How Teens Are Really Using Facebook: It's a 'Social Burden,' Pew Study Finds

The Facebook generation is fed up with Facebook. That's according to a report released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Pew's findings suggest teens' enthusiasm for Facebook is waning, lending credence to concerns, raised by the company's investors and others that the social network may be losing a crucial demographic that has long fueled its success.

Facebook has become a "social burden" for teens, write the authors of the Pew report. "While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives, it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own."

Teen's aren't abandoning Facebook -- deactivating their accounts would mean missing out on the crucial social intrigues that transpire online -- and 94 percent of teenage social media users still have profiles on the site, Pew's report notes. But they're simultaneously migrating to Twitter and Instagram, which teens say offer a parent-free place where they can better express themselves. Facebook, teens say, has been overrun by parents, fuels unnecessary social "drama" and gives a mouthpiece to annoying oversharers who drone on about inane events in their lives.

Read more at Huff Post

Video Games: suffering industry

Sales figures are murky, but most estimates put annual revenues (for video games) at between $60 billion and $70 billion.

According to NPD, a firm of analysts, sales of consoles and other hardware fell by a fifth in America last year. Sales of the games themselves are doing no better. Both Sony and Microsoft, which makes the Xbox, a rival line of consoles, have reported falling income from their games divisions.

Games designed for smartphones and tablets are booming. In 2012 the ten top-grossing apps for Apple’s iPhone smartphone were all games. Many mobile games are free; those that are not sell for a handful of dollars compared with $60 for a big-budget console title.

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Newspaper, Magazine Ad Fortunes Continue To Decline

The release of fourth-quarter figures for newspaper advertising and first-quarter figures for magazine ad pages earlier this month made it clear that the long decline of print advertising is going to continue -- and possibly even accelerate -- in coming years.

Print advertising has suffered a precipitous 60% drop over just seven years, with 27 straight quarters of year-over-year declines. This is the seventh straight quarter of year-over-year declines for magazines, wiping out the short-lived recovery enjoyed by the medium in 2010. Magazine ad pages tumbled from a total of 243,305 in 2005 to 150,699 in 2012, for a 38% decline over the last seven years.

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A tale of two Tinseltowns

“The business model within film is broken,” says Amir Malin of Qualia Capital, a private-equity firm. Between 2007 and 2011, pre-tax profits of the five studios controlled by large media conglomerates (Disney, Universal, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros) fell by around 40%, says Benjamin Swinburne of Morgan Stanley. He reckons the studios account for less than 10% of their parent companies’ profits today, and by 2020 their share will decline to only around 5%. That is because the “big six” studios (the other is Sony Pictures, owned by the eponymous electronics maker) are growing more slowly than TV.

Film and TV are very different businesses, though studios like Warner Bros and Fox do both. TV is relatively stable and currently lucrative. In contrast, film revenues are volatile. In 2011 American cinemas sold 1.28 billion tickets, the smallest number since 1995. Last year, ticket sales rose back to 1.36 billion and box-office revenues to a record $10.8 billion, thanks to blockbusters like “The Avengers”. But film-going in America is not a growth business, especially now that people have so many media to distract them at home. The share of Americans who attend a cinema at least once a month declined from 30% in 2000 to 10% in 2011.

One boss of a film-production company calls the international box office “the lifeboat on the Titanic”. Box-office revenues outside America are growing two and a half times as fast as they are domestically.

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How to Buy Friends and Influence People on Facebook

Whoever said you can’t buy friends was dead wrong. A search for “Twitter followers” reveals dozens of outfits dedicated to making insecure weirdos (and marketers) with cash to burn look more popular than they are. To game the system, these companies create fake users and even pay real account holders for following and liking. As a result, the social media giants must constantly tweak their algorithms to spot frauds; recent upgrades to Facebook’s auto-detection system resulted in accounts losing thousands of likes. Here’s our guide to the not-so-underground friend market.

Facebook

Price of popularity: On Socialyup.com you can buy 500 likes for $30 or 20,000 for $699.

Spot the frauds: Watch for accounts with lots of likes but very little discernible user activity. A page with tens of thousands of fans but only a few comments and nobody in the “Talking About This” column is a prime suspect. One study says 97 percent of fake profiles identify themselves as female (while just 40 percent of real users do).

