Marketers need to gain a better understanding of multitasking behavior to effectively plan advertising. The term "multitasking" has its roots in the computer industry. It describes the way computers handle multiple tasks by sharing processor resources. Consumers choose some, but not all, of their media exposure; in particular, they may be subjected to "environmental" media content in public places such as restaurants and bars, retail settings, medical offices, etc.
Read more here
Saturday, June 11
Thursday, June 9
LinkedIn Most Valuable
Facebook remains the most frequently used social network, but LinkedIn has become the most valued, according to a recent study by ROI Research and sponsored by Performics. Twitter was next, followed by YouTube, and MySpace. Facebook remains the only social networking site that is declining in importance.
Read more here
Read more here
U.S. Online Ad Spending To Hit $31 Billion In 2011
U.S online advertising revenue this year will surge 20% to $31.3 billion on the strength of robust display ad spending, according to the latest forecast from eMarketer. That's a jump from the market research firm's prior estimate from the end of 2010, projecting online ad sales would increase just 10% to $28.5 billion in 2011.
Last year, online video increased 40% to 1.4 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Spending on ordinary banner ads is expected to continue growing in 2011 as well, rising from $6.2 billion to $7.6 billion. After rising just 4% in 2009, online display spending bounced back last year with a 24% gain to reach $9.9 billion, accounting for 38% of total online ad revenue. The eMarketer forecast predicts that growth level would be maintained through 2011.
The Internet will account for nearly 20% of all U.S. major media ad dollars spent this year, up from 17% in 2010. By 2015, online advertising is expected to make up nearly 28% of all media ad spending. By comparison, TV ad dollars will hover around 38% for the next five years.
Read more here
Last year, online video increased 40% to 1.4 billion, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Spending on ordinary banner ads is expected to continue growing in 2011 as well, rising from $6.2 billion to $7.6 billion. After rising just 4% in 2009, online display spending bounced back last year with a 24% gain to reach $9.9 billion, accounting for 38% of total online ad revenue. The eMarketer forecast predicts that growth level would be maintained through 2011.
The Internet will account for nearly 20% of all U.S. major media ad dollars spent this year, up from 17% in 2010. By 2015, online advertising is expected to make up nearly 28% of all media ad spending. By comparison, TV ad dollars will hover around 38% for the next five years.
Read more here
Texting Cools Off
Growth in the volume of text messaging is slowing sharply, just as new threats emerge to that lucrative source of wireless carrier profits. While U.S. cellphone users sent and received more than 1 trillion texts in the second half of 2010, according to CTIA, a wireless industry trade group, that was just an 8.7% increase from the prior six months. It was the slimmest gain since texting exploded last decade.
Text traffic will come under more pressure in the months ahead. This week, Apple Inc. showed off an application that will allow iPhone and iPad owners to bypass carriers and send text messages over the Internet to other people with Apple devices.
Read more at the WSJ
Text traffic will come under more pressure in the months ahead. This week, Apple Inc. showed off an application that will allow iPhone and iPad owners to bypass carriers and send text messages over the Internet to other people with Apple devices.
Read more at the WSJ
Internet Forecasting
Interest in internet forecasting was sparked by a paper published in 2009 by Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. He found that the peaks and troughs in the volume of Google searches for certain products, such as cars and holidays, preceded fluctuations in sales of those products. Other researchers have shown that searches for job-related terms are a good predictor of unemployment rates and that mentions of political candidates on Twitter correlate with electoral outcomes.
Johan Bollen of Indiana University Bloomington (and his team) examined all the data for the autumn and winter of 2008, they found that Twitter users’ collective mood swings coincided with national events. Happiness shot up around Thanksgiving, for example.
Dr Bollen’s algorithm, which he described in a paper published in February in the Journal of Computational Science, has been licensed to Derwent Capital Markets, a hedge fund based in London. Derwent will use it to help guide the investments made with a £25m ($41m) fund that the firm hopes to launch in the next few months. Other funds are rumoured to be using similar tricks already. WiseWindow, a marketing firm based in Irvine, California, uses social-media activity to forecast demand for products.
Read more at The Economist
Johan Bollen of Indiana University Bloomington (and his team) examined all the data for the autumn and winter of 2008, they found that Twitter users’ collective mood swings coincided with national events. Happiness shot up around Thanksgiving, for example.
Dr Bollen’s algorithm, which he described in a paper published in February in the Journal of Computational Science, has been licensed to Derwent Capital Markets, a hedge fund based in London. Derwent will use it to help guide the investments made with a £25m ($41m) fund that the firm hopes to launch in the next few months. Other funds are rumoured to be using similar tricks already. WiseWindow, a marketing firm based in Irvine, California, uses social-media activity to forecast demand for products.
