When Betabeat stopped by the TV Guide offices in Times Square yesterday, Christy Tanner didn't waste any time getting our attention, pointing out that TVGuide.com gets 25 million monthly unique visitors, up from 4 million since 2006. (For reference, last year comScore reported that The New York Times’s website was attracting 30 million monthly uniques.) What's more, she added, anticipating our assumptions, almost half those users are under 35 and average 22 page-views per person. Sixty-year-old brands repositioning themselves for the internet era, we suppose, don't have time to beat around the bush.

In fact, as Ms. Tanner, executive VP and general manager of the website and TV Guide Mobile, explained, TV Guide Digital seems to be in the midst of a digital reawakening, the best example of which is its surprising useful new app, released on iOS today, with an Android version coming this fall.

(Photo: via TV Guide)

The TV Guide cable channel, website and brand are owned as part of a joint venture between Lionsgate and One Equity Partners, JPMorgan's private equity firm, but the digital arm operates independently. Modeled after a startup, the staff is divided equally into developers, editors/writers and sales. And has spent the past two years researching and developing the app to improve on its first-generation, listings-only mobile version, which has had 7 million downloads and gets 1.5 million monthly active users.

The new app makes it incredibly easy to personalize results using a platform they call "Watchlist." Users can input their interests in terms of actors, shows, movies, sports teams, etc., and Watchlist will display where you can find free and pay episodes on TV, on demand (it was the first to index Xfinity results obscured by Comcast's unintuitive cable system) or even streaming. Better yet, the results, which are sortable by what's on right now or what's new to stream, sends you directly to that episode on Hulu Plus, iTunes, Crackle, HBO Go, MAX Go and more, with plans to add more sources in the coming months.

Other apps, like BuddyTV Guide and Peel also offer customizable results, but the Watchlist feature, which has already picked up 500,000 members online, differentiates TV Guide's offering. Ms. Tanner said the company was surprised to see users adding shows before they had even premiered, which helped them to figure out that "New Girl," was going to be a hit before Fox started offering the premiere for free on iTunes, as well as to identify sleeper hits passed over by the critics, like the History Channel's miniseries "Hatfields & McCoys."

AdAge has started regularly publishing Watchlist data, like which new fall shows have been added, but Ms. Tanner said TV Guide is waiting until it gets 1 million users before it starts building a recommendations tool off of the results. For now, however, the data helps TV Guide lock down advertisers, since the company is able to approach specific shows and entice them to advertise if a show is a popular, or if it isn't. (Based on advertising revenue, TV Guide Digital has been profitable for the past two years.)

In addition to Watchlist, the app includes a number of other mechanisms for discovery, including sorting the standard TV listings by favorite channels, and looking at the TV schedule by what's popular or what's trending.

The TV Guide also includes social features like "I'll Watch" social sharing or the ability to check into shows on Facebook or Twitter, although we remain unconvinced that's a better option than just, saying, checking Twitter for Aaron Sorkin hate-a-thon that erupts alongside "The Newsroom" every Sunday night.

Photobucket--the janky-looking, but still widely-used image-hosting site once owned by News Corp--is debuting a serious overhaul for the first time in years with an emphasis on taking control of the lifecycle of your photos and videos, CEO Tom Munro told Betabeat. With a significant redesign and new privacy controls, Photobucket hopes to best Facebook, Flickr, and the like as your default storage space to organize and share photos and soon "tell stories."

Photobucket lurched towards a comeback last year when Twitter decided to use its technology to power native photo sharing. However, consumers might be more likely to associate the service, which launched in 2003, with eBay sellers or their LiveJournal or MySpace account. (The company claims that currently Photobucket, which has 10 billion photos, is second only to Facebook in terms of uploads.)

