Revenue, Earnings | featured news

Zynga reports a sharp drop in its losses in the last three months of 2012, as revenues at the designer of games including Farmville stabilised.

EBay Inc reported holiday quarter results that just beat Wall Street expectations, but the e-commerce company also gave a cautious forecast for 2013. EBay shares climbed 1.7 percent to $53.80 in after-hours trading following the announcement. Expectations were high ahead of the results because sales data from outside sources suggested strong sales growth from eBay's online marketplace and a solid increase in transactions processed by the company's PayPal payments business.

Washington Post posted a profit as the company recorded fewer restructuring charges, although revenue was flat as its education division continued to struggle.

Pandora pays over 2,000 artists more around $10,000 a year, and over 800 make $50,000. Top-tier artists like Adele are in the $1 million range, while others are tripling that sum. Not bad, in other words, especially since this is only taking into account Pandora payments, not those from Rhapsody, Spotify, or any other online streaming service. In fact, Pandora only accounts for about 6.5% of all online radio.

The company reports a swing to an operating profit in its broadcasting unit despite lower revenue, but warns that its return to overall profitability may be delayed.

Google Inc's revenue increased 21 percent as strength in its Internet advertising business offset a persisting drop in ad rates, stirring hopes among investors the Web search leader is close to slowing that decline.

Facebook's first-half revenue roughly doubled to $1.6 billion, underscoring the world's largest social network's appeal to advertisers.

AOL's earnings more than doubled amid gains from asset sales, though ad revenue dropped 27%. CEO Armstrong said AOL is on the path to recovery, with much of the revenue declines "self-inflicted."

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. says revenue in the third quarter jumped 39 percent due to its acquisition of fellow drugmaker Wyeth, but hefty charges dragged its profit down 70 percent.

Revenue and profit were up at Wal-Mart, but sales fell 0.4 percent at stores open at least a year.