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What, me, worry?

Those three words broadly sum up the attitude of the broadcast TV network chiefs regarding the encroachment on their turf by digital media companies, as they conducted their traditional springtime dog and pony shows for advertisers in New York this week.

Two weeks earlier, Google, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and other big digital media companies closed out their “Newfront” presentations to the same constituency, appealing for a portion of traditional TV’s annual $70 billion market share.

But as this week’s upfront presentations revealed, the linear video guys still have lots of swagger.

“Not Google, Netflix, Yahoo or, YouTube can compete with our scale,” Fox Broadcasting entertainment chairman Peter Rice told advertisers and their agencies Tuesday. “They’re now buying shows — good for them. In reality they’re going to find they’re in the NFL. It takes a lot to make a show that people want to watch across all media.”

“Everyone is still talking about the first screen, the TV screen,” CBS Corp. chief Les Moonves told the Carnegie Hall audience Wednesday. “The first screen must come first, and there’s no second screen without it.”

For now, the money seems to backing up these claims.

With the CW delivering the last of the big broadcaster presentations of fall schedules on Thursday, network ad sales executives and media agency TV buyers will commence their annual negotiation dance.

During these transactions, large automakers, drug companies, packaged-goods makers and other big brands will buy the bulk of their commercial time for the coming TV season.

Last week, Morgan Stanley media analyst Benjamin Swinburne predicted that broadcasters would see about a 1 percent increase over last year’s upfront market haul, estimating their take this year to be around $9.16 billion.

Swinburne projected that cable networks — whose collective market share is being specifically targeted by companies including Google, Yahoo and AOL — will see their upfront revenue increase around 4.3 percent to $9.69 billion.

“We think it is still too early for online video to be meaningfully disruptive to TV,” Barclays Equity Research analyst Anthony DiClemente reported Wednesday.

The average U.S. person, DiClemente noted, still watched 153.19 hours a month of TV in the fourth quarter, compared to 4:34 hours of online video and 4:20 of video on phones.

Digital as we wanna be

When they weren’t belittling the premium video efforts of the digital stalwarts, network entertainment chiefs were touting their own digital prowess.

Rice told advertisers that on Fox, their brands “can live across platforms, with digital and social we can engage with your customers like never before … We’re delivering both impressions and expressions that makes Fox the number one network on TV and social.”

Meanwhile, on Thursday, CW detailed plans for a new digital studio called CWD, which will produce online programming including game shows, comedies and animation.

One of CWD’s first projects will be Gallery Girl, a series of animated comedy shorts featuring a sarcastic SoHo art gallery owner who plies her acerbic wit to her celebrity patrons.

On the other side, digital companies weren’t really expecting to peel away too much in the way of digital market share this year. Their objective is a longer-term play.

“We’re gearing up for 2013,” Yahoo’s head of video and original programming, Erin McPherson, told paidContent in March.

With the rise of social platforms and emergence of new mobile and connected devices, we have seen an explosion in the amount of information being created and consumed. It is not a surprise that we have quietly entered the post-search world.

And with information exploding on the web, companies big and small are finding ways to organize it around constructs such as “knowledge” and “interests.” Think of these as attempts to push the Internet into “discovery” phase.

Yesterday, Google announced its Knowledge graph. Today, Twitter is introducing a way to follow others based on interests. In a blog post, the company said:

Currently, when new users come to Twitter, we show them all almost the same suggestions for what or who to follow. That isn’t ideal. Since you have individual interests, you should get individual suggestions. To make it easier and faster for everyone to get started on Twitter, we’re beginning some experiments with tailored suggestions in a number of countries around the world.

The first experiment will show new users a list of accounts that we recommend you follow, alongside a timeline filled with Tweets from those accounts. If you’re part of the experiment, you’ll see a Twitter experience that’s relevant to you right when you sign up. (Of course, you can always choose to not follow the suggested accounts that don’t interest you.)

If you’re a current user, you may see tailored suggestions in Who to follow so you can constantly find interesting and relevant accounts that are new to you.

In doing so, Twitter is also telling the world that Google and Facebook aren’t the only game in town and it has a reach to match those mega-billion dollar giants.

These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.

(That paragraph also explains why Twitter was talking about its new do not track privacy policy earlier this morning.)