The changes couldn't have come a moment too soon. Just last week, Buzzfeed, Gawker, and even CNN delved into the "dark art" of "fusking," whereby Photobucket's privacy settings could be exploited to access nude photos of unsuspecting women. Gawker featured one woman's harrowing tale of having her parents find her boobs on the Internet. Fusking programs take advantage of the fact that the URLs you send out to friends, even in private or password-protected album, use the photos actual file names, making it easy to find others in the same ablum.

As we spoke to Mr. Munro on the phone earlier this week, naked images were still being added to the sub-Reddit "photobucketplunder," although the moderators of that sub-Reddit and "requestaplunder" set the pages to private this morning. However, the most damning line in Buzzfeed's investigation might have been, "Remember Photobucket?"

"You may have seen some issues with fuskering? It's kind of a shame in the way it's been reported," Mr. Munro said, pointing out that the exposed photos were predominantly from public accounts and that only 50 private accounts were violated, adding, "But even one is too many." He also said not all the photos on those sub-Reddits were from his site. Photobucket has offered the ability to scramble URLs for years, but in the wake of the controversy, the company is being more proactive, automatically scrambling URLs for new albums, unless users request otherwise, posting an interstitial when users log in suggesting that they scramble the URLs on older albums. "Any fuskering we detect," he added, "We immediately go in and change those settings for the user and we're working with the proper legal authorities when this happens."

UPDATE: This afternoon, The DailyDot reported that those sub-Reddits were taken down after Photobucket issued DCMA takedown requests for violating Photobucket's terms of service.

Mr. Munro said the Photobucket redesign, which has been in the works since before the fusking controversy, were motivated by internal research with users and backed by an external study about photo taking and sharing habits conducted by InfoTrends. "The new Photobucket is really designed to give users secure backup, organization, and easy access, which maybe to you and me sounds like everybody should have that, but these three things--when we did our research--are really the biggest pain points for consumers, even today," said Mr. Munro, citing a study that shows the average person takes photos on four devices and shares on five services.

"Your photos are fragmented, so backing up becomes pretty difficult. Only about 50 percent of us back-up, which corresponds to why half of us have lost photos and videos," he added.

It's a nagging problem. Currently, Betabeat has photos scattered around Dropbox, Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, not to mention an old digital camera. The question is whether Photobucket will be your answer. Facebook is still the biggest player, but newly-minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is reportedly taking an increased interest in Flickr, which got a major makeover of its own.

The Photobucket redesign lets users connect to their mobile phone, laptop, and social networks like Facebook. Through the Photobucket mobile app, which has been downloaded 15 million times on Android and iOS, "anytime a photo hits your camera roll, it's uploaded to Photobucket," Mr. Munro said. (Beware the semi-naked selfies!) You can edit, organize and share on the sleeker, friendler new site and Photobucket keeps a copy of the original, undoctored image.

But the company seems to be aware that In the Time of Zuckerberg, you're going to need a little something more to get consumers to choose you as their default. To that end, Photobucket is beta-testing a service in September that emphasizes telling "Stories," by moving beyond the photo-with-comment-underneath structure and into a flowing, multimedia horizontal timeline--shareable with a link to other social networks. (Unfortunately, the word "story" is slightly tainted with an advertorial tinge by Facebook's "Sponsored Stories.")

Mr. Munro showed us a rather compelling video of how one woman used the upcoming Storytelling features to display the narrative of her son's birth, easily sending requests to other Photobucket members to add photos to her timeline and posting comments adjacent to images and videos in the stream.

As the company said in a press release notes:

With Photobucket Stories, you can easily create, curate, and collaborate with friends, combining photos, video and text all on a single canvas that can be easily shared. No longer are you confined to sharing images one at a time or in structured album formats; with Photobucket Stories you can tell your complete story with context and meaning.

It seemed like an ideal solution for a cabin trip in the Catskills we went on last weekend that left photos from the trip fragmented across a dozen different smartphones, Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts. Of course, then we'd have to convince those dozen people to sign up for Photobucket, in addition to everything else.

You can see if it's worth it yourself. Here's a an invitation to try out the beta for stories, open to the first 50 people who sign up.

