Online ad spend hit $26bn in the US in 2010

Click to enlarge

"The IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report for the full year 2010 and Q4 2010 both showed record results in the United States. Released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and prepared by PwC US, the latest report puts all 2010 Internet advertising revenues at a record $26 billion, up 15% from 2009. Fourth quarter revenue also hit new highs at $7.45 billion, up 19% from Q4 2009 and 15% from Q3 2010.
Highlights of the report include:
- There were record numbers for the yearly advertising revenue as well as record quarterly highs in the Q4 2010.
- The most popular ad format in 2010 was search which represented 46% of revenue and saw 12% growth from last year.
- Sponsorships saw the most growth with an 88% increase over last year and 142% increase in the fourth quarter alone.
- Display-related advertising – which includes Digital Video Commercials, Ad banners/display ads, sponsorships and rich media – continued to grow this year, totaling nearly $10 billion with an increase of 24% over 2009.
- The results exhibit revenue growth for the past five consecutive quarters.
- The Annual Report marks the debut of estimated US mobile ad revenue for 2010: between $550 and $650 million.
“As the latest IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report amply demonstrates, brand advertisers and marketers have adopted the power of digital media as a central element of their campaigns,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “Consumers have shifted more of their time to digital media – watching television shows and movies online – and advertisers now accept this multifaceted medium as a key component for reaching their targets.”
“With a strong rebound from 2009, the $26 billion spent on Internet advertising points to a continued focus on digital media ad spend, with dollars catching up to the eyeballs. More time spent online, especially with increases in digital video and social media, has certainly helped to fuel the continued growth,” said David Silverman, PwC Assurance partner.
“We now have had five consecutive quarters of growth since the great recession impacted interactive advertising in 2009,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President, Industry Services, IAB. “The record-breaking revenue in Q4 2010 and the total year indicate that interactive advertising has weathered the storm and then some."

Source:  Data compiled by the IAB & PwC, reported in a press release from the IAB, 13th April 2011

Hilton Worldwide received over 100,000 room bookings via it's mobile app in 2010

"Hilton Worldwide received over 100,000 room bookings via its mobile applications in 2010, demonstrating the revenue-generating potential of a rounded social media strategy for hotels, the brand has said.
Speaking at the latest Cornell Hospitality Research Summit (CHRS) in the United States, Hilton’s senior VP of corporate strategy Kevin Jacobs said the hotel group had “gone all in” with its social media strategy, which included a focus on mobile applications.
“Since over 80 per cent of Hilton’s guests travel with a mobile device and 40 per cent use it to search travel, mobile apps make sense,” he said.
Hilton’s mobile apps have seen more than 340,000 downloads, he added, and guests used them to book well over 100,000 room-nights in 2010, with revenue up 200 per cent."
Source:  Big Hospitality, 12th April 2011

Three times as many people stream music videos as download music

"Here's some surprising good news for video aggregator YouTube: More Internet users watch music videos for free on YouTube than download music either through official sources like iTunes or even illegally. That discovery comes from Nielsen, who polled more than 25,000 users about their online music habits towards the end of last year.
Nielsen's report on the subject, "The Hyper-Fragmented World of Music," says that three times as many people stream music videos as download music, adding that audio-only streaming is also more popular than legal digital downloads ("Unfortunately," the report continues, "subscription models have yet to gain popularity with users"). Legal digital downloads are nonetheless globally popular, with the format experiencing double digit growth in Europe."

Source:  Research from Nielsen, reported by Techland, 12th April 2011

See the full Nielsen Study here

Rebecca Black's Friday video hit 100m views after 63 days

Other stats:
2,104,000 Comments
260,000 Likes
2,07,000 Dislikes
Source:  YouTube, retrieved 13th April 2011

StumbleUpon gets one billion 'stumbles' a month

"In January, we reported that StumbleUpon had broken a new record with 27.5 million stumbles in one day. At the beginning of this month, we interviewed Marc Leibowitz, StumbleUpon’s VP of Marketing and Business Development who told us that since 2009, StumbleUpon has grown from 6 million to 15 million users. Recommendations have tripled, now surpassing 800 million every month. Each month, over 3-4 million users are active on StumbleUpon, with the primary base being in the US.
Today, they’ve just crossed a new threshold: 1 billion stumbles per month.  StumbleUpon is now driving billions of visitors to websites that have been “Stumbled.”"

Source:  TheNextWeb, 6th April 2011

Bing has over 30% of searches in the US

"Experian® Hitwise®, a part of Experian Marketing Services, announced today that Google accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 2, 2011. Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent of searches for the month, with Yahoo! Search and Bing receiving 15.69 percent and 14.32 percent, respectively. The remaining 69 search engines1 in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.58 percent of U.S. searches."

Source:  Press Release from Experian Hitwise, 11th April 2011

TripAdvisor has 45m reviews & opinions, and over 6m photos

"Milestones in the history of TripAdvisor:
- November 2000: http://www.tripadvisor.com goes live
- March 2002: The site is profitable
- April 2004: Sold to IAC
- August 2005: Part of Expedia, Inc.
- January 2005: The first hurdle of a million reviews and opinions is achieved.
- April 2008: 15 million reviews and opinions
- July 2009: 25 million reviews and opinions
- May 2010: 35 million reviews and opinions
- August 2010: TripAdvisor becomes the first travel site to have more than 40 million monthly users* to become the world's largest travel site.
- October 2010: 40 million reviews and opinions
- 2010: TripAdvisor launches 10 new sites around the world
- March 2011: 45 million reviews and opinions covering:
1) 85,000+ destinations
2) 474,000+ hotels
3) 100,000+ vacation rentals
4) 135,000+ attractions
5) 675,000+ restaurants
6) With 6,000,000+ candid traveller photos"
Source:  Press release from TripAdvisor, 12th April 2011
Note:  I'm not sure what constitutes an 'opinion' but I suspect it includes all comments on the forum

Google activates 350,000 Android devices each day

"I think general trends include the proliferation of mobile devices. We have seen Google is now activating 350,000 Android devices daily. That's up from 300,000 several months ago and roughly 60,000 a year ago, so a significant acceleration in mobile. We are seeing Google also serve over two billion ad impressions a day through AdMob, which serves display advertising into applications on mobile devices. We are seeing Google post over $1 billion in revenue from mobile alone, over $2.5 billion in display, so we think display advertising is also at a big inflection point as companies like Procter And Gamble and other consumer products companies are opening up their budgets and spending more online. Twelve years ago that money may have gone to Yahoo! or AOL. I think it's now being focused on social media platforms too, on sites such as Facebook or Twitter, as well as Google, which offers some performance-based display advertising products."

Source:  Brian J. Pitz is an Executive Director and a Senior Research Analyst in equity research at UBS Investment Bank, interviewed on Yahoo Finance, 11th April 2011

U2's 360 Tour is the highest grossing tour in history

"It takes 120 lorries to transport, has a 50-metre tall sound system and cost more than any tour in the history of music. But it appears that U2's 360° extravaganza was worth the investment as it has become the highest grossing tour ever, beating the record set by the Rolling Stones.
The Irish band's first tour in three years, which kicked off in June 2009 at Barcelona's Camp Nou stadium, made it past the $558m (£341m) world record after their concert in São Paulo, Brazil, with 20 more gigs to go. The Stones pulled in $558m (£341m) for their Bigger Bang tour between 2005 and 2007.
By the time the U2 tour ends this July, the band will have played to more than 3 million fans in more than three dozen cities around the world and will have made an estimated $700m.
U2's manager, Paul McGuinness, said he and the band were proud of the tour. "That dollar figure for the gross looks enormous," he said. "Of course I can't tell you what the net is, but I can tell you that the band spend enormous sums on production for their audience. Fans all over the world agree that a ticket to U2 360° is good value for money."
Estimated to have cost more than $100m, 360° was already set to be the band's most expensive tour, with the transportation of the stage alone estimated to cost $750,000 a day whether or not the band played. It was projected to gross $750m by the end of 2010, eclipsing takings from the 2005-06 Vertigo tour, which earned U2 $389m."
Source:  The Guardian, 11th April 2011

Motherhood drives smartphone ownership

"More than half (53%) of the women surveyed said they purchased a smartphone as a direct result of becoming a mom. During this transition to motherhood, the most important features of her phone changed from her address book and text messaging to her camera, up 78% to #1, and video camera, which increased by 167% to #2. Apps, which weren’t even on her top ten list of important mobile features before she became a mom, increased 67% to #3 on the list. More than half (52%) of the moms surveyed have ten or more apps downloaded, with nearly 25% of the apps being for her kids."
Source:  Press release from Babycenter, 29th March 2011

The mobile version of ESPNCricInfo accounted for 45% of all of the site's page views on the day of the Cricket World Cup Final

"ESPN says the mobile version of its ESPNcricinfo site accounted for 45 percent (45 million) of all the brand’s page views during the April 2 final, in which India beat Pakistan. That’s the highest share of any of the digital media through which ESPN covered the sport, and doesn’t even include the app versions of ESPNcricinfo.
It’s significant that mobile use outweighed desktop use. ESPN claims ESPNcricinfo’s mobile site took 63.6 percent of the global mobile audience in its industry segment - far outweighing the 36.1 percent share ESPNcricinfo claims it took in the desktop web market.
That effect came from Indians, who supplied the largest slice of mobile traffic to ESPNcricinfo (377.3 million page views through the tournament). There are around 700 million mobile phones in use in India - nearly the entire population of 1.15 billion. Many of the handsets are unsophisticated, but broadcasters nevertheless supply subscription audio content. In neighbouring Pakistan, BBC Urdu offered five, two-minute World Cup audio reports every hour for on-demand listening by dial-up during the competition."
Source:  ContentSutra, 11th April 2011

Shazam lost over £600,000 on revenues of nearly £11m in the year to June 2010

"Mobile discovery service Shazam has published its financial results for the year ended 30 June 2010.
The company reported revenues of £10.6 million, and a loss after tax of £635,366 in the documents, filed with Companies House in the UK.
That compares to revenues of £7.3 million in the previous financial year (ended 30 June 2009), when Shazam reported a loss after tax of £89,943.
In its latest financial year, Shazam’s administration expenses were £10.5 million, having grown from £6.6 million in the previous year. Of the £10.5 million, £4 million went on wages and salaries."

Source:  Music Ally, 7th April 2011