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Building An Interactive Business Does Not Help CBS (CBS) Earnings

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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95129c3Buying online content company CNET and building out internet sites for its legacy properties was supposed to help earnings at CBS (CBS). At least the company would have something to balance its huge, old-world TV and ratio operation. But, it hasn’t worked.  Things are so bad CBS even had to cut its dividend.

After hours, CBS announced earnings for the last quarter of 2008. Revenue fell 7% to $3.5 billion compared to the same quarter last year. The purchase of CNET helped the topline which is actually bad news. Without it, the rest of the company would have been hammered. But, buying revenue is not a solution.

In the quarter, operating income for the company fell 49% to $362 million. Of that, $272 million was from TV and $71 million was from radio. Interactive was a pathetic $29 million. Even outdoor advertising did better.

CBS’s quarterly dividend went from $.27 to $.05.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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