The 'Aspirational' Consumer: R.I.P.

The spending habits of the utmost tier of earners remains robust, but everyone below has cut back and plans to stay there. “If you look at the 10-15% [sales volume] declines for upscale retailers and brands, it was [due to] people spending beyond their means and not being able to sustain it,” said AARC president Ron Kurtz. Even within the sphere most would consider well-off ($250,000 average annual household earnings), 41 percent reported they’re making a conscious effort to reduce expenditures for the next 12 months.

Isolated data? Hardly. Consumer Edge Research recently found that skipping top-shelf brands in favor of lower-end ones is most common in households with incomes of $100,000 or higher. A study conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers/Kantar Retail earlier this year revealed that 93 percent of shoppers say they’ve changed their shopping behavior—with 17 percent opting for cheaper brands. “Although we’re starting to see signs of shoppers getting tired of trading down, they remain cognizant of today’s economic realities,” said a Kantar official in a statement. These findings are in line with last year's McKinsey study, which revealed 41 percent of consumers think that premium brands are “not worth the money.”

So much for life’s little indulgences.

Read more at Brand Week.

Born digital

IN THE digital realm, things seem always to happen the wrong way round. Whereas Google has hurried to scan books into its digital catalogue, a group of national libraries has begun saving what the online giant leaves behind. For although search engines such as Google index the web, they do not archive it. Many websites just disappear when their owner runs out of money or interest.

In 1996 Brewster Kahle, a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur, founded the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving websites. He also began gently harassing national libraries to worry about preserving the web.

Another issue is ensuring that the data is stored in a format that makes it available in centuries to come. Ancient manuscripts are still readable. But much digital media from the past is readable only on a handful of fragile and antique machines, if at all. Audio and video programmes based on proprietary formats such as Windows Media Player are another challenge. What happens if Microsoft is bankrupt and forgotten in 2210?

Read more at The Economist.

A Social Music Chart

Entrepreneur Eric Garland thinks he has a better music chart. His secret? Tweets, status updates, and web chatter. BigChampagne, based in Beverly Hills, tracks sales, downloads, and listening activity on just about every music-distribution platform, from iTunes to FM radio to MySpace. (And, yes, it still tracks illegal file sharing too.). BigChampagne then analyzes and sells the data to record labels, talent agents, and radio stations that are looking to find under-the-radar acts.

In late July, BigChampagne unveiled its latest creation, the Ultimate Chart, which supplements widely available data on sales on Amazon (AMZN) and iTunes with metrics that measure a song's buzz: YouTube (GOOG) and MySpace hits, Twitter and Facebook mentions, Clear Channel radio spins, and Rhapsody and Last.fm streams.

Read more here.

TV Station Mocks Social Media

Newspaper Circulation Falls

Newspapers across the country broadly reported falling circulation from April through September, though the rate of decline has slowed. Figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations showed that overall weekday circulation at 635 newspapers declined 5 percent from circulation in the same six months last year. The decline last year was at more than twice that rate.

Read more at the New York Times.

Local TV: Value Drops

Local TV station advertising revenue and overall profits may be skyrocketing upwards -- but station value is not rising for media investors. Looking at the six pure-play TV station groups, New York-based media investment company M.C. Alcamo & Co. says companies are trading at less than they did at the start of the year -- even though revenues and profits are higher. At the same time, these 15 media companies -- pure-play and integrated media companies -- have seen 12.1% more revenue in the second quarter of 2010 versus a comparable period in 2009. In addition, profitability among this media group has improved 5 percentage points to 39% from 35% a year ago.

Read more here.

Paper Credit Deteriorating

The credit outlook for the U.S. newspaper sector is getting worse, Moody's says, as it revised its outlook for the industry from stable to negative. According to Moody's, newspaper revenues are likely to drop 5%-6% this year, with a mid-single-digit drop next year, following a 22% decline in 2009.

Read more at Barron's.

The Top 25 U.S. Newspapers

If you ranked the top 25 U.S. newspapers by PageRank (by Google) instead of circulation, the list looks like this:

• 9/10 - The New York Times stands alone as far as Google concerned – it has the highest PageRank of the top 25 U.S. newspapers
• 
  
• 8/10 – The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Chicago Tribune, NY Daily News, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle and StarTribune have equal authority at 8/10
• 
  
• 7/10 – The Dallas Morning News, The Chicago Sun-Times, Detroit Free Press, Houston Chronicle, The Arizona Republic, The Oregonian, The Star-Ledger, The San Diego Union-Tribune and Newsday are tied for third place with a PageRank of 7/10

Take popular blogs like The Huffington Post or TechCrunch for example. Both blogs have a Google PageRank of 8/10 – do those blogs have the same authority as The Wall Street Journal or USA Today? As far as Google is concerned they do.

