Twitter’s future

Around 285m people log on to Twitter each month—some 20% of American smartphone users and 9% of those elsewhere. It gets its content free from twittering users, and makes money by charging advertisers for such things as inserting “promoted tweets” into users’ message streams. Twitter has more than quadrupled its revenues since 2012, to an expected $1.4 billion this year. Like many technology firms, its valuation has ballooned even more. So far, however, Twitter is a more important cultural force than a commercial one. It remains unprofitable according to general accounting principles, and this is not expected to change until at least 2017. Today Facebook has 1.4 billion monthly active users, over four times as many as Twitter, and controls around 10% of all digital advertising spend in America, according to eMarketer, a research firm. Advertisers look for a combination of scale and precision in online advertising..

Read more at the Economist

Internet of Things To Reach 25 Billion Units by 2020

The number of objects connected to the Internet and in use will grow 30 percent from this year to next, for a total of 4.9 billion, according to a new report from market research firm Gartner, and will hit 25 billion by 2020. Along with the growth in the number of devices, Gartner predicts an increase in total spending on the Internet of Things (IoT) to climb from $69.5 billion next year to $263 billion in 2020.

Read more at Campus Technology

Survey: 40% of U.S. web users harassed online

More than one-third of adult Internet users in the U.S. say they've personally experienced harassment online, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center. The most common form experienced by users is being called an offensive name (27%) or having someone try to "purposefully embarrass them" (22%). As for the more serious forms of harassment, the survey found 8% of users have been physically threatened, while another 8% say they've been stalked.

Read more at USA Today

Newspaper Ad Revenue Fell $40 Billion in a Decade

From 2000 to 2013, advertising revenue for America's newspaper fell from $63 billion to $23 billion, according to a report by Washington Post veteran Robert Kaiser.

Read more in the Atlantic

How Videogames Like Minecraft Actually Help Kids Learn to Read

“Suddenly, being a writer is sexy and hip and cool. They have an audience that knows their stuff, and they expect you to be knowledgeable.” The lesson here is the same one John Dewey instructed us in a century ago: To get kids reading and writing, give them a real-world task they care about. These days that's games.

Read more at Wired

the TV business is set for a profound upheaval

Unlike newspapers and the music industry, which saw their businesses sink with the rise of the internet, change has come gradually (for television). So far the TV industry has been a story of powerful and rich characters intent on keeping things just as they are. Network-owners and pay-television distributors made a pact not to sell each other out, and worked to preserve a business that has been extremely lucrative for all of them.

Advertisers and analysts have started to use the word “video” instead of “television”, because they consider online video an increasingly important part of their ad spending. The doomsaying may be premature. Viewing habits have changed, especially among the young, who watch more online video and time-shifted television, and often prefer to stare at a tablet than at a TV. But Americans continue to watch a remarkable amount of TV the old-fashioned way: around four-and-a-half hours a day, on average.

Many younger people will never shell out for traditional pay-television but advertisers have few alternatives to reach big audiences besides television, so for now have stuck with the medium in spite of flagging ratings. That should give TV bosses a bit of comfort for the upcoming season but they would do well not to lose sight of the wider narrative arc.

Read more in the Economist

Tech industry’s restructuring

Another trend is that consumers are spending more time on mobile devices. This, among other things, has hit Google, which is selling more advertisements on smaller screens, where rates are lower, whereas growth in more lucrative ones on bigger devices has slowed. For other firms this shift has been good news: Yahoo, a struggling online conglomerate, joined Apple in exceeding analysts’ expectations in large part because of a notable increase in mobile-advertising sales, which accounted for 17% of its revenue of $1.1 billion in the past quarter.

Read more in The Economist

Politicians know which TV shows you watch, and tailor their advertisements accordingly

Cable-TV firms sell campaigns data about subscribers’ individual viewing habits. It arrives anonymised, but with addresses, which can then be matched to the addresses on voter-registration and canvassing databases. So if, for example, people living at addresses marked as potentially Republican happen to watch lots of golf, then a Republican candidate might buy ads on the Golf Channel. Indeed, according to a study by Echelon Insights, a political consultancy, 93% of political spots on that channel are Republican; on Comedy Central, by contrast, the ads are 86% Democratic.

By 2016 advertising will be even more precise, reckons Mr Goldstein. The newest thing offered by cable and satellite TV companies is called “addressable advertising”. This allows advertisers to buy the viewers they want rather than slots on particular programmes. So whatever the target voter watches, a campaign advertisement will appear in the middle of that show, via the set-top box.

Read more at the Economist

The future of the Book

In the past decade people have been falling over themselves to predict the death of books, of publishers, of authors and of bookshops, even of reading itself. Even the most gloomy predictors of the book’s demise have softened their forecasts. Books may face more competition for audiences’ time, rather as the radio had to rethink what it could do best when films and television came along; the habit of reading for pleasure has fallen slightly in the past few years. But it has not dropped off steeply, as many predicted.

Read more at The Economist

Replacing wallets with mobile phones

Such technology has been around for years. It has failed to take off, however, in large part because so many firms have fingers in the mobile-payment pie, and often block others from grabbing a big piece of it.

Mobile phones have already enabled poor countries to leapfrog a few stages of development in telecoms and, in some cases, finance. Cheap mobile payments will allow them to jump further.

Read the full story at the Economist

Nielsen Will Soon Rate Everything on the Web, From Videos to Articles

Nielsen announced that it’s expanding its ratings system to all kinds of digital content to give both its creators and advertisers a more meaningful way to measure popularity in the online era.The most striking development in Adobe’s new system is that it’s designed for comparing disparate kinds of content. The new ratings, Nielsen says, can rank an online video next to a podcast next to an article.

