NBC’s Sites Grow In Leaps And Bounds Thanks to Financial Woes, iTunes

Ed: The draw of cool and the clout of distribution. Image is everything.

NBC’s Sites Grow In Leaps And Bounds Thanks to Financial Woes, iTunes

NBC had a huge week thanks to the financial troubles being experienced on Wall Street and its new relationship with Apple.

CNBC.com was the chosen destination for investors and businesspeople alike this week as the instability on Wall Street led to the site’s largest audience ever. For the first time in its history, CNBC.com served 1 million unique visitors on Monday and racked up 14.6 million page views — a 26 percent gain over the site’s previous high, according to its internal data.

Tiny Fey and the hoopla surrounding Vice-Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin can be thanked for giving NBC.com its most-watched viral video of all time. According to the company, it bested previous favorites, “D— in a Box” and “Lazy Sunday,” and even beat out copies uploaded to YouTube.

But that wasn’t all. Apple reported that NBC Universal’s TV properties were huge hits on iTunes over the past ten days and the company witnessed more than 1 million downloads of NBC properties. Even better for the company, about 30 percent of the top-selling episodes on iTunes are now NBC Universal properties.

It looks like NBC’s decision to kiss and make up with Apple paid off.

Ad Agency: Gates And Seinfeld Not Done Yet (MSFT)

by Vasanth Sridharan

Crispin-Porter, the ad agency that came up with the oft-perplexing and maybe funny Microsoft ads featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, say they have one more in the can and they're planning to make more of them, Gizmodo reports.

If true, this basically splits the difference between yesterday's blog reports, which painted Jerry's shelving as an embarrassing defeat for Redmond, and Microsoft's spin, distributed via the WSJ and the NYT, that the shelving was always in the works.

Gizmodo's source tells the site that they are, in fact concentrating on different ads as part of the $300 million marketing campaign, but that they're going to continue making ones featuring Seinfeld until Microsoft tells them to stop. We hope they keep going!