Pinterest

Price of popularity: Pinfol delivers 100 followers for $15 or 5,000 for $95.

Spot the frauds: Scroll through a user’s followers list and keep an eye out for a high proportion of accounts with no bio or photo.

Twitter

Price of popularity: FanMeNow’s packages start at $10 for 1,000 followers. $1,750 will score you a million.

Spot the frauds: Promotional tweets and the default “egg” avatar are hallmarks of phony accounts. Fake Follower Check is a free web tool that measures a user’s followers against typical characteristics of spam accounts.

YouTube

Price of popularity: 500views.com delivers 30,000 views for $150. For $3,100, make your video “viral” with a million views.

Spot the frauds: Beware of generic comments. One music clip we saw racked up tens of thousands of views in weeks, but the only comments were variations on “This video is great!”

Read more here

Thanks to new digital tools, marketing is no longer voodoo

Give and take has “radically changed the relationship between our brands and the consumer”, says Patrice Bula, Nestlé’s marketing chief. “Today we have really entered the age of conversation.” This helps explain why marketers are feeling both potent and panicky. Instead of just lobbing messages out into the void, they must now act as customers’ “ambassadors”, says David Edelman of McKinsey, a consultancy. And that is tricky. Already 70% of big American firms employ a “chief marketing technologist.”

Read more here

On YouTube, Video Makes the Radio Star

Since YouTube’s inception in 2005, the site’s been known primarily as a bottomless Big Gulp brimming with webcam confessionals, cute-mammal footage, and assorted other Web junk. Over time it’s also become a musical kingmaker—a place where fledgling and unfamiliar talent can break through to massive audiences.

A decade ago the record industry’s gears clicked along more or less as they always had: Labels signed up promising acts discovered by A&R scouts, paid those acts advances against future music sales, and hawked that music through a sprawling network of radio programmers and retailers. Today, with album sales continuing to plummet—in 2004, 666.7 million albums were sold; by 2012 that number was down more than 50 percent, to 316 million—labels and artists depend more than ever on touring and merchandise for revenue. Songs are ads meant to help sell tickets and T-shirts, and YouTube is beginning to rival radio when it comes to breaking those tracks.

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Ethics Flags For New Media

Launching his namesake company's news division in the 1990s, Michael Bloomberg largely rejected long-held rules of the journalism trade that insist on keeping thick firewalls between reporters and the profit-making workings of their companies.

Companies like Bloomberg are reinventing the news business. And it raises key questions for people who watch the media, most notably this one: As the news business gets reconfigured around advances in technology, what does that mean for the old rules and the people who follow them?

"Many more journalism companies will face the type of competing values that the journalists at Bloomberg faced because, as the economic model for journalism changes, more companies, if they're successful, are going to look like Bloomberg," said Kelly McBride, who teaches journalism ethics at The Poynter Institute.

Read more here

Media Balks at Band-Aid Shield Law

49 states plus the District of Columbia have some form of shield law giving journalists a degree of confidentiality similar to that which prevents priests, attorneys, and therapists from testifying in court. But the law has failed to gain traction at the federal level, partially due to indifference outside the media industry, and partially due to concerns that the law would hinder criminal and national security investigations.

Read more here.

Video: Changes in Advertising

Radio Dips, But Station, Digital Revs Rise

Clear Channel said total revenues slipped 1% from $1.36 billion in the first quarter of 2012 to $1.34 billion in the first quarter of 2013, due to declines in its radio and international outdoor business. These losses were offset somewhat by increases in its Americas outdoor division.

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Facebook Ad Revs Skyrocket 43%, Mobile Grows To 30%

Facebook is looking more than ever like the mobile company CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared it had become last year. The social network's mobile business rose to 30% of its advertising sales in the first quarter from almost nothing a year ago.

Why Facebook is focusing so keenly on mobile is no mystery. Facebook said its number of monthly active mobile users hit 751 million as of the end of March, up 54% from a year ago, and up 10% from 680 million in the fourth quarter. Monthly active users on Facebook overall reached 1.1 billion, up 23% from a year ago, while daily active users rose 26% to 665 million in the quarter.

Read more here

Twenty Years Ago Today the World Wide Web Went Public

Twenty years ago today, something happened that changed the digital world forever: CERN published a statement that made the technology behind the World Wide Web available to use, by anybody, on a royalty free basis.

