800m Facebook users use 'translate' each month

"Machine learning is accomplishing Facebook’s mission of connecting the world across language barriers. Facebook is now serving 2 billion text translations per day. Facebook can translate across 40 languages in 1,800 directions, like French to English. And 800 million users, almost half of all Facebook users, see translations each month.
That’s all based on Facebook’s own machine learning translation system. In 2011 it started working with Microsoft Bing to power translations, but has since bene working to transition to its own system. In December 2015, Facebook finally completed the shift, and now exclusively uses its own translation tech."

Source:  Techcrunch, 23rd May 2016

130m visual searches are done each month on Pinterest

130 million "visual" searches using Pinterest's image search tool each month (explained here: https://t.co/h7X1klq1ZB) #EmTechDigital

— Tom Simonite (@tsimonite) May 23, 2016

2.3m American households own a virtual reality headset

"Parks Associates announced new consumer research today showing that 2% of U.S. broadband households, or 2.3 million households, own a virtual reality headset. The research firm will host CONNECTIONS™: The Premier Connected Home Conference May 24-26 in San Francisco, where its analysts will discuss findings from 360 View: CE Adoption and Trends, a survey of 10,000 U.S. broadband households, which reveals 5% of U.S. broadband households plan to buy a VR headset in 2016, an increase from only 1% who made a purchase the year prior."

Source:  Parks Associates, 16th May 2016

Note - This figure seems high, until you realised that it includes Google Cardboard.  

'As much as' 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound

"Facebook might be hosting upwards of 8 billion views per day on its platform, but a wide majority of that viewership is happening in silence.
As much as 85 percent of video views happen with the sound off, according to multiple publishers. Take, for instance, feel-good site LittleThings, which is averaging 150 million monthly views on Facebook so far this year. Eighty-five percent of its viewership is occurring without users turning the sound on. Similarly, millennial news site Mic, which is also averaging 150 million monthly Facebook views, said 85 percent of its 30-second views are without sound. PopSugar said its silent video views range between 50 and 80 percent.
The news shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as Facebook has built a video ecosystem that does not require users to turn the volume up — and publishers have been more than happy to play ball. Most users’ news feeds are now inundated with short videos that feature text or captions narrating what’s being shown on screen. While most of these videos feature narration or some form of background music, the intent is to make it easy for people to consume the information presented in the videos without needing to turn the sound on."
Source:  Digiday, 17th May 2016
Note - So keep it visual, and use subtitles!

More than 300,000 a week log on to Google's free wifi in Indian railway stations

"Guwahati station, the gateway to India’s easternmost states, has just became the 15th train station in India to offer our free, high-speed Wi-Fi service. The other stations that have just come online include Allahabad, Jaipur, Patna and Ujjain Junction, following quickly on the heels of the nine stations announced last month.
 As the network has expanded, the number of people logging in has as well – we’re thrilled that more than 300,000 people are now using this high-speed Wi-Fi each week."

Source:  Google India Blog, 12th May 2016

The number of scripted TV shows in the US doubled between 2009 and 2015

"Between 2009 and 2015, the number of scripted shows nearly doubled, from just over 200 to an estimated 409 last year. Netflix alone says it will produce 600 hours of original television and spend $5 billion on programming, including acquisitions. This dramatic surge in TV production has touched nearly every aspect of the industry, from actors and showrunners to those responsible for production logistics for all of the new programming ordered from an ever-expanding roster of networks."

Source:  Vulture.com, May 2016

Mobile location data in the US is accurate to about 30m

""PlaceIQ commissioned independent research from Findyr, a global technology company that provides brands with custom data and analyses, to conduct the study. The new study consisted of an independent, third-party analysis of more than 150 physical locations across five U.S. cities and found that on average, location data obtained via mobile smartphones is accurate up to 30 meters.
In addition, the average finding for location data accuracy varied in each of the five U.S. cities analyzed, which included Boston, MA (21 meters), New York City, NY (27 meters), Austin, TX (28 meters), Washington, D.C. (29 meters), and Chicago, IL (38 meters).
These findings are demonstrative of the complex relationship between multiple factors that affect location data accuracy, such as signal source (GPS signals, Wi-Fi, cell tower triangulation), environment (area density, skyline view, indoor or outdoor location), and personal use (location data access enabled, type of mobile app used, operating system usage)"

Source:  Yahoo, 25th May 2016

60% of Instagram's users say they learn about products and services on the app

"60 per cent of Instagram’s 400m monthly active users say they learn about products and services on the app and 75 per cent say they are inspired to act — by searching for a brand’s website, going to a boutique or telling a friend."

