Wednesday 31 May 2017

The iPhone has a 92% loyalty rate in the US

Tuesday 30 May 2017

66 App Publishers had their first $1m year on Apple's App Store in 2016

"When it comes to building a successful business, Sensor Tower’s Store Intelligence data reveals that more app publishers are achieving an important milestone on Apple’s App Store than on Google Play. Based on our analysis of in-app revenue—not inclusive of advertising revenue—nearly double the number of publishers made their first $1 million in annual revenue last year on the U.S. App Store compared to Google Play. In all, 66 publishers met or surpassed this benchmark figure on Apple’s store in 2016, which was 1.7 times more than the 39 that managed the same degree of success on Google’s platform."

The Grand Tour was the most sought after VOD programme in Q1 2017

"A non-Netflix show – The Grand Tour – was the most sought-after digital video-on-demand title available globally for the first time in the quarter to March, according to the latest Global On Demand Report from Parrot Analytics.
Parrot Analytics analyses the demand for 30 recent popular US digital titles across 10 markets, based on the application of artificial intelligence to expressions of demand across social media, fan sites, peer-to-peer protocols and file-sharing platforms.
According to Parrot, the top shows in the US in the three months to March were Stranger Things, with 10.5 million average ‘demand expressions’ and The OA, with 9.1 million – both from Netflix. Amazon’s The Grand Tour and The Man in the High Castle came third and fourth, followed by Netflix’s Marvel’s Luke Cage.
Overall, 16 of the top 30 titles came from Netflix, while Amazon accounted for seven and Hulu for four. Crackle (Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee) and Seeso (Bajillion Dollar Propertie$) had one title each near in the top 30 list. Stranger Things enjoyed a 257% spike in popularity after the release date for Season 2 was announced during the Super Bowl.
In the UK, The Grand Tour, which topped the list in five of the 10 markets studied, led the way with 6.3 million expressions of demand, followed some way behind by Stranger Things with just over 2.6 million and The Man in the High Castle, also with 2.6 million.
The OA and The Crown made up the top five. The Grand Tour aside, the list was largely dominated by Netflix, followed by Amazon, a pattern that was repeated in Australia, where The Grand Tour topped the list, with Netflix occupying the remaining four of the top five slots."

Android has more than 2bn active monthly users

"Onstage at Google I/O in Mountain View, CEO Sundar Pichai announced that earlier this week the company surpassed 2 billion monthly active users on the Android platform, continuing its reign as the world’s most popular mobile operating system.
The company has added nearly 400 million users to its mobile operating system since September of 2015 when it last gave an update. By comparison, Apple announced in January of last year that there are 1 billion devices running iOS.
Pichai also detailed that the company has quickly grown its Google Photos platform. Google has been tweaking the service constantly, and is continuing to see some major traffic on the platform. The product now has over 500 million monthly active users that upload 1.2 billion photos onto the service every day.
A lot of numbers are being voiced in the billions today, Google currently has seven unique products with over one billion monthly active users each."
Source:  TechCrunch, 17thMay 2017

35 creators on Patreon make more than $150,000 a year

"Patreon’s novel idea of fans just directly paying the artists they love is having its hockey stick moment. Patreon tells TechCrunch that in a year, it’s doubled the number of monthly active paying patrons to 1 million, and the number of active creators to 50,000. It’s now on track to pay out $150 million to creators in 2017, which would make its 5 percent cut equal $7.5 million in revenue. That’s after paying out $100 million total since 2014.
Videographers, musicians, writers, illustrators, animators, podcasters, game developers and more artists are finding steady income through Patreon at a time when other platforms look shaky for creators.
After the PewDiePie scandal alerted advertisers that they were appearing alongside objectionable content, YouTube has started letting them filter out certain channels. The result has been a decrease in monetization for YouTube stars. Vine died. Snapchat has neglected creators, refused to offer them direct monetization options and now has seen view counts fall due to ditching auto-advance and competition from Instagram.
Meanwhile, Instagram doesn’t offer ad revenue splits with creators. Facebook has begun to give some video makers 55 percent of the revenue from ad breaks they insert in their clips, but the program has yet to scale. Ad-supported platforms often pay merely $0.10 to $0.0005 per view, so creators have to be broadly popular to earn a living.
Yet on Patreon, contributors frequently cough up $5 per month to each of their favorite creators, who make 50X to 10,000X more per fan than on ads. In exchange, creators offer the art they’ve made that month, reserving premium access and rewards to those who pay more. Thirty-five creators made more than $150,000 in 2016, and thousands earn more than $25,000 a year."

