State Of The News Media: Everything In Decline But Digital

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s has served up its annual and comprehensive “State of the News Media" report. It offers a mostly pessimistic assessment of the condition and trajectory of various news media in the US today. In perhaps its most striking finding, the report shows how declining revenues leading to repeated cost-cutting have hurt readership and audience loyalty. Based on survey data, the State of the News Media argues that slipping quality and diminished coverage have alienated large numbers of people who've abandoned news publications o [...]


Microsoft Study: Multi-Screen Behavior And What It Means For Marketers

We all know the day of multi-device and cross-screen usage is here. The challenge for marketers is to understand how to communicate effectively with consumers as they engage with multiple devices simultaneously and sequentially throughout the day. A new study commissioned by Microsoft, titled Cross-Screen Engagement, aims to help marketers learn how users are engaging with multiple screens and to find opportunities to reach consumers "in their moment". In the two-phase study, Flamingo Research and Ipsos OTX interviewed consumers in five markets—Australia, Brazil, Canada, the UK and t [...]


Generation M: 50 Percent Of Smartphone Teens Go “Mostly Mobile” For Internet

New "teens and technology" survey data from Pew give us a glimpse of the Internet's future -- it's "mostly mobile." According to the Q3 2012 survey, 23 percent of teens have tablets (vs. 25 percent of adults) and 47 percent of teen cell phone owners have smartphones. This compares with approximately 55 percent of mobile phone owning US adults according to Nielsen. Given that these survey data are now about six months old, Pew's teen figures could well be higher if the survey were done today. Teens and adults in the US access the Internet at comparable levels, generally. However, among [...]


Apple Devices Dominate In-Flight, Tablet Traffic

The tablet is becoming the device of choice in the air. According to Gogo, 35 percent of in-flight Internet usage happens on tablets, 32 percent on smartphones. The remaining 33 percent is on laptops. It's easy to see why tablets are becoming the preferred in-flight work and entertainment device. Economy travelers are often unable to open their laptops when the seats in front of them recline. (As an aside, here's an aggressive response to that problem.) The majority of in-flight mobile devices running on Gogo are on iOS (84 percent), while 16 percent are Android, which has grown from [...]


Report: Local-Mobile Ad Targeting Offers Big Performance Lift

Mobile ad network xAd joined the "year in review" club, releasing a report showcasing a year's worth of data from ad campaigns on its network. The bottom line: location targeting, whether in search or display, improves performance over standard mobile search and display advertising. The network offers a range of location targeting types that go well beyond conventional "geotargeting." The company told me that a majority of its national advertisers are now using one or more flavors of advanced location targeting. These include location-based behavioral targeting, audience targeting and m [...]


Hitwise: Google Has Top Mobile Website And 5 Of The Top 10

Experian Marketing Services (Hitwise) announced Hitwise Mobile today, a new service that offers traffic and related data about mobile user behavior in 170 categories and for 4 million mobile sites on a global basis. For the week ending February 23, Google had the top mobile site overall in the US. It also had four more in the top 10: Gmail, News, YouTube and Maps. For all the talk of Facebook mobile usage, it was third behind Google and YouTube in Hitwise's rankings (app traffic is not included, however). Compare mobile Web traffic for January. The difference is that Yahoo An [...]


Sprint Beats Verizon As US Carrier With Most Samsung Galaxy S3 Web Traffic

Samsung has sold more than 20 million Galaxy S3 handsets to date around the world. Accordingly, the Galaxy S3 is the most popular Android handset and has eclipsed all other Android phones in the market. That's in part because of Samsung's aggressive, multi-million dollar global advertising campaign for the device. It's a very nice phone, but not the best current Android handset. That distinction, in my view, belongs to the LG-made Nexus 4. In addition, in Q4 the S3 lost its position as the world's top-selling smartphone to the iPhone. Below is a Strategy Analytics "shipments" chart showi [...]


Study: iPhone 5, Galaxy S3 Neck And Neck In Web Traffic Share

According to ad network Chitika's latest traffic study, Samsung's Galaxy S3 has caught the iPhone 5 in terms of the amount of Internet traffic it generates. The findings are drawn from "tens of millions of U.S. and Canadian smartphone mobile ad impressions" this month. Chitika said that in October 2012, Apple's latest iPhone enjoyed an 8-point lead in Web traffic share over Samsung's Galaxy. Now, it's down to one point, according to the ad network. The chart below reflects the comparative shares of the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 5 when looking only at traffic coming from the two devices. [...]


Duopoly Time: Apple And Samsung Combine For Almost 90 Percent Of 2012 Global Smartphone Market

Woe be to any mobile phone maker that isn't named Apple or Samsung. Numbers out today from IDC show the two combining for a staggering 87.6 percent of all smartphones "shipped" in 2012 on a global basis. In Q4, according to IDC, the two companies' products constituted 91 percent of all smartphones shipped. Shipped is actually a false market share metric. That's because shipments don't always equal sales or usage. However, in the case of Apple and Samsung these data are a reasonable proxy for actual sales. According to IDC, Samsung controlled 42 percent "of all Android smartphone shipment [...]


Global Handset Sales Fall But Smartphones Continue To Gain

People are starting to shun conventional mobile phones also known as "feature phones." But sales of smartphones continue to grow. According to sales data compiled by Gartner, global mobile handset sales in 2012 hit 1.75 billion units. However that was a nearly 2 percent (1.7 percent) drop from the previous year. According to the firm, "Demand for feature phones remained weak in 2012 and in the fourth quarter." Indeed, feature phone sales were off over 19 percent in Q4. By contrast demand for smartphones continues. As already widely documented Samsung and Apple were the two dominant smartpho [...]


