Archive for the ‘eMarketer’ tag
Will Google and the FTC Go In for a Rematch?
The FTC is reportedly investigating Google for anti-competitive actions in the $9.64-billion U.S. display advertising market.
An inquiry in display advertising might look initially like more of a stretch than the FTC’s failed challenge to the company on search and search advertising. But Google is growing like a weed in the display advertising market, analysts say.
The FTC hasn’t confirmed whether or not it is investigating Google’s display — essentially non-search — advertising business.
In 2008, Google earned just 3 percent of U.S. display ad revenue, according to eMarketer. but in the first quarter of this year, it brought in 24 percent, according to IDC. Facebook, with 9 percent, was the company’s closest competitor. (eMarketer’s data from 2012 indicates that Google still trailed Facebook slightly.)
Google has automated more of the advertising process than its competitors have and can provide better analytics to marketers, based, also, on the data it has on users from its various services.
“They are the only vendor that has the entire advertising value chain under one roof. If you take all the advertising technology ‘stack,’ or value chain, there’s a lot of segments where Google is dominant. It’s not a monopoly per se, but if I was a regulator I would keep a close eye on it, because the sum is more than the parts,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst at IDC.
As mobile advertising grows, Google also sits in a dominant position there as well. The company has simply added a mobile advertising checkbox to its automated ad placement system, leveraging its dominance on desktop to make it a major player in mobile advertising.
“Google has a huge advantage because they have a huge distribution with both publishers and users,” said Weide.
Given Google’s reach, advertisers have little incentive to look to other ad networks.
But it’s one thing for regulators to look into a market trend and another for them to sue the company for anti-competitive practices. To make antitrust charges stick, regulators would have to demonstrate that Google was actively using its might to squelch competitors and that the result was bad for consumers.
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Welcome To The One Screen World
Channel surfing got weird.
There was this episode of All-Star Celebrity Apprentice this season that revolved around each team’s ability to create a television ad for the consumer electronics company, LG. It wasn’t really about a particular model of television or kitchen appliance. It wasn’t about some new-fangled technology that would allow their washing machines to clean your clothes through some kind of micro-parcel technology. It was all about how connected these devices have now become. The television, the smartphone, the washer and dryer and yes, even the refrigerator are now "smart." Smart in a connected sense. Smart in not just being connected to the Internet, but in how each device now has a touchscreen that offers up all kinds of information – from operating data to content (like recipes based on what’s inside the fridge). Screens are everywhere. Screens are connected. Screens are mobile. Screens are increasingly getting cheaper and more ubiquitous.
Welcome to the one screen world.
Not too long ago, I was asked to give a presentation on the state of digital media and how well brands are intersecting the worlds of marketing and technology. Prior to my closing keynote presentation, there was a panel discussion about the state of media. One senior media executive was discussing the power of a four screen world. I thought that he had made a mistake. I was familiar with the concept of three screens (television, computer and mobile), but four screens was something new. Eventually, he unveiled that the fourth screen was the tablet. It’s still somewhat shocking to think that the iPad was first introduced on April 3rd, 2010, and we now live in a world where more iPads are being sold than any PC manufacturer sold of their entire PC line (and this has been a constantly growing trend since 2012). In fact, all of this shores up to the notion that it’s not about three screens or four screens. It’s about one screen: whichever screen is in front of me. In a world where screens are connected and everywhere, the notion of even counting them seems arbitrary, at best. Don’t believe me, speak to somebody who is currently sporting Google glass.
The true tale of a nineteen year old.
My niece is nineteen years old. When she was sixteen years old, she would come home school, take out her laptop, plop down on the couch, lift the computer lid, turn on the TV, plug in her earbuds, so that she could listen to music on her iPod, and her BlackBerry was always within reach. From afar it looked like she was running NORAD. Fast-forward a mere three years, and now she comes home from school, takes out her iPad… and that’s it. All of that core content is now readily available on the one screen (in one way, shape or form). From content (in text, images, audio and video) to communications (chatting with friends on Skype or via Google Hangouts)… it’s all readily available on this one device that rules them all. Yes, we are seeing a massive uptick in consumers who are using companion devices (meaning, they are watching TV but have their smartphones nearby), and while the industry does refer to it as a companion device, the truth is that you’re not watching the television with one eyeball and your iPhone with the other. The only screen that still matters, is the screen that is in front of you.
