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AP Goes With Twitter
January 14, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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The Associated Press began using its official Twitter account as an advertising platform on Monday, as the news organization looks for new ways to generate revenue.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd was the first sponsor on the @ap account for breaking news, which is followed by 1.5 million Twitter users. The South Korean electronics maker’s initial “SPONSORED TWEET” promoted its events at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
AP did not disclose financial details of the arrangement.
Twitter, which sells ads directly to make money from the social media’s monthly base of 200 million users, will not receive any proceeds from the AP-Samsung deal.
The AP called the initiative part of a new business strategy and stressed that sponsored tweets will clearly be labeled to differentiate them from news tweets.
The ads provide AP a new income source as news organizations from newspapers to television face severe revenue declines in the face of high production costs.
While the AP was founded in 1846 by U.S. newspapers as a breaking news conduit, only 22 percent of its revenue comes from member fees. Photo licensing, advertising on its news application AP Mobile and YouTube channel are other revenue streams.
Microsoft Delivers Massive Security Updates
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Microsoft today patched a whopping 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), and other software, including 30 bugs in the Windows kernel device driver and one in IE that was exploited at the Pwn2Own hacking contest last month.
The company also delivered a long-discussed “backport” to Office 2003 and Office 2007 that brings one of the newer security features in Office 2010 to the older editions.
The 17 updates, which Microsoft dubs “bulletins,” tied a record set late last year, but easily beat the October 2010 mark for the total number of flaws they fixed. Altogether, today’s updates patched 64 vulnerabilities, 15 more than in October and 24 more than in the former second-place collection of December 2010.
Nine of the 17 bulletins were pegged “critical,” Microsoft’s highest threat ranking, while the remainder were marked “important,” the next-most-serious label.
Microsoft and virtually every security expert pegged several updates that users should download and install immediately.
“There are three we think are top priorities,” said Jerry Bryant, group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in an interview earlier today. Bryant tagged MS11-018, MS11-019 and MS11-020 as the ASAP updates.