Also vital, says Mr Freston, is frequent consumer research and changing the channels' content before the popularity of a particular type of programming passes its peak.
It's also credited with supplying Netflix's service with some of its best content and fueling the popularity of the service.
The growing popularity of the content and web services businesses which have higher margins will also help profitability going forward.
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The second stack captures the social agenda, or the popularity of FORBES content across the social Web and our site as measured by our Velocity algorithm.
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AOL's point of view, because the popularity of its own content means that advertising and a cut of sales revenues can generate high margins for the firm.
But when it came to online streaming, it had to license the content from studios and as the popularity of online streaming grew, its licensing costs spiked 53%.
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Peter Fincham, ITV's director of television, called the figures a testament to "the enduring popularity of high-quality television content broadcast free-to-air to mass audiences".
The result is typically the development of user-generated content (UGC), which has grown in popularity along with the rise of digital (particularly social) media.
Box office popularity also spawns higher DVD sales and content licensing.
And, apparently the popularity of sites where consumers post their own created content is trumping that of traditional media sites.
Away from device sales, the company's location and commerce department had a difficult quarter, but the sale of map content licenses (to companies like Amazon) offset the dwindling popularity of standalone GPS units.
Link sites such as Newzbin 2 are gaining popularity as those determined to get their hands on free content move away from traditional peer-to-peer downloading methods.
With the growing popularity of digital media and pay-for-download content, that scenario is made more difficult thanks to digital rights management copy-protection schemes, abbreviated as DRM, that make it nearly impossible to move or copy our music, movies and TV shows to the different devices we use every day.
Meanwhile, according to Viacom, YouTube openly discussed its dependence on copyrighted content to become popular, and Google saw that IP-theft-driven popularity as a major factor in its acquisition of the company.
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Google ranks content according to relevance--how closely it resembles the search term--and popularity--how many other sites are linking to it.
But the popularity of Tumblr and Twitter has shown that, when it comes to creating content, many writers prefer simplicity and built-in sharing to something more flexible but harder to master.
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At CNN content partner Mashable, a blog that got its start focusing exclusively on social media and saw its popularity rise as Facebook's did, the staff geared up by creatin g an IPO-inspired playlist on music site Spotify (which, perhaps not coincidentally, is accessible only through a Facebook account).
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