It’s bigger than you think.
While most people are busy paying attention to the fact that Yahoo just bought Tumblr for over one billion dollars, they’re forgetting something profound about the last acquisition of chaotic proportions (when Facebook bought Instagram for close to one billion dollars as well). In the Newsweek article, Instagram Will Take Facebook Into the Mobile Age (April 16th, 2012), journalist Dan Lyons so appropriately wrote: "The Internet was all about websites. Then came the iPhone and Android, and today the only reason anyone creates a website is to promote a cool new mobile app." And here we are, today, with over a billion smartphones in the world and they are outnumbering the PCs. Within the next decade, virtually all mobile phones will be smartphone, meaning 6 billion people will be constantly connected. And, as if the exponential growth of the one screen world is not scary enough, we currently live in a world where more individuals have a mobile subscription than access to electricity or safe drinking water (more on that here: Putting Global Mobile In Context).
So, how are the brands stacking up?
Not so well, thanks for asking. According to a recent survey by Adobe, 45% of marketers still don’t have a mobile presence, and this is happening at the exact same time that eMarketer is reporting that 15% of online retail sales will take place this year via a mobile device (sales will reach nearly $39 billion in 2013, which is up over 56% from 2012). If ever there was a time to embrace the notion of the one screen world, this would be it. Businesses are still splitting hairs of what is the Web, what is the smartphone, what is the tablet and what is TV in a world where consumers are shoring these screens up into one. They have a constant and consistent desire to simply have the content they want on the device they want, when they want it. Sadly, most marketers are thinking about how they are going to advertise on a mobile screen, instead of hunkering down and figuring out what the customer’s new expectations are when everything from their washer and dryer to their television and smartphone are hyper-connected to one another. Instead of curling up into a ball or sticking the proverbial head in the sand, what we’re truly seeing in this day and age is a massive global opportunity – unlike anything in business that we have seen before – to take the mobile lead. By the looks and sounds of the data and the exponential growth in consumer demands for these devices and the content on them, the one screen world is poised to make websites, social media and e-commerce combined look like a joke in comparison.
Are you ready? Is your brand ready?
The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Harvard Business Review. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:
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Two Terms Marketers Need for Today’s Media Landscape
We thought that the Internet would bring with it a whole wave of new media disruption. We were unprepared for just how massive the disruption has been.
You needn’t look any farther than this one staggering statistic to understand the change that has been afoot in the past short while: Google‘s advertising revenue is larger than that of the entire print industry’s revenue. In the past short while, we have seen the rise in new ways for advertisers to connect with consumers like never before. You can’t throw a marketer down a flight of stairs these days without hearing the terms, real-time bidding, big data, retargeting and native advertising tumbling off of their tongues. It has become so pervasive that it’s beginning to make social media, mobile marketing and plain-old digital advertising seem somewhat antiquated. With this, we’re seeing an increasing amount of media budgets shifting from traditional channels to digital advertising. So, where do you, the business leader, place those ad dollars? Do you spend them with the latest and greatest shiny object? Do you stick to your traditional guns? Do you sprinkle it around in the hopes of hitting the jackpot on the advertising table of roulette?
It is time to create a media model that transcends these divergent ways that consumers are connecting brands.
What if we tossed away the terms we have used to date? What if we forgot all about traditional media, social media, mobile marketing, banner ads, QR codes and more and simplified the media creation process by simply asking if the media is active or passive? Passive media is any form of media where the consumer can’t physically do anything with it, except for consume it (newspaper, television, radio, etc…). Active media is any form of media where the consumer can physically engage with it (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc…). But there’s a hook to this (there is always a hook, isn’t there?). We can’t just look at one aspect of the experience to see whether it is active or passive, we have to look at all four quadrants to find true equilibrium that will drive success.
Quadrant #1: The Consumer. When is the consumer active or passive with the media channel? Do all consumers want to tweet, share, chat and create when they are engrossed in a TV show late in the evening, or are they most comfortable sitting back and watching the drama unfold? We live in a world where television broadcasters are pushing at a feverish pace to make what was a very passive media channel (sitting back and watching) into an active one (adding widgets, encouraging tweeting and more). Understanding how the consumer best connects to the media is core to understanding what type of advertising they will best engage with. So yes, you can tell TV show viewers to follow along on Facebook, but how many of them simply want to watch the TV show and go to bed?
