Only 30% of content on The Telegraph online appears in print

"In an average day The Telegraph now produces:
-- 600 articles
-- 40 substantial videos
-- 25 picture galleries
-- 25 concurrently updated blog and an average of five live news blogs across news and sport.
-- Gallagher says barely a third of the output of The Telegraph newsroom goes out in print."

Source:  The Media Briefing, 16th May 2013

Note - I'd love to see a comparison of different newspapers.  I'm guessing that this would be more pronounced for The Mail Online for example.  Any media studies students want to do a fun project?

A Facebook fan is worth an average of $174 to a brand

"A Facebook fan is worth $174 to a brand, up 28% since 2010, according to Syncapse, a social media marketing firm.
Syncapse worked with research firm Hotspex on a survey based on data collected from more than 2,000 U.S. panelists in late January and early February. The study compared Facebook fans and non-fans based and their corresponding product spending, brand loyalty, propensity to recommend, media value, cost of acquisition and brand affinity to arrive at the figure.
Though $174 is an average figure, the value varies from brand to brand.
The reason, says Syncapse CEO Michael Scissons, is "what a consumer would spend on Zara vs. Coke." A higher average purchase price makes a fan more valuable.
The study also contrasts fans and non-fans. The former are much more active in social media. The average fan is a fan of 10 brand pages at a given time. On the other hand, almost two-thirds of non-fans have followed 10 or fewer brand pages. Three quarters of fans are likely to share good brand experiences and share promotions and discounts with their Facebook friends. About two-thirds of fans are likely to share a bad brand experience."
Source:  Mashable, 17th April 2013
Note - There is obviously lots of controversy about this sort of analysis - clearly fans are always likely to spend more on a brand than non-fans, and you can't necessarily say that being a fan creates that - treat with caution.

Path is growing at a rate of a million users a week

"Path, a more intimate social-networking app that’s like a personal journal, is now growing by 1 million registered users a week after its most recent launch.
The newest version of Path includes a way to message your friends — for which Path limits to 150 — and send them stylized stickers like other top messaging apps. Around half of Path’s registered users (now at 9 million) are regularly using the app on a monthly basis, CEO Dave Morin said.
Most of the growth is now occurring in English-speaking parts of the population after seeing significant growth in Central and South America — particularly among Spanish-speaking populations — he said. He said the growth started with Venezuela, where Path added around 500,000 users in a weekend, and then spread up through Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean before reaching Spanish speakers in the U.S.
Now, Path is among the top apps on the App Store, and has shown some significant staying power, according to AppData."
Source:  WSJ, 25th April 2013

More smartphones than feature phones were sold in Q1 2013

"The worldwide mobile phone market grew 4% year over year in the seasonally slow first quarter of 2013 (1Q13) as smartphones outshipped feature phones for the first time. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped a total of 418.6 million mobile phones in 1Q13 compared to 402.4 million units in the first quarter of 2012 and 483.2 million units in the fourth quarter of 2012.
In the worldwide smartphone market, vendors shipped 216.2 million units in 1Q13, which marked the first time more than half (51.6%) the total phone shipments in a quarter were smartphones. The market grew 41.6% compared to the 152.7 million units shipped in 1Q12, but 5.1% lower than the 227.8 million units shipped in 4Q12.
"Phone users want computers in their pockets. The days where phones are used primarily to make phone calls and send text messages are quickly fading away," said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. "As a result, the balance of smartphone power has shifted to phone makers that are most dependent on smartphones."
"In addition to smartphones displacing feature phones, the other major trend in the industry is the emergence of Chinese companies among the leading smartphone vendors," noted Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC's Mobile Phone team. "A year ago, it was common to see previous market leaders Nokia, BlackBerry (then Research In Motion), and HTC among the top five. While those companies have been in various stages of transformation since, Chinese vendors, including Huawei and ZTE as well as Coolpad and Lenovo, have made significant strides to capture new users with their respective Android smartphones.""

Source:  Press release from IDC, 25th April 2013

Google spent $291 million on acquisitions in Q1 2013

"Google spent $291 million on eight acquisitions during the first quarter, according to company filing with the federal government.
From the company's 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google spent a mere 0.5 percent of its $50.1 billion cash that it reported during its first quarter of 2013.
Out of that, $150 million was attributed to patents and already developed technology, $133 million to goodwill, $24 million went on customer relationships, and $16 million to net liabilities assumed.
In the filing, Google said: "These acquisitions generally enhance the breadth and depth of our expertise in engineering and other functional areas, our technologies, and our product offerings."
It's not so much that Google made acqusitions during the quarter — which included Channel Intelligence for $125 million, and Wavii for approximately $30 million, and four other firms that were not publicly disclosed — but that the company spent so much."