Twitter is trying to solve what my colleague Mathew Ingram calls its “filter” problem. It isn’t the only one. Zite, a mobile app, for example has tried to organize articles and blog posts around “interests.” Prismatic, arguably one of the best of all new services, is building the digital daily newspaper.

Back in 2008, I wrote a post, Can serendipity make you rich? arguing:

The problem is that there’s too much data coming online too quickly, and the traditional method of search that involves first finding and then consuming the information is not going to work for much longer. There just won’t be enough time for us to do that and still have a life. It’s a problem, and therefore solving it is an opportunity — a very big opportunity.

Well, looks like many companies are looking at the opportunity and licking their chops. And that can’t be a bad thing for us, the people of the Internet.

 

Zite and new notions of content discovery will be part of the discussion about the ever-changing media landscape at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York City.

Details of the new venture are still hard to come by. But the new streaming service being jointly launched in August by Verizon and Redbox seems clearly intended to compete with over-the-top services like Netflix, and not so much meant to further the TV Everywhere goals of Verizon FiOS.

“This is going after some FiOS customers, but this is really meant for the launch across the United States to the Redbox population and their 30 million customers,” said Verizon chief financial officer Fran Shammo Thursday morning, speaking in Boston at the 40th annual J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference.

Also read: A new ‘stream team’: Verizon and Redbox take on Netflix

Shammo said Verizon’s impetus for the joint venture was not so much to transition video content licensed for the fiber-optic-fueled FiOS’ roughly 4.4 million subscribers, a la TV Everywhere, “but to expand our capability outside FiOS’ footprint.”

As for the Redbox footprint, it’s actually much bigger than 30 million. With Coinstar conducting a separate financially oriented event Thursday, “analyst’s day,” its Redbox unit tallied nearly 39 million customers at the end of the first quarter.

It’s about to take over the 10,000 Blockbuster Express kiosk locations it acquired in February. And the company has plans to expand into Cananda, the third biggest disc-rental market in the world.

As for the streaming venture, Shammo said it will showcase Verizon’s new proprietary digital distribution platform, Verizon Digital Media Services (VDSM), which he believes has advantages over the content delivery networks utilized by Netflix and Hulu.

“Utilizing that backbone, we’re able to deliver content at a much cheaper rate than people out there today,” Shammo said.

Podcasts may have fallen a bit out of fashion lately, but the new cloud-based podcast playback and discovery platform Player FM hopes that you’ll give the medium another chance. Launched by former Googler Michael Mahemoff just a few days ago, Player FM allows users to aggregate their personal podcast subscriptions online and play them on any computer or mobile device, right within the browser – no additional software required.

Mahemoff, who is a self-professed podcast fan, told me via email that his biggest motivation was the high barrier of entry for prospective listeners. “Getting into podcasts has been too hard for too long,” he said. Player.fm has only been up for a few days, but early observations led him to believe that most people would rather have an option to play individual podcasts on demand than subscribe to them via iTunes or any other podcast software. That’s why Player.fm puts a big emphasis on cross-platform web playback. From the site’s FAQ:

Player FM runs nicely in most modern smartphone and tablet browsers, including iPhones, iPads, and many Android devices… In most cases, you can switch to another app and the track will keep playing. On iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, you can also control playback on the lock-screen, just like with iTunes.

Player FM currently allows users to browse a curated directory and listen as well as subscribe to various podcasts. Each user’s subscriptions are aggregated in one single, personal feed, which can easily be shared with others as well. Mahemoff told me that he wants to add additional social features as well as the ability to review and curate podcasts. “Knowing what to listen to has always been a barrier with podcasts and I hope Player FM can improve the situation,” he told me.

But making podcasts more accessible is only one side of the coin for Mahemoff. He also wants to to help enhance the podcast standards to add options for micropayments through services like Flattr. This would make it possible for listeners to tip a podcaster with the click of a button.

Speaking of revenue: Mahemoff is also evaluating options to bring advertising to Player FM, but he believes that ad formats haven’t adapted to the world of podcasting yet. “In podcasts, everyone hears the same ad, no matter who they are or where they’re listening, and publishers cannot track effectiveness,” he told me, adding: “There’s a real opportunity to make ads more useful to listeners and more efficient for publishers. And if it supports more spoken-word content, that’s good by me!”