'About 60% of a programmatic campaign budget should be spent on media'


Source:  Campaign article written by Dan Gilbert, Chief Executive of UK agency Brain Labs, 16th May 2017

Over 20% of funds raised on Kickstarter are for games

"The numbers behind gaming’s growth on the site are striking. In total, fans have pledged over $580 million (£465m) to in excess of 20,000 successful campaigns – more than 20% of all funds raised on the platform. Tabletop games have done particularly well; in 2016, a six-month study found that board, card and roleplaying games had attracted six times as much funding as their digital counterparts.
Crane attributes this success to a range of benefits the site offers creators.
“With Kickstarter it’s really easy to make your games look nice,” he says. “You can show off your minis, really zoom in to the gorgeous details of a game in a way that’s difficult to do on another platform or on Amazon.”
He adds that the open nature of the service gives creators a level of creative freedom that might not be on offer from established, traditional publishers, pointing to the horror game Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, which recently raised over $12.3 million (£9.9m), making it the highest-funded games project in the site’s history."

European digital ad spend rose to over €40bn in 2016

"At its annual Interact conference today, IAB Europe announced that online advertising grew 12.2% in 2016 to €41.8bn establishing itself as the dominant advertising medium in Europe.
The AdEx Benchmark study is the definitive guide to the state of the European online advertising market and is now in its eleventh year. The research demonstrates that online advertising continues to surpass TV advertising. All markets participating in the study recorded positive growth, a total of twenty markets grew double-digit for the third year running (three markets recording 30%+ growth. Mobile continues to drive the growth with both mobile display and mobile search seeing 50%+ growth in 2016. Mobile dominates across all markets with a 100%+ growth rate in some markets.
Mobile display now accounts for €5.4bn and continues to grow its share of the display market to 33.3%, with a growth rate of 53.3% compared with 2015.
Video which is considered as a key channel for delivering brand advertising campaigns, according to IAB Europe’s Attitudes to Digital Video Advertising report, continues to experience strong growth to a share of 18.2% of the total display market.
[...]
The IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark study divides the online ad market into three categories: Display, Search and Classifieds and Directories. Growth in these online advertising formats has been underpinned by shifting uses in devices and changing consumption patterns.
Display advertising outperformed other categories for the third year in a row with a growth rate of 13.8% and a value of nearly €16bn.
Search continues to be the largest online advertising category in terms of revenue with a growth of 12.9% and a market value of €19.1bn. It continues to be the largest online advertising format in terms of revenue.
[...]
Top 3 Individual growth markets were:
Romania – 36.9%
Slovenia – 32.2%
Ireland – 31.4%

Top 10 Rankings
UK – €14.2bn
Germany – €5.9bn
France – €4.2bn
Russia – €2.6bn
Italy -€2.3bn
Netherlands – €1.7bn
Spain – €1.6bn
Sweden – €€1.6bn
Belgium – €0.9bn
Switzerland – €0.9bn"

Thursday 18 May 2017

More than half US schoolchildren use Google education apps

"Today, more than half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students — more than 30 million children — use Google education apps like Gmail and Docs, the company said. And Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops that initially struggled to find a purpose, are now a powerhouse in America’s schools. Today they account for more than half the mobile devices shipped to schools.
“Between the fall of 2012 and now, Google went from an interesting possibility to the dominant way that schools around the country” teach students to find information, create documents and turn them in, said Hal Friedlander, former chief information officer for the New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest school district. “Google established itself as a fact in schools.”"
Source:  NYT, 13th May 2017