Read more at Gizmodo

Print v Digital Reading

How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest among us, but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone who routinely switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who have already vowed to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin?

Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.

More at Scientific American here

YouTube Wins Copyright Battle With Viacom

A federal judge has cleared YouTube of liability for infringing copyright by allegedly hosting tens of thousands of clips of content owned by Viacom. U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton ruled that Google's YouTube was protected by the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which broadly give sites immunity when users upload copyrighted material, as long as the sites remove the content upon request.

The ruling marks the second time that Stanton dismissed Viacom's case, which the company filed in 2007.

A Viacom spokesperson said the company intends to appeal the dismissal.

Read more here

AP makes its money from broadcasters

The Associated Press’ president and CEO says U.S. newspapers comprise only about 20% of its current revenue (and) broadcasters now provided the bulk of the organization’s revenue at about 43%.

http://www.netnewscheck.com/article/25661/ap-head-alliance-with-papers-is-beyond-biz

Ad revenue uptick for print mags in 1st Q

Print magazines saw a 0.5% lift in advertising revenue in the first quarter, to $4.13 billion from $4.11 billion in the first quarter of 2012, according to the latest report from the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB). Ad pages declined 4.8% to 31,137 in the first quarter from 32,708 a year earlier. It was the first gain in almost two years.

More here

Google Turns to Big Data to Unmask Human Traffickers

Despite all their manpower, law enforcement, anti-trafficking task forces, and policymakers know surprisingly little about the illegal cross-border flow of humans forced into the sex trade or into slave labor or cut open to have their organs extracted. Google (GOOG) believes Big Data can turn the tables on these crime gangs.
The search giant announced on April 9 that it will award a $3 million grant, part of its Global Impact Award program run through its Google Giving philanthropic arm, to a trio of anti-trafficking organizations.

Crunching data like this, and being able to match it with similar data across borders from other trafficking emergency hotlines, could build a clearer, more timely picture of where the human-trafficking-related crime is originating and how law enforcement and victims rights groups can intervene.

Read more at Business Week

Pandora Hits 200 Million Users

Pandora has announced hitting the 200 million user mark in the U.S. The online radio service streams 200 million songs before 10 a.m. every day.

Read more here.

Newspaper Ad Revs Drop Again

Newspaper advertising revenues have been dropping steadily for some years now, and the end of 2012 brought no respite for publishers. For the full year, total ad revenues -- including niche publications, direct marketing and nondaily publication advertising -- fell 6.5% from $27.1 billion in 2011 to $25.3 billion in 2012. Focusing on the combined Sunday and daily ad revenues, including both print and online, total revenues slipped 6.8% from $23.9 billion to $22.3 billion. The latter figure is just 45% of peak newspaper revenues of $49.4 billion in 2005, equaling a 55% decline in seven years.

Read more here

Magazine Ad Pages Slip

Print advertising is dwindling at consumer magazines. The Publishers Information Bureau released figures showing total magazine ad pages fell 4.9% from 33,673 in the first quarter of 2012 to 32,023 in the first quarter of 2013. Of 213 titles tracked by the PIB, 107 (50%) experienced ad page declines in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012.

Read more here.

How paywalls are evolving

It’s often easier to persuade people to subscribe to sports content than to entertainment content, even as it’s easier to sell ads against entertainment content than it is against sports content. So it does make sense to keep entertainment free, and put some kind of paywall around sports.

What’s impossible to calculate, of course, is the long-term opportunity cost of driving away people who want to read your content but aren’t willing to pay...the act of putting up a paywall is the act of “essentially harvesting revenue from a loyal long-term audience” — people who have been reading the publication for years, and have turned it into a habit they don’t want to give up. That’s fine, as a short-term means of maximizing revenues. But it’s dangerous in terms of getting new loyal readers. Which is one reason why online media startups almost never have paywalls: they want as many people as possible to discover them.

My expectation, then, is that newspaper paywalls will become both increasingly sophisticated and increasingly expensive over time — but that paywalls are not going to migrate very quickly out of the newspaper world and onto the rest of the internet. In a dying industry, the sensible thing to do is to maximize your revenues before you die. Paywalls might well make money for newspapers. But that doesn’t mean that newspapers aren’t dying. Quite the opposite.

