Approximately 60% of gamers say they have bought some sort of virtual good within a game

"Free-to-play games, where you can play a game for free but are then encouraged to buy virtual goods such as weapons, have taken off. Even though this business model is like a return to the expensive old days when gamers paid a quarter for minutes of play, hardcore gamers are embracing virtual goods.
About 88 percent of 4,816 gamers surveyed said they had purchased some form of digital content, including music, movies and games. About 60 percent of respondents said they had purchased a virtual good inside a game (where the virtual good was not a full game), according to a new report by market researcher DFC Intelligence and virtual goods platform company Live Gamer.
Many of the virtual goods games fall into the category of MMO Lite, or relatively casual massively multiplayer online games. These games don’t have the high monthly fees of World of Warcraft, which charges $14.95 a month. DFC Intelligence forecasts that the North American and European MMO Lite market will grow from $800 million in 2009 to $3 billion by 2015.
Gamers in both Europe and North America are now comfortable with buying digital content, the report said. Buying virtual characters, weapons, decorations or other items is now common in games ranging from Zynga’s FarmVille on Facebook to Nexon’s Combat Arms. These sorts of online games have hundreds of millions of users around the world."
Source: Research from DFC Intelligence and virtual goods platform company Live Gamer, reported by VentureBeat, 29th March 2010

Social gamer demographics for UK, US, France and Germany

Click to enlarge

Source: GamesIndustry.com using data from TNS, 2010 - more data on the site

Pre-tax losses for The Times & The Sunday Times hit £87m for the year to June 2009

"Pre-tax losses for the Times and the Sunday Times widened to £87.7m for the year to 28 June 2009, from £50.2m in the previous 12 months.
Statutory accounts filed to Companies House have also revealed that at News Group Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that publishes the Sun and the News of the World, profits fell to £40.3m, down from £44.7m, during the 12-month period.
Turnover at Times Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that publishes the Times and Sunday Times, was down 13.4% year on year to £385.5m. News Group Newspapers' turnover was down 1.4% year on year to £617.9m.
The company blamed the widening losses at Times Newspapers on declining advertising revenues and said its directors expected the general level of activity to continue "for the foreseeable future"."
Source: The Guardian, 23rd March 2010

US newspaper ad revenues (print & online) fell by 27% in 2009

"Combined print and online advertising revenue fell 27.2 percent in 2009 to 27.56 billion dollars from 37.84 billion dollars the previous year, according to NAA figures released on Wednesday.
Print advertising revenue dropped 28.6 percent in 2009 to 24.82 billion dollars while online advertising revenue declined by 11.8 percent to 2.74 billion dollars, the NAA said.
Classified advertising revenue was particularly hard hit, falling by 38.1 percent last year to 6.17 billion dollars.
Free online sites such as Craigslist have devastated classified advertising since the ads reached a peak of 19.6 billion dollars in 2000, the year print advertising revenue also hit an all-time high of 48.67 billion dollars."
Source: Newspaper Association of America, reported by AFP, 25th March 2010

Lady Gaga's online videos have generated more than 1 billion views in aggregate

"Lady Gaga is the most-watched franchise in history with Poker Face, Bad Romance, and Just Dance. She's also the first and only franchise from any category to surpass 1 billion views. Vampire romance Twilight isn't far behind, with New Moon and Twilight sinking their teeth into a combined 980 million views. Soulja Boy comes in third, with 860 million views, helped by the boost from Crank Dat's 720+ million views. Beyonce and Michael Jackson follow with 740 and 730 million views, respectively."
Source: Research from Visible Measures, reported in their blog, 23rd March 2010