Source:  FT, 22nd May 2016

Mid-tier bloggers 'can charge up to $2,500 for a blog post'

"According to multiple sources, mid-tier bloggers can charge up to $2,500 for one blog post, plus corresponding social media conversation. The average fee, however, probably ranges closer to between $400 and $1000, depending on the breadth, scope and content. Even those with just 10,000 followers can find ways to monetize. “We try not to let bloggers take less than $200 per post, even if they’re small,” said Nazarudin, whose BloggerBabes network helps broker deals between brands and bloggers. Two hundred dollars might not sound like a lot, but if a blogger is publishing two to three sponsored posts a week, as many are, even on the low-end of the spectrum, it can quickly add up. And certainly, there is no shortage of opportunities for motivated bloggers to partner with brands."
Source:  Racked, 23rd May 2016
Note - 'Mid-tier' is defined elsewhere in the article as
"a social following of 50,000 and your content is great and your readership is loyal"

A lot of popular Vine users are no longer active on the platform

"Once a social media darling, Vine is falling out of favor. After analyzing 9,725 Vine users with more than 15,000 followers, influencer marketing company Markerly found that 52 percent of them have exited the platform since Jan. 1. Instead, they have moved to YouTube and Snapchat for different reasons.
“I used this account a lot before Snapchat came out,” influencer Nash Grier wrote in his Vine profile.
The finding may not surprise many. Compared to Vine, Snapchat offers features like geofilters, 3D stickers and My Story that allow would-be influencers to create more vivid in-the-moment content than they used to share on Vine. YouTube, on the other hand, lets creators make more polished long-form video content, which is becoming appealing to more and more Vine stars. For example, Zach King, one of the biggest celebrities on Vine, started to move his content over to YouTube where he updated three or four times a month. His most recent Vine clips, in comparison, were posted in January."
Source:  Digiday, 17th May 2016
Note - Zach King has started posting again

Slack has 3m Daily Active Users

Source:  Blog post from Slack, 25th May 2016

Candace Payne's 'Chewbacca Mask' was the first Facebook Live Video to hit 100m views

"A braying Chewbacca mask found "on clearance" has shot a Texas mother to internet stardom.
Candace Payne was not expecting to purchase the mask when she went to her local Kohls department store, just outside of Dallas, Texas. She doesn't even consider herself a huge Star Wars fan.
On Thursday, the 37-year-old mother of two was returning some items and was going to spend her birthday money on some exercise clothes or something "for the kids".
The Facebook Live video she broadcast from the store's car park - immediately after purchasing the Chewbacca mask - has broken the record as the most-watched Facebook Live video - ever.
"That's just crazy," Mrs Payne told the BBC. "I'm just laughing - in all honesty, that is ridiculous. I've looked at the number of views and it just seems like someone is just playing with a calculator."
It's a big number: So far, more than 48 million people have watched Payne laugh hysterically as she shows Facebook her new purchase. (Update: As of early Saturday, the video has had 91 million views.)"
Source:  BBC News, 20th May 2016
Note 1 - As of 23rd May the video has had 135m views - see it here
Note 2 - For absolute clarity, the video had very few views 'live' - almost all of these views came afterwards when it somehow went viral.  'Live' basically means that it was uploaded while it was being made, which is clearly the easiest thing to do.
Note 3 - Psy's Gentleman (follow up to Gangnam Style) reached 100m views in 4 days in 2013 - the fastest video ever to do so.  So Candace Payne easily beat that.

The Gates Foundation donated $10 per RT of their Tweet for Red Nose Day

Don't have a red nose? That's ok! For every RT we'll donate $10 toward ending child poverty. #RedNose4Kids pic.twitter.com/pFgi2CrSOx

— Gates Foundation (@gatesfoundation) May 19, 2016

Note - it was to a limit of $1m, and they added an extra $500k

Wow! Thanks for your support! We hit our goal so quickly, we've decided to add an additional $500K (for a total of $1.5mill) to this effort.

— Gates Foundation (@gatesfoundation) May 20, 2016

5,000 Shopify merchants are distributing order confirmations and shipping alerts via Messenger

"Despite gripes about the usefulness of Facebook chatbots, “tens of thousands” of developers are building them, Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky revealed onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. And, 5,000 Shopify merchants are now distributing order confirmations and shipping alerts via Messenger, showing e-commerce companies are eager to reach the app’s nearly one billion users."

Source:  TechCrunch, 10th May 2016

Samsung's Gear VR has over 1m monthly active users

"Samsung’s Gear VR headset had more than one million monthly active users in April, according to new data released by  Oculus Wednesday. The Facebook-owned virtual reality company now wants to get those users to keep coming back by launching a new user interface for the headset.
[...]
Oculus said this week that developers have built over 250 apps for Gear VR so far. Interestingly, one of the biggest draws for the device is video content: Seven out of the ten most popular apps are video-related, and almost 80 percent of the users of the device use it to watch video on any given day, according to Oculus."

