Some stories for this long holiday weekend in U.S.:
-- Chinese Online Traffic Exceeds U.S. Web Sites During Olympics: So says WebTrends, citing its own analytics. To be expected, if only because of sheer numbers in China. CCTV.com, the site run by national broadcaster China Central TV, drew more than 100 million unique visitors during the 2008 Olympic Games...In comparison, NBCOlympics.com reported an average of 4.3 million unique users a day. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) averaged 4.7 million daily.
-- Candidates' Sites Do Behavioral Targeting: And that is a surprise? It has raised alarms from some privacy advocates, who say no one should unwittingly have their political leanings analyzed as they use the Web, or be tracked for the delivery of political ads.
-- For Webisodes, Only Handful of Hits: A long NYT story about why webisodes haven;t broken through the mainstream, yet. Usual litany of reason, with usual litany of defenders…
-- Blogs to Riches: Perez Hilton: A profile of Mario Lavandeira, the blogger behind celeb gossip site PerezHilton.com, and his rise to fame. Ads on his homepage fetch up to $54,000 a day, and his overhead is minimal-- his only employee is his sister Barby, who fields emails and corrects typos. Which means he's pulling down millions a year, the Wired story says. The site now averages 198 million pageviews a month, according to Quantcast. Nielsen Online estimates that while visitors to TMZ.com, one of his main competitors, stay only 15 minutes, those on Hilton's site linger for 45 minutes.
-- IAC (NSDQ: IACI) Goes Kids: IAC, in an attempt to cash in on the big kids virtual worlds audiences, will on Sept. 16 will launch its own virtual world aimed at tweens called ZwinkyCuties.com. It will go head to head with Disney's (NYSE: DIS) Club Penguin and Webkinz, among others. The portal is a spinoff of Zwinky.com, a two-year-old site aimed at teenagers that claims more than 16 million registered users globally and six million unique visitors per month.
-- Fans flock to Disney's Club Penguin Times: The Club Penguin Times is more widely read than New York's Daily News, the Chicago Tribune or the Dallas Morning News. And it's not even 3 years old.
-- Apollo joins bidders in race for Reed Business: Yes, one more...US private equity group Apollo Management has entered the bidding war for Reed Business Information...Bidders are expected to submit final offers at the end of September.
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