Quadrant #2: The Media. How do you think Google – as a search engine – would be performing if the sole form of revenue was driven by banner advertising on the search results and not the contextually relevant format of AdWords? In fact, banner advertising is a very simplistic and non-active type of media. Online publishers replicated the print model by creating these little boxes that resided on web pages that had content on them back in the mid-nineties. The model was simplistic: "we have content on a web page, why not put an ad next to it like we do with magazines and newspaper?" While banner advertising still generates billions of dollars in media advertising, the truth is that it is a very passive advertising format that was simply copy and pasted over to the a very active new media (the Web). We could talk about how "interactive" these banner ads are (or were promised to be), but the analytics don’t lie: banner ads couldn’t perform any worse. Over 99% of banner ads fail to generate any kind of click. They are passive forms of media that are pasted into very active digital channels.
Quadrant #3: The Channel. Are you the same person on Google as you are on Facebook as you are when you are reading this post on Harvard Business Review? Digital consumers are not only different, but are both passive and active in the digital platform depending on which channels they are using. When you are doing a search on Google, you have a very different intent and mindset than when you’re on Facebook and connecting to friends or catching up with acquaintances. It becomes abundantly clear that you’re also in a dramatically different media mindset as you read these words than when you’re creating a board on Pinterest. Understanding how these channels operate and which types of advertising matches the consumer’s intent is critical to building a successful advertising campaign.
Quadrant #4: The Platform. Is the platform an active or passive one? Think about digital books as a medium. Do readers really want links, embedded video, extended audio interviews, sharing capabilities and more? Will they, intuitively, turn what has traditionally been a very passive medium into an active one, simply because book publishers feel they are competing for attention with everyone from YouTube to Twitter? As we watch the "smartening" of the television, it will be interesting to see just how many viewers truly deep dive into the myriad of new ways that television is hoping the viewers will. Most newer televisions are Internet enabled, but what is the true number of households that actually connect their TV sets to the Internet and engage with channels like Netflix and beyond? According to eMarketer, nearly one quarter of US households now have a TV connected to the Internet, so we’re about to find out just how active this typically passive platform can become.
It’s not a zero sum game when it comes to active and passive media.
As with all things, understanding the quadrants and then matching your marketing to best meet the needs of the consumer will be paramount for success. That being said, it is not a zero sum game, and the ways that consumers engage with different forms of media is not an absolute. While some will claim that Twitter is useless unless you’re constantly tweeting and retweeting, there is a large user base that is simply interested in following celebrities (these people are very passive in an active channel). And, for every person who watches The Voice while building up a hearty Doritos stain on their jammies, there is a ever-growing segment that will tweet, share, chat and follow every move that that Team Usher makes (these people are very active in a passive channel). So, instead of worrying about social media marketing, mobile marketing and more, why not sit back as ask yourself these questions: when are our consumers active or passive with our brand? Is our advertising active when they’re active and passive when they’re passive? Are the channels that we’re advertising on active when the consumers are active or passive when they are passive and more? And, lastly, is the platform – in and of itself – a predominantly active or passive one? From there, you can truly start to better understand what a proper advertising mix can look like and you will also be better at defining which opportunities could potentially work against the others that are woefully flawed.
Active media. Passive media. Active consumers. Passive consumers. The world of media continues to change.
The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Harvard Business Review. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:
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Facebook Isn’t Losing U.S. Users, At Least Not Yet, According to Meta-Analysis
A meta-analysis of user numbers from various sources shows that Facebook is not losing users in the United States, but other markers suggest waning interest in the social network.
Facebook is not seeing declining user numbers in developed markets including the United States, the analysis, conducted by eMarketer, found.
eMarketer expects that Facebook will surpass 1 billion active users this year.
But the use patterns identified by eMarketer did present some troubling news for the Menlo Park-based company. Younger users may not be fleeing the social network, but they are spending less time on it. Older adults make up the network’s fastest growing audience in developed countries. Together, these patters suggest that Facebook faces an uphill battle in retaining its audience numbers over time.
The social network’s strongest growth globally comes from India, Brazil, Russia, Japan and Indonesia, eMarketer found.
Some trackers of Facebook use fail to account for mobile users while others do not yet have enough mobile data to differentiate between trends and seasonal variation. Many look at Instagram separately. Use of the photo-sharing site continues to grow, the study found.