Image courtesy of Flickr user  zigazou76.

No more need for price speculation, folks. Facebook just put out an amended S-1 filing, which sets its IPO price at $38.00 a share. Get your checkbooks ready.

Facebook will debut on the NASDAQ on Friday, as expected, under the ticker symbol FB. According to the company, it will offer 421,233,615 shares – which breaks down to 180 million new shares and 241,233,615 shares from existing stockholders, i.e. Zuckerberg and company. That would raise the company and its investors a cool $16 billion.

In addition, Facebook’s current owners have also agreed to relinquish another 63,185,042 in the next 30 days if its underwriters see fit, and given the enormous demand and escalating IPO share target they probably will.

The IPO will value Facebook at an astonishing $104 billion. To put that in context check GigaOM’s look at the other big digital media IPOs of the last year – which no longer look so big by comparison. For the rest of our Facebook coverage during IPO week, check out our special pull-down section on the GigaOM homepage.

The Oracle of Omaha acquired his hometown newspaper in January and just snapped up dozens more in a $142 million deal. This is supposed to be the fastest declining industry in America. What is Warren Buffett up to?

Here’s why the deal makes a lot more sense than it appears:

A “three corner pool shot”

This week’s deal makes Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, the proud owner of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and 62 other daily and weekly papers in Virginia and the South. Most of the titles, like The Goochland Gazette and The Bland County Messenger, have small circulations in the range of 5,000 – 25,000.

The Oracle himself explained the deal this way:

“In towns and cities where there is a strong sense of community, there is no more important institution than the local paper. The many locales served by the newspapers we are acquiring fall firmly in this mold and we are delighted they have found a permanent home with Berkshire Hathaway.”

Buffett can wax sentimental all he wants but he is still the same hard-nosed businessman who was tough enough to stick it to Goldman Sachs. Like any of his deals, this is all about money.

“This deal is like a three corner pool shot that accomplishes several things at once,” says Ken Doctor, a media analyst.

Doctor notes that the deal includes an enormous loan and credit line to the newspapers’ former owner, Media General, in which Berkshire Hathaway will earn 10.5 percent. Buffett’s company also obtained stock warrants that will likely pay out handsomely as Media General works on becoming a full-time broadcasting company.

But what of the newspapers themselves? Doctor says that Buffett got them for a steal, noting that they sold on average for about $2 million a pop — or the price of an expensive home in each of the towns where they’re printed.

Small town papers make money

The story of the catastrophic decline in newspapers has been driven by metropolitan papers like the Washington Post  (on whose board Buffett sat for years) where ad rates plummeted while readers embraced digital alternatives.

The experience of small towns and counties has been different. In these places, a lack of print and online competition has allowed newspapers to hold onto some of their traditional monopoly power.

“In these communities, the local paper is the sole source of everyday news — from high school sports, local events or obituaries,” says Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and founder of digital subscription service, Press+.

This lack of competition has not only meant a slower decline in their print operations, but also a longer time period to make the transition to digital. While some metropolitan papers have rushed in a panic from one ill-advised paywall strategy to another in an effort to stay alive, smaller papers have had the luxury of a wait-and-see approach. In the meantime, digital subscription strategies have become more refined.

Crovitz claims that 70 publications have recently jettisoned the “free online” offer for print subscribers in favor of charging 25 percent and then letting readers opt-out of the digital part of the package.  He says that 90 percent of the customers elected to keep paying more.

What all this means for Buffett is that he can treat his newspaper fleet as a longer term investment that will pay off in three to five years. Most of the papers will likely deliver a modest profit from print while Berkshire Hathaway coaxes them into a digital strategy in which a growing share of revenue comes from subscription rather than ads (Doctor predicts subscription-based revenue will soon rise from 30 to 50 percent). The company can then cut away many of the printing, distribution and other legacy costs associated with newspapers.

Buffett being Buffett

Going into the newspaper business is a strange proposition for most investors but not for Buffett. This week’s purchase is consistent with a number of his investment mantras, including sticking to what he knows.