Facebook Vacation: 61 Percent Of Users Say They’ve Taken One

A new Pew survey on Facebook usage patterns leads me to want to coin a new term: "Facay" -- for "Facebook vacation." According to survey data collected in December, "61 percent of current Facebook users say that at one time or another in the past they have voluntarily taken a break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more." Pew says that its data, based on a survey of 1,006 US adults, "indicate there is considerable fluidity in the Facebook user population." In addition to the above finding, 20 percent of survey respondents say they no longer use Facebook, while 8 percent [...]


Twitter And Facebook Report On Top Tweets Per Minute & “Top Moments” During Super Bowl

While it appeared to me that she was still lip-syncing yesterday, Beyonce Knowles was one of the big winners of yesterday's social media buzz bowl. The not-so-single lady's celebrated halftime performance generated more than 250,000 tweets per minute (TPMs). Overall, according to Twitter, her performance drove 5.5 million tweets -- and perhaps shut down power at the stadium for a half hour thereafter. Other top TPM winners were the following: Power outage: 231,500 TPM 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jones: 185,000 TPM Clock expires; Ravens win: 183,000 TPM Jones catch [...]


Report: Apple Edges Samsung To Become Largest Smartphone Maker In US

Last week Apple announced quarterly earnings: $54 billion revenue, $13 billion in profit. Despite their size, investors started dumping the stock, worried that its growth and glory days were over. Then the "Has Apple lost its cool to Samsung?" articles started appearing. Around the world, Samsung and Android have solidly claimed the top spot in sales. But in the United States, that's not true. According to Strategy Analytics, Apple is the "number one mobile phone vendor for the first time ever." This is based on shipments, a metric I don't like. However, for Apple, shipments and sales a [...]


Report: Google+ Now 2nd-Biggest Social Network Worldwide

Google+ has passed Twitter and is now the second-biggest social platform worldwide with 343 million active users. That's according to a recent report that, frankly, has some confusing claims and stats. The data is from GlobalWebIndex, a site/service that I can't claim to have ever heard of before. The company says it does 130,000 Internet usage "interviews" in 31 international markets -- covering about 90 percent of the global Internet-using population. We reached out for clarification about the data and how it's collected earlier today, but the company has yet to reply. As for the da [...]


Most Popular App In The US? It’s Facebook (Thanks To Apple)

Facebook can thank Apple for helping making it the top overall mobile app in the U.S. in 2012, according to new numbers out today from the comScore Mobile Metrix service. ComScore says Facebook ended the year with more than 85 million unique adult visitors -- that's on both Android and iOS. It's about 11 million more unique visitors than Google Maps. After Facebook, Google apps hold down the next five spots. Facebook and Google Maps were pretty much neck-and-neck for several months last year, but comScore says Google Maps usage saw a significant decline after Apple dumped it from iOS [...]


On Google+, Traditional Media Catching Up To Online News Sites

Online-only news sites get the most engagement on Google+, but traditional media are catching up ... and fast. That's according to Adam Sherk, a consultant that works with many news and content sites. Studying a total of 48 news organizations, Sherk collected the overall engagement counts for each on Google+ -- how many +1s their posts get, how many comments and how many shares. He ran a similar study a year ago and compared the new results to see which organizations are doing better in engaging their fans. Mashable has ascended to the top spot overall, according to Sherk's study, with [...]


Apple Announces 40 Billion App Downloads To Remind Developers Of Where The Money Is

This morning Apple issued a press release announcing that the iTunes App Store had reached 40 billion app downloads. It also said in the release that nearly half of those had come in 2012: Apple today announced that customers have downloaded over 40 billion apps, with nearly 20 billion in 2012 alone. The App Store has over 500 million active accounts and had a record-breaking December with over two billion downloads during the month. Apple’s incredible developer community has created over 775,000 apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users worldwide, and developers have been paid over seven [...]


Android Has Nearly 54 Percent Mobile Market Share — comScore

Earlier today comScore released November mobile market share numbers for the US. Android and iOS continued their gains, with Android picking up some momentum over Apple. Some version of the Android OS is now installed on 53.7 percent of US smartphones. Meanwhile the other smartphone operating systems continued their long slow declines, including Microsoft's. ComScore's data suggest no traction for Windows Phones in the US, although there is some evidence of adoption in Europe and elsewhere. The leading handset maker in the US is Samsung, followed by Apple. All others, including Googl [...]


If 2012 Was “The Year Of Mobile,” 2013 Will Be “The Year Of The Tablet”

After a year of massive growth in smartphone adoption nobody is questioning the importance of mobile anymore. Finally the tired conference joke, "Every year for the past ten years has been the year of mobile," will be repeated no more (thank the lord). But even as marketers have yet to fully "get their heads around" the new reality of smartphone-powered consumer behavior they'll have to contend with yet another form factor: tablets. No longer a novelty gadget, the tablet is now a mainstream computing device. Post-Xmas sales data will soon make that very clear. If 2012 was finally, defini [...]


Infographic: The Year In Social Media, A 2012 Recap

What happened in social media over the past year? In 2012, everything from President Obama holding a Google Hangout to Facebook buying Instagram and going public to the Pope joining Twitter and Psy's Gangnam Style breaking one billion views on YouTube. The folks at The SEO Company working with NowSourcing produced a nice infographic documenting some of the many social media highlights of 2012: Want the infographic for yourself? You'll find it here: The State Of Social Media 2012. Any highlights or important moments you think are missing? Share them below. And Happy New Year's Eve [...]


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