Baidu's net income rose by 118.5% YoY in Q2 2010

"Leading Chinese search engine, Baidu, Inc, announced last week its unaudited financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2010. The big news this quarter has been the significant gains the search leader has made in the wake of the marginalization of its next closest competitor, Google Inc, which fell out of favor with the Chinese government when it refused to abide by its content regulations (aka – censorship requirements.) According to Chinese market research company iResearch the country’s entire search market revenue grew by an impressive 53% Quarter-over-Quarter (QoQ)and Baidu was the largest beneficiary. Baidu’s share of the market increased to 70.8% from 67.8% in Q1 while Google’s share fell to 27.3% from 29.5%.
Key financial highlights for Q2 2010 include:
Total revenues grew 74.4% Year-over-Year (YoY) to RMB1.914 billion ($282.3 million),
Operating profit grew 129.8% YoY to RMB971.8 million ($143.3 million), and
Net income grew 118.5% YoY to RMB837.4 million ($123.5 million).
[...]
Key operating highlights for Q2 2010 include:
After a slightly down quarter in Q1, Baidu’s active online marketing customers grew again to 254,000, a 25% YoY increase and a 15% Quarter-on-Quarter (QoQ) increase,
In addition to growth in total customers the company also saw strong increases in the average revenue per user (ARPU). Baidu’s ARPU grew to RMB7,500 (US$1,106), a 39% YoY increase and a 27% QoQ increase,
Traffic acquisition costs (TAC) of RMB186 million accounted for 9.7% of total revenues compared to 16% in the year earlier period and 13.2% in the previous quarter."
Source:  DigitalEastAsia, 26th July 2010

11% of phones sold in 2009 were touch-screen only

"All mobile phones sold in 2009 by input method
Touch screen input only - 11%
QWERTY input only - 13%
Combo input Touch and keypad - 3%
Basic T9 keypad only - 73%"
Source: TomiAhonen Consulting 2010, quoted in Communities Dominate Brands, 29th July 2010

Mobile ad server Opera serves 1 billion ad views to mobile devices per day

"Opera joins the exclusive one billion served per day club. According to Opera Software statistics, Opera Mini users viewed more than one billion pages on July 25, 2010. Every second, Opera Mini servers compressed more than 11,500 pages before sending that content to phones around the world.
Opera Mini has experienced tremendous page view growth in recent years. In June 2008, Opera Mini servers processed 100 million page views per day for the first time. In June 2010, Opera Mini users viewed more than 910 million pages on average every day, an increase of more than 161% since June 2009."
Source:  Press release from Opera, 29th July 2010

Digital accounted for 28% of Publicis' H1 2010 revenues

"Publicis Groupe, the French owner of ad agency networks including Saatchi & Saatchi, has reported a like-for-like revenue increase of 7.1% to €1.38bn (£1.15bn) in the second quarter.
[...]
Publicis said that 33% of revenue came from advertising, 20% from media planning and buying and 47% from "specialised agencies and marketing services", which includes digital activities. Taken on their own, digital activities accounted for 28% of first half revenues."
Source:  The Guardian, 29th July 2010

Disney paid up to $763m for social gaming company Playdom

"Walt Disney is making a big move into social games, with the purchase of fast-growing social game developer Playdom for up to $763.2m. The deal includes a "total consideration" of $563.2m, in addition to a performance-linked earn-out of up to $200m.
[...]
The deal price represents a big return for Playdom's investors, who had put $73m into the company since last November. Just last month, Playdom had raised $33m in an add-on to its first round. That round included an investment by Disney venture arm Steamboat Ventures. Other backers included New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.
The acquisition shows just how quickly the valuations of social game startups are soaring. The last major acquisition in the space was last fall when Electronic Arts paid $275m in cash and up to $100m in earnouts for Playfish, which had 60 million monthly active players of its titles at that time. Playdom, by contrast, claims only 38 million monthly active users."
Source:  The Guardian, 28th July 2010

Bloggers, by country

Click to enlarge

"It should not be much of a surprise that the most bloggers (29.2%) are located in the U.S. In fact, there are more than four times as many bloggers in the U.S. as there are in the second most populated country within the blogosphere - the U.K., which is home to 6.75% of bloggers.
Japan accounts for the third-most bloggers (4.9%), followed by Brazil (4.2%), Canada (3.9%), Germany (3.3%), Italy (3.2%), Spain (3.1%), France (2.9%) and Russia (2.3%)."
Source:  Inside Blog Demographics, Sysomos, June 2010