Buffett knows this business well from owning the Buffalo News and sitting on the board of the Washington Post, but also has more personal experience in the industry such as using $5000 from his savings as a paper-boy to launch Berkshire Hathaway. He also claims to read five newspapers a day.

Buffett also has a history of squeezing value out of traditional or troubled industries that scare off many investors. In recent years, for instance, he has bet big on airlines, autos and railroads.

There is also the question of scaling. According to Doctor, Berkshire Hathaway has long excelled at finding large scale efficiencies and the company now has enough newspapers (it also has six Nebraska papers in addition to the Omaha World-Herald) to make that happen.

Finally — and this is only speculation — some might wonder if Buffett, who has been close to the Obama Administration, might enjoy owning dozens of media outlets in swing states Virginia and North Carolina in an election year.

Join us for paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in NYC to discuss these issues and lots more.

Urban Airship (see disclosure below) is investing big in its infrastructure, scaling its push messaging service to deliver 100,000 messages in a single second. As Airship begins to refine push marketing to take into account location, time and context, it becomes of critical that the company not only deliver massive volumes of messages simultaneously, but also to deliver them in as near real-time as possible, according to the company.

In Urban Airship’s blog, Director of Architecture and Delivery Erik Onnen wrote that the company has quadrupled its capacity and is now capable of pushing simultaneous IP missives to huge gatherings of people, a feature that will come in handy when Airship launches its Segments service this quarter. Using technology from its SimpleGeo acquisition last year, Airship will be able to customize push updates based on location and prioritize based on relevancy.

“Specifically, we now have the capability to send a message in one second to every fan seated in the biggest stadium in college football, Michigan Stadium,” Onnen wrote in the blog.

Coincidently ESPN happens to be one of Urban Airship’s biggest customers, so the example is quite apt. At CTIA I sat down with Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke and he explained that context and speed will be both key to both Airship’s future and the evolution of IP push beyond a mere marketing and notification tool. He said AirBnB uses Airship’s push for closing room transactions, so it’s critical that messages move at the speed of negotiation.

In the football example, a sports media brand like ESPN, which sends millions of score and news updates a day, could send you a completely different set of stats and information if the app was aware you were actually a spectator at a game, Hieggelke said. A Michigan fan might have set his preferences to receive updates every time a touchdown is scored. But if actually present at the game the app could automatically feed him play-by-play info and player profiles. Because the customer is experiencing the game firsthand, it’s of vital importance that the update is immediate, Hieggelke said.

“The possibilities are endless,” Hieggelke said. “The New York Times could detect I’ve left Portland and have arrived in New York and start sending me local restaurant reviews. Walgreens can detect you’re near a pharmacy and have a prescription that needs to be refilled. It then sends you an alert.”

Urban Airship just pushed its 20 billionth notification, and its growth trajectory is only getting steeper. To achieve that kind of scale, Airship is doing a lot of tinkering with its HBase and Hadoop database and analytics platforms. It’s rolling out new elements – with codenames like Gooey Buttercake and Metalstorm (my favorite) – that will manage associations between applications, devices and tags; parse location and presence information for millions of users; and assemble that information along with data from multiple outside databases into the notifications themselves. (If you’re curious, Onnen goes into much more detail in the blog post.)

Keeping the push name unsullied

In my conversation with Hieggelke, he also revealed that Urban Airship plans to start an industry education initiative called Good Push with the aim of reining in bad marketing practices using IP messaging technologies.

“For instance, location has been talked for a while as walking through a mall and having offers pushed to you left and right,” Hieggelke said. “That’s a terrible idea. We need to establish a certain level of trust.”

Push messaging is still a relatively new format, and it doesn’t yet carry the negative associations most customers have with other digital marketing formats like e-mail or pop-up ads. When downloading an app and prompted to allow push updates to an app, most customers give permission. But an increasing number of apps are abusing the practice, though Hieggelke wouldn’t name names.

It’s easy to guess at the biggest offenders. There’s been an increasing backlash against companies like Airpush that send ads directly to an Android smartphone’s notification bar, often without even referencing the installed app that’s generating the ad. The danger here is that questionable and covert practices like these will sully the entire push marketing ecosystem. The worst thing that could happen is if consumers start automatically refusing permission to apps to receive updates, Hieggelke said.