Source:  Variety, 11th May 2016

Taxi rides with China's Didi rose 20-fold in the year to March 2016

"China’s homegrown Uber arch-rival, Didi Kuaidi, is still seeing exponential growth nearly four years after the app launched.
The number of completed rides rose 20-fold from March 2015 to March this year, revealed Softbank today in its earnings briefing for 2015. Softbank is an investor in Didi.
The report also stated that Didi is profitable in 230 of the 300 cities where it operates. That’s likely a reference to Didi’s private car rides, which compete directly with UberX and UberBlack – not to Didi’s service for regulated taxis, which covers well over 400 Chinese cities."

Source:  Tech in Asia, 10th May 2016

Yelp has 121,000 local advertisers

"[Y]esterday Yelp reported Q1 earnings that were better than expected. The company said it had 121,000 local advertiser accounts, representing 34 percent annual growth. It also cited a 76% percent year over year advertiser repeat/retention rate."

Source:  Screenwerk blog, 6th May 2016

Emoji 'reactions' account for 3% of Facebook Likes

"Back in February, after months of testing, research and quibbling about the design, Facebook excitedly launched the suite of five emoji reactions, from happy to sad, that lets people express their emotions on a post. Turns out, people aren’t using them.
Marketing firm Quintly analyzed 130,000 posts and found that 97 percent of the interactions on them included the use of like button, writing a comment or a share. That means just a measly 3 percent of the time people used a reaction option. The firm concludes that Reactions “are not used very frequently by the average user at this point.”"

Source:  Digiday, 4th May 2016

American Netflix users 'miss 160 hours of TV ads a year'

"First of all, we know that Netflix recently passed the 75 million subscriber mark. And, at around the same time, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that Netflix subscribers stream 125 million hours of content every day. So, with some simple arithmetic, we can calculate that 125 million hours spread across 75 million subscribers is 1 and 2/3 hours per subscriber per day.
From Nielsen, we know that a typical hour of cable TV includes 15 minutes, 38 seconds – or 938 seconds – of commercials. Multiply that figure by 1.67 repeating and you get 1,563.3 (also repeating) seconds of commercials per day. That’s 570,616.7 seconds per year, which works out to 158.5 hours. So each subscriber saves him or herself about 160 hours of commercials per year by streaming their content through Netflix."

Source:  CordCutting.com, 10th May 2016

Note 1 - Always treat figures like this with scepticism!

Note 2 - The 15 minutes per hour of ads only applies to the US - in the UK it's about 8 minutes and of course that's for commercial channels only

Note 3 - That's per household only, obviously.  Subscribers are households, not people.

Note 4 - Go back to Note 1

Mobile app loyalty by category

Source:  Data from Flurry, reported on its blog, 12th May 2016

AdBlock Plus has 100m active installations

"Today, on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in Brooklyn, our co-founder Till Faida announced that we now have more than 100 million active users (by “active users” we mean “active installations,” i.e. you may be counted as more than one “user” if you’ve got ABP active on multiple devices). These are our latest numbers, which we’ve been working for months on getting more accurate without breaking our strict privacy policy. Harder than it sounds … Happily, we’ve got some stupid smart data scientists who’ve figured out a way to get an accurate estimation.
While user numbers in countries where ad blocking is fairly well-known, like Germany and France, are pretty stable, in countries like the US and UK people are really coming on to the benefits of taking back control of their online experience."

Source:  AdBlock Plus blog, 9th May 2016

75% of the world's TV households are digital

"Global digital penetration climbed from 40.4 per cent of TV households at end-2010 to 74.6 per cent by end-2015, according to the latest edition of the Digital TV World Databook. About 584 million digital TV homes were added in 138 countries between 2010 and 2015. This doubled the digital TV household total to 1,170 million.
From the 584 million digital homes added between 2010 and 2015, 156 million came from primary DTT [homes taking DTT but not subscribing to cable, satellite TV or IPTV]. Digital cable contributed a further 231 million. There were more pay IPTV additions (88 million) than pay satellite TV ones (67 million). However, there were still 398 million analog TV households (terrestrial and cable) by end-2015, although this was down from 863 million at end-2010.
From the digital TV households additions between 2010 and 2015, 381 million were in the Asia Pacific region; more than doubling its total to 608 million. China became the largest digital TV household nation in 2010, rising to 339 million digital TV homes (29 per cent of the world’s total) by end-2015.
The number of pay-TV households (analogue and digital) reached 907 million by 2015, up from 716 million in 2010. Asia Pacific increased by 126 million – or two-thirds of the global additions – during this period to bring its total to 520 million.
The number of global digital pay-TV subscribers doubled from 382 million in 2010 to 771 million in 2015.
China had the most pay-TV subs, at 264 million by end-2015 (up by 69 million on 2010). India added a further 32 million pay TV subs."