Read more at The Economist
Report: Major Shortage in Local Reporting
There is a shortage of in-depth local journalism needed to hold government agencies, schools and businesses accountable, the federal agency that regulates television broadcasters concludes in a new report. The dearth of reporting comes despite an abundance of news outlets in today's multimedia landscape, the report says.
The report says staffing levels at daily newspapers have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2001. "A shortage of reporting manifests itself in invisible ways: stories not written, scandals not exposed, government waste not discovered, health dangers not identified in time, local elections involving candidates about whom we know little," the report says.
Read more here
The report says staffing levels at daily newspapers have fallen by more than 25 percent since 2001. "A shortage of reporting manifests itself in invisible ways: stories not written, scandals not exposed, government waste not discovered, health dangers not identified in time, local elections involving candidates about whom we know little," the report says.
Read more here
Wednesday, June 8
Paywalls are Still a Bad Idea
The metered approach can have benefits for papers that implement it, by boosting revenue and appealing to advertisers. But those positives can be more than outweighed by the negatives of a paywall, particularly for smaller newspapers — the main one being that a wall creates an opportunity for free competitors, of which there are a growing number.
The amount of inventory sold to advertisers varies widely. In the U.S. market, the “sell-trough” [sic] ratio is about 60 percent, but it can go as low as 30 percent on some markets. This means the media can sustain some loss in page views due to the implementation of the metered system without losing ad revenue.
I hear that the brass at the New York Times expect its paywall to be revenue neutral — the amount of money they expect to bring in from online subscriptions is pretty much equal to the amount of money they expect to lose from online advertising.
The biggest flaw from a business perspective, particularly for smaller newspapers, is that walling up your content is an invitation to free competitors — from AOL’s Patch.com and Huffington Post to Mainstreet Connect and Neighborhoodr and Topix.net — to come and take away your readers.
Newspapers like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal can make paywalls work because their content is extremely focused and (arguably) more valuable than that produced by free competitors. The New York Times is hoping it falls into that category as well, although as a mass-market newspaper, that conclusion is more of a gamble. But if you are a small-town or even medium-sized metro paper, walling off your content could be a recipe for disaster, by giving your more nimble competitors exactly what they are looking for: readers eager for a free alternative.
Read more here
The amount of inventory sold to advertisers varies widely. In the U.S. market, the “sell-trough” [sic] ratio is about 60 percent, but it can go as low as 30 percent on some markets. This means the media can sustain some loss in page views due to the implementation of the metered system without losing ad revenue.
I hear that the brass at the New York Times expect its paywall to be revenue neutral — the amount of money they expect to bring in from online subscriptions is pretty much equal to the amount of money they expect to lose from online advertising.
The biggest flaw from a business perspective, particularly for smaller newspapers, is that walling up your content is an invitation to free competitors — from AOL’s Patch.com and Huffington Post to Mainstreet Connect and Neighborhoodr and Topix.net — to come and take away your readers.
Newspapers like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal can make paywalls work because their content is extremely focused and (arguably) more valuable than that produced by free competitors. The New York Times is hoping it falls into that category as well, although as a mass-market newspaper, that conclusion is more of a gamble. But if you are a small-town or even medium-sized metro paper, walling off your content could be a recipe for disaster, by giving your more nimble competitors exactly what they are looking for: readers eager for a free alternative.
Read more here
Monday, June 6
Analyzing the metered model
About half of the audience (for online media) is composed of casual users dropping by less than 3 times a month, or sent by search engines; 25% come more than 10 times a month.
News organization have implemented (paid) systems in different gradations. At the far end of the spectrum, we have the Times of London: no access to the site without first paying. That’s is the riskiest option. The site ends up losing 90% of its audience (and the related advertising revenue) but hopes to offset the loss by gathering enough online subscribers. Others choose to give some of the site for free and put the most valuable contents — sometimes the digital version of the print edition — behind a paywall. This doesn’t always make economical sense as many readers are happy enough with the free content part. The most successful paywall implementation has been the Wall Street Journal: it now has more than 1m paid subscribers, but it took 10 years to get there. The third option involves a metered system. The principle is simple: once you’ve seen a certain number of stories in a given period of time, you need to become a paid subscriber to keep viewing the site. Some newspapers have been quite successful at deploying such a metered system.
