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
Thursday, May 23
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.
Read more here
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.
Read more here
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.
Read more here
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.
Read more here
Tuesday, May 21
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.
Read more here
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.
Read more here
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
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).
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.
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
Monday, May 20
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
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.
Read more here
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.
Read more here
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