Si Newhouse, CEO of Advance Publications

Looks like Condé is starting to put that $500 million digital war chest to good use. Today, the media conglomerate purchased grocery list and recipe organizing app ZipList, to the tune of $14 million, reported AllThingsD.

As we previously reported, Condé is no stranger to the woes of the print-to-digital transition. But since last year, the company has been bragging about a multimillion dollar stockpile of cash it'll use to help bring the stodgy old print biz up to tech speed. The ZipList purchase appears to be one of the first moves representing Condé's tentative foray into the digital sphere.

It may seem like an odd pairing, but Condé actually already owns Epicurious, a community for "people who love to eat," so ZipList should fit well alongside that property. The company also invested in Moda Operandi, a fashion startup, last September.

Oh, and ZipList fans--don't take to Twitter to voice your disgust over the acquisition just yet: AllThingsD says the Virigina-based company will continue to operate separately. Sorry, Buzzfeed.

via Crunchbase

OMGPOP, the New York-based casual gaming company founded all the way back in 2006, just had its first big breakout with Draw Something. In fact, according to the AppData leaderboard, which measures apps on the Facebook platform, Draw Something just surpassed Zynga's Word with Friends in terms of daily active users.

Draw Something has 10.8 million daily active users logged in through Facebook, compared to Words with Friends 8.9 million. OMGPOP, which pivoted from its first concept, iminlikewithyou, in 2009, has released five Facebook games to date. But Draw Something is its first big hit. And how! A few days ago, the company told TechCrunch that Draw Something had passed 25 million registered users, was close to 1 billion ad impressions, and considering a TV show based on the game (which reminds us, where's that Angry Birds movie, anyway?)

As TechCrunch notes, daily active users isn't the same as monthly usage, where Zynga's army of CityVille and Texas Holdem Poker addicts still reign supreme, "But game developers tend to focus on daily usage since it often correlates better with monetization."

History has taught us with casual games, what goes up, can come down. (Anyone remember the Scrabulous? At one point, it was popular enough to inspire its own rip-off theme song.)

One thing is for certain, however. Facebook should be feeling nervous that the biggest games on its platform are played primarily on mobile devices. Says TechCrunch:

"This does not bode well for Facebook’s future gaming or platform revenues since it can’t earn a share of transactions in native iOS or Android games. Facebook even revised its policy a few weeks ago, saying that mobile web apps running inside a Facebook iOS app may only use iOS payment methods and may not reference or encourage Facebook Credits."

On the heels of its success, OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter told Kim Mai-Culter that he's in talks with both potential buyers and investors, but is focused on building Draw Something--good thing, considering recent reports of crashing in its latest iPhone review.

After all, that "heads down" approach, while Zynga's busy monitoring its stock price post-IPO, may have won them the lead. "I drive by their offices and the employees are always playing pingpong," reports Betabeat's newest hire (and SF-resident) Jessica Roy. "You can see through the glass windows. Perhaps that's why they're getting bested by OMGPOP."

via flickr.com/docsearls

It looks like we can cut the question mark at the end of "Chris Hughes: Media Mogul?" The New York Times Media Decoder blog reports that the rumors were true, Mr. Hughes will indeed head up the 98-year-old neoliberal magazine, which has struggled with diminishing profits and dwindling circulation.

Although the terms of the deal were not revealed, Mr. Hughes will become the magazine's editor-in-chief and publisher. And they've wasted no time updating the publication's Wikipedia page. After spearheading President Obama's digital campaign in 2008, Mr. Hughes went on to found Jumo, a social network for nonprofits and activists which was "acquired" by GOOD for $0.