#NuggsForCarter is the most Retweeted Tweet of all time

"It’s official. Carter Wilkerson’s (@carterjwm) call for a year’s supply of free nuggets from @Wendys has become the Tweet heard around the world. With 3.42M Retweets, it has officially surpassed Ellen’s infamous selfie as the most Retweeted Tweet of all time."
Source:  Twitter blog, 9th May 2017
Top 3 - 
Nuggs For Carter - 3.6m
Ellen Selfie - 3.4m
Louis Tomlinson - 2.5m

A person with a million Instagram followers can get £3,000 per post

"“It’s the Kardashians who have trail-blazed, really. Everything they do is monetised,” Nicholls says, referring to the “royal family” of the reality television/social media kingdom. The result is a steady and largely effortless stream of cash for those with enough online “disciples”, as he calls them. A person with a million Instagram followers can get £3,000 per post, he explains, and another £2,000 to wear an outfit to an event. “Very quickly you’ve earned £5,000 just by going out,” he says.
Make-up bloggers Nic and Sam Chapman at a beauty and fashion festival in New York © Getty
The prices rocket as the number of followers increases. According to Captiv8, a US social media analytics company, payment for posts on Instagram can range from $800 for people with fewer than 250,000 followers up to $150,000 for those with 7m or more. The rates for Snapchat posts are broadly similar, Facebook carries a moderate premium and YouTube is the most expensive of all, with 7m or more followers resulting in an average fee of $300,000. And that is before you count the other branding opportunities available to social media celebrities. The new and old worlds are effectively one and the same, with fame in one spilling into the other."
Source:  FT, 4th May 2017

Snap has sold approximately 60,000 Spectacles

Thursday 4 May 2017

Estimated ARPU from advertising for Google, Facebook, Twitter & Snapchat

"Following our recent analysis that Facebook is closing the gap on TV advertising, Ampere research also suggests that Facebook is also approaching Google. Across the various global online advertising players, Google is closest to TV on the ARPU measure, currently making about $7 each quarter for each monthly active user (MAU) from advertising on its sites. Thus, it really isn't far behind TV, where the average viewer is responsible for between $10 and $11 of advertising revenue per quarter.
In contrast, Twitter has been struggling to grow its revenue per MAU, which is fairly stable at about $2. Snapchat has been the big success story of recent quarters. Although it lags other players in terms of revenue per MAU, Snapchat been very active in beginning to monetise its customer base more aggressively. It has increased revenue from practically $0 per quarter per MAU to $0.70 in less than two years.
It may be in second position now, but when it comes to ARPU, Facebook advertising has been rapidly closing the gap on Google’s lead. In Q1 2015, Facebook made $2.3 per MAU. Google made about $5. By the end of 2016, Facebook had more than doubled its number to nearly $5 per MAU in advertising revenue."
Source:  Blog post from Ampere Analysis, 4th May 2017

Facebook has 1.94bn Monthly and 1.28bn Daily Active Users

"First Quarter 2017 Operational and Other Financial Highlights
Daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.28 billion on average for March 2017, an increase of 18% year-over-year.
Monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 1.94 billion as of March 31, 2017, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
Mobile advertising revenue – Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 85% of advertising revenue for the first quarter of 2017, up from approximately 82% of advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2016.
Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures for the first quarter of 2017 were $1.27 billion.
Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities – Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities were $32.31 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2017.
Headcount – Headcount was 18,770 as of March 31, 2017, an increase of 38% year-over-year."
Source:  Press release from Facebook, 3rd May 2017

Wednesday 3 May 2017

Amazon is getting more than 4 orders from Dash Buttons a minute

""Just a year ago, orders via Dash Button were occurring more than once a minute, now that rate has increased to more than 4x a minute," Amazon said a statement. For some items, like Folgers coffee grounds and Glad garbage bags, Amazon says "more than half" of their orders are made via Dash Button."
Source:  Engadget, 25th April 2017