Source:  ZDNet, 26th April 2013

The median number of Facebook friends by location

Click to enlarge

Source:  Data from Wolfram Alpha, reported on their blog, 24th April 2013
Note that the data comes from all of the people who have used Wolfram alpha to look at their own Facebook page stats, so the sample is not necessarily representative of all Facebook users
Also - Lots more data given in the post here

More messages are sent through mobile chat apps than through SMS

"Chat apps such as WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage have overtaken the text message as the favourite way to tap out a note to friends, undermining the traditional SMS cash cow for mobile operators.
The data, collected for the Financial Times by telecoms and media consultancy Informa, highlights the rapid rise of a technology that did not exist five years ago but is seen by some as a potential challenger to Facebook’s dominance in social networking.
There were more instant messages being sent daily by the end of last year than there were text messages, Informa said.
The consultancy expects “over the top” messaging to more than double to 41bn per day this year – more than twice the number of text messages expected to be sent."

Source: The Financial Times, 29th April 2013

It takes over 45,000 plays on Spotify to generate the same revenue as one album sale

"Consider Pandora and Spotify, the streaming music services that are becoming ever more integrated into our daily listening habits. My BMI royalty check arrived recently, reporting songwriting earnings from the first quarter of 2012, and I was glad to see that our music is being listened to via these services. Galaxie 500's "Tugboat", for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times "Tugboat" was played there, Galaxie 500's songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).
To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one-- one-- LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)"

Source:  Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi writing on Pitchfork, 14th November 2013

New product innovation is shifting from developed to emerging markets

"We can see this recent shift take form if we focus on new product innovation between 2008 and 2012. In 2008, the world’s 26 developed market countries, which include the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany and Canada, generated 75 percent of global new product innovation, while the 47 emerging markets launched the remaining 25 percent.
In 2012, however, emerging market countries like China, Brazil, India and Mexico stepped up their innovation efforts and entered the list of top 10 innovative markets. Overall, the emerging markets contributed 31 percent of the world’s new product innovation in 2012, while innovation in developed markets dropped to 69 percent."

Source:  Nielsen Newswire, 23rd April 2013

The growth of mobile connections

"The first commercial citywide cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979
The milestone of 1 billion mobile phone connections was reached in      2002
The 2 billion mobile phone connections milestone was reached in 2005
The 3 billion mobile phone connections milestone was reached in 2007
The 4 billion mobile phone connections milestone was reached in February 2009"

Source: Original sources not given, but this is from Ajit Jaokar's blog, 17th April 2013

Note - The GSMA say that there were 6.8 billion mobile connections by the end of Q4 2012

Next Generation Media Quarterly - April 2013

My new presentation is now on Slideshare, looking at key stats & stories from the past 3 months.  Find out why Airbnb loves hearts!

Next Generation Media Quarterly April 2013 from Dan Calladine

'You're more likely to survive a plane crash than to click on a banner ad'

I've added this one as an example of a stat that is clearly not true, but that gets quoted a lot.  (Another one is 'more people have a mobile phone than a toothbrush', but that's another story).  This stat has been doing the rounds since about 2011,and was recently repeated by Digiday, who should know better, but is hard to trace back to it's original maths or logic.

Solve Media first published the stat in a deck with a number similar stats, but with no sources given.  Solve Media place ads in CAPTCHAs and so have a vested interest in saying that other ad formats don't work.  You can argue that I have a vested interest in saying that banners do work, but more than that I'm just irritated by the lack of sources or explanation, and the deliberately meaningless comparison.

"How annoying are banner ads? You know, those ubiquitous advertisements that drop down in your face when you open most news sites? The worst are the ones that expand when you scroll over them, forcing you to click on them no matter how hard to try to avoid it. If you hate banner ads as much as we do, you are not alone: most people do not click on them. Solve Media, an advertising consulting company, has discovered how much more likely you are to do even the most statistically unlikely of things than click on one of these intrusive advertisements, Business Insider reports. For example, "you are 31.25 times more likely to win a prize in the Mega Millions than you are to click on a banner ad." Not only that, "you are 87.8 times more likely to apply to Harvard and get in...112.50 times more likely to sign up for and complete NAVY SEAL training...279.64 times more likely to climb Mount Everest...and 475.28 times more likely to survive a plane crash than you are to click on a banner ad." It's unclear how they figured this out, or if the methodology is all that sound, but we're going to hazard a guess that people hate banner ads enough to enjoy the numbers anyway."

Source:  The Atlantic, 29th June 2011