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correction - those are %'s not m shares. I meant "Toscafund reducing by about 10% ...and Sports Direct increasing by 12%"

This is not new though and pre-dates Sports Direct's holdings notices. Standard Life were reported as being interested in 3.6m shares (4.22%) as of 17th June 2015 in the annual report.

I have to say that Toscafund reducing significantly was not what I wanted to see. But it's all so opaque that it's difficult to know what's really happening. On the face of it, Toscafund reducing by about 10m shares on 6th April and Sports Direct increasing by 12m shares on 24th March look like balancing transactions. The timings don't match though and MS's frequent derivative and borrowings changes confuse the situation - a big increase in "the result of stock borrowing agreements" in today's notice and the derivatives/swaps more or less gone. Skindle - I don't think the board could accept an unreasonably low bid from Sports Direct even if a majority of shareholders were holders of Sports Direct stock. Wouldn't they have a duty to act in the interests of the "minority" shareholders in such an instance?

(Also posted in the ii board) Since it's so quiet, a bit of detail on Quantcast. After shutting down at the end of March, the R1 Premium segment in Quantcast appears to have been relaunched with a new segmentation, including much greater mobile tagging. The old Burst Media vertical channels (Giant Realm, MomIQ etc) seem to have been turned off and a new subject matter split (Family, Education, Arts, ...) is in place with a series of sub-segments each having up to about 100k daily US people/uniques. Early days yet, but on the basis of April 7th data, the top 5 US-reach sub-segments are: 99k Arts (number is US people for the day) 71k Stlye 65k Health 64k Science 57k Family As part of the relaunch, they appear to have got the mobile web tags loaded and this segment is now showing a much healthier mobile web % than prior to the re-segmentation. It is now running at 20-30% mobile web (3 days April 5th-7th) compared to 6-7% in late March. At the same time, the mobile apps reach in the second "RhythmOne Premium" segment is also ramping up since the relaunch, with nearly 60k uniques on April 7th. https://www.quantcast.com/wpath%3Ap-59TntzuqummDw%2FRhythmOne%20Premium?country=US https://www.quantcast.com/wpath%3Ap-59TntzuqummDw%2FRhythmOne%2520Premium?country=US

Just on the LYFE contingent payments, I think the answer is probably no. In the FY15 annual report there is a note on page 67: "However...additional information was assessed...where it became apparent that the financial conditions could not be met. As such, management revised its estimate of the fair value of the contingent consideration to $nil..." The first time I've actually noticed this comment. The financial conditions bit refers to "Up to a further $0.8m deferred contingent consideration is payable after 1 year, contingent upon the product line meeting certain financial conditions." Doesn't really sound very good in terms of LYFE post-acquisition performance, does it?

For the 1st April transaction they qualified the shares holding in section 13 of the form as "Of the total voting rights attached to shares in Section 8A, 1,947,635 (2.25%) of these are the result of stock borrowing agreements." I interpreted this to mean they had borrowed the shares.

Not the only share that's low volume this morning, but the spread is actually relatively tight for blinkx (18.5-19.0). So it doesn't seem to be the MM's discouraging trading here.

Which looks like +/- 4%. Either the MMs are as confused as we are, or they really want to discourage trading at the moment.

So they've given back nearly all the stock they borrowed on 1st April? Clear as mud.

You're having a laugh right? 1H Adjusted EBITDA: (6,840) 1H Adjusted loss: (13,399) 1H loss: (79,517))

typo. 45 shares traded. Just the 1 trade. An "O" trade for 45 shares. How does that work?

A whole 45 shares trades so far according to this site's trades listing.

I agree on the AdKarma $5m, I would expect that to have been a cash outflow in the last fiscal year. The $4m restructuring cost is more uncertain though. That is the estimated cost I think, and when the cash disappears depends on what the costs are, when people leave etc. For example, if you look at Quantcast, they appear to have shut down the first RhythmOne Premium segment (Giant Realm, MomIQ etc) from 31st March. If that really reflects closing down the business around that date, then redundancy payments would probably not be made until this financial year. Equally office closure costs may drag on into this year. You may also have a working capital cash benefit as the business shrinks i.e. some of the relatively good cashflow performance may be due simply to being owed less money by customers because you're doing less business with them.

dodgy maths - I should have said "MS would still have been 5.8% short"...