Read more here.

BBC Guidelines

The BBC posts a new set of guidelines for online and social journalists here.

Texting "Gone Mad"

The average teenager sends over 3,000 texts per month. That's more than six texts per waking hour. According to a new study from Nielsen, our society has gone mad with texting, data usage and app downloads. Teens are sending 8 percent more texts than they were this time last year. Other age groups don't even come close, either; the average 18 to 24-year-old sends "only" 1,630 texts per month. The average only drops with other age groups. However, in every age bracket, the number of texts sent has increased when compared to last year. Texting is a more important means of communication than ever.

Read more here.

Making Money in the Music Business

For the past ten years sales of recorded music have declined so steeply as to become a cautionary tale about the disruptive power of the internet. The rise of illegal file-sharing and the end of the digital “replacement cycle”, in which people bought CDs to replace tapes and records, caused spending to collapse. In Japan, the world’s biggest CD sales market, the number of discs sold fell by 6% in 2008 and 24% in 2009.

Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. The longest, loudest boom is in live music. Between 1999 and 2009 concert-ticket sales in America tripled in value, from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion (see chart 1). It is not that more people are going to concerts. Rather, they are paying more to get in. Fans complain bitterly about the rising price of live music.

Music’s best business customer is television. “Watch an evening’s worth of TV and count how many times you hear music in the background,” says Jeremy Lascelles, chief executive of Chrysalis.

In a sense, the recorded-music market is not so much dying as greying. America’s bestselling album since 2000 is “1”, a collection of Beatles hits from the 1960s. Some music executives fret that the stadium-filling acts will not be replaced.

Read more in The Economist.

Digital Forensics

How do we check the accuracy of news images, particularly in moments of breaking-news urgency? Though we’re seeing a blossoming of fact-checking in text-based journalism, we have yet to see an equivalent movement in image-based news reporting — mostly, of course, because we lack good tools for determining whether images are authentic or manipulated, whether they depict what they claim to or something else entirely.

Enter Hany Farid. A computer science professor at Dartmouth, Farid is a pioneer in the field of digital forensics, figuring out how to analyze images to determine their authenticity. (Think CSI: Photojournalism.) Now, photo-tampering is becoming so prevalent, Farid notes, that mistrust of images is slowly becoming our default. “There’s almost a backlash,” he says, “and now there’s this over-skepticism of everything out there. It’s amazing.”

Read more here.

Facebook's 'Herding Instinct'

Research from Oxford University shows that consumers have a herding instinct to "follow the crowd" once a clear winner is established. However, this instinct appears to switch off almost entirely if the product fails to achieve a certain popularity threshold. The study concludes that while some books and films are highly advertised by their producers, that element is only a small fraction, leaving the great majority of books and films exposed to the forces of social influence.

The study concludes that social influence had a key role in whether apps became flops or hits.
They discovered that once an app had reached a rate of about 55 installations a day, its popularity then soared to reach stellar proportions.

Read more here.

The Other Social Network

What The Social Network film doesn't mention are all the other college social networks that Facebook shoved aside as it expanded across the country. Of those sites, perhaps the greatest threat to Facebook's dominance was Campus Network, then called CU Community after Columbia University, where it was founded. Why did Facebook succeed where Campus Network failed? The simplest explanation is, well, its simplicity. Yes, Campus Network had advanced features that Facebook was missing. While Campus Network blitzed first-time users right away, Facebook updated its features incrementally. Facebook respected the Web's learning curve. Campus Network did too much too soon. Neither site, of course, can claim to be the first social network—Friendster and MySpace already had large followings in 2003. But both Facebook and Campus Network had the crucial insight that overlaying a virtual community on top of an existing community—a college campus—would cement users' trust and loyalty. Campus Network figured it out first. Facebook just executed it better.


Read more at Slate.

