Friday, August 28, 2015

Nielsen is now tracking ratings for nearly 1,000 streaming shows

Studios are now getting data on who's watching what on Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu










Netflix is notorious for not providing audience numbers for its streaming programs, instead leaning on subscriber growth to give observers a sense of how well its efforts are doing. That's starting to change. The Wall Street Journal reports that Nielsen is currently months into a program that allows it to track shows on Netflix and other services like Amazon Prime and Hulu, and it now has data on nearly 1,000 shows — including how many people watch an episode and information like age and gender. Nielsen hopes that the data it shares can help studios negotiate for higher licensing fees from services if the shows that stream online are shown to do well.

Nielsen started measuring viewership data on streaming sites last winter as a means of giving major studios like Twentieth Century Fox and NBCUniversal a clearer sense of how streaming affects their revenue. Studios still make more money from traditional, ad-supported television, but subscription-based streaming has been eating into TV viewership for some time now. Charging Netflix and Amazon for popular shows can help stem any losses from audiences changing their viewing habits.

NIELSEN STILL DOESN'T TRACK STREAMING CONTENT ON MOBILE DEVICES

The data Nielsen is tracking is still fairly limited, though, since it doesn't include viewership from mobile devices or overseas subscribers. Nielsen has plans to include those metrics, but Netflix uses those limits to dismiss the effort out of hand. Meanwhile, the streaming giant also already provides certain well-paying studios with information on how often a show is streamed on a monthly basis. However, Netflix has reason to be a little nervous. If Nielsen data shows that its original programming doesn't have the same draw as licensed shows, investors may be somewhat less inclined to support the company's future projects.

Friday, August 21, 2015

The Most Searched Jobs in Salary.com

  

Which Jobs Are Most Searched on Salary.com?

Wondering which jobs people are searching the most? Well wonder no more, because we've got your answers.

With more than 4,000 job titles in our database, people from all over the country come to Salary.com and use our tools to find out how much jobs are paying. But which jobs are the most popular? Well, we combed through our data for the month of July and came up with the top 10 most-queried searches. And we'll be back on a monthly basis to update the results so you know which jobs are hot at any given time.

Is your job on the most-searched list?

Dentist


Better to be a dental student smiling pearly whites at the thought of future paychecks than a patient who will need that expertise. But whoever is searching, dentist is trending at the tail end of the top 10.

Personal Trainer

PERSONAL TRAINER


With summer in full swing, many men and women want to get in swimsuit shape. It's all about the gym and enlisting the help of personal trainers, which means many fitness-oriented people are checking out how much personals trainers make so they can potentially become one.

  


Accounting

ACCOUNTING SALARIES



"Accounting" is search term not for a specific job title, but rather a popular industry. But whether people want to become accountants, actuaries, or auditing managers, it's clear there's a big interest in all jobs that fall under the accounting umbrella.

Flight Attendant
FLIGHT ATTENDANT

Clearly people want to know if the people handing out peanuts make -- wait for it -- peanuts, or not. But clearly at #7 on the most-searched jobs list, becoming a flight attendant is still an alluring occupation for many people.

College Professor
COLLEGE PROFESSOR



As people get toward the end of July it's time to start thinking about hitting the books again, so it makes sense that people are searching out salaries for college professors. Obviously the level of pay is going to depend on many factors including years of experience, tenure, the size of the school, and the subject area, but all those people hoping to become college professors can check that link and find out roughly what they can expect to bring home for a paycheck.

  

Pediatric Physician
PEDIATRIC PHYSICIAN



As one of many healthcare related professions on the list, it turns out many people are curious to know what pediatric physicians make for a salary. Whether the searches are being done by soon-to-be doctors or by parents wondering why their co-pays are so high, remains to be seen.

Public School Teacher




Searches for public school teacher salaries are consistently in the top 5, and July was no exception. Despite the fact that it's summer and school is out in most places, people always want to know what teachers make because it's constantly a hot topic. And for education majors going back to school in September, it's necessary information. Just don't be discouraged at the amount, and keep fighting for more pay for teachers!

Nurse Practitioner

NURSE PRACTITIONER



Nurses. We need them badly and nursing jobs are always a big draw on our site as people considering nursing school and careers in the healthcare industry invariably search for this job title.

  

Engineering

ENGINEERING

Again, this is not an exact job description but it's a field that was the second-most searched term on our site in the month of July. It's clear people start here on a catch-all page and then narrow their choices be it chemical engineer, aerospace engineer, electrical engineer, or any other of the many fields under this umbrella.

