• by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan , Op-Ed Contributor, June 3, 2013

Buy on rumor, sell on news?

After all of the hype leading up to the  return of “Arrested Development”  and its debut on Netflix, the company's stock slipped 6% earlier in the week.

That sounds about right: Buy  on the rumor, sell on the news. 

Has native advertising jumped the shark?

Every media company from Buzzfeed to the New Y ork Times has set its sights on native advertising as a means to make free, ad-supported content a viable business.  But, we thought we had limits.  Apparently not.  Reddit is not only getting into content, but it's setting its sights on native advertising.

If nothing else proved that native advertising had jumped the shark, this may be it.  It's one thing for a UGC panacea like Reddit to dive into content creation, but for it to seek to weave in advertising in content, that can only mean one of two things: native advertising really is the future of media, or it's a buzzword whose 15 minutes ran out five train stations ago.

Has Hulu peaked?

A year ago, a number of companies bid on Hulu, to no avail.  Since then, the #2 video property (after YouTube) lost its CEO.  Today, the business is back on the auction block and a handful of companies including yahoo! have placed offers.  The knock on the site was the questionable bag of rights.  With a couple of bids coming in at over $1 billion, you have to wonder: Has Hulu peaked?  Or, is this a breakthrough moment where Hulu will finally deliver on its potential (despite its owners' perpetual tugging back).

Is Google going to be dominate even more?

Last week, I commented on how Google could eclispe Facebook in social advertising by making YouTube the pillar of its social strategy.  This week, we saw two stories corroborate that idea: for one, YouTube is gaining ground on Facebook.  Second, Google is amalgamating ad dollars faster than anyone else.  In other words, social is Google's for the taking. But the longer is misfired via Google Plus, the less likely Google wins in social.

Is this a seemingly benign death blow to TV companies' online aspirations?

TV media companies have had the luxury of turning up the dial and accelerating their online strategy by publishing their archives online.  But this week, those plans were thrown a curveball: "Thanks to federal law, all full episodes of movies and TV shows that have aired on TV must be closed captioned for the hearing impaired when shown online, often at considerable expense. Short clips, including news segments, are exempted."

In other words, as media companies will hesitate to publish their own broadcast content if it means having to invest dollars to add close dcaptioning, making made-for-Web sources more attractive.

Time Warner's online video bets

Earlier this week, Time Warner Investments made a big bet in Maker Studios.  Meanwhile, CNN - a Time Warner subsidiary - just hatched a partnership with Buzzfeed.  While these two decisions were most likely made independently, they do show a willingness on Time Warner's behalf to get increasingly aggressive with online video.

Time will tell if either move makes a dent long-term.