Read more at Reuters

EC says corporate information can be spread on Twitter, Facebook

The Securities and Exchange Commission says companies can use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to disseminate key information just as they already do on corporate websites. But, the agency said, companies must make it clear that they plan to make that information available on social media outlets so that investors know where to look for it.

Read more at the LA Times.

Is The Company Behind Rodman's Korea Visit The Future Of Media?

What has become the core of the Vice brand is a kind of gritty, on-the-ground reporting from some of the roughest parts of the world.With Vice on track to expand to more countries and launch a news channel for young people, it may have inadvertently built the future of media.

Read (or listen) to more at NPR

Signs of promise and peril for American news organisations

Nearly a third of them say they have abandoned a news source because they thought the quality of its information was declining. Weather, traffic and sport now account for around 40% of local television newscasts. The average length of a story keeps falling. Only 20% of local TV stories exceed a minute, and half take less than 30 seconds.

A more pernicious trend is the growing number of public-relations workers. In 1980 PR flaks and journalists prowled in around equal numbers; in 2008 the ratio of PR folk to journalists was nearly four to one.

The bulk of the $37.3 billion spent on digital advertising in 2012 went to five firms: Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL.

Read more in the Economist

Why data without a soul is meaningless

The problem with data is that the way it is used today, it lacks empathy and emotion. Data is used like a blunt instrument, a scythe trying to cut and tailor a cashmere sweater.

The idea of combining data, emotion and empathy as part of a narrative is something every company — old, new, young and mature — has to internalize. If they don’t, they will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

“Data needs stories, but stories also need data. Data, when its put up in front of you as a number, it gets stripped of the context of where the data came from, the biases inherent in it, and the assumptions of the models that created it.”

The symbiotic relationship between data and storytelling is going to be one of the more prevalent themes for the next the few years, starting perhaps inside some apps and in the news media.

Read more at Gigaomo

Evernote's Cult Grows

That’s a lot of expectations for an experience that boils down to three columns in a browser window. You type, or clip or upload a new “note” (an image, a recording, or a Web page) into the right-hand column; store it in a “notebook” listed on the left-hand side; and browse or search in the middle. The promise is that Evernote saves your ideas, documents your meetings, archives articles, reminds you what your kid wants for Christmas, and coughs up the business card of Plaid Jacket Guy from that conference in Scottsdale. In addition to segregating such material into notebooks, users can organize it with tags, but don’t have to. Evernote’s search function, with optical character recognition that even picks up words within pictures, is impressively accurate and speedy. The effectiveness of this function is crucial, because the willingness to dump work and personal material in one place is central to Evernote’s worldview.

Evernote says it has 50 million users around the world (a third in the U.S.) and is adding 100,000 a day. Operating on a “freemium” model, the company makes money primarily from the sliver of that user base that pays $45 a year, or $5 a month, for a souped-up version with more storage capacity. It has been profitable, and though it’s investing heavily now, it expects to be profitable again soon. But with $251 million in venture backing and a valuation estimated at $1 billion, Evernote has greater ambitions. Chief Executive Officer Phil Libin talks about reaching a billion users; others at the company freely throw around the phrase “the Evernote lifestyle.”

Read more at Business Week

This Is the Scariest Statistic About the Newspaper Business Today

In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads. And it's getting worse, according to a new report by Pew. In 2011, the ratio was just 10-to-1. Since 2003, print ads have fallen from $45 billion to $19 billion. Online ads have only grown from $1.2 to $3.3 billion. Stop and think about that gap. The total ten-year increase in digital advertising isn't even enough to overcome the average single-year decline in print ads since 2003.

Read more from The Atlantic

the Publishing Company That Beat the Internet

With the advent of the Internet, the primary sources of revenue—circulation and advertising—have eroded, while the costs of printing magazines—ink, paper, and distribution—continue to rise.

(But) Meredith, the demure Iowa-based publisher of upbeat women’s service magazines (including Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Traditional Home, has profited from a few key strategies. They are experts at repurposing their content across multiple platforms (magazines, books, websites, mobile devices, tablets, etc.) and aggressively look beyond advertising and circulation for revenue. In print, they stay as far away from the news as possible. They are particularly successful at licensing their magazine titles’ names to major national businesses selling branded products; they also run their own marketing agency.