The study counted individual monthly active users who access Facebook via any device at least once per month. Facebook’s own figures include all monthly active users, including accounts belonging to pets and brands.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Marketers, Let Your Egos Go
What if your ideas didn’t matter?
For senior marketers, it is a very humbling thought. What if your ideas, your thoughts and even your experience as a trained marketing professional didn’t amount to a hill of beans in terms of the actual brand’s advertising performance? What if everything you have been bringing to the table could be debunked with a simple multivariate testing regiment? There is a very real threat to the marketing profession, and it’s one that has been present for quite some time, but it’s gaining more and more momentum. The net outcome of this movement could prove that machines are better advertisers than humans.
Let’s take a step back.
Mad Men‘s lead character, Don Draper, has an acutely profound skill in being able to turn a brand insight into an emotion that can bring you to tears. If you doubt that, watch him spin and weave a tale about the profound power that Kodak’s slide carousel could have on the world. It’s not just the emotional resonance of his message, his pitch and delivery, but the core insight that he is able to both uncover and demonstrate back to the consumer that touches us. Don Draper is, obviously, a fictitious character but he’s the perfect composite of hundreds (if not thousands) of advertising legends who have roamed our earth. Great advertising is magic. It does more than sell… it tells a story that captivates our imaginations and connects us to a brand – and to others who share in the brand sentiment. It’s a unique art form in that its sole purpose is to generate income and increase the engine of capitalism on behalf of corporations. It is art for money’s sake. It’s hard to argue that any computer or technology can create that kind of emotional connection or weave that kind of story.
Where we’re at today.
Traditional advertisers will tell you that not much has changed. The job – day in and day out – remains the same: create a compelling enough message that your customers can’t ignore you, generate advertising that creates attention and interest and closes the sale. Rinse and repeat. What we can’t deny is that technology is now penetrating the marketing industry like never before. You could practically hear the Chief Marketing Officer’s bodies hitting the floor in March of last year when the research firm Gartner reported that by 2017, a Chief Marketing Office will be spending more on IT than the Chief Information Officer. It seems almost unfathomable that the marketers will need more technology that the actual technology department in corporations, but when you scratch beneath the surface, it all starts to crystallize.
Data + Testing + Web + Mobile + Social + Local + Personalization = gold.
This past week, has seen some fascinating – albeit divergent – moves in advertising that – when combined – paint a powerful and proactive picture as to just how much advertising has changed… and how much more change is about to occur. The first interesting tidbit is that younger, digital natives, are becoming increasingly comfortable sharing their personal data online so long as they are deriving a value from the exchange (Millennials More Comfortable Than Their Elders Sharing Personal Data Online). So, in a world where consumers are screaming about their privacy being breached by every website that tracks their clicks, young people seem more-than-fine in giving up personal information so long as they get something out it. Next up, we’re seeing an exponential growth in the amount of programmatic buying in media that is taking place (Despite Reservations, Programmatic Buying Gains Steam). The numbers don’t lie, according to this eMarketer news item. 70% of media buyers and publishers are doing some kind of programmatic buying and 77% of those doing it plan on increasing their spend in the next year. What makes this even more profound is that the survey cited also states that a good chunk of these media entities are thinking about moving entirely to programmatic trading and stopping their direct relationships with publishers. Lastly, the challenges of retargeting (the ability to serve advertising that is related to a user’s past online experience – like showing them an ad for a specific shoe that they were looking at on Zappos but never bought) is coming to light (Web Ads That Know Too Much). As exciting as that nascent advertising technology is, many agencies and publishers are not able to fully harness the potential of it to make it work effectively… yet. Still, millions of dollars is being poured into this quickly-maturing advertising opportunity, and nobody doubts the future potential that is upon us in terms of delivering measurable advertising without much human (or creative) intervention.
Should advertisers remove the ego?
