The BBC's iPlayer costs £5.2m a year to run

"The BBC's hugely popular iPlayer catch-up service costs at least GBP5.2m (USD7.8m) a year to run in operational and development costs, according to the UK broadcaster. The figures, released by the BBC in response to a Freedom of Information request, reveal that GBP 5.7m (USD8.6m) was spent on pre-launch costs for the iPlayer and GBP4m (USD6m) on development costs over the past four years. Running costs for the service total GBP4m (USD6m) annually, meaning the iPlayer has so far cost approximately GBP22.5m (USD34m) since launch.
The GBP5.2m (USD7.8m) does not include costs paid to network provider Siemens for handling the 120m streams a month delivered by the player or other fees paid to contractors, such as Microsoft. There are also thought to be some other costs spread across other BBC budgets. However, the sum spent on ongoing development and running costs is still a small fraction of the state-owned broadcaster's total budget, and represents good value for money considering the site attracted approximately 5.9m users each week in February. Estimates suggest that around one-in-six UK citizens watches the iPlayer."
Spource: StrategyEye, 29th June 2010

The most popular functions on US kids' mobile phones

Click to enlarge

Source: Slide 17 of Four or More: The New Demographic, Pew Internet and American Life Project, 30th June 2010
The full presentation is well worth reading.

Music video site Vevo has a reach of 50m a month, 80% through YouTube

"Almost 30 years after MTV first broadcast that video had killed the radio star, Vevo's music video site launched in December, hoping to revive a format that had been languishing. At 34, Rio Caraeff, a former digital executive at Universal Music, oversees a company owned by Universal, Sony Music and the Abu Dhabi Media Company. He has worked with Google's YouTube site to deliver 50,000 high-definition videos from 8,000 artists on YouTube, on Vevo.com and on sites from AOL to Last.fm. He has secured videos from three large labels, but not Warner Music. Edited highlights of a video interview with FT.com appear below.
Six months on from your launch, what scale have you grown to?
We have just under 50m unique visitors each month. It's a significant amount of scale that we've built in a very short period of time, largely due to our partnership with Google. We've built the largest music entertainment network online today.
How much of that traffic is Google/YouTube responsible for?
About 80 per cent of our business comes through the YouTube channel, and about 20 per cent comes off the YouTube channel [from elsewhere]. Our goal is to get to a balanced position fairly soon."
Source: Financial Times, 28th June 2010

1.9 million more Britons use the internet than did one year ago

"UKOM (The UK Online Measurement Company powered by Nielsen) today revealed that people over 50 years old were responsible for the majority of the increase in the numbers of Britons using the Internet over the last year.
The size of the UK Internet audience grew by five percent from 36.9 million people in May 2009 to 38.8 million people in May 2010. Of these 1.9 million new Britons using the Internet, 1.0 million (53 percent) were at least 50 years old.
Men over 50 were responsible for most of this growth, accounting for 722,000 (38 percent) new British Internet users followed by women over 50 who accounted for 284,000 (15 percent) new users. Following the 50+ age group, women aged 21-34 accounted for 272,000 (14 percent) new British Internet users and ‘tweenage’ girls aged 12-20 who accounted for 231,000 (12 percent)."
Source: UKOM/Nielsen, 30th June 2010

Apple sold 1.7m iPhone 4s in the first 3 days

"Apple® today announced that it has sold over 1.7 million of its iPhone® 4 through Saturday, June 26, just three days after its launch on June 24. The new iPhone 4 features FaceTime®, which makes video calling as easy as one tap, and Apple’s new Retina display, the highest resolution display ever built into a phone, resulting in stunning text, images and video."
Source: Apple press release, 28th June 2010

Coca Cola's World Cup 'promoted trend' on twitter generated 86 million impressions with a 6% engagement rate

"Coca-Cola saw “phenomenal” results from its first experiment with paid advertising on Twitter, the drinks company’s digital marketing chief told the Financial Times.
The US soft drinks company is only the second brand to sponsor a “trending topic”, using Twitter’s “promoted tweets” to tap into online discussion about the World Cup this week.
It saw 86m “impressions” or views of the ads in 24 hours, said Carol Kruse, vice-president for global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola, which is an official sponsor of the football tournament.
Coke also saw an “engagement rate” of 6 per cent, compared with the approximately 0.02 per cent of people who click on a regular online advertisement."
Source: Carol Kruse of Coca Cola, reported by the Financial Times, 25th June 2010
Note - 6% x 86m = 5,160,000 engagements

