Facebook has two billion monthly active users

"Facebook Inc said on Tuesday that 2 billion people are regularly using its flagship service, marching past another milestone in its growth from a college curiosity in the United States to the world's largest social media network.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg disclosed the number to his followers in a Facebook post. "It's an honor to be on this journey with you," he wrote. (bit.ly/2sefWFL)
The user base is bigger than the population of any single country, and of six of the seven continents. It represents more than a quarter of the world's 7.5 billion people.
Facebook defines a monthly active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through its website or a mobile device, or used its Messenger app, in the past 30 days. It does not include people who use the Instagram or WhatsApp networks but not Facebook.
The company said in May that duplicate accounts, according to an estimate from last year, may have represented some 6 percent of its worldwide user base.
The social network's user population dwarfs that of similar companies. Twitter Inc reported in April monthly active users of 328 million, while Snap Inc's Snapchat had 166 million daily users at the end of the first quarter.
WeChat, a unit of Tencent Holdings Ltd and a widely used service in China, said in May that it had 938 million monthly active users in the first quarter.
Facebook had 1.94 billion people using its service monthly as of March 31, an increase of 17 percent from a year earlier. It reached 1 billion in October 2012."

Source:  Reuters, 27th June 2017

Zuckerberg's original post is here

YouTube has 1.5bn logged in users each month

"This year at VidCon, YouTube shared some new metrics that really drive home how much it’s dominating mobile video usage and how quickly its service is gaining viewers on TVs.
The highlight was the fact that there are now 1.5 billion logged-in users visiting the site every month. The distinction is important as there are undoubtedly still quite a few folks hopping on YouTube that aren’t necessarily using Google Accounts to do so.
The site announced it hit 1 billion monthly active users in 2013, though that number assumedly related to all visitors, logged-in and not.
Logged-in users spend an average of more than one hour per day watching YouTube just on mobile devices, a pretty daunting number that showcases just how pervasive video has gotten on the mobile web.
“When we compare that [metric] to TV, people — in some countries like the U.S. — watch up to four hours per day, so we think there’s lots of room to get people to watch even more YouTube,” CEO Susan Wojcicki said onstage.
On that note, the company said that the TV screen was their fastest growing medium of consumption, noting that the category was growing 90 percent year-over-year, something that the company’s new YouTube TV service is undoubtedly going to add to. The company didn’t have any new details to share on desktop video viewing habits."

Source:  TechCrunch, 22nd June 2017

Americans spend more time alone as they get older

Source:  The Atlas, June 2017

Cutting ad load times boosts ad revenue

"Cutting down the amount of code on its webpages has helped Meredith make more revenue per visitor.
Meredith, which publishes women’s lifestyle titles including Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, began an audit of its code a year ago. This led it to remove several vendors and shift code from browsers to servers. The code audit helped Meredith speed up its ad-rendering times by 15-20 percent across desktop and mobile, which, along with an increase in native advertising, contributed to a 20 percent increase in revenue per visit, said Matt Minoff, Meredith’s chief digital officer.
The results were especially dramatic on mobile, where Meredith gets about 60 percent of its traffic and where speed is especially important: There, getting ads to load faster helped drive a 74 percent increase in revenue per visit. Meredith wouldn’t share raw numbers."

Source:  Digiday, 21st June 2017

Mobile screen size correlates to mobile gaming session lengths

Source:  Blog post from Flurry, 20th June 2017

Most time spent watching video is for content over 20 mins

Source:  Ooyala's Video Index Q1 2017, June 2017
Note 1- This is time spent, not number of videos
Note 2 - Ooyala can only measure what is in its network, so as far as I know this does not include YouTube or Facebook.  If it did 'short' videos would surely be much higher

Instagram stories has 250m daily active users

"The company reported Tuesday that Stories, the feature that lets users share videos and posts that disappear after 24 hours, is now used by 250 million people every day. That means Stories added 50 million new users in two months, one month faster than its jump from 150 million to 200 million users.
Instagram is also changing its live video feature so users can now share those live videos to their Stories. Originally, live videos on Instagram disappeared as soon as the broadcast ended, but now they could exist for up to 24 hours."

[...]

"The new milestone means almost 100 million more people use Instagram Stories than use Snapchat, the actual inventor of the Stories format. That’s a bummer for Snapchat, because they clearly invented something that people want to use — Instagram has just scaled it more quickly."

Source:  Recode, 20th June 2017

The revenue from eSports is expected to rise to over $450m in 2017

"The revenue from eSports is expected to rise from $130m (£100m) in 2012 to $465m (£365m) this year, according to Newzoo, the eSports data expert. The global audience will reach 385 million this year, made up of 191 million regular viewers and a further 194 million occasional viewers. ESports stars such as the South Korean player Faker, who has just turned 21, are already paid up to £2m a year, and that’s not including bonuses and sponsorship. But will they ever compete with, say, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo? And should we be worried if they do?"