The demographics of bloggers

Click to enlarge

"Not surprisingly, the most active bloggers are younger people who have grown up during the blogging "revolution", which started about seven years ago. Bloggers in the 21-to-35 year-old demographic group account for 53.3% of the total blogging population. This group is followed by the generation just behind them - people 20-years-old or under are 20.2% of the blogging landscape. This group is closely followed by 36-to-50 year-olds (19.4%), while bloggers who are 51-years-old and older only account for 7.1%.
The difference between genders in the blogosphere is balanced with women making up 50.9% and males 49.1% of bloggers. This suggests the Internet is a gender neutral environment."
Source:  Inside Blog Demographics, Sysomos, June 2010

One in ten phones sold on contract in the UK has the Android operating system

"Sales of Android phones have risen by more than 300% from the beginning of 2010, with one in 10 contract handsets sold in the UK now running Google's mobile operating system.
Android's share of the UK mobile contract market grew by 10.2 percentage points from the first quarter of 2010 to the second quarter, from 3% to 13.2%, new figures from retail watcher GfK show.
From the beginning of 2010, most of the UK's major mobile operators have started selling a number of hotly-anticipated mobile devices running Google's Linux-based software. The HTC Desire and HTC Legend are among other devices lauded by critics."
Source GfK data, reported by The Guardian, 26th July 2010

During the World Cup final people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages

"The World Cup final represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history.
Throughout the match, Tweets-per-second (TPS) were much higher than average; during the game’s final 15 minutes, this jumped to more than 2,000 TPS. (Spain’s winning goal in the final scored a 3,051 TPS.)
During the final, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages.
At the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages. This moment is represented on this Wordle infographic."
Source:  Twitter blog, 15th July 2010

19% of mobile handsets shipped in Q2 2010 were smartphones

"The second quarter saw 60 million smartphones shipped around the world, a 43 percent jump from a year ago, according to a study released Thursday by research firm Strategy Analytics.
Growth was driven by robust subsidies from carriers, strong competition between high-end vendors, and a rising selection of lower-cost phones running systems like Android and Symbian, according to the study. Overall, smartphones accounted for 19 percent of all handsets shipped during the period."
Source:  Data from Strategy Analytics, reported by CNET, 22nd July 2010

The Old Spice 'Responses' videos have generated more video views in 10 days than the original ads have done in 5 months

"The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures.
Those video responses, recorded in seven-minute spurts over several days last week, have accumulated 42.3 million views so far and more than 35 million last week alone, a Viral Chart record. The TV spots have also done well on the web, but have accumulated only 34.7 million views since "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" was first posted online in February.
[...]
For those keeping score, total views on the Old Spice campaign including all original spots and responses stands now at 113 million views. Here's how it breaks down:
"The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" (launched Feb 4): 22.3 million
"Different Scents for Different Gents" (launched Feb 5): 4.2 million
"Where Freshness Smells From" (launched March 15): 2.6 million
"Odor Blocker" (launched March 31): 29.2 million million
"The Return of the Man Your Man Could Smell Like" (launched June 29): 12.4 million
"Old Spice Responses" (launched July 13): 42.3 million"
Source:  Visible Measures blog, 22nd July 2010

There are 420m people online in China

"According to the report, the number of netizens in China is increasing. By June 2010, there were 420 million netizens in China, including 115.08 million in the rural areas, accounting for 27.4% of the total. Mature netizens take a larger percentage in the age structure of the Chinese Internet users than before, and those above the age of 30 account for 41% of the total.
At the same time, the educational background and income level of the Chinese netizens has lowered. The time period spent in the use of the Internet by Chinese netizens continues to increase and reached an average of 19.8 hours per week per user.
However, insufficient bandwidth is still a problem for the Chinese Internet sector. At present, the penetration of broadband in China has reached 98.1% and the number of people using broadband is 363.81 million. The bandwidth is still insufficient. Statistics from Akamai, a U.S. distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery, shows that the average Internet speed in China is 857kbps, which is much slower than that in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea."
Source:  Data from the CNNIC, reported by China Tech News, 16th July 2010
(The original report is in Chinese.  The CNNIC are pretty slow at getting these reports translated, but the report should appear here eventually)