What's the former Facebooker's plan to rescue old media? According to Media Decoder, Mr. Hughes will focus on "distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad."But that doesn't mean he's privileging technological innovation over good ole fashioned gumshoe reporting. As Mr. Hughes writes in his letter to The New Republic's readers:

Many of us get our news from social networks, blogs, and daily aggregators. The web has introduced a competitive, and some might argue hostile, landscape for long, in-depth, resource-intensive journalism. But as we’ve seen with the rise of tablets and mobile reading devices, it is an ever-shifting landscape—one that I believe now offers opportunities to reinvigorate the forms of journalism that examine the challenges of our time in all their complexity. Although the method of delivery of important ideas has undergone drastic change over the past 15 years, the hunger for them has not dissipated.

In the next era of The New Republic, we will aggressively adapt to the newest information technologies without sacrificing our commitment to serious journalism. We will look to tell the most important stories in politics and the arts and provide the type of rigorous analysis that The New Republic has been known for. We will ask pressing questions of our leaders, share groundbreaking new ideas, and shed new light on the state of politics and culture.

Between Mr. Hughes' new gig and Yishan Wang's appointment as CEO of Reddit, we think its safe to say the Facebook Mafia is starting to feel the call of duty.

The new Flickr photo view, slated to roll out 2/28/2012.

Markus Spiering has, as they say, a good eye. Most of his resume was in mobile before he became a senior product manager for Flickr. In March 2011, he slipped into the head product role, lording over Flickr's 45 or so employees. ""I have the pleasure to run product management for one of the most exciting web sites in the world: Flickr," he says on his website. He's in town for the Photo Hack Day hackathon this weekend, the first small sign of what could be the company's reinvigorated interest in its audience.

Mr. Spiering is very happy to be making extensive changes to the Flickr interface, the first of which will roll out next week, as he explained in a meeting with Betabeat, Yahoo's Jason Khoury, and Flickr.com, looking pretty on Mr. Spiering's Macbook Air.

Mr. Spiering moused over the current photo view. "This is very typical of Flickr," he said. "Lots of white space, small photos, lots of information around."

He then opened a new tab to show the spread, completely revamped. Suddenly the photos look more than four times their current size and lie neatly justified on the page, somehow jigsawing together without cropping or changing the order in which they appear.

The new photo view will hit on Feb. 28, Mr. Spiering said, and with it comes a new upload interface. Flickr's uploading page now looks more like an app than a website. Goodbye, retro blue links. Hello, swoopy drag-and-drop.

Betabeat came away from the conversation with the impression that Yahoo is not sleeping on Flickr, as some users and former employees have suggested. Last month, a small housecleaning booted at least five employees in customer service in order to "centralize" Flickr's support with other Yahoo customer support, making it available 24 hours a day across the globe and making it more scaleable, Mr. Spiering said.

Outcry arose among Flickr devotees who have been calling for Yahoo to cut the cord. Former Flickr engineer Nolan Caudill wrote a blog post denouncing Yahoo's "major mistake," suggesting the move was another example of Flickr's neglect under its corporate parent. Betabeat ran a thought experiment: "Wherefore Flickr? Ideas for the Beloved Photo Site’s Escape From Yahoo."

Mr. Spiering. (twitter.com)

"Seems like taking it private a la StumbleUpon would be great if Yahoo were willing to do it," one source very familiar with Flickr speculated in an email.

At the time, power user Thomas Hawk—never one to shy away from criticizing Flickr—was actually optimistic. "It could really honestly be Markus Spiering (who now runs flickr) and Yahoo staff cleaning house," he wrote in an email. "The culture at flickr has been rotten for a long time."

Community management had been "an absolute disaster," in his opinion. "It could be that flickr is retooling and actually in a weird way going to try and re-engage their customers," he wrote.

Yahoo has been paying attention to Flickr all along, Mr. Spiering insisted, and has made a lot of improvements since it bought the site in 2005. "We didn't communicate as much as we should have," he said.

He pointed out that the photo page was redesigned as recently as the summer of 2010, and that Yahoo has started integrating Flickr across its products. For example, the Yahoo weather app displays user photos that match the location and weather in the background of the forecast. Flickr will also be integrated into Yahoo Mail soon, he said.

