Will millennials cough up money for media?

Deloitte projects that the average millennial will pay just $19 on newspapers this year, less than the cost of four Sunday editions of The New York Times. Newspaper companies are also facing a similar money problem on the Web, which is eroding both their advertising revenue and ability to get money directly from readers. And they partially brought that fate upon themselves.

“It’s not that millennials don’t want to pay for things — it’s just that they don’t want to pay for the things that a lot media companies are making.”

Read more at Digiday

2014 was another bad year for music sales

New numbers from Nielsen show that digital album sales in the U.S. declined by 9 percent in 2014, to 106.5 million, down from 117.6 in 2013. Including CDs, album sales even fell 11 percent. Digital song sales are also down 11 percent..

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Instagram Is Bigger Than Twitter

Instagram announced Wednesday that it now has 300 million monthly active users, up 50 percent in just nine months. That makes the service, a photo- and video-sharing app owned by Facebook, more popular than Twitter, which had 284 million monthly active users as of the third quarter. More than 70 percent of Instagram’s users are outside the United States, the company said.

Read more at the New York Times

Magazine Single Sales tumble

According to newly released newsstand sales numbers by the Alliance for Audited Media, Cosmopolitan won the September issue battle with 698,500 total single-copy sales for its cover featuring Lucy Hale. While Cosmo won the battle, it isn’t exactly winning the war. In September, the title logged total single-copy sales of 1.1 million. That means that in the 12 months to September 2014, sales have declined 35.1 percent at the newsstand.

InStyle’s single-copy sales fell 26.5 percent in September, and Vogue’s sales declined 28.1 percent, while Glamour, which came in fourth in newsstand sales with 260,416 with its Olivia Wilde cover, nonetheless saw sales plummet 49.7 percent from September 2013.

Read more at WWD

Video in demand

Some big providers, such as Google (which owns YouTube) and Netflix, one of the world’s largest video-steaming services, are exploring other ways to deliver films more reliably.Google has been perfecting a technique of pre-loading YouTube video clips for particular users before they even hit the play button.

Read more at the Economist

Fewer People Than Ever Are Watching TV

About 2.6 million households are now “broadband only,” meaning they don’t subscribe to cable or pick up a broadcast signal, according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report, released December 3. That figure comprises about 2.8% of total U.S. households and is more than double the 1.1% of households that were broadband only last year. At the same time, overall viewing of traditional TV is continuing its slow decline. The average person watched about 141 hours of live television per month in the third quarter of 2014, compared to 147 hours in the third quarter of 2013.

Read more at TIME

The future of television

Only 24 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have cable, whereas 61 percent pay for a stand-alone streaming service. Inevitably, streaming will disrupt TV the same way the internet disrupted the music and print-media industries — by "unbundling'' content and making it cheaper.

Read more at The Week

Rich countries are deluged with data; developing ones are suffering from drought

Africa is the continent of missing data. Fewer than half of births are recorded; some countries have not taken a census in several decades. On maps only big cities and main streets are identified; the rest looks as empty as the Sahara. Lack of data afflicts other developing regions, too. The self-built slums that ring many Latin American cities are poorly mapped, and even estimates of their population are vague.

As rich countries collect and analyse data from as many objects and activities as possible—including thermostats, fitness trackers and location-based services such as Foursquare—a data divide has opened up. The lack of reliable data in poor countries thwarts both development and disaster-relief.

Read more at the Economist

FCC Airwave Wireless Spectrum Auction

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has auctioned off AWS-3 frequencies, and total bids have reached more than $30 billion on Nov. 21, surpassing the reserve price of $10.1 billion.

Read more at Tech Times

There are now 3 billion internet users, mostly in rich countries

The UN's International Telecommunication's Union (ITU) has revealed that over 3 billion people are now connected to the internet, an increase of 6.6 percent over last year. Of the 4.3 billion people still not connected to the internet, 90 percent live in developing countries, with two-thirds of users in first-world countries.

Read more at Engadget

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