Thursday 30 August 2012

62% of consumers across 12 markets use social media while watching TV

"The results of Ericsson ConsumerLab's annual study - presented in the TV & Video Consumer Trend Report 2012 - reveal that social TV is becoming a mass-market phenomenon.
Sixty-two percent of consumers use social media while watching TV on a weekly basis, an increase of 18 percentage points in one year. By gender, 66 percent of women engage in this behavior, compared to 58 percent of men. Twenty-five percent of consumers use social media to discuss what they are watching while they are watching it.
Niklas Rönnblom, Ericsson ConsumerLab Senior Advisor, says: "Mobile devices are an important part of the TV experience, as 67 percent of consumers use smartphones, tablets, or laptops for TV and video viewing. Furthermore, sixty percent of consumers say they use on-demand services on a weekly basis. Watching TV on the move is growing in popularity, and 50 percent of the time spent watching TV and video on the smartphone, is done outside the home, where mobile broadband connections are facilitating the increase."
Although viewing behaviors and demands are changing, only 7 percent of consumers say they will reduce their TV subscriptions in the future. In fact, instead of looking to cut costs, consumers are willing to pay more for an enhanced viewing experience: 41 percent of consumers say they are willing to pay for TV and video content in HD.
More than half of consumers want to be able to choose their own TV and video content. Rönnblom says: "As the number of screens and services increase, people are eagerly looking for an easy-to-use, aggregated service that can bring everything together. It should allow consumers to mix on-demand and linear TV including live content, facilitate content discovery, leverage the value of social TV and provide seamless access across devices.""
Source:  Press release from Ericsson, 28th August 2012
Methodology:  "Data was collected in Brazil, Chile, China, Germany, Italy, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, UK and the US. In all, 14 qualitative and 12,000 quantitative online interviews were conducted representing more than 460 million consumers."
Full presentation here

Flipboard has 20 million users

20 million users
1.5 million daily users
3 billion flips
86 mins per user per month
Source:  Infographic from Flipboard, 28th August 2012

The number of URLs requested for removal from Google's search results per week


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Source:  Blog post by Google, 28th August 2012

Users referred by Facebook spend more on Zappos than those from Pinterest

"Zappos already lets users share what they buy through Facebook Inc. (FB), Twitter Inc. and Pinterest. While consumers share more often on Pinterest than on the other two social networks, sales from Pinterest posts contribute the smallest amount of revenue, Young said.
Zappos users were 13 times more likely to share a purchase on Pinterest than on Twitter and 8 times more likely to share on Facebook than Twitter, Young said. Even so, posts on Twitter brought in the most revenue -- an average of $33.66 an order -- while Facebook posts garnered $2.08 per order and sales from Pinterest were 75 cents on average, he said.
“Even if a person has 100,000 followers on Pinterest and she pins something to a board called ‘Stuff I Love,’ that’s not as big a deal as an endorsement tweeted to 10,000 followers,” Young said."

Wednesday 29 August 2012

Cadbury's Olympic sponsorship helped it add more than 260,000 new fans & followers over the Olympic period

"The Kraft-owned chocolate brand, which is a sponsor of both the London Olympics and Paralympics, has been highly active in its marketing activity around the Olympics.
Its initial above-the-line activity, its Spots and Stripes campaign, was criticised in some quarters for failing to engage customers.
However, Kraft claims its social media activity has been a success. It claims to have added 2.5 million fans and followers to its UK social media channels on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, which are dedicated to the Games content, since the start of the year.
The combined social media channels, which now have a reach of 7.5 million, experienced sharp growth over the 17 days of the Olympic Games.
The steepest growth was on its @CadburyUK Twitter account, which added 25,000 followers over the course of the event, taking it to a total of 75,000.
Its CadburyUK Facebook Page, which has 245,000 fans, lifted 20% during the 17-day period, adding 35,000 followers.
Its Google+ page gained 200,000 new fans during the Games, which saw it break through the two million fans mark.
Cadbury claims this growth on Twitter is partly organic, through having engaging conversations with consumers, but also using paid-for products throughout the Games helped it achieve greater scale."