US digital ad spend rose to $72.5bn in 2016; >50% was mobile

"Mobile advertising accounted for more than half (51%) of the record-breaking $72.5 billion spent by advertisers last year, according to the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and prepared by PwC US. The total represents a 22 percent increase, up from $59.6 billion in 2015. Mobile experienced a 77 percent upswing from $20.7 billion the previous year, hitting $36.6 billion in 2016.
Other highlights from the report include:
Digital video hit a record $9.1 billion in 2016, a 53 percent year-over-year rise from $5.9 billion in 2015
On mobile devices, video revenue skyrocketed, more than doubling—up 145 percent year-over-year—to nearly $4.2 billion
Social media advertising generated $16.3 billion last year, climbing 50 percent over 2015’s $10.9 billion
Search revenues reached nearly $35 billion in 2016, up 19 percent from $29.5 billion in 2015
Digital audio, measured for the first time in this report, brought in revenues of $1.1 billion in 2016
Retail, representing 21.3 percent of internet ad spend in 2016, Financial Services at 13.3 percent, and automotive at 12.5 percent, continue to have the largest category share, with Media (5.2%) picking up speed, up 13 percent over 2015
“Mobile fueled the internet economy in 2016, with advertisers showing their confidence in digital to achieve their marketing goals,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “This increasing commitment is a reflection of brands’ ongoing marketing shift from ‘mobile-first’ to ‘mobile-only’ in order to keep pace with today’s on-the-go consumers.”
“In a mobile world, it is no surprise that mobile ad revenues now take more than half of the digital market share,” said David Doty, Executive Vice President and CMO, IAB. “Digital video’s powerful ability to attract engaged audiences is naturally attracting greater investments. Next week’s NewFronts presentations will showcase the latest in original digital video content, certain to spark even greater interest from marketers and media buyers.”
“Mobile, social, video, and programmatic trends combine to redefine the digital landscape, providing unprecedented access for advertisers to reach consumers,” said David Silverman, partner, PwC US. “Digital audio, generating $1.1 billion in 2016 speaks to the continued evolution of new formats that enable marketers to find audiences at home, behind their desks, or wherever they are.”"
Source:  IAB / PwC, 26th April 2017

Instagram has 700m monthly active users

"Instagram has doubled its user base, to 700 million monthly actives in two years, fueled by Stories, web signups and better onboarding on low-end Android phones. Instagram’s growth rate is actually speeding up. It took just four months to add the last 100 million users since hitting 600 million in December, while it took six months to go from 500 million to 600 million.
Here’s a breakdown of how long it took Instagram to add each 100 million users:
October 6, 2010 – Launch
February 26, 2013 – 100 million;  28 months
March 25, 2014 – 200 million; 13 months
December 10, 2014 – 300 million; 9 months
September 22, 2015 – 400 million; 9 months
June 21, 2016 – 500 million; 9 months
December 15, 2016 – 600 million; 6 months
April 26, 2017 – 700 million; 4 months
For reference, this makes Instagram more than twice the size of Twitter. Soon it might join Facebook’s other properties in the billion-user club, since WhatsApp and Messenger have 1.2 billion users and Facebook 1.8 billion."

60% of the Guardian's Google mobile traffic is from AMP

"Many publishers have scrambled to adopt AMP, Google’s answer to Facebook Instant Articles. As the Guardian’s experience showed, Accelerated Mobile Pages can be a success if publishers put the work in.
AMP has gradually been taking over the Guardian’s mobile traffic; today, 60 percent of its Google mobile traffic is AMP, well above the 10 to 15 percent that publishers have been getting from AMP, according to a recent estimate by SEO consulting company Define Media.
AMP pages are 2 percent more likely to be clicked on and clickthrough rates on AMP pages to non-AMP pages is 8.6 percent higher than they are on regular mobile pages, according to Natalia Baltazar, a developer for the British newspaper, who presented at AMP Conf, a two-day conference hosted by Google taking place in New York City March 7-8."