Paypal has over 100m active accounts

"PayPal has just hit a new milestone: the payments platform has more than 100 million active accounts.
The news, announced by PayPal President Scott Thompson, also comes with a bold prediction: that by 2015, the wallet will become a thing of the past."

Source:  Mashable, 29th June 2011

News Corp sold MySpace for over $500m less than the purchase price

"MySpace, the long-suffering Web site that the News Corporation bought six years ago for $580 million, was sold Wednesday to the advertising network Specific Media for roughly $35 million.
The News Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, had been trying since last winter to rid itself of the unprofitable unit, which was a casualty of changing tastes and may be a cautionary tale for social companies like Zynga and LinkedIn that are currently enjoying sky-high valuations.
Relief over the sale was palpable on Wednesday, and not just at the News Corporation. Wall Street “just wanted it done, because it’s been a real drag on growth,” said Michael Nathanson, a media sector analyst for Nomura Securities.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the News Corporation said that it would retain a minority stake. Specific Media said it had brought on board the artist Justin Timberlake as a part owner and an active player in MySpace’s future, but said little else about how the site would change.
The sale closes a complex chapter in the history of the Internet and of the News Corporation, which was widely envied by other media companies when it acquired MySpace in 2005. At that time, MySpace was the world’s fastest-growing social network, with 20 million unique visitors each month in the United States. That figure soon soared to 70 million, but the network could not keep pace with Facebook, which overtook MySpace two years ago.
As users fled MySpace, so, too, did advertisers. The market research firm eMarketer estimates that the site will earn about $183 million in worldwide ad revenue this year, down from $605 million at its peak, when the site introduced many Web users and many advertisers to the concept of social networking."

Source:  New York Times, 29th June 2011

Google is activating more than 500,000 Android devices a day

"Google Android chief Andy Rubin said on Tuesday that more than 500,000 Android devices are activated each day worldwide.
At Google I/O 2011, the web giant announced its Android roadmap and tools for integrating with devices and the home
Week on week, that is a growth rate of 4.4 percent, Rubin said in a post to Twitter. In May, Google announced a 400,000-devices-per-day figure, up from 300,000 per day in December.
That growth in part is due to Android handsets being widely available and inexpensive to implement, as well as offering the basic smartphone experience of touchscreen, fast processor and multimedia features. Also in May, Android's worldwide market share reached 36 percent."

Source:  ZDNet, 29th June 2011

The top 10 handsets for mobile web browsing in India

"Top handsets for May 2011 (since May 2010)
Nokia 2690 (10)
Nokia 5130 XpressMusic (1)
Nokia 2700c (2)
Nokia X2 (new)
Nokia 2730c (6)
Nokia C1 (new)
Nokia 3110c (3)
Nokia 5233 (new)
Nokia 7210 Supernova (7)
Nokia 6300 (5)"
Source:  Opera's State of the Mobile Web, May 2011, published 29th June 2011
Note - data relates to the top handsets by usage for those using Opera's mobile browser

A Portrait of an American Tablet User

"Key findings from “A Portrait of Today’s Tablet User” include:
Today’s tablet users represent 12% of the US internet population ages 8 - 64; that number is projected to grow to 23% by early 2012—a group that represents an estimated 54 million people
87% of tablet users are accessing content and information, the dominant activity for this device
93% of tablet users have downloaded apps; the average tablet user has downloaded 20 apps
79% of app downloaders have paid for apps in the last 12 months; 26% of all apps downloaded are paid
On average, those who have downloaded apps on tablets have spent $53 on apps in the past 12 months
In addition to iTunes, Amazon and Google, 29% of tablet users would prefer to buy apps from their cable company or internet provider and 25% would prefer to buy their apps directly from publishers"

Source:  Press release from the OPA, 22nd June 2011

Methodology - "The OPA collaborated with Frank N. Magid Associates., Inc. to conduct this study. Magid fielded a nationally representative online survey of 2,482 people, ages 8 to 64 years old, to evaluate the attitudes and behaviors of tablet owners and users between April 15 and April 20, 2011. The study found that 12% of today’s US online population (ages 8 to 64) currently owns or uses a tablet device and an incremental 11% intend to purchase a tablet device in the next 12 months."

Paypal is processing up to $10m in mobile payments each day

"It’s no secret that everyone’s talking about mobile payments.  We’ve written about it plenty here at PayPal, and it’s a story playing out in the press almost daily.   We recently saw coverage of new data from analyst firm Forrester Research predicting that mobile commerce will hit $6 billion in 2011 – and reach up to $31 billion by 2016.
Today the Wall Street Journal reported on some updated numbers from PayPal as well – we’ve just raised our 2011 Mobile Total Payments Volume (TPV) projections to $3 billion. Mobile payments are growing at a rate we never could have imagined when we started processing them back in 2006 – in fact, this is the third time we’ve had to update our mobile 2011 projections. We first predicted $1.5 billion in 2011 mobile payments volume. At our analyst day in February, we upped that to $2 billion and just a few months later, we have now added another billion to that number.
We’re thrilled by this news, and by other numbers we’ve seen climb in the past few months. We’re now seeing up to $10 million in mobile TPV a day – a big increase from the $6 million we reported in March.  And we currently have eight million customers who are regularly making purchases on their mobile phones, up from a previously reported six million users."