Whatsapp delivers 10 billion messages a day

"Last October, BGR broke the news that WhatsApp was delivering 1 billion messages each day. This caused quite a stir, as it dovetailed with some mobile operator warnings about declining SMS volumes, most notably by KPN. On Thursday, just 10 months later, WhatsApp confirmed that it is now handling 10 billion messages a day — 4 billion inbound messages and 6 billion outbound. How’s that for a hockey stick? The disparity between incoming messages and outgoing messages highlights the popularity of the group messaging feature, which plays a big role in the app’s success."
Source:  Yahoo/BGR, 23rd August 2012
Earlier - 1 billion messages a day (Sent only)

Tuesday 28 August 2012

Digital accounts for 36% of Aegis Media's revenues

"Digital made up 36% of Aegis revenues in the first half of 2012, up from 34% the year previous."

The iPad accounted for an estimated 69% of all tablets shipped in Q2 2012

"The April to June quarter of 2012 set a new record for media tablet shipments reaching nearly 25 million units with total shipments growing 36% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and 77% year-over-year (YoY). Apple iPad shipments represented nearly 69% of worldwide volumes for the period, according to a preliminary assessment of vendor share by market intelligence firm ABI Research. Gains in the quarter also came from Samsung (8.1%) and ASUS (4.0%), while RIM (1.0%) experienced the most significant decline. Shipments of Dell and LG ceased in the period as both companies retrench for future tablet offerings. Worldwide shipments of media tablets are expected to exceed 100 million units in 2012.
Most impressive about Apples 17.0 million tablet shipments in 2Q2012 was it nearly matched 2010 total worldwide shipments of 17.3 million for all vendors, says Jeff Orr, senior practice director for mobile devices. Company representatives noted that nearly 1 million of its iPad 2 devices were shipped to US education customers during the period, which contributed to the companys growth but also its continuing average selling price (ASP) decline. ABI Research estimates a 4% drop in ASP for the company QoQ and nearly 19% YoY."

The demographics of American QR code scanners

"With the numbers increasing it is key for marketers to focus on the demographics of QR code users. Males make up the majority of the scanning population at 69 percent. As far as mobile platforms, Android leads the way with 53 percent of barcode scans. Apple iOS is the other notable mobile platform that accounted for 43 percent of scans.
Over 75 percent of the QR Code scanning demographic is comprised of people 25 years and older. Meanwhile, 60 percent of people scanned from home, according to comScore data cited in the ScanLife report. The most popular hours of scanning seem to fall midday and early evening between the hours of 3 and 7 pm."
Note - Based on data from ScanLife's own app only

QR code scanning in the US rose 400% Y-o-Y in Q2 2012

"A recent mobile barcode trend report released by ScanLife showed huge growth in mobile barcode scanning. The trend report for Q2 of 2012 showed a record breaking number with 5.3 million scans in the month of June alone, the highest ever number of scans in a month.
The number of scans per minute jumped from 24 in Q2 2011 to 120 in 2012. The company also reported that 4 million new people scanned via ScanLife in Q2 2012.
The largest campaign run in Q2 of 2011 provided just over 30,000 scans where as the top campaign from Q2 of 2012 resulted in over two million scans. Campaigns that garnered the highest number of scans contained contests or loyalty programs as the primary content. Other mentionable QR campaigns contained social media content, app download content, and video content.
ScanLife's report represents traffic from QR codes and UPC barcodes, including QR code traffic generated through third party platforms as well as through ScanLife."
Note - Based on data from ScanLife's own app only

47% of US smartphone owners used shopping apps in June 2012

"Ebay and Amazon are beating social commerce platforms like Groupon and LivingSocial in the mobile shopping app contest. According to Nielsen, eBay Mobile - which allows shoppers to take photos of items to list for sale and notifies them of auctions and watched item status - attracted 13.2 million users in June. That's an increase of 31 percent since January 2012, according to Nielsen data provided to ClickZ.
Those eBay users spent more than an hour with the mobile app in June, far more time than all but one of the other apps in the top 10 list. The only app that beat eBay in time spent was mobile shopping rewards app Shopkick, which boasts a whopping three hours and 19 minutes in average time spent in June. Still, the Shopkick app user base is only around half that of the top three shopping apps - 6.5 million uniques.
Amazon Mobile and Groupon round out the top three shopping apps by unique audience in June. Interesting to note is the growth rates of the apps. While eBay grew 31 percent since January and Amazon rose 35 percent to 12.1 million, Groupon's unique audience grew only 10 percent according to Nielsen, reaching just under 12 million unique users.
According to Nielsen, 47 percent of smartphone owners in the U.S. used shopping apps in June, accessing them 17 times on average in that month."