Flickr also changed its pricing structure in January, adding a new Flickr Pro option for $6.95 for three months and dropping the price for a two-year subscription by $5. The lower price points suggests an eye toward user acquisition. (Flickr's traffic is down since the launch of Google+, according to the notoriously unreliable Compete.com.)

Flickr's upload page, 2/21/2012.

Flickr missed its chance to be Instagram before Instagram was Instagram; it also faces fierce competition from Google+ and Picasa, which is siphoning off some of the social photographers who make up one of Flickr's core user bases. (Mr. Spiering declined to name who he thinks Flickr's top competitors are. "It's very hard to tell," he said. "People use it in different ways." Some upload thousands of photos and never leave a comment; others use the site as a photo database; and others exclusively comment but never upload.)

But Flickr is reorienting according to Yahoo's "mobile first" strategy and the design is thoughtful and forward-looking. The Flickr API is still one of the most popular public APIs, the company says, although two years ago it was the most popular (damn you, Facebook). Flickr actually has an API for almost every function on the site, Mr. Spiering said, although not all are public. He said more than 3.5 million photos are uploaded to Flickr via PC and mobile devices a day.

Flickr's upload page, slated to roll out 2/28/2012 late March 2012.

Flickr will continue to make major changes in waves in 2012, Mr. Spiering said, but there will be no New Flickr campaign. "It is not as if we close the curtain and all of a sudden say, 'ta da, it's different!'" he said. It does seem as if Flickr has had an attitude readjustment, at the least.

New York Times Co., bringing the hot new revenue fire, as ever.

“It’s working from a revenue perspective,” Ms. Robinson said of the paid online subscription model introduced back in March. By September, digital subscriptions were up to 324,00o. The Boston Globe, also owned by the Times Company, introduced paid subscriptions in October. With that money, the company has been paying down its debt. Coupled with reduced costs, they now have the finances to start buying growth. And what better place to look than the bubbling tech sector?

The company, whose stock has been down more than 20 percent this year, will likely be looking for acquisitions that can counteract sliding ad revenue, which was down 8.8 percent in the third quarter.

Now that About.com, another property owned by the Times, is trying to shed its spammy image for the world of premium online video, perhaps the New York Times might be in the market for another content farm?

Mr. Newhouse

Startups must be in this season, because it looks like Uncle Si is starting to pivot. Advance Publications, the Conde Nast parent company owned by the billionaire Newhouse clan, is "quietly" making a departure from the glossies, newspapers, and cable companies on which it built its empire. Keith Kelly at the New York Post reports that Advance, "armed with a $500 million war chest," is looking to invest in both the digital and startup world--both realms the company has struggled with in the past.

Earlier this month, Mr. Newhouse spun reddit out from under Conde Nast and into an independent company under Advance, perhaps hoping to better capitalize on high volume traffic, which in the case of some sub-reddits is basically as large as if they were "their own websites, ” reddit general manager Erik Martin has told Betabeat.

As Mr. Kelly reports:

"The digital investment fund, which has probably spent less than 20 percent of its capital so far, came fromthe $500 million divestment of Advance’s preferred stock in the cable channel Discovery Holdings in late 2010 and has been gathering steam since Andrew Siegel was hired fromYahoo! in January."

The fund goes beyond leveraging Conde brands. For example, the company's latest deal: a secondary investment in a Boston-based video analytics startup called Visible Measures. DAG Ventures led the $13 million round. (Partial equity is a departure from Advance's usual "all or nothing" acquisition approach. Rather, Mr. Siegel told the paper, he's making deals “anywhere from $100,000 for seed ideas all the way up to multiple tens of millions for startups that are a little further along.”  Part of that diversification strategy apparently involves a stake in Trigger Media Group, the new digital media fund with ties to McKinsey and Bob Pittman, the former president of AOL and founder of MTV.

Mr. Kelly also reports that "sometime in the next week, the Conde Nast unit of Advance is expected to announce that it has taken a major stake in Moda Operandi, the fashion startup co-founded by socialite Lauren Santo Domingo.