Advertising remains the company’s lifeblood. In 2012 ad sales accounted for $769.8 million of Meredith’s $1.37 billion of revenue. Of that, 64 percent came from the company’s publishing division. The rest came from ad sales at Meredith’s 13 regional TV stations.

Read more at Business Week

Mobile Users Check for Updates 14 Times a Day

Facebook mobile users check their smartphones for updates an average of 14 times a day, according to a survey by the social networking site and IDC on their mobile users. Facebook is the third-most used application on mobile phone devices, right after email (78 percent) and web browsing (73 percent).

At least 89 percent of 18-24 year olds surveyed check their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up and 62 percent check their smartphones as soon as they wake up.

Read more here.

Columbia’s J school is overrated

Journalism school, especially Columbia's vaunted program, is often anti-market in outlook. Much of what the market wants, journalism training doesn't give it.

The disgrace is not just that the school takes students' or their parents' money to train them for a livelihood that it reasonably can predict will not exist. But it is also an intellectual failure: The information marketplace is going through a historic transformation, involving form, distribution, business basis and cognitive effect, and yet Columbia has just hired a practitioner to lead it with little or no career experience in any of these epochal changes.

Read more at USA Today.

The problem with online freelance journalism

The fact is that freelancing only really works in a medium where there’s a lot of clear distribution of labor: where writers write, and editors edit, and art directors art direct, and so on. Most websites don’t work like that, and are therefore difficult places to incorporate freelance content. The result is that it’s pretty much impossible to make a decent living on freelance digital-journalism income alone: I certainly don’t know of anybody who manages it. There’s still real money in magazine features, and there are a handful of websites which pay as much as $1,000 or $1,500 per article. But in general it’s much, much easier to get a job paying $60,000 a year working for a website than it is to cobble together $60,000 a year working freelance for a variety of different websites.

The lesson here, then, is not that digital journalism doesn’t pay. It does pay, and often it pays better than print journalism. Rather, the lesson is that if you want to earn money in digital journalism, you’re probably going to have to get a full-time job somewhere.

Digital journalism isn’t really about writing, any more — not in the manner that freelance print journalists understand it, anyway. Instead, it’s more about reading, and aggregating, and working in teams; doing all the work that used to happen in old print-magazine offices, but doing it on a vastly compressed timescale. There are exceptions to this rule, of course — websites which still pay freelance writers decent sums. But in general, it’s fair to say that the web is not a freelancer-friendly place. Just be careful about extrapolating: there are lots of very good digital-journalism jobs out there, no matter how badly some freelancers get treated.

Read more at Reuters

what happens in a single Internet minute

Fortunately, Intel has broken down what happens in an Internet minute into an easy-to-digest infographic. Every minute, 639,800GB of global IP data is transferred.  In a single minute of Internet time, 204 million e-mails are sent.  Twitter processes 100,000 new tweets. An Internet minute is filled with 30 hours of videos uploaded and 1.3 million video views. There are still 6 million Facebook views and 277,000 logins every minute.

Read more here

Journalism Cutbacks Are Driving Consumers Away

Nearly one-third of consumers surveyed by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism said they have abandoned a news outlet because it no longer gave them what they had counted on, either with fewer or less complete stories. Television news viewership is down. Newsroom employment at newspapers is down 30 percent since a peak in 2000 and has gone below 40,000 people for the first time since 1978.

Government coverage on local television news has been cut in half since 2005, the study said. Sports, weather and traffic now account for 40 percent of the content on these broadcasts; yet that's just the sort of information readily available elsewhere. That's a recipe for future erosion, Mitchell said. Forty-two percent of adults under age 30 counted themselves as regular local news viewers in 2006; last year that was down to 28 percent, the study found.

Cable news is increasingly cable talk, although it's difficult to conclude whether that is because of financial considerations or the sense among executives of what viewers want. Over the last five years, CNN has sharply cut back on produced story packages and live event coverage, the study found.

Read more here

Local TV News, Losing Viewers, Seeks Bigger Mobile Identity

TV stations have added more local news programming than ever while at the same time losing viewership, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew reported a slight uptick in viewership of network affiliates' newscasts in 2011. A year later all viewership gains were lost -- and then some. Last year, viewership of key late local newscasts slipped 7% to around 25 million; early evening newscasst dropped by around the same amount to 22 million viewers.

