Rafat Ali
paidContent.org
Friday, October 10, 2008 4:07 AM

A bit hard to stay focused and keep writing about media, considering the scope of other things happening around. Anyway, in our own industry, even as analysts downgrade online ad revenues ahead of Q3 earnings period, Yahoo was down to below $13, the first time in more than five years. This is the lowest since the summer of 2003, when it was deep in the first post-bubble recession. It closes today down more than 8 percent to $12.65. The company reports its Q308 earnings on Oct 21, and analysts are expecting quarterly profits and sales to fall short of consensus estimates, due to the weakening display ad market. All kinds of rumors are surfacing now, including some major layoffs, serious merger talks between Yahoo and AOL, and other more wilder ones. And of course the Google-Yahoo ( NSDQ: YHOO) ad partnership may be stuck in regulatory issues for a while now....

Then in the general media sector, Marketwatch has a good roundup: Time Warner hit a five-year low of $9.94 before closing at $10.09, down 6.4 percent. News Corp. dropped 10 percent to close at its five year low, at $9.01. Viacom also gave up 5.7 percent to close at a five-year bottom of $20.08.

Also, there are deepening concerns about the advertising-heavy CBS, and its shares are at their worst level in 10 years. Earlier this morning, Soleil analyst Laura Martin downgraded CBS to "Hold" from "Buy" and slashed its 12-month price target to $12 from $30.