The ten most-followed brands in social media


1 - YouTube
2 - Facebook
3 - Zynga Poker
4 - Disney
5 - Coca Cola
6 - MTV
7 - Farmville
8 Twitter
9 - Starbucks
10 - Converse
Source:  Digiday, 27th August 2012
Methodology "Track Social has compiled a list of the most-followed businesses on social media, taking into account the number of fans each has on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn."

Types of content accessed by US smartphone owners



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Source:  A Portrait of Today’s Smartphone User, conducted by Frank N Magid Associates, for the Online Publishers Association, August 2012
Note 1 - Lots more data in the full presentation
Note 2 - It's frustrating that they didn't ask about social networking activities, but then the OPA are not in the business of showing how many people are using social networking sites...
Methodology:  "Data comes from a nationally representative online survey of 2,540 internet users between the ages of 8 and 64. The sample is matched to the U.S. Census with regard to age and gender" Conducted from 19th - 26th March 2012

Spotify's premium users provide 83.5% of its revenues

"Ad revenue barely pays the bills, if that, and it rarely supports music startup models. It's not happening for Pandora, and it's not a meaningful revenue source for Spotify, either.  According to financial filings spilling this week, Spotify now receives 83.5 percent of its revenue from paying, premium subscribers.  Which means that free listeners are mostly dead weight, unless they can effectively be transitioned to paid.
At the end of 2011, roughly 8 percent of registered users were paying (2.6 million subscribers, 32.8 million registered users).  These days, the company reports 4 million paying subscribers, out of roughly 15 million active users.  The company counted more than $56.6 million in losses for the year. "

China has 45 million mobile TV viewers

"Wang Letian, technology products director of mobile phone TV operator China Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), revealed today that as of June 2012, China had 45 mln China Multimedia Mobile Broadcasting (CMMB) users, with paid users exceeding 21 mln.
Wang stated that, since the commercial launch of CMMB services in 2009, CBC has established holding subsidiaries in all of China's 31 provinces, with signal coverage in over 337 major cities and 855 county level cities, covering a population of more than 500 mln."

Friday 24 August 2012

Average dwell time from visitors on mobile devices is 2 minutes longer if the site is optimised for mobile

"The study proved how a significant percentage of the top 100 brands such as Tesco, B&Q and Boots are starting to sit up and listen, with nearly 40% now having a mobile-optimised website. Google’s, ‘thinkmobile’ research released in 2011 revealed that 79% of long tail brands did not have a mobile-optimised site- indicating an uptake in mobile optimisation and proving the speed at which mobile is being adopted amongst brands in the UK.
Using the GSMA MMM data, the study showed that the advertisers with a mobile-optimised website enjoyed increased engagement with consumers. Amongst the advertisers that had a mobile-specific site, average dwell time was 5 minutes, 2 minutes longer than the average for advertisers without a mobile web presence. Furthermore, consumers who visit an advertiser site that is mobile-optimised looked at on average 19 pages per person - 33% more than if the site was not optimised (12 pages)."

Thursday 23 August 2012

Spotify made a loss of £35.9m in 2011

"Music streaming service Spotify is to continue to expand globally, despite recording a €45.4m (£35.9m) loss in 2011.
The deficit came despite the company increasing its revenue for the year to €187.8m, compared with €73.9m in 2010.
The loss has been attributed to the heavy costs involved in licensing from record labels the music Spotify offers.
The service confirmed plans to expand to Canada, as well as some countries in Asia and South America.
It is already available in 15 countries, including the UK and US.
The London-based firm has also set up subsidiaries in Singapore and Hong Kong, but is yet to launch the product in either country.
The Wall Street Journal reported growth in the company's premium-member subscriptions, citing its latest financial report. Income from paying customers last year made the firm €156.9m, up from €52.6m in 2010.
However Spotify's other revenue model - playing ads inbetween music for non-paying subscribers - has slowed.
The company recorded only a minor increase - €6.5m - in advertising revenue, making €27.6m in 2011."

65% of American Facebook users are aged 35 or older

"55% of Twitter users are 35 or older.
63% of Pinterest users are 35 or older.
65% of Facebook users are 35 or older.
79% of LinkedIn users are 35 or older."
Source:  Data from Pingdom, reported on their site, 21st August 2012
Note - More on the demographics of Facebook, the demographics of Twitter and other sites on the Pingdom site

Most CMOs are confident that social media builds awareness, loyalty & sales


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Source:  Research by BazaarVoice, reported by Forbes, 21st August 2012
Methodology:  "[A] survey conducted by Bazaarvoice of 100 members of The CMO Club [with a small] sample size (100), where 56.1% of the brands represented have more than $1 billion in annual revenuewhile another 36% have $100-999 million in annual revenue, and just 7.9% have annual revenue of $0-100 million."