Read more here
News organization have implemented (paid) systems in different gradations. At the far end of the spectrum, we have the Times of London: no access to the site without first paying. That’s is the riskiest option. The site ends up losing 90% of its audience (and the related advertising revenue) but hopes to offset the loss by gathering enough online subscribers. Others choose to give some of the site for free and put the most valuable contents — sometimes the digital version of the print edition — behind a paywall. This doesn’t always make economical sense as many readers are happy enough with the free content part. The most successful paywall implementation has been the Wall Street Journal: it now has more than 1m paid subscribers, but it took 10 years to get there. The third option involves a metered system. The principle is simple: once you’ve seen a certain number of stories in a given period of time, you need to become a paid subscriber to keep viewing the site. Some newspapers have been quite successful at deploying such a metered system.
Read more here
Game consoles under attack
The dominance of games played with a console system and TV is under assault by new mobile and social gaming. A third of Americans have a smartphone capable of playing addictive games such as Angry Birds, according to Nielsen. Nearly 20% play social-network games such as CityVille and FarmVille, NPD Group says. The rapid adoption rate of casual games now outpaces traditional console games, and U.S. spending is expected to exceed $3 billion this year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Will stay-at-home console games be left in the dust? Not likely. For starters, console games still dominate, while mobile and social online games are a fringe of the $25 billion game industry. And this year, spending on console games is expected to grow an estimated 5% or more.
The average video game player is 37 years old; the average buyer of computer and video games is 41, according to Ipsos MediaCT research for the group. Women are 42% of gamers, up from 38% in 2007, while 29% of gamers are over the age of 50.
Read more at USA Today.
The average video game player is 37 years old; the average buyer of computer and video games is 41, according to Ipsos MediaCT research for the group. Women are 42% of gamers, up from 38% in 2007, while 29% of gamers are over the age of 50.
Read more at USA Today.
Saturday, June 4
Kickstarter
Founded in 2009, Kickstarter is an online fundraising platform for creative projects. Musicians, designers, filmmakers, and other artists craft a short pitch, usually a video, post it on the site, and set a fundraising target and a time frame. Contributors are more like donors than investors, since they earn no return or equity, though they are promised rewards (a copy of the CD, dinner with the artist). If the project meets its goal, Kickstarter, a for-profit company, takes a 5 percent cut and the creator gets the rest. If it falls short, no money changes hands.
Kickstarter has emerged as a legitimate option for financing independent films. So far, the company has raised more than $21 million from nearly 240,000 backers for 2,443 films, according to co-founder Yancey Strickler. He says six films have crossed the $100,000 mark.
Read more at Business Week.
Kickstarter has emerged as a legitimate option for financing independent films. So far, the company has raised more than $21 million from nearly 240,000 backers for 2,443 films, according to co-founder Yancey Strickler. He says six films have crossed the $100,000 mark.
Read more at Business Week.
5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet
1) An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.
E-books don’t exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started.
2) You can’t keep your books all in one place.
You can’t see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. The way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we’ve arranged and pick something out.
3) Notes in the margins help you think.
It’s not enough to be able to highlight something. A careful reader wants to argue with the author, or amplify a point, or jot down an insight inspired by something freshly read. And it has to be proximate to the original — a separate notebook is ridiculous.
4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
It’s just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental.
5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.
When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.
Read more at Wired
E-books don’t exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started.
2) You can’t keep your books all in one place.
You can’t see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. The way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we’ve arranged and pick something out.
3) Notes in the margins help you think.
It’s not enough to be able to highlight something. A careful reader wants to argue with the author, or amplify a point, or jot down an insight inspired by something freshly read. And it has to be proximate to the original — a separate notebook is ridiculous.
4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
It’s just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental.
5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.
When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It may be all about vanity, but books — how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don’t keep — say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.
Read more at Wired
Friday, June 3
Money? There's an app for that
Attempts to turn mobile phones into digital wallets gather pace. Square, a start-up... wants to undercut the credit-card processing fees charged to small businesses and to make it easy for them to accept digital payments.. Google was expected to unveil plans to test its own mobile-payment service.
Both geeks and moneymen know that persuading more Americans to use their phones as mobile wallets will not be easy. A survey by Javelin Strategy & Research published last year found that only 19% of Americans were interested in using some form of contactless payment. Those who think mobile wallets’ time has come point out that more and more tech firms are embracing Near-Field Communication (NFC), a wireless connectivity technology that allows phones with embedded NFC chips to make payments when “waved” near an in-store terminal.