As the great philosopher, Uncle Ben, from Spider-Man so eloquently stated: "with great power comes great responsibility." While it may be fun for marketing professionals to have a five martini lunch while ensuring that the baseball stadium still sports their logo and that the ads are running on every TV show that will impress their friends and family members, it’s somewhat disheartening to see the lack of enthusiasm that senior marketers have for all of this evolution (or revolution – depending on who you ask). At the Monetate Agility Summit 2013 in Philadelphia at the beginning of April, I shared the stage with famed marketing optimization expert (and friend), Bryan Eisenberg (co-author of bestselling books like Waiting For Your Cat To Bark? and Always Be Testing). He concludes that too many marketers let their ego get in the way. It’s a sobering indictment. In a world where testing creative, landing pages and more can be done in a simple and measurable way, Eisenberg asserts that the number one reason senior marketers don’t buy into the data and technology is because they are worried that the results will prove their intuition wrong. And, that more often than not, those intuitions are wrong. It weaves a complex story. We have consumers increasingly willing to share personal data, the technology to create hundreds of fast and easy to execute tests, and additional technology to manage the complexity of the media buy behind it and yet, we’re all still acting like Don Draper.
From Mad Men to Math Men.
This doesn’t mean that creative, insights and storytelling dies. It does mean that we can leverage that aspect of insights while pushing technology to make us better at how that message connects and converts to more sales at a much higher level of efficiency and efficacy. Marketers let our egos get in the way for too long because we had little else to go by. Now, the excuses are getting thinner and hold less value. It turns out that big data, programmatic buying, retargeting and more could well usher in a world where advertising delivers on it’s original promise: to drive more sales and get less expensive as it learns. Now, if only us marketers can let our egos get out of the way.
The above posting is my twice-monthly column for the Harvard Business Review. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:
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Tablets Drive Disproportionate Mobile Sales, Study Shows
Tablets will drive 65 percent of mobile commerce sales in 2013, even though smartphones still make up the majority of connected devices in the U.S., according to an eMarketer report released today.
All told, mobile devices will make up 15 percent of digital sales in 2013, up from 11 percent last year, the report predicted.
Studies differ in methodology, but 35 percent of mobile traffic in the fourth quarter of 2012 came from iPhones while just 17 percent came from iPads, the most popular tablet. But tablets are no longer a luxury item; they’re now found in half of all Internet-connected homes.
By 2017, a quarter of digital sales will come from mobile devices, with nearly three-quarters of that coming from tablets, eMarketer predicts.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Bitcoins And The Future Of Business
Facebook is a license to print money.
As far as social media goes and the growth of online social networking, it’s hard not to have Facebook be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of new media, at this point. The company claims well over a billion active users. They generated close to $4.5 billion in advertising in 2012, and while many were tough on the company in their post IPO performance due to a lack of mobile agility, the company has made some leaps and bound in the past short while to rectify the course in a post Web-browser world and changed that perspective around. In fact, mobile ad spending could rise to $7.29 billion in 2013 (according to eMarketer) and while Google is set to take home more than half of that, Facebook will account for close to thirty percent as well.
There is a bigger picture.
Take a step back and look at what companies like Facebook and Google have created. They are not just tools and services, but a centralized community in a decentralized geography of users who are deeply connected to one another on a global level. When you tag mobile on to that, it’s not hard to imagine a world that doesn’t require telephone services or even text messaging as we have known them to date. Why wouldn’t those who are connected via social media, also communicate instantly and more directly through those channels? There is a profound reason why Facebook and Google offer email, messaging, video conferencing and chat services as part of their suite. Once one company has their users so deeply connected (and yes, this is about much more than Facebook’s massive acquisition of Instagram), it becomes increasingly difficult for a user to leave (look no further than the slower adoption and acceptance of Google + in a Facebook world). As you continue to take this bird’s eye view of these massive channels (and how deeply connected people are ingrained in them), you begin to realize that Google and Facebook are, essentially, Internets unto themselves. While many lauded the Web’s arrival as a new place that would disintermediate the mass media companies, and a place where anyone can become a publisher, we went from four major network television stations, to a handful of online giants that control the bulk of online traffic. Right now, these companies see media solutions (advertising, marketing and communications opportunities) as the easiest – and most obvious – way to generate income… much like the traditional media channels that came before them.
What if the true value, revenue and potential of companies like Facebook and Google went beyond the revenue that they generate from advertising?
It’s easy for a company that attracts a lot of eyeballs to become snowblind by the money that brands and media agencies are throwing at them. Ultimately, the economics of advertising is somewhat simplistic: advertising generates the most revenue in a scarcity model. We have no printing press on the Web, and video content doesn’t have to be consumed during prime time on Thursday. In fact, even your typical one thousand word article can be chopped up into multiple Web pages to serve up as many display banner ads as the publisher wants. With so many places to publish content online and so much user generated content, it’s not hard to see a digital advertising world that offers more inventory than there is a market for (an abundance model). Before dismissing that notion as hyperbole, think about how many users complain about Facebook’s advertising and how non-relevant/contextual the ads often are. If a brand was willing to buy that highly targeted and coveted space, we all know that Facebook is willing to sell it. What this means is that there could be other revenue models worth exploring, and one of them could be the creation of a currency.