Read more here

Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks

By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”

“You’d expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated and successful in spreading ideas that they themselves are excited about,” says Dr. Falk. “But our research suggests that’s not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important.”

Read more at the New York Times

The Book Is Dead, Long Live the Book

Book revenues have been crumbling for the last two years, a development that will only accelerate, and brick-and-mortar bookstores have been steadily losing ground for the last five years. Long derided by publishing houses, e-books, though still a minority phenomenon in Germany, are experiencing tremendous growth. Today, about 11 percent of Germans are reading digital books on devices like the Kindle and the iPad, up from only 4 percent two years ago. In the United States, e-books already make up more than 15 percent of volume in the bookselling industry, mainly because they are more affordable. All of this indicates that margins will continue to shrink, as the book business becomes increasingly hectic, nervous and profit-driven.

People who read e-books aren't actually reading alone. Software uses millions of pieces of anonymous data to monitor how readers actually behave. Almost everything can be documented: how fast people read, which text they highlight and which pages they stop reading. The reader has become transparent. Could software be influencing the work of the editor soon? Is it conceivable that books will be rewritten based on readers' reactions, so as to achieve a higher read-through rate?

Read more at ABC News

How To Make $10 Million On YouTube

In January, the same month that Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla's YouTube channel Smosh passed Ray William Johnson's to become the most popular channel on YouTube, Forbes estimated the brand brought in $10 million in revenue the previous year.

"YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world by itself, and that is the way that we look at it," said Barry Blumberg, president of Smosh (and EVP of Smosh's parent company, Alloy Digital). "It does generate significant revenues for our business, but it is one aspect of our business, and we use it to drive to other aspects of our business and to expose our content to the largest possible audience."

Today, the Smosh channel counts 8.2 million subscribers (Johnson trails with 7.7 million subscribers) and an average of 73 million views per month.

Read more at BuzzFeed

Southwest Airlines plan for social media crises

"We're busier when there's nothing going on because we are constantly preparing and altering our contingency plans to address things that could happen."

With Wi-Fi now available on Southwest planes, social media users are reporting crises before the official Southwest dispatch channel can. For instance, when a hole popped open in the fuselage of a plane going from Phoenix to Sacramento, Calif., the first tweet about it was online within nine minutes. Dispatch didn't report it until about 20 minutes later.Luckily, Southwest's social media team monitors social channels incessantly. The airline is even building a command station it's planning to dub "The Listening Post." That's how Southwest was able to pull together a blog post about the situation—the plane made an emergency landing in Yuma, Ariz., within two hours of the emergency.





Read more here

Outdoor Revs Hit Nearly $7 Billion In 2012

Out-of-home advertising revenue increased 4.2% from $6.43 billion in 2011 to $6.7 billion in 2012, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association.

Read more here

Facebook's Graph Search May Be Key to More Ad Sales

When Facebook (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Graph Search on Jan. 15, he hailed his company’s latest innovation as a great leap forward for search. Facebook members who want to know their friends’ preferences before making decisions on restaurants, vacations, career choices, and maybe even life partners, can look for, say, “single friends in San Francisco who like sushi,” and be rewarded with meaningful results. Zuckerberg thinks he can offer his customers the grand prize of advertising: perfect microtargeting.

Read more at Business Week

Music sales post small rise in 2012, first since '99

The music business broke a 12-year losing streak in 2012, posting a small but symbolic 0.3 percent rise in trade revenues to $16.5 billion, figures from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) showed on Tuesday. The slight increase will come as a relief to record label bosses who have watched the value of sales plummet from a peak of $28.6 billion in 1999, as illegal downloads and a reluctance to embrace the digital age hit revenues hard.

Read more from Reuters

Wearing the Internet

Google Glass is no longer a rumor, said Tim Parker in Forbes.com. “It’s real.” The company unveiled a prototype of its Internet-equipped eyeglasses last week, announcing that it would give a selected bunch of “bold, creative individuals” the chance to purchase the first version this year for $1,500. The futuristic spectacles have a tiny screen located in the top right-hand corner of the frame, where Web data can be projected in front of the user’s eyeball. Using voice-activated technology, you can do a Google search, call up GPS directions, video chat with your friends, and even record what you’re seeing with a tiny mounted camera—all without fumbling for a cellphone. Users (will) be able to record or take pictures of people without their knowledge or consent.

Read more at The Week