Read more at The Economist
Both geeks and moneymen know that persuading more Americans to use their phones as mobile wallets will not be easy. A survey by Javelin Strategy & Research published last year found that only 19% of Americans were interested in using some form of contactless payment. Those who think mobile wallets’ time has come point out that more and more tech firms are embracing Near-Field Communication (NFC), a wireless connectivity technology that allows phones with embedded NFC chips to make payments when “waved” near an in-store terminal.
Read more at The Economist
The data revolution
Last year people stored enough data to fill 60,000 Libraries of Congress. The world’s 4 billion mobile-phone users (12% of whom own smartphones) have turned themselves into data-streams. YouTube claims to receive 24 hours of video every minute. Manufacturers have embedded 30m sensors into their products, converting mute bits of metal into data-generating nodes in the internet of things. The number of smartphones is increasing by 20% a year and the number of sensors by 30%.
Companies that can harness big data will trample data-incompetents. Data equity, to coin a phrase, will become as important as brand equity. In the 1980s and 1990s retailers such as Walmart used their mastery of retailing data to launch the “big-box” revolution (huge out-of-town stores with ultra-low prices). Today’s big data will provide the raw material for further revolutions.
Read more at The Economist
Companies that can harness big data will trample data-incompetents. Data equity, to coin a phrase, will become as important as brand equity. In the 1980s and 1990s retailers such as Walmart used their mastery of retailing data to launch the “big-box” revolution (huge out-of-town stores with ultra-low prices). Today’s big data will provide the raw material for further revolutions.
Read more at The Economist
Small Papers Lead the Way on Paywalls
The University of Missouri School of Journalism recently interviewed hundreds of daily newspaper publishers and found that 46 percent of papers with a circulation under 25,000 per week say they charge for at least some of their online content. By contrast, only a quarter (24 percent) of newspapers with a circulation of more than 25,000 charge for any content. If one of those is your hometown rag, don't get complacent just yet. A third (35 percent) of the papers that don’t currently charge say they have plans to do so, and another 50 percent “may begin charging at some point.” (Fifteen percent of those polled say that they had no plans to put up any sort of paywall.)
Read more at AdWeek.
Read more at AdWeek.
Tuesday, May 31
New Business Model in Vogue at Condé Nast
From 2007 through 2009, Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker saw about $500 million in revenue disappear, a 30% decline, and posted a loss in 2009. In response, Condé Nast closed magazines, trimmed its famously large budgets and re-examined almost every tenet of its business. To pursue new areas of growth, Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications Inc., has set aside $500 million to invest in digital properties.
Read more at the Wall Street Journal
Read more at the Wall Street Journal
Sunday, May 29
Content-Focused iPad Apps Value Form Over Function
A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.
Read more here.
Read more here.
Sunday, May 22
DePaul stocks video games for research
DePaul University is one of a growing number of university libraries housing video game collections for student research into game design, the school said. Other universities with collections include Illinois, Stanford and Michigan.
Read more here.
Read more here.
Amazon's Kindle E-Books Outselling Paper Books
Amazon (says) its customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than print books.
Read more at PC Mag
Google Abandons Master-plan to Archive the World's Newspapers
Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on "newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites."
The five-year-old News Archive project was Google's attempt to do for old newspapers what Google Books has been attempting to do for the world's libraries.
Read more here.
The five-year-old News Archive project was Google's attempt to do for old newspapers what Google Books has been attempting to do for the world's libraries.
Read more here.
Saturday, May 21
Flacks vastly outnumber hacks these days
Reporters were shocked, shocked to hear that a big PR agency, had tried to persuade newspaper writers and a blogger to scribble nasty things about Google’s record on privacy, while concealing that its growing rival, Facebook, was paying for this lobbying.
The incident shows how the upheaval in the news business is working for, and against, the PR firms. Newspapers and other old media are losing influence—and thus becoming less worth lobbying. But job cuts and online obligations mean journalists are also more desperate for copy, making them a softer touch. Research by Jamil Jonna of the University of Oregon (originally for a book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism”, but since updated) found that as newsrooms have been slimmed and PR agencies have grown fatter, for each American journalist there are now, on average, six flacks hassling him to run crummy stories
Read more at The Economist.
The incident shows how the upheaval in the news business is working for, and against, the PR firms. Newspapers and other old media are losing influence—and thus becoming less worth lobbying. But job cuts and online obligations mean journalists are also more desperate for copy, making them a softer touch. Research by Jamil Jonna of the University of Oregon (originally for a book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism”, but since updated) found that as newsrooms have been slimmed and PR agencies have grown fatter, for each American journalist there are now, on average, six flacks hassling him to run crummy stories
Read more at The Economist.
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