Papers Thrive in India

Since 2005 the number of paid-for Indian daily newspaper titles has surged by 44% to 2,700, according to the World Association of Newspapers. That gives India more paid-for newspapers than any other country. One reason why the internet has not yet started destroying Indian newspapers is that only 7% of Indians surf the web regularly. Granted, only 65% of Indian adults can read—a pitiful figure. But it is nearly twice what it was three decades ago. The Times of India, whose circulation of 4m makes it the world’s biggest English-language newspaper, charges roughly ten times more than regional dailies do. The circulation of Hindi papers rose from less than 8m in the early 1990s to more than 25m last year.

The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a trade body, and KPMG, a consultancy, predict that in the next four years the newspaper industry’s revenues will grow by 9% a year, to $5.9 billion. One day, the internet will start to hurt print. Around 16m Indians visited online news sites in October last year, up by 37% from the previous October.

Read more at The Economist

Skills from Zapping 'em

THE relentless march of technology into everyday life has always given rise to debate about whether it is a good or a bad thing. Some believe that the internet and computer software are making humans more stupid or shallow. But others argue that computer programs in the form of video games can make people smarter or improve specific skills, such as spatial awareness. Indeed, an entire industry has emerged to help people “train” or improve their brains.

Shawn Green, Alexandre Pouget and Daphne Bavelier, from the University of Rochester, in New York state, set out to find an answer. The researchers conclude that video-games players develop an enhanced sensitivity to what is going on around them and that this may help with activities such as multitasking, driving, reading small print, navigation and keeping track of friends or children in a crowd.

Read more at The Economist.

The Return of Advertising

Advertising is still leaching out of newspapers, particularly regional ones. It is returning only slowly to magazines. Billboards are faring better. Yet the greatest old-media winner is television—in most countries the main advertising medium.

Many newspaper readers have moved online, where they are worth less to advertisers. Not so TV viewers. In the first quarter of this year the average American spent 158 hours per month in front of the box, according to Nielsen, a research firm. That was two hours more than a year earlier. B

Television’s ability to build brands by surrounding adverts with gripping content is unsurpassed. Online video is still not a serious competitor, partly because viewers are less tolerant of ads, partly because much of it is poor. Yet some websites are closing the gap. Many companies are experimenting with social networks, where people are more engaged.

Read more at The Economist.

Rise of the App Culture

As the mobile phone has morphed from a voice device to a multi-channel device to an internet-accessing mini-computer, a large market of mobile software applications, or “apps,” has arisen.
35% of adults have cell phones with apps, but only two-thirds of those who have apps actually use them. Of the 82% of adults today who are cell phone users, 43% have software applications or “apps” on their phones. When taken as a portion of the entire U.S. adult population, that equates to 35% who have cell phones with apps.

Yet having apps and using apps are not synonymous. Of those who have apps on their phones, only about two-thirds of this group (68%) actually use that software. Overall, that means that 24% of U.S. adults are active apps users. Older adult cell phone users in particular do not use the apps that are on their phones, and one in ten adults with a cell phone (11%) are not even sure if their phone is equipped with apps.

When compared with other cell phone using adults, and the entire U.S. adult population, the apps user population skews male, and is much younger, more affluent, and more educated than other adults. Overall, the apps-using population also skews slightly Hispanic when compared with other adult cell phone users.

Read more here.

Magazine Pubs Change Name

The Magazine Publishers of America is being renamed MPA — the Association of Magazine Media (dash and all). The dispatching of “publishers” from the name is meant to signal how readers can engage with magazines beyond the printed page through nontraditional means like Web sites, mobile devices, tablets, events, social media, books, retail presences and even branded merchandise.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, magazine ad spending, which reached $14.4 billion in 2007, fell to $13.3 billion in 2008 and $10.5 billion last year. The declines are expected to continue, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated, to $9.8 billion this year and $9.5 billion in 2011. That cumulative decline from 2007 to 2011 would be 34 percent.

Read more at the New York Times.

Facebook Myths

1. Facebook is used mostly by college kids. While Facebook's base still skews young, about two-thirds of its 134 million American members are older than 26. Outside the United States, Facebook's fastest growth has been among middle-age women.

Facebook messaging is beginning to replace e-mail among the Italian educated elite and among businesspeople in Colombia. And in Indonesia, Facebook's third-largest country, if you use the Internet you are almost certainly a member: Of the 30 million people online there, 27.8 million of them use Facebook.

3. Facebook users are up in arms about privacy. In an experiment, security firm Sophos invited Facebook users to befriend someone named Freddi Staur, whose profile contained almost no information but showed a photo of a small green plastic frog. The request was accepted by 41 percent of users.

Read more at The Washington Post.