Yes, GB that might explain some of it. But in that case wouldn't MS effectively have been short Findel and if so shouldn't that have been declared? SPD declared a 12.6% CFD position as of 24th March. MS declared a 6.8% equity swap position also as of 24th March. MS declared a further 1.0% equity swap position and a 2.25% borrowed stock position as of 1st April. So if the Findel side of the MS equity swap was then CFD'd with SPD, MS would still have been 5.2% short between 24th March and 1st April wouldn't they? And even after the 1st April swap and borrowing they'd still be 2.5% short. And what about the counter-party to the MS equity swap - haven't their voting rights gone down? In any event, I wish they could come up with a zero sum disclosure regime - where one party can only disclose an increase in voting rights if it is matched by someone else disclosing a reduction if relevant thresholds are crossed.

...literally. If I look at just the holdings notices since Sports Direct got involved (25th September) I have the following voting rights positions declared: 30% Sports Direct 20% Toscafund 17% Schroders 10% Morgan Stanley 6% FIL So a total of 83% so far. If I then go back a bit further to take account of the June and September holdings notices for Aberforth and R&M I can add: 5% Aberforth (29th June) 6% R&M (14th Sept) So a total of 94%. If I then add in the holdings of Henderson (5%) and Standard Life (4%) detailed in the Annual Report as of 17th June 2015, I end up over 100%. And that's without all our individual positions! Now Henderson and Standard Life both have under 5% and sometimes institutions have a 5% discloseable threshold for TR-1's rather than 3% so I suppose it's possible they have exited without a holdings notice. But even so, it feels to me like either we must be missing some holdings notices or there's some double counting of voting rights in the notices we do have.

rusty: 'How can we buy profit making businesses. I believe adkarma alone was making 2.4m and still be "loss making".' It's not necessarily that we're turning profit-making businesses into loss-making ones. It's that we're closing down previously profitable businesses and replacing the revenue with other revenue (and associated costs). You can see this in the TU. They say that in FY15, non-core product lines were over 50% of revenues, whereas in FY16 they are about 30%. Over 50% of FY15 revenues of $215m - say $110m About 30% of FY16 revenues of $165-170m - say $50m So $60m of non-core product line revenue has disappeared in FY16 (assuming the definition of "non-core" hasn't changed). This was previously profitable business I presume (in FY14 if not in FY15). It has been partially replaced by AllMedia, AdKarma and maybe some new business through the RhythmMax exchange. But this new revenue all comes with associated costs and in the meantime they have all the fixed costs associated with the business that has disappeared. So the fact that they have "eliminated over $40m in annualized operating expenses" is good news, but in my opinion does not mean $40m on to the bottom line because they've also lost the revenue (net of TAC maybe) that went with some of those operating expenses. However, the good news is that they have been adding new revenues (the $75m, I think) and as the non-core revenues decrease relative to the core revenues then the business should be highly geared towards increasing core revenues i.e. it should get easier to add net new revenue even if some of the non-core business is still in decline and if that new revenue comes at relatively low marginal cost then a good part of it should flow through to the bottom line. That's assuming that the environment stays relatively stable and they're not blindsided (again) by another "transformational" industry event.

8th April 2015 "...FY2015 was a transformational year for both the online advertising sector and blinkx." 5th April 2016 "FY2016 has been a transformational year for the Industry and the Company."

I think that was sobeit, not shroder. Would it be too cynical of me to point out that in the 1H comment they mention "fixed operating expenses" whereas in today's comment it's just "operating expenses" and that by reducing revenue you clearly ought to reduce the variable operating expenses? Probably just a drafting error...Ho hum.

Euroclear March data now out, showing shares on loan up again in March, which suggests short positions increasing. Oct'15 0.4m shares on loan (average) Nov'15 0.3m Dec'15 0.6m Jan'16 2.6m Feb'16 2.5m Mar'16 2.9m Certainly my recent purchases at 189p and 198p not looking too smart today. But I'll hold on for a bit longer. I still think we ought to see more holdings notices relating to the action on 24th March.