“If the consumer starts thinking of this like spam, it’s a shame because it’s such a powerful and useful tool,” Hieggelke said.

So far Good Push is only in its infancy. Airship is working with the Mobile Marketing Association to create a set of best practices for marketers, that Hieggelke hopes will establish a baseline standard for the industry.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Thought Netflix and Comcast would kiss and make up after the broadband provider announced today that it would raise its bandwidth cap from 250GB to 300GB per month? Think again.

Here’s the statement a Netflix spokesperson sent me via email:

“Increasing the data cap is a small step in the right direction, but unfortunately Comcast continues to treat its own Internet delivered video different under the cap than other Internet delivered video. We continue to stand by the principle that ISPs should treat all providers of video services equally.”

In other words: The key issue of how Comcast treats its own Xfinity.tv on demand traffic hasn’t been resolved. Comcast said earlier today in a statement that it adheres to FCC principles that bind it to treat all IP traffic equally, but also repeated its assertion that Xfinity simply isn’t part of the Internet – something that our own Stacey Higginbotham has called dodging the net neutrality issue. Read her excellent analysis of today’s Comcast announcement here.

Comcast Tower

Comcast plans to raise its broadband cap to 300 GB per month as it trials two new ways to deal with managing traffic on its network, the nation’s largest cable operator said in a blog post today. The move is a welcome one for those who have hit the existing 250 GB cap, but it neglects to address some of the earlier complaints that have arisen in the last few weeks about Comcast exempting some of its own video on-demand trafficand allegations that the company is prioritizing that traffic in violation of federal rules implemented when it bought NBC-Universal.

What Comcast plans to offer

Comcast says it plans to trial two types of plans in unnamed markets. The first will offer customers a higher cap at higher tiers of service. So the Internet Essentials, Economy, and Performance Tier customers will have a 300 GB cap while those getting higher speeds (and Comcast offers some pretty high speeds at 100 MBps) will have some undetermined, higher cap. Customers under this plan will also be allowed to buy additional gigabytes for a certain amount. Comcast gave the example of $10 per 50 GB block.

The second trial will offer customers a 300 GB cap across all product lines and will offer customers a chance to buy more bytes for the same price. What’s key in both of these situations is that Comcast is allowing customers to buy more gigabytes after they hit the cap. Previously, it cut customers off. In this way it’s closer to capped plans such as those offered by AT&T, which stops users at a 250 or 150 GB per month cap and then charges them $10 for 50 more gigabytes.

The second approach will increase data usage thresholds for all tiers to 300 GB per month and also offer the option to buy more gigabytes. Comcast will also suspend the enforcement of its caps across all of its markets while it tests the new caps and plans.

While Comcast’s decision to expand its caps is good, it’s also sticking to the idea that unlimited broadband is detrimental to the quality of its network. In its blog post and on a conference call discussing the new plans, Comcast repeatedly tied these caps to better network management, but Comcast already has a network management plan that it filed with the FCC after it was caught blocking P2P packets on its network. In that plan, the company noted that when its network became congested it would temporarily slow traffic to customers requiring the most bandwidth. So why does it need the cap?

What Comcast doesn’t talk about.

Many argue that the cap is less about network management and more about protecting Comcast’s pay TV business as customers spend more time watching television via web-based subscription services including Netflix and Hulu. As I said, I’m glad Comcast has raised its cap, but conspicuously missing from the Comcast post is an admission that the cap is problematic when Comcast still offers to exempt some of its services from the cap.

When asked about this, David Cohen, Executive Vice President of Comcast, shut down the discussion, saying, “It is a real stretch to create a discrimination argument here.” He went on to say that the concern over any exempted services should be dramatically reduced because of the increased data threshold. “We’re relieving a hypothetical pressure on usage, here,” he said.

While the cap’s size has created some controversy as more and more customers hit it, the issue is less the size and more the existence of the cap if Comcast continues to offer services that will be exempt from that cap. Even at 300 GB per month, if certain types of traffic don’t count against that cap, then the cap still offers Comcast a competitive advantage over Netflix, YouTube and other over-the-top video services. Cohen repeatedly, however, mentioned a comment from the Netflix earnings call where the CEO of the streaming video provider said that a 250GB cap wasn’t affecting its business.

What Reed Hastings actually said was this:

It’s not a near-term issue with the 250 gigabyte cap. But the core principle [of network neutrality] is important anyway, which is the cap should be applied equally or not at all.

The larger cap also doesn’t address the question of whether or not Comcast is prioritizing its own traffic over other Internet traffic as was alleged earlier this week in a blog post by Bryan Berg, the CTO of MixMedia Labs. Comcast has explained why it believes it is not prioritizing its traffic in a manner that would draw government ire, but in a close reading of its post, what Comcast is describing is highly technical. Essentially it is saying that it is creating a logical as opposed to a physical separation in the traffic, and that it why it is marking packets.

Comcast wants you to feel free to use the web

So while Comcast is trumpeting its forward-thinking behavior on caps, there are a lot of questions about the timing of its announcement. Reporters on the call repeatedly asked Cohen about the rationale for increasing the cap. Cohen said its median usage is between 8-10 GB per month or about four percent of the cap and that the “vast, vast majority of users aren’t hitting the cap,” which does beg the question: why change the cap now?

Cohen’s response was, “It’s a matter of messaging way more than it’s a question of capacity.” He reiterated the idea that this is about encouraging users to use and download lawful content on their Comcast service without worrying about the cap. This implies that customers might find the cap inhibiting their behavior or that people questioning the cap are making some headway. So for now, customers get 20 percent more head room on their Comcast cap, and we’ll have to wait and see when and where Comcast rolls out its new plans.

Meanwhile I’ll leave you with Cohen’s suggested headline for this piece: “The headline today should be, we’re out of the cap business.”

With huge anticipation around Facebook’s IPO, we decided look at how other digital media companies that have gone public over the past year have fared. The big takeaway: Most have had a bumpy ride — and only one has had steady gains since its stock-market debut: LinkedIn. Read on to see how the others, including Yandex, Zynga, Renren, Groupon, Yelp, Pandora, Demand Media, Brightcove and FriendFinder, have made out.

Stock market debut: 5/24/2011
Deal size: $1.3 billion
Valuation: $8.4 billion
Number of shares offered: 52.2 million
Set price/share: $25
Opening price/share: $35
* Most-recent opening price: $21.93

YNDX data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 12/16/2011
Deal size: $1 billion
Valuation: $7 billion
Number of shares offered: 100 million
Set price/share: $10
Opening price/share: $11
Most-recent opening price: $8.49

ZNGA data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 5/4/2011
Deal size: $743 million
Valuation: $4 billion
Number of shares offered: 53.1 million
Set price/share: $14
Opening price/share: $18
Most-recent opening price: $6.39

RENN data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 11/4/2011
Deal size: $700 million
Valuation: $10.5 billion
Number of shares offered: 35 million
Set price/share: $20
Opening price/share: $28
Most-recent opening price: $12.66

GRPN data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 3/2/2012
Deal size: $107.3 million
Valuation: $1.47 valuation
Number of shares offered: 7.15 million
Set price/share: $15
Opening price/share: $22
Most-recent opening price: $21.63

YELP data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 5/19/2011
Deal size: $353 million
Valuation: $4 billion
Number of shares offered: 7.8 million
Set price/share: $45
Opening price/share: $83
Most-recent opening price: $112

LNKD data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 6/15/2011
Deal size: $235 million
Valuation: $2.6 billion
Number of shares offered: 161 million
Set price/share: $16
Opening price/share: $20
Most-recent opening price: $11.50

P data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 1/26/2011
Deal size: $151.3 million
Valuation: $1.5 billion
Number of shares offered: 8.9 million
Set price/share: $17
Opening price/share: $23.50
Most-recent opening price: $9.06

DMD data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 2/17/2012
Deal size: $55 million
Valuation: $290 million
Number of shares offered: 5 million
Set price/share: $11
Opening price/share: $14.30
Most-recent opening price: $14.98

BCOV data by YCharts

Stock market debut: 5/11/2011
Deal size: $50 million
Valuation: $263 million
Number of shares offered: 5 million
Set price/share: $10
Opening price/share: $10
Most-recent opening price: $1.15

FFN data by YCharts

* All most-recent opening prices are from May 17, 2012.