We wouldn't be surprised. At a startup party hosted on the Gawker rooftop in late June, Moda's other co-founder, Áslaug Magnúsdóttir, fresh of off hiring the company's CTO Matt Pavelle, shied away from talking to Betabeat for fear she would spill some big news. No need to be scared, Betabeat can keep a secret.

But that's not the only old school company embracing Unigo's unique formula of surprisingly comprehensive reviews from college students and counselors. The student review section in the US News & World Report's rankings and directories will also now be powered by Unigo. The funding will be used to expand into grad schools and accredited universities outside the US and develop partnerships with other publishers.

The site delves deeper than your traditional guides to cover not just finding, getting in, and paying for college, but also what to expect when you get there. Betabeat checked out a random assortment of schools on Unigo and in each case found the answer section for questions "What's the dating scene like" and "What's the best place to get work done on campus" robust. That might be because of the gamification elements Unigo has baked into the system to incentivize students and counselors to participate. We chatted with Unigo's VP of strategy Chris Lake about how it works.

"For the college students, the more content they post, the more points they get, which pushes them higher on their school's profile. The top three students get featured on the school's main landing page," explained Mr. Lake. Narcissism aside, why would a student care about being featured? "We have content syndication partnerships with media outlets like HuffPo, USA Today, US News & World Report where we put together columns answering a topical question. So the top students (or counselors within a given category) could be featured in one of those media outlets," he said.  There's also school pride. "If all of the students from a given school create a lot of content, it can push their school up as well."

With counselors, it's a little easier to see the incentive. "Instead of  'competing' within each school," he explained, "they are competing within different categories related to the admissions/application or financial aid processes. So the counselors compete within The Essay or The FAFSA." They also get a chance to be on the landing page for the school and, potentially,  featured on the HuffPo.

For now, the startup is subscribing to the if-we-build-it, they-will-come philosophy. Tumblr followed the same model, but with Unigo, it's easier to see how incorporating pay elements, say from colleges who want branded information. "We're focusing on growing the site by creating the best content and helping students find, get in and pay for college and democratizing the process. So we're sort of following the formula of, building the best product, attracting as many users as possible," said Mr. Lake. "The monetization is something we're working on right now. All of the content will remain 100 percent free."

"Gphone" hahaha.

Just in time for a post-mortem on Carol Bartz's tenure as CEO of Yahoo comes an interview with YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in The New York Times about their plans to revamp Delicious. Even before her abrupt cellphone ouster by a bunch of "doofuses"--her words, not ours--Ms. Bartz was criticized for her "failure to innovate" or even capitalize on innovative acquisitions like Delicious and Flickr.

So what will Delicious look like under the leadership of Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley, who purchased the bookmarking service after Yahoo threatened to shutter it or sell? According to AllThingsD's Liz Gannes, "The new Delicious sounds a lot like the old Delicious brought up-to-date," but that's sort of the point. The need for a service like Delicious, the forward-thinking bookmarking site that never quite caught on outside early adopter circles, is heightened by the torrent of information flowing from social sites like Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and more.

"There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet," Mr. Chen tells the Times. His plan is take Delicious mainstream with a recommendation feature based on what you share and a homepage that sounds a little like Techmeme to us, where users can browse "stacks" of images, videos, and links around a particular recent event

But it doesn't necessarily have to be news-related. Delicious's new owners also want to help you capitalize on the Googling of those who came before you, as Mr. Chen told the Times:

“You’re Googling around and have eight to 10 browser tabs of results, links to forums and message boards, all related to your search,” he said. The new Delicious, he said, provides “a very easy way to save those links in a collection that someone else can browse.”

Now if only someone would offer to buy Flickr. Betabeat shares the same position as Matthew Stinson, who recently tweeted, "Dear Yahoo!, before you implode, please sell Flickr to a responsible buyer. Kthxbye."