Monday Note

An occasional look at industry data and miscellaneous other items. See the previous compilation here.
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Web monetization
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$100,0000 a day. This is the price tag for an advertiser to appear on Wall Street Journal’s home page. Rupert (Murdoch) smiles: WSJ.com can generate $100m just in ad revenue, in addition to its million subscribers.
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$500,000 a day, that’s the rate for MySpace, another of Rupert’s properties.
(Source for both: Dow Jones.)
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170 million web sites today. Just to bear in mind: in 1994, they were less than 4000.  Google is pending $2bn a year in datacenters to keep up with the growth of the internet.
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The financial crisis
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$20 trillion of debt. The Credit Default Swap market is seen as largely responsible of the current crisis. CDS are a form of insurance contract tied to underlying debt supposed to protect the buyer in case of default. The market has almost doubled every year for the past five years, reaching $20 trillion in notional amount outstanding. (Source: Bank of International Settlements in the Economist.)
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$200bn left in the Fed’s bank account. The US Federal Reserve System is running out of ammunition. A year ago, the Fed had $800bn in Treasury Securities. Taking all pledges and commitments of last week, the central bank lost three quarter of its reserve. (Source: Wall Street Journal)
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Half-billion dollars in salary. Between 1993 and 2007Richard Fuld former CEO of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers took home this sum as a total compensation.  “That amounts to $17,000 an hour to obliterate a firm”, notes New York Times’ columnist Nicolas Kristof.
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3 pages to surrender. This is the length of the term-sheet laid out by Timothy Geithner the president of the Federal Reserve of New York and by Treasury staffers in Washington, to take control of the insurance conglomerate AIG. The document was hand delivered to AIG head office.  (Source: WSJ) –FF
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