The most 'Liked' Facebook groups, by genre

Click to enlarge

"Using the half a million pages Facebook grader has data on, I found that not only are "interest" pages the most common type, on average they're also the most liked. They're so far above the average in fans that they dwarf every other type. See the chart below? The giant line on the left is interest pages.
In the graph I compared the most-liked pages to the average number of fans Facebook pages in our data set have (624). What you see there is those types that have more fans than the average. I had to remove interest pages so you could actually see the rest of the lines."
Source: Dan Zarella, writing in the Hubspot blog, 17th June 2010

The iPhone accounts for just 4% of the EU big 5 mobile market in terms of handset penetration

"The iPhone currently represents just 4 percent of the EU5 (U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy) mobile market, but 18 percent of the overall EU5 smartphone market. However, the iPhone has facilitated fundamental change in mobile user behaviour and ignited fierce competition among device and operating system (OS) providers.
iPhone owners are the most voracious consumers of mobile media: 94 percent use mobile media, 87 percent use applications and 85 percent browse the mobile internet. With just 4 percent share of the European market, iPhone users represent 12 percent of all mobile media users."
Source: Press release from comScore, 23rd June 2010
(More data on operating systems in the full press release)

Users of the mobile content site Myxer still buy physical CDs

Click to enlarge

"- 32% of users listen to music on their phone between 1-5 hours a week, with 26% listening to music on their phone 20 hours a week or more.
- 65% of Myxer users attended at least one live music event in the past year and 55% of concertgoers bought something from the artist at the venue.
- 74% of Myxer users still buy physical CDs, while nearly half of respondents (47%) have reported that radio is the most popular way for them to discover new music."
Source: Myxer Boombox report, May 2010, released June 2010
Methodology:
"Since 2005, Myxer has cataloged demographic, handset, and carrier data for downloads served by our platform. This data set covers over one billion downloads and 35 million unique individuals, and is currently growing by some 90 million downloads each month. The overwhelming majority of Myxer users are in the US.
By mining this data, we are able to uncover what we believe to be interesting trends in user behavior and preferences, demographic changes, and carrier and handset usage. Myxer’s BoomBox Report is our way of sharing this information with the industry as a whole.
For this month’s report Myxer used PollDaddy, an online polling and survey tool, which gathered responses from 1,049 Myxer users."
Note - the report is monthly, free, and well worth signing up for. Sign up here

Nearly 30% of smartphone users start their day with the mobile internet, and 45% end their day with it

"Nearly a third (30%) of smartphone users start their day with the mobile Internet and 45% end their day with it, with the peak time for use while relaxing at home in the evening (64%). The only time Web use falls off dramatically is when people are actively engaged in other activities like sports or at live events.
"This clearly demonstrates how mobile Internet use has caused a significant shift in consumer need to have constant connection with the outside world," stated the report, which based its findings on a survey of 8000 active smartphone users across Italy, Sweden, the U.K., U.S., Australia, China, India and South Korea.
What's more, people are accessing the mobile Web at home while consuming other media. Half of smartphone users said they browse the mobile Web while watching TV, listening to the radio, and while traveling. Thirty-nine percent do so while using the PC-based Internet, and 34% while reading newspapers and magazines. From these findings, Initiative concluded that marketers can use mobile to amplify messaging in other media."
Source: Initiative Media, reported by Mediapost, 22nd June 2010

Apple has sold 3 million iPads in 80 days

"Apple® today announced that it sold its three millionth iPad™ yesterday, just 80 days after its introduction in the US. iPad is a revolutionary and magical product that allows users to connect with their apps, content and the Internet in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.
"People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world, including those in nine more countries next month."
Developers have created over 11,000 exciting new apps for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch™ user interface, large screen and high-quality graphics. iPad will run almost all of the more than 225,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®."
Source: Apple press release on PR Newswire, 22nd June 2010

The Doctor Who interactive game City of The Daleks was downloaded 524,000 times in 12 days

"Publisher BBC Wales Interactive says more than half a million people downloaded the first episode of its Doctor Who: The Adventure Games series in the first 12 days after the PC game released for free in the UK.
As with the other episodes, the first release, City of the Daleks, was originally intended as a full and legitimate Doctor Who episode for the sci-fi television program, and features the likenesses and voices of the show's stars Matt Smith and Karen Gillen.
Doctor Who's head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, as well as many others involved with the production of the show, is also involved with the publicly-funded game project, as Sumo Digital (Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, Virtua Tennis 2009) handles its development.
Along with the 524,299 UK gamers that downloaded City of the Daleks, the publisher notes that the BBC's main Doctor Who site received a week-on-week 67 percent increase in traffic from unique UK visitors during the seven days after the game was released."
Source: Gamasutra, 18th June 2010