Physical Therapist

PHYSICAL THERAPIST
Median annual salary: $80,139


The most-searched job out of all 4,000+ job titles and fields in July was physical therapist. As the multitude of Baby Boomers reaches an age of physical decline, physical therapists have become very much in demand, so it makes sense people are going into the field and researching it at a high rate.


Thursday, August 20, 2015

Stop Kidding Yourself. A Classic Car Is (Almost) Never a Good Investment (BusinessWeek)

Why Ferrari-nomics can be a dismal science.
A Ferrari 365 from 1972 is expected to fetch somewhere around $450,000 during the annual Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in Monterey, Calif. this weekend. When it was last bought in 2008, the car was worth $160,000. For the investment, the lucky owner may receive roughly triple his money and a few memorable – albeit nerve-wracking – road trips with 8-track theme music.

The 1972 Ferrari comes with a mouse-hair dashboard and an 8-track stereo.
The 1972 Ferrari comes with a mouse-hair dashboard and an 8-track stereo.

So should you be trying to get into the vintage-car game? In a word: no. No way. Absolutely not. Here's why:

1. Lots of Idling

The Pebble Beach sales, like most marquee car auctions, are an exception. Only about 3 percent of vintage cars sell at auction and they are the best of the best. It’s like watching a super-cut of holes-in-one and deciding to try your hand at golf.

In reality, values for scads of vintage cars have been relatively stable for years. Detroit classics from the 1950s, for example, have mostly idled in the past decade, according to Hagerty Insurance, which tracks the values of the various old rides it underwrites. The same goes for muscle cars and so-called affordable collectibles like the Triumph TR6 and the Volkswagen Beetle.

 2. A Tendency to Stall

Rolling assets are not in any way recession-proof, no matter what the exotic car dealer tells you. In the 2008 downturn, the only upside to owning a vintage Mercedes 300 with gull-wing doors was feeling slightly less frightened to actually drive it. From the third quarter of 2008 to the third quarter of 2009, the value of “blue-chip” collectibles like "the Gullwing" slid by 19 percent, according to Hagerty. That’s more than twice as much as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. A sampling of vintage Ferraris in that window fared even worse, plummeting 25 percent.

 3. Running Hot

Post-recession, the rebound was swift. A lot of vintage-car gurus believe that the run-up in prices since the recession is officially in "frothy" territory. A Hagerty monthly index of expert sentiment on the market has dropped 9 percent in the past year.

Rick Drewry, senior claims specialist of collector cars at American Modern Insurance Group, said the auctions are starting to attract investors who don't know much about cars at all. "I'm starting to see cars that weren't ever that good go up in value," he explained. "For the longest time, they were throw-aways." In short, we may be approaching peak Porsche.

4. Slow and Saggy

Here's an uncomfortable truth: Classic cars are kind of awful -- at least relatively speaking1. Sure, they are moving time capsules of miraculous engineering and most of them have swoon-worthy looks. But would you race a 50-year-old road bicycle or do your taxes on a computer from 1965? In terms of going fast and handling the curves, today’s most pedestrian vehicles are far more capable than almost all vintage rides.

Ford's Focus offers vintage Ferrari performance for $17,000.
Ford's Focus offers vintage Ferrari performance for $17,000

Take that Ferrari 365 from 1972. It gets to 60 miles-per-hour in about 7 seconds and has a top speed of 163. Today’s sportiest Ford Focus puts out similar numbers with eight fewer cylinders, a bunch more airbags, and a back-up camera to boot. Sure, it doesn't have an 8-track, but it also doesn't have six separate carburetors to tune.

 5. If You Must Buy…

If absolutely none of these facts sway you, at least go for the German and Italian brands. Avoid anything manufactured by the Americans or the Brits. Sure, they are hot at the moment and tend to crash harder, but the economic magic behind companies like Porsche and Ferrari is on the supply side. They simply didn’t make that many cars, which means that when markets get hot they have a bit of a turbo effect.
When shopping for your dream car, consider models from the 1980s and 1990s. They were the ones on bedroom posters of Generation Xers who are entering in their prime earning years and they are just now starting to appreciate accordingly. A Lamborghini Countach from 1989 is the perfect example. "For a kid in the '80s, that car was like a unicorn," Drewry said.

A 1989 Lamborghini Countach, the stuff of Gen-X school-boy fantasies.
A 1989 Lamborghini Countach, the stuff of Gen-X school-boy fantasies.

Finally, if you're bent on buying old cars, get as many as you can afford. Classic vehicles are like tiny tech companies: it’s very difficult to tell which ones are going to take off. Just don’t forget about the management fees (read: mechanics).