Wednesday 22 August 2012

Social network adoption by the top 100 brands


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Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, Pinterest, Instagram
Source:  Based on the Interbrand 100, analysed by SimplyMeasured, and reported by Forbes, 13th August 2012

80% of mobile page views relating to the Olympics were from apps

"During the Olympic Games, it was apps that consumers turned to for their sporting content, not the mobile web. That's according to information firm Nielsen, which tracked usage of LOCOG's two main iOS and Android apps, Join In and Results, among a panel of 1,400 nationally representative smartphone users during the Games.
80 per cent of all mobile pageviews relating to the Games can be attributed to apps, and that number jumps significantly in terms of time spent - apps accounted for 96 per cent of all time spent using a London 2012 mobile property."
Note - I'm assuming this is US only, although it doesn't explicitly say so

'Vice' had a turnover of over $110m in 2011

"At the end of the 1990s Vice was a free fanzine distributed in Montreal, Canada; 15 years on and it is a global media company with offices in 34 countries.
While the magazine is still running and is "a really important part of what Vice is", it represents less than 5 per cent of the company's overall revenue. Last year the total revenue was more than $110 million and Vice is "on track in 2012 to generate significantly more", Dan'l Hewitt, general manager of AdVice, a division of Vice Media, told Journalism.co.uk.
As Vice moved online its focus evolved into online video, which has been driven by developments in technology. "The cost of video equipment and editing software came down, so we were able to create more video content for ourselves," Hewitt said.
"That started around five or six years ago and then with new platforms coming into the fold, places like YouTube and Vimeo and Facebook, we were able to syndicate and distribute our content to new audiences in those places."
Vice now has more than 30 ongoing video series franchises. They range editorially across fashion, music, travel, culture and art, and they are all character-driven, punchy stories created for a young audience. Or as described on the main Vice YouTube channel – which has notched up more than 25 million views – "Vice specialises in unabashed depravity and going to places we don't belong"."

Data on tablet owners in the US



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Source:  Data from comScore's TabLens, reported on their site, August 2012

Tuesday 21 August 2012

90% of UK TV viewing is 'live'


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Source:  Data from Barb, Jan-Jun 2012, reported by Thinkbox in their Half Year Review 2012, August 2012
Note - DTR = Digital Television Recorder = DVR = DVR

10 million guest nights have been booked on Airbnb

Between June 2008 and June 2012.  Quoted in this infographic
Source:  Airbnb, August 2012

Play.com customers who engaged with Facebook ads spent 24% more than those who did not

"Customers who engaged with one or more Facebook campaign spent 24 per cent more on the website than those who did not engage with a Facebook campaign, research from Play.com has found, with £2m of gross merchandise sales being attributed to Facebook.
The Rakuten owned company also found that shoppers who were referred through Facebook to make their first purchase on Rakuten’s Play.com spent 30 per cent more than an average customer in their first year of using the website.
Adam Stewart, director of marketing at Rakuten’s Play.com, said: “We know that there is a lot of discussion at the moment about how to quantify the value of social fans. Our results show that through intelligent engagement, social fans, particularly on Facebook, are massively valuable to online retailers. In fact, Facebook fans can be more valuable to online retailers than those gained through paid-for channels. Our approach has helped Rakuten’s Play.com attract over two million pounds of sales in 2011 that can be directly attributed to Facebook."

Google Maps features over 1 million public transit stops in over 500 cities

"Since 2005, we’ve collaborated with hundreds of transit authorities around the world to make a comprehensive resource for millions of riders to find out which bus, train, subway or tram can take them to their next destination. Today, Google Maps has public transportation schedules for more than one million transit stops worldwide, in nearly 500 cities including New York, London, Tokyo and Sydney.
Public transportation information is especially useful when it’s in the palm of your hand. Today we’re releasing an update to the Google Maps for Android app (version 6.10) which makes this transit information even more useful. We’ve made some changes to the Transit Lines layer, so that you can select a specific mode of public transportation (train, bus, tram or subway) to display on the mobile map, hiding the other