Source:  Blog post by Paypal, 23rd June 2011

The best times of day to use social media for marketing

Click to enlarge

Source:  Kissmetrics, using data from Dan Zarella, 16th June 2011
Note - the graphic is easier to read on the Kissmetrics site

The average smartphone user spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the internet

Click to enlarge

"Our analysis shows that, for the first time ever, daily time spent in mobile apps surpasses desktop and mobile web consumption.  This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms.  Let’s take a look at the numbers.
[...]
Flurry found that the average user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet.  This was not the case just 12 months ago.  Last year, the average user spent just under 43 minutes a day using mobile applications versus an average 64 minutes using the Internet.  Growing at 91% over the last year, users now spend over 81 minutes on mobile applications per day.  This growth has come primarily from more sessions per user, per day rather than a large growth in average session lengths.  Time spent on the Internet has grown at a much slower rate, 16% over the last year, with users now spending 74 minutes on the Internet a day."
Source:  Blog post from Flurry, 20th June 2011
Note on methodology:
"In this report, Flurry compares how daily interactive consumption has changed over the last 12 months between the web (both desktop and mobile web) and mobile native apps.  For Internet consumption, we built a model using publicly available data from comScore and Alexa.  For mobile application usage, we used Flurry Analytics data, now exceeding 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications.  We estimate this accounts for approximately one third of all mobile application activity, which we scaled-up accordingly for this analysis.
[...]

The preceding chart compares the average number of minutes consumers spend per day in mobile native apps vs. the web.  For mobile apps, Flurry tracks iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and J2ME.  And for the web, our figures include the open web, Facebook and the mobile web. "

In the retail sector, one extra Facebook fan aquired will drive an additional 20 visits to the main site over the course of the year

"We’ve been talking at Hitwise for a very long time about the benefits of social media and how Facebook in particular is becoming critical to the success of multi-channel marketing. We are constantly asked: “What’s the ROI with advertising on Facebook?”and until now that has always been a difficult question to qualify precisely. Leveraging our unique data sets we now have an answer: for retailers, each new fan acquired on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to your website over the course of a year.
[...]
Our data shows that for the top retailers, even if they have no Facebook fans they can still expect to receive on average 62,000 visits from Facebook each month. However, by utilising this new service, brands can more rapidly build a fan base within Facebook and therefore drive more traffic to their website. Within retail each new fan acquired will drive an additional 20 visits to a retailer’s websites, which in turn will generate extra sales both online and offline."
Source:  Data from Hitwise and Techlightenment, reported in Robin Goad's Hitwise blog, 23rd June 2011

5.4% of paid search impressions in the US come from mobile devices

"It is clear that mobile is not just a growing market, it is a market to really dive into. Mobile is interesting for both search engines and for advertisers. Research performed (in the US!) by Efficient Frontier shows us that the number of mobile searches and mobile paid ads is growing rapidly. But CTR and ROI still stays behind.
Efficient Frontier tells us that already 10-15% of traffic on average comes from mobile devices. And that’s an average, if you look at specific markets these numbers can sometimes even double. The research also shows that 5.4% of all paid search impressions currently come from mobile devices, which is a huge growth compared to last year. This means that by the end of 2011 Efficient Frontier believes that “somewhere between 7.0%-9.5% of search advertising dollars could be spent on mobile devices”."

Source:  Research performed by Efficient Frontier, reported in State of Search, 10th March 2011

Google own 3 of the 5 most-accessed mobile apps in the UK

"In April 2011, 40 per cent of the 21.8 million UK mobile internet users accessed a connected application*. Google Maps ranked as the top mobile app with 6.4 million users, reaching 73.3 per cent of all UK app users. Yahoo’s Weather app ranked second with 3.6 million followed by Facebook’s app with 3.5 million unique visitors. Another two apps published by Google - Google Mobile and YouTube - rounded out the top five, highlighting Google’s strong position among UK mobile consumers."
Source:  Data from the GSMA Mobile Media Metrics Report, reported in a press release from comScore, 22nd June 2011

The optimum number of times to post to Facebook is three per week

"One of the most common questions I hear about Facebook marketing, is: “How often should I post to my page?” And of course, I wasn’t happy that I didn’t have hard data to backup any answer I might give, so I did a little analysis.

I looked at over 2,600 of the most liked Facebook pages and their posts per day rates. What I found was surprising. As pages posted more than once a day they tended to have fewer likes, especially once they got past a 3 posts per day level."

Source:  Dan Zarella in his blog, 13th January 2011
Note - see Dan's blog for a great chart visualising this.