Source:  The Guardian, 16th June 2017

'TV advertising is 5 times more effective at driving KPIs than online display'

"In a study published by Neustar commissioned by Turner and Horizon Media, TV remains the most effective way to advertise. The research, which extensively examines the effect of advertising across the major marketing channels, showed that dollar for dollar, TV provides the most scale and delivers the highest return on ad spend from both a sales and awareness perspective.
“This research reaffirms that television continues to be the biggest driver of marketing success today, yet there remains a lot of room to grow even further as the industry and consumer habits shift,” said Beth Rockwood, ‎VP, Portfolio Research and Chief of Staff, Turner. “Recognizing that growth opportunity, Turner has been one of the industry’s biggest proponents for reimagining the experience of television – developing new audience targeting methods, as well as forging innovative content partnerships, to deliver highly engaging, unexpected experiences to fans.”
The insights were derived from Neustar’s advanced analytics software, which ran thousands of models spanning key advertising categories — automotive, financial services, CPG, retail, telecom, theatrical movies, QSR and consumer electronics — and used seven years’ worth of data. Ultimately, the research found that for a $1 million investment, television’s lift is consistently 7 times better than paid search and 5 times better than online display advertising."

Source:  Neustar blog, 1st June 2017

Click the link to download the full report.  KPIs included measures like sales and new account opens.

Pokemon GO has sent more than 500 million visitors to McDonalds in Japan

"Pokémon GO-maker Niantic says it has driven 500 million visitors to sponsored locations like McDonald’s Japan where gamers can score a special virtual good. But it never said how much those sponsors paid per visitor delivered by the game.
But in an interview published yesterday by Brazil’s Globo newspaper, Niantic VP of strategic partnerships Mathieu de Fayet said (translated), “The idea is to offer players items at certain locations, and partners pay $0.15 for each visitor attracted to the game. And we’ve already attracted 500 million visitors. In Japan [at the game’s peak last summer], each activated McDonald’s store attracted 2,000 visitors a day.”
However, we followed up with Niantic, and a spokesperson claimed that $0.15 number is incorrect, possibly due to a translation error. The company says “Niantic’s cost per visit (CPV) model visit has partners spending less than $.50 / daily unique visit to sponsored locations.”
At $0.15 per visit the math would indicate that the sponsorships could have racked up $75 million in revenue for Niantic, while the high bound of $0.50 would have generated $250 million.
Given that McDonald’s Japan activated 3,000 stores in the country, that price would mean that at the game’s peak, the fast-food giant would have paid out roughly $900,000 per day to Niantic for the Pokémon GO sponsorship at $0.15 per visitor, or $3 million per day at $0.50 each."

Source:  TechCrunch, 31st May 2017

How the 5 biggest tech companies make money

Source:  Yahoo Finance / Business Insider, 26th May 2017

Sony has sold more than 1 million PlayStation VR headsets

"Sony has now sold more than 1 million PlayStation VR headsets, the company announced today. The news follows a reveal back in February that the PSVR had topped 915,000 units sold since its debut last October. It puts PSVR ahead of direct competitors like the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift — according to research firm SuperData, the two sold 420,000 and 243,000 units respectively by the end of 2016 — but still well back of Samsung’s Gear VR, which has sold more than 5 million units globally. Shawn Layden, president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, admits there’s still plenty of work to be done, especially given the large install base of PS4 owners, which is approaching 60 million. “It’s still just a million units,” he says."

Source:  The Verge, 5th June 2017

Visitors spend approx 35% more time with pages that use Google AMP

"Chartbeat says visitors to web pages that load with Google AMP are spending 35 percent more time with that content on average than with standard mobile web pages.
On average, visitors spend 48.2 seconds with pages found through Google search that load with AMP, compared to 35.6 seconds on average with standard mobile pages found through search.
That means pages that load with accelerated mobile pages software (that’s what AMP stands for) are more valuable to advertisers, because visitors that spend more time with content spend more time scrolling through ads."

Source:  Recode, 5th June 2017

Apple users take a trillion photos a year

Apple users take a trillion photos a year. Peak for film was around 80bn, in 1999

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) June 5, 2017

Source:  Stat announced at Apple's WWDC, June 2017

17% of Daily Mail readers who voted in the June 2017 General Election voted for Labour

Source:  YouGov, 13th June 2017

Mobile Subscriptions as a percent of Population by Region, Q1 2017

Source:  Ericsson's Mobility Report, Q1 2017

Mary Meeker's 2017 Internet Trends

It's always good, but this year Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins has really excelled herself

Internet Trends 2017 Report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

A quick key:

1) Global Internet Trends = Solid…Slowing Smartphone Growth 4-9
2) Online Advertising (+ Commerce) = Increasingly Measurable + Actionable 10-80
3) Interactive Games = Motherlode of Tech Product Innovation + Modern Learning 80-150
4) Media = Distribution Disruption @ Torrid Pace 151-177
5) The Cloud = Accelerating Change Across Enterprises 178-192
6) China Internet = Golden Age of Entertainment + Transportation 193-231
(Provided by Hillhouse Capital)
7) India Internet = Competition Continues to Intensify…Consumers Winning 232-287
8) Healthcare @ Digital Inflection Point 288-319
9) Global Public / Private Internet Companies… 320-333
10) Some Macro Thoughts… 334-351
11) Closing Thoughts… 352-353