popular phones through exclusive agreements, …

"The problem with companies who have built their business around free is that it is far from free to remain successful," notes Mark Cuban on his blog. "The more success you have in delivering free, the more expensive it is to stay at the top." It's a vicious cycle, he says. The more success you have, the more important it is to maintain that success, which means spending more money on new infrastructure and new sources of revenue-"all of the things that will prevent (companies) from staying lean, mean and flexible," Cuban says. "All of the things that distract them …

Netscape founder Marc Andreessen has completed raising $300 million for a new venture capital fund with longtime investing partner Ben Horowitz. In an interview with Kara Swisher, Andreessen says the new firm, called Andreessen Horowitz, will invest in digital companies of any size and of any kind and at any stage in their lifecycle. He adds that the firm is also willing to take equity stakes in public companies. "We are unafraid of investing in 400 people instead of 40 people," Andreessen says. "And we could invest $50,000 to $50,000,000." Andreessen tells Swisher that several major institutional …