It’s not easy to make money.
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer universal, digital currency platform that has been getting a tremendous amount of attention is the past few months. This virtual money holds no physical presence (it’s all zeroes and ones) and is both used to pay for goods and services as well as being traded (much like any other commodity) in the online sphere. In the past short while, it has been gaining in both popularity and value. Currently, the value of one Bitcoin is over one hundred dollars and, to add some perspective to this, in early March there were trading below $35 and as of this past January, they were trading at under $15. Last week, GigaOm published a very comprehensive article about Bitcoin titled, Yes, you should care about Bitcoin, and here’s why, that explained the currency as such: "Bitcoin is to state-issued currencies – often referred to as fiat money – as P2P file-sharing is to traditional broadcast media. There is no centralized source for it that can be controlled or moderated or regulated. It is difficult if not impossible to track from the outside… It is important to understand that, while fiat money is issued and controlled by governments and their laws, Bitcoin is generated and controlled by algorithm. While governments can always print more money according to their needs, there will only ever be just under 21 million Bitcoins (right now there are around 11 million), because that’s how the algorithm works." Beyond the logistical, technical and security issues that are happening in parallel with Bitcoin’s meteoric rise, it is abundantly clear that this is a first generation digital currency experimentation and that we can expect our world to see a lot more of this. What if Facebook, Google and others took on the business of borderless digital currency? Think about the current race for digital wallets and decentralized online banking opportunities. What if the real business of Facebook or Google was to become the next-generation of Bitcoin? Facebook Credits already exist (remember Linden dollars in Second Life?). Currently credits in online platforms are still centralized and controlled, but what if Facebook gave their billion-plus community their own currency system and then extended it outward – one that wasn’t or couldn’t be affected by local governments, markets and the like? What if one dollar for me was the same monetary value as one dollar for (in whatever country you’re living in)? Clearly, there are many economic and legal hurdles that these companies are going to have to solve and jump through to create their own legally recognized currency, but Bitcoin is pointing to a fascinating new world where banks and our money – as we have known it to date – is about to become even more digitized and globalized. It’s something all of us need to be watching much more closely, because it makes perfect sense.
If Facebook is a massive global community, why wouldn’t that community have a shared currency for exchange?
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EMarketer: 26% Of U.S. Consumers Access Social Networks On Mobile Today, Facebook 85% Of That
Figures out today from eMarketer estimate that in the U.S., just under 82 million consumers, or 26% of the population, will access social networks from their phones this year, rising to nearly 117 million by 2014. But if you are a social networking startup that sees that low-penetration figure as an opportunity, be aware that at the moment Facebook has all but cornered the market, and that the market is slowing down. Facebook today accounts for 85% of all mobile social networking activity, and that proportion is only growing: eMarketer projects that Facebook will account 87.4% by 2014 — or four out of every 10 mobile users and nearly two-thirds of smartphone users.
Meanwhile, growth in social network on mobile is slowing right down, from 50% in 2011 to 18% by 2014.
Basing estimates on a variety of survey and traffic data from research firms and regulatory agencies, historical trends, company-specific data, and demographic and socioeconomic factors, eMarketer analysts found that smartphones are completely dominating social networking activity in the U.S. at the moment.
Some 95.5% of all users are checking and updating on their statuses on higher-end devices, it says. In other words, the different efforts we’ve seen from the likes of Twitter and Facebook to make their services friendly to lower-end devices are almost certainly mainly being utilized outside the U.S. Overall, in a separate piece of research, eMarketer notess that 116 million people in the U.S. will own and use a smartphone monthly this year, 43% of them Android devices.
EMarketer projects that by 2014, the percentage of people in the U.S. using social network sites on their phones will remain a minority activity, with 36.2% of users accessing sites (among the mobile population, the number is about 10 percentage points higher, at46.3%) . This shows that while the figure is growing, and indeed needs to be a consideration for companies like Facebook, PC-based access will continue to account for the majority of use in the U.S.