Source;  Advanced Television, 12th May 2016

Digital ad spend in Europe grew to €36.2bn in 2015, overtaking TV

At the 10th edition of its annual Interact conference today, IAB Europe announced that online advertising grew 13.1% to a market value of €36.2bn in 2015 surpassing the €33.3bn European TV market.
The AdEx Benchmark research – the definitive guide to the state of the European online advertising market – revealed a €30bn net addition to the online ad market in the last 10 years. All markets participating in the study recorded positive growth, a total of twenty markets grew double-digit for the second year running (three markets recording 30%+ growth, a further nine showing 20%+ growth and a further eight 10%+ growth). Mobile and video formats continue to show strong growth.
Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe, commented “These results confirm the lead position for digital advertising in the European media landscape echoing today’s digital first consumer environment. Given the ever-increasing contribution of digital advertising to the economy and its role in the delivery of digital content and services we must continue to foster European innovation and empower our businesses to compete across the globe.”
The IAB Europe AdEx Benchmark study splits the online ad market into three broad segments: 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 with a growth rate of 17.4% and the pace of Display growth further accelerated versus 2014. In 2015, the total value of the Display ad market was €13.9bn.
Search showed growth of 12.6% – and a market value of €16.9 billion. It continues to be the largest online advertising format in terms of revenue, and has increased its growth in 2015 after a slight decrease in 2014.
[...]
Mobile and video continue to be the key growth drivers of the European online ad market and this becomes increasingly apparent when looking at the more advanced mobile economies (like the UK and Ireland) where nearly 50% of online advertising is now generated on mobile.
Mobile display now accounts for €3.5bn or 25.4% of the display market, with a growth rate of 60.5% compared with 2014. Online video advertising also showed strong growth, now representing 16.7% of the display market.
[...]
The top 10 list of markets are as follows. Top 3 Individual growth markets were:
Ireland 29.0% growth
Bulgaria 22.3% growth
Poland 21.8% growth
Top 10 Rankings
UK – €11.8bn
Germany – €5.8bn
France – €4.2bn
Italy – €2.1bn
Netherlands- €1.6bn
Russia – €1.5bn
Sweden – €1.3bn
Spain – €1.2bn
Denmark – €0.8bn
Switzerland – €0.8bn

Source:  Press release from IAB Europe, 11th May 2016

Google and Facebook controlled 64% of the US digital ad market in 2015

"Google is reportedly jumping deeper into the ad blocking issue by exploring an acceptable ads policy, publisher and industry sources say.
Google, together with Facebook, controlled 64 percent of the [US] digital ad market last year. With that clout, Google could have an outsized impact on the kinds of ad formats that become the industry standard."

Source:  Digiday, 9th May 2016

(Note - this includes some ad formats where they pass on a large percent of the revenue to others)

70% of Hulu viewing is on connected TVs

"Hulu's subscriber base has grown more than 30 percent from last year, and will reach 12 million U.S. subscribers by this month. "Hulu is TV, and the fact that 70 percent of our viewing happens in a living room environment just reinforces that idea to the market," said Peter Naylor, svp of advertising sales with Hulu.
[...]
Seventy percent of Hulu's viewing now occurs on connected TVs. Just eight years ago, 100 percent of Hulu's content was viewed on desktop. That number is now at 15 percent and dropping. "Mobile-tablet is growing, but living room is growing the fastest. And that's taking share from the other two," said Naylor. "That's why all these innovations are happening in the living room, because that's where the viewing is. The easier I make it for people to buy in this space, it drives my business forward."!

Source:  AdWeek, 4th May 2016

10 billion video views a day are watched on Snapchat

"The majority of people using Snapchat Inc.’s application are making videos, fueling a boom in watching them, the company is telling its investors.
More than a third of Snapchat’s daily users create “Stories,” broadcasting photos and videos from their lives that last 24 hours, according to people familiar with the matter. Now users are watching 10 billion videos a day on the application, up from 8 billion in February. Snapchat on Thursday confirmed the number of video views.
Snapchat is sharing the new stories statistic with investors to help explain that its app is focused on serving people who create and broadcast content, not just consume it. The first screen of the app is a camera, prompting users to share what they’re seeing or doing. Users can decide whether to send their snap directly to friends, where it disappears after it’s watched, or post it to their Snapchat Story, where it can be viewed for 24 hours by a broader audience."

Source:  Bloomberg, 28th April 2016

Earlier - 8bn announced in late February