Read more at Wired

The divide between having ideas and reporting

Increasingly think-tanks are doing journalism—not just blogging and tweeting but foreign reporting, too. Deskbound journalists, meanwhile, are embracing data and spreadsheets.

Unlike non-profits, such as ProPublica and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, think-tanks are in journalism more to promote ideas than to inform the public or expose wrongdoing. Much of what they publish is about policy. For officials and politicians, writes Jeremy Shapiro of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, “The thinkers are the validators. They will write op-eds, give pithy quotes to important newspapers, and appear on network news programmes.” Think-tank journalism comes closest to the traditional sort when it is in the field.

For journalists, the news is not so good. Twitter, blogs and newsletters can get a think-tank’s ideas to its audience direct. Hence a relationship that used to be symbiotic, with wonks helping create news and hacks distributing it, is becoming competitive—especially in the battle for influential readers, such as politicians.

Read more at The Economist

China tries to restrict foreign entertainment online

China’s TV regulator said that, from April, any foreign series or film would need approval before being shown online. Chinese media say that regulators are also considering limiting the number of foreign series shown online to a specific proportion of total output. The new rules appear aimed at closing one of the biggest loopholes in China’s control of its media: on terrestrial TV, for example, foreign dramas are banned in prime time. Many are forbidden altogether.

Read more at The Economist

Surveillance is the advertising industry’s new business model

By monitoring the websites people visit, these companies can infer their location, income, family size, education, age, employment and much more. One data firm has compiled a billion profiles of potential customers, each with an average of 50 attributes. Consumers are lumped into “segments” such as “men in trouble”—presumed to have relationship problems because they are shopping for chocolates and flowers—or “burdened by debt: small-town singles”. When people visit websites, advertisers bid to show them precisely targeted ads. The auctions take milliseconds and the ad is displayed when the website loads.

Targeted advertising has advantages for consumers. It pays for many popular websites which people can enjoy free of charge. Relevant ads are probably more useful to consumers than irrelevant ones. But any business based on covert surveillance is vulnerable to a backlash.

Someone who is categorised by a data broker as a “motorcycle enthusiast” might find his rates for medical or accident insurance rise. “Men in trouble” might find it harder to get a job. Until objections were raised, OkCupid, a dating website, used to sell data about people’s drug and alcohol consumption. It is not going to be to anybody’s advantage to have such information about them widely available.

Read more at The Economist

TV is increasingly for the old

According to new research by media analyst Michael Nathanson of Moffett Nathanson Research. ..The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago. Read more in the Washington Post

65% of smartphone users check their device upon waking

A third of all smartphone users in the U.K.—or 11 million adults—check their phone within five minutes of waking, according a report published Thursday from consulting group Deloitte. 67% of 18 to 24-year-olds do so within 15 minutes. And there is a set routine. Most smartphone owners first check their text messages (33%), followed by e-mail (25%), and then social networks (14%), says the report, based on data from a survey of 4,000 people.

The pattern of phone “addiction” continues during the day. One in six adults looks at their phones more than 50 times a day. 18 to 24-year-olds check their device on average 53 times a day, and for 13% the figure is more than 100 times.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

5 simple tips for visual branding on social media

The number one mistake companies make when branding their businesses on various social media outlets is being inconsistent across different platforms. One great example is Quotery.

Use simple branded images and videos on Instagram, such as a peek at a new product.

Use shareable images that can have many interpretations on Pinterest, such as a DIY or recipe with an attractive image that can be pinned to recipe boards, foodie boards and party planning boards.

Use large images that can stand out in a news feed on Facebook, such as a sale or an event poster

Use time sensitive or less important links on Twitter since it stands the possibility of getting, such as an article about an event the night prior.

Keep your profile picture simple and consistent.

Read more at TheNextWeb

5 data-driven ways to get your Facebook posts seen

At any given point a user logs into the Facebook platform, there are more than 1,500 posts that user could be shown.

Try shifting your scheduling strategy from posting during the most popular times in the workweek to the most effective times. Although most of the work marketers put in happens Monday-Friday, the magic actually happens during the weekend. 

Images receive 37 percent more interactions.

Using exclamation points in a post correlates with more engagement.

Add hashtags for 60 percent more engagement.

Our data showed a positive correlation between word count and post effectiveness. More specifically, posts of 80-89 words got 2 times as much engagement.

Read more at The Next Web

Investors are taking an interest in journalism

This week A&E Networks, a television company jointly owned by Disney and Hearst, was negotiating to buy a 10% stake in Vice’s parent company. The deal would value Vice Media at $2.5 billion, nearly double what it was worth about a year ago when Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox bought a 5% stake, and ten times what Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, paid for the venerable Washington Post last year.

BuzzFeed still produces a lot of fluffy content (including, this week, “27 Google Searches All Cat Owners Can Relate To”) but it is hiring foreign correspondents to provide more serious coverage. The Huffington Post, a pioneer of digital news, is seeking readers in places like France and Brazil. Few newspapers have established a truly global business, says Ken Doctor, a media analyst, but a handful of digital news firms could pull it off.

Read more at The Economist

Why is Amazon paying $970m for a video-game streaming startup?

Some amateur gamers have gained huge audiences through streaming sites like Twitch, just as they have on other forms of media. YouTube “vloggers”, often confessional and endearingly personal, are becoming celebrities in their own right. A gaming-related subgenre of video blogs, “Let’s play”, is persistently popular on YouTube. The videos of one “Let’s play” broadcaster, Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, are alone estimated to bring in advertising revenues of up to $16m a year, according to SocialBlade, an analytics firm.
Read more at the Economist