US iPhone game sales are estimated to exceed PSP game sales

Click to enlarge

"NPD Group shows that combined U.S. console and portable software revenue was approximately $11 billion and $9.9 billion in 2008 and 2009, respectively. After estimating portable sales, we were able to back into console revenues. We then added our own estimates for iPhone game revenue, detailed later, which total $115 million and $500 million for 2008 and 2009, respectively.
With these figures, our main finding is that iPhone (and iPod touch) is a gaming platform to be reckoned with. Controlling 5% revenue of a $10 billion industry in just a year and a half is significant. From a market share perspective, console games lost ground to portable platforms and iPhone. While the downturn in the economy may have dampened sales of the more expensive console games category, there is no denying that iPhone has generated substantial revenue and entered strongly into a mature industry.
More interesting to us than iPhone's impact on U.S. gaming was its impact on the portable category, which we estimate totaled $2.25 billion and $2.55 billion in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Michael Pachter, managing director at Wedbush Morgan Securities and a prominent video game analyst, suggests "iPod touch is the most dangerous thing that ever happened" to game publishers. As prices come down for the iPod Touch, and games sold through the App Store continue to have lower price points, more of the young gaming generation may switch to Apple devices over Sony PSP and Nintendo DS for gaming. Further, Apple has squarely positioned the iPod Touch as a gaming machine.
From what we calculate, consumers are downloading iPhone games in droves. Comparing iPhone against Sony and Nintendo games sales shows that Apple has taken nearly one fifth of the portable market in 2009, largely at the expense of Sony PSP. With Sony PSP Go, Sony's latest effort to revive its portable sales, having fallen short of expectations, Sony finds itself now challenged by two competitors in this segment."
Source: Blog post by Flurry, 22nd March 2010

Spotify is used by 15-18% of the Swedish population

"The conversion numbers are getting better. "We're now in six countries, and have more than 320,000 paying subscribers," Ek relayed. Back of the envelope math? Paying subs are floating at around 4.6 percent, given a top-line estimate of 7 million users (also offered by Ek). Last month at the New Music Seminar in Los Angeles, Ek disclosed a paid subscriber number of 250,000.
Other stats from the chat? Spotify currently houses 100 million playlists, of which 30 million are albums. In Sweden, the app is used by 15-18 percent of the population, and the resulting swell is happening alongside album sales increases."
Source: Daniel Ek of Spotify, speaking at SXSW, reported by DigitalMusicNews, 17th March 2010

Only 25 artists made more than $10,000 from on-demand music streams in the US in 2009

"Billboard analysis shows that even the amount of money earned by top artists from on-demand streams and noninteractive streams (such as Internet radio) is, in plain terms, shockingly low.
When Billboard calculated the rankings for its annual Money Makers report, the music trade magazine assigned a value to each digital download or song streamed based on information about labels' licensing deals with those services and assumptions made about standard artist contracts.
The results show that of the more than 100 artists examined to compile the Money Makers list, only 10 made more than $2,000 from noninteractive streams in 2009, with Beyonce topping the list with an underwhelming $5,000. Only 25 artists made more than $1,000 from on-demand streams, with Michael Jackson topping that list -- as the result of a barrage of interest after his death -- with $10,000. Neither totals include any due publishing royalties and all are for U.S. activity only.
Compare that with the money that artists make from other digital channels. Digital album download sales generated sales of at least $200,000 for 13 artists, led by Jackson with $800,000, while another 26 sold $100,000 or more. Three acts pulled in more than $1 million in digital track sales for the year, led by Lady Gaga, with 33 making more than $100,000 from digital single sales.
Even tethered subscription downloads -- tracks downloaded from services like Rhapsody that must have their licenses renewed monthly -- showed better numbers. Nickelback, Jackson and Taylor Swift each made about $500,000 from such services, leading a field of 26 acts that earned in excess of $100,000."
Source: Billboard/Reuters, 26th February 2010

Spotify has more than 7m users in Europe

"Spotify has more than 7m users around Europe, 250,000 of whom pay for the service. Of those, “pretty much all” are subscribers to its £9.99/€9.99 ad-free service, which also allows smartphone owners to access its internet-based library of songs."
Source: Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, speaking at the Financial Times Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference, reported by the Financial Times, 2nd March 2010

31% of the videos on YouTube that are embedded on other platforms are music videos

Click to enlarge

Source: Inside YouTube videos, by sysomos, February 2010.
sysomos analysed 2.5m YouTube videos to produce the report. This only deals with videos embedded on to sites like Blogger.

FarmVille players exchanged 690m virtual Valentines gifts in February 2010

"Game players can also exchange special virtual presents for the holiday -- in essence, small pictures of flowers or heart-shaped boxes. FarmVille users have given one another 690 million valentines since the promotion began Monday, according to Zynga Game Network Inc., the game's maker."
Source: Zynga Game Network, reported by LA Times, 13th February 2010

The internet is the third most popular news source in America

"The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get their daily news, according to a new survey conducted jointly by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio. Getting news online fits into a broad pattern of news consumption by Americans; six in ten (59%) get news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day."
Source: Understanding the Participary News Consumer, Pew Internet & American Life Project, 1st March 2010