UK digital ad spend rose 13.8% Y-o-Y to £5.56bn in H1 2017

"Driven by the rise in popularity of people watching online video, advertisers spent more on video ads than banner ads for the first ever time – according to the latest Internet Advertising Bureau UK / PwC Digital Adspend report.
In the first half of 2017, advertisers spent £699 million on video ads – a 46% year-on-year rise – whilst spend on banner ads increased by just under 2% to £685 million. Video is the fastest-growing ad format and now accounts for 35% of all spend going on display advertising.
The IAB’s CEO Jon Mew says, “The time people spend watching online video has grown tremendously over the last few years, so it’s little wonder that video is now the fastest-growing ad format as advertisers look to tap into the changing way people consume content.” 
The time people spend watching short video clips appears to have almost trebled over the last three years (Sept 2014 to Sept 2017): from 51 minutes to 2 hrs 21 minutes per week, according to YouGov data¹.
Within video advertising, spend on outstream2/social in-feed nearly doubled and is now the most popular format, accounting for 52% of video spend (£363 million), overtaking pre-and post-roll ads which account for 44% (£309 million).
Dave Counsell, Digital Trading Director, the7stars, said: “There’s no doubt that video is digital’s most important and powerful format. Growth in online consumption, improvements in measurement, quality of placements, targeting and creativity are now available alongside its unrivalled effectiveness. It’s an extremely exciting time to witness the strong results video is providing for advertisers.”
Display advertising as a whole grew 18% to £2 billion, whilst search grew 15% to £2.8 billion and classifieds remained flat at £692 million. Thus, overall digital ad spend grew 13.8% to £5.56bn in the first half of 2017.
With half of UK internet time now being spent on smartphones3, mobile’s share of digital ad spend has risen from 35% to 43%, or £2.37 billion. Mobile’s year-on-year growth was 38% and now accounts for 57% of all display ad spend, 70% of video spend and 83% of social media spend.
Ad spend on social media sites grew 42% to £1.05 billion, accounting for over half (53%) of the display ad market."

Source:  Data from the IAB & PwC, 17th October 2017

UberEats is bigger than Uber in several markets

"UberEats stands out even from the rest of the company’s fast-growing — and unprofitable — business. The delivery service, available in more than 120 markets globally, sometimes eclipses Uber’s main ride-hailing business in markets like Tokyo; Taipei, Taiwan; and Seoul, South Korea, the company said. The number of trips taken by UberEats drivers grew by more than 24 times between March 2016 and March 2017. As of July, UberEats was profitable in 27 of the 108 cities where it operated. Uber declined to reveal the service’s revenue."

Source:  New York Times, 23rd September 2017

More than 80% of store transactions in Sweden are cashless

"For a minimalist society like Sweden, cash has long been an unwanted appendage.
“We haven’t accepted cash for maybe a year and a half,” says Märta Skilimark, manager at Swedish coffee and tea store Johan & Nyström. “Our Swedish customers are very used to it. It’s basically tourists who are surprised we don’t take cash.”
According to the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank, more than 80 per cent of store transactions are cashless. Similarly, from 2013 to 2014, Sweden’s cash-to-GDP ratio shrank 5.8 per cent as increasing quantities of physical money fell out of circulation. With digital payment systems such as Swish and iZettle having taken the country by storm, cash is falling by the wayside."

Source:  Raconteur, 27th Sept 2017

BuzzFeed's live morning show AM to DM is getting about 1m viewers each day

"Twitter’s making a big push into live video, with deals for pro sports, talk shows, network TV premieres and more. But what does a real newscast look like if you rethink it for Twitter? BuzzFeed’s AM to DM offers a possible answer — and it’s a fun one.
I should say up front that I’m super-biased here, even by the debased standards of media writing about media. One of the show’s hosts, Saeed Jones, was my roommate a few years ago, while the other, Isaac Fitzgerald, is a close friend. (He was the one who suggested that Jones and I should live together.)
Still, I was far from the only one watching after the show premiered last week. AM to DM was trending on Twitter, reaching No. 1 in the U.S. and No. 4 globally. In fact, BuzzFeed says the show averaged about 1 million unique viewers each day, with clips being viewed a total of 10 million times. And it’s a young audience, with 78 percent of daily live viewers under 35."

Source:  TechCrunch, 4th October 2017

Note - Not exactly sure of what counts as a viewer - would someone scrolling past a re-tweet count?
See AM2DM here

70% of brands have influencer Programmes on Instagram

Source:  Data from L2, reported in a blog post, 2nd October 2017
The top 3 categories are Luxury, Activewear and Beauty.

60% of Snapchat users create content on the platform daily

"Snapchat expects over a trillion Snaps to be sent this year — roughly 3 billion per day, with daily active users opening the app 20 times per day.
Sixty percent of its daily users create content on the platform daily, and more than one third of daily users engage with Snapchat's augmented reality technology — putting Snapchat far ahead of both Apple and Facebook in AR use. By comparison, Facebook has seen a decline in page engagement.
In Q2, users under 25 spent more than 40 minutes per day on the app and users 25 and over spent more than 20 minutes per day on the app. By comparison, Instagram users under 25 spend 32 minutes per day on the app, and users over 25 spend 24 minutes a day on the app."

Source:  Axios, 6th October 2017

Online dating is the second most popular way for heterosexual couples to meet

"Loose ties have traditionally played a key role in meeting partners. While most people were unlikely to date one of their best friends, they were highly likely to date people who were linked with their group of friends; a friend of a friend, for example. In the language of network theory, dating partners were embedded in each other’s networks.
Indeed, this has long been reflected in surveys of the way people meet their partners: through mutual friends, in bars, at work, in educational institutions, at church, through their families, and so on.
Online dating has changed that. Today, online dating is the second most common way for heterosexual couples to meet. For homosexual couples, it is far and away the most popular.
That has significant implications. “People who meet online tend to be complete strangers,” say Ortega and Hergovich. And when people meet in this way, it sets up social links that were previously nonexistent.
The question that Ortega and Hergovich investigate is how this changes the racial diversity of society. “Understanding the evolution of interracial marriage is an important problem, for intermarriage is widely considered a measure of social distance in our societies,” they say."

Source:  MIT Technology Review, 10th October 2017

Instagram has 800m MAUs and 2m active advertisers

Excited to announce 800M users, 500M daily users, and 2M advertisers on Instagram. Honored to be a small part of this team.

— Kevin Weil (@kevinweil) September 25, 2017