Revenue

Facebook has announced its latest attempt at making money, and this time it involves letting users pay to promote their friends' posts. The feature lets users pay to have a friend's post show more prominently in other friends' news feeds. "If your friend is renting their apartment out and she tells her friends on Facebook, you can share the post with the people you and your friend have in common so that it shows up higher in news feed and more people notice it," the company said, citing an example of when this feature could be useful.  PHOTOS: Tech we want to see in 2013 The feature is similar to another one that Facebook introduced last year that lets users pay to promote their own posts.

At a time when taxpayers are being asked to dig deeper to resolve Los Angeles' chronic budget crisis, city employees are receiving raises that will cost tens of millions of dollars within a few years, according to records obtained by The Times. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, an assortment of City Council members and Police Chief Charlie Beck are urging voters to approve a sales tax hike on the March 5 ballot that would boost the city rate to 9.5% , one of the highest in the state. At the same time, thousands of police officers, firefighters and civilian employees are in the midst of receiving a two-year series of raises that were backed by the mayor and council.

California raked in far more tax money than expected last month, according to a report from the state controller, who tracks the state's cash flow. Total revenue was $4.3 billion higher than the latest projections from Gov. Jerry Brown's administration, giving the state its best numbers for any January in the last decade,  the report said . "It signals that California may be entering an era where we can govern outside of crisis," Controller John Chiang said in a statement.

CBRE Group Inc., the world's largest commercial real estate brokerage, finished 2012 strong and optimistic as conditions improved in many real estate markets. The Los Angeles firm said Wednesday that its commissions from property sales rose 22% in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier, led by a 32% jump in the Americas and a 31% increase in Britain. "We are very pleased with our strong finish to 2012," President Robert Sulentic said. "Despite continued fiscal and economic uncertainty, all of our global operating regions delivered solid top-line growth in the fourth quarter.

Walt Disney Co. reported a 6% drop in first-quarter earnings, compared with a year ago, in part because of charges associated with its high-profile dispute with the creator of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and a decline in operating income at the film studio. The Burbank entertainment giant reported net income of $1.4 billion, or 77 cents a share, for the quarter ending Dec. 29, down from $1.5 billion over the same period in 2011. Revenue for the first quarter rose 5% to $11.3 billion.

At the heart of the new book "Love in the Time of Algorithms" is a philosophical question: does the billion-dollar dating industry, whose currency is the perpetual promise of new relationships, signal the death of commitment? It is the question posed to Sam Yagan, chief executive of free dating website OkCupid, by the book's author, Dan Slater. "That's really a point about market liquidity," replies Yagan, a graduate of Harvard University and Stanford Business School, and a self-confessed "math guy" who says he knows nothing about dating.

Since 2008, Mark G. Yudof has led the 10-campus University of California system through a dramatic period of budget cuts and tuition hikes but also of widening financial aid and solid academic reputation. A constitutional scholar with a sardonic wit and a fondness for Tex-Mex food, Yudof recently announced he will step down in August and become a law professor at UC Berkeley. He cited gallbladder surgery and a broken arm over the last year or so and said it was a good time to leave since UC would be financially stronger with extra tax revenue approved by California voters in November.

It was 20 years ago Friday that a bright-eyed, former NBA executive named Gary Bettman officially became the NHL's first commissioner. His self-proclaimed mission: to spread the little-known gospel of hockey and duplicate the boom the NBA experienced by stabilizing the NHL's economic underpinnings and making stars of its underappreciated players. "The fans don't want to read about labor negotiations," Bettman said during his first week on the job. "They want to read game stories and stories about people.

Media company Viacom Inc. disappointed Wall Street with lower revenue in its fiscal first quarter, particularly at its Hollywood film studio, Paramount Pictures, which bombed at the box office. In past quarters, Paramount could count on being propped up by the company's cash cow MTV and Nickelodeon television networks. But those networks are struggling to reverse ratings slides, exposing Paramount's thin film slate and a bare home video cupboard that contained only one release. For the quarter ended Dec. 31, Paramount's film revenue plummeted 37% to $975 million.

SAN FRANCISCO - The good news for investors: Facebook Inc. is quickly figuring out how to make money from ads on mobile devices. The bad news: It hasn't come cheap. Advertising on mobile devices accounted for about 23%, or $306 million, of ad revenue in the fourth quarter, the Menlo Park, Calif., company said Wednesday. That was up from 14% in the third quarter, the first time Facebook broke out mobile advertising. "We started off the year with no ads on mobile, and we ended with 23% of ad revenue coming from mobile in the fourth quarter," Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told analysts during a conference call to discuss fourth-quarter financial results.