Indeed, eMarketer estimates that the number of Facebook mobile monthly active users this year will be around 70 million people. That works out to less than half of the 186 million MAUs that Facebook reported for June 2012 in the U.S. and Canada (Facebook’s worldwide MAU figure for June 2012 is 955 million).
Although we are still at a relatively young stage in the market, the landgrab for social mobile might at the same time be closing off: eMarketer notes that growth is slowing down by quite a lot in the next few years.
In 2011, it was growing by 50%; this year that will come down to 40%, and by 2014 “the number of mobile social networkers will increase by just 18%” although it does point out that this is “still in the healthy double digits.” It notes that mobile Facebook usage (as it dominates the space) “will have a similar growth trajectory.”
Marketers and Analytics Find It Hard to Get Along
We talk a lot about analytics.
We collect a lot of data.
We know that there is business value in data.
If we know all of this why is it that marketers are finding it so hard to truly use analytics?
There are many reasons and a recent study by eConsultancy and Lynchpin (repackaged by eMarketer) gave some of them. The first relates to the sheer volume and data and finding how much is actually useful to marketers.
Over 50% of the respondents said that only 50% of the data collected is useful to their business. So why is it being collected? Good question. One way that marketers can make their lives easier is to collect only the pertinent data rather than collecting everything under the sun and thus creating an opportunity to miss valuable in formation in the clutter.
The next finding is interesting as well. Nearly 50% of those spoken too either did not have a business intelligence strategy OR didn’t integrate web analytics with larger business intelligence efforts at all. Again we have to ask, ‘Why is it being collected then?”
These questions are tough ones for marketers. It could be that many marketers are not statisticians or are not as mathematically inclined as today’s data driven world demands. These are skills that can be acquired but getting someone to take the time and effort to learn is a different matter.
So what does the marketing industry as a whole need to do? It needs to align the geeks with the creatives. Creatives get nervous around piles of numbers that are supposed to prove something. Creatives are about messaging and the psychological aspects of the marketing game. It’s almost like the void that exists between engineers and sales people where you need a sales engineer to bridge the gap. Do we need to develop marketing engineers as go betweens?
Anything is better than seeing these statistics which show that the collecting of data far outpaces the application of data. This kind of activity will be the thing that slows progress in the Internet space.
What do you suggest we do about it?
Facebook’s latest headcount: 955M and still growing
Facebook has been steadily marching toward the one-billion-user mark. Today the company announced that it is very nearly there, with 955 million active monthly users.
Today’s figure represents a 55 million-user increase since April, when the social network had just surpassed 900 million MAUs (monthly active users).
The MAU figure is Facebook’s preferred metric for describing its growth. We also got an update on daily active users (552 million, up from 526 million in April) and mobile users (543 million, an increase from 488 MAUs on mobile devices in April). MAUs and DAUs were both up around 30 percent year over year, and mobile monthly users saw a 67 percent year-over-year increase.
The reason for today’s announcements is, of course, Facebook’s quarterly earnings, and all these eyeballs add up to a lot of cash for the social network — the majority of its $1.18 billion in revenues for the second quarter, in fact.
Online marketing analysis firm eMarketer noted that Facebook is dominating the U.S. display ad market, taking the lead from Google with a 14 percent share of the total market in 2011, up from 11.5 percent in 2010.
And mobile users also represent a huge opportunity for Facebook. Mobile advertising spending in the United States climbed to a stunning $1.45 billion in 2011. Mobile advertising wasn’t a huge priority for Facebook, which rolled out its very first mobile ads earlier this year. Currently, Google claims 51.7 percent of the mobile advertising market, around $750 million, according to eMarketer.
We’ll have more coming up soon on Facebook’s earnings, growth, and stock price fluctuations, so stay tuned. For now, here’s a handy little chart showing stock prices for Facebook and a few related companies over the past month. As you can see, investors aren’t too impressed — yet. (In fact, Facebook stock hit a new low of $24 in after-hours trading today.)
Here are some more fascinating stats from today’s string of announcements:
- Revenues came to $1.18 billion, made up mostly of advertising revenues, which totaled $992 million.
- Overall, revenues were up 32 percent year over year.
- For Facebook ad campaigns, 70 percent had an ROI of 3x or better, and 49 percent showed an ROI of 5x or better.
- Facebook’s warchest of cash and marketable securities grew to $10.2 billion, including the $6.8 billion it made during its IPO.
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