News Corporation (NWS)

NWS operates a booming DBS segment, which grew by 21% in 2007. Since NWS earns revenue through subscription fees in its DBS business, this segment is protected from weakening advertising sales in its other operations. Furthermore, DBS is becoming increasingly more popular, indicating that at least this business segment has strong growth prospects which will help protect NWS's revenues as its print businesses are declining.

In what could reshape the landscape of social web sites, MTV has agreed to split ad revenues with Facebook and Twitter. “You’re Watching With Alexa Chung” filmed on January 21 will show live Facebook updates and tweets from Twitter. Viewers will be able to comment and see their comments on MTV instantaneously. This is the first time a social networking site will share ad revenues generated from the broadcast of the show with a major content provider instead of just receiving exposure for the site. This venture will certainly lead to other social web sites to demand the same content sharing deal from large corporations looking to take advantage of the new up and coming social networking sites. Left out of this equation is Myspace. It will be interesting to see how NewsCorps Rupert Murdoch markets the second largest social web site with its 130 million members worldwide.

Almost half of NWS's revenue is earned internationally (mainly Australia and Europe) which help protect the company's revenue from domestic woes in the U.S. This means that although NWS's Fox News may be losing ad sales in the U.S., some other business segments like its healthy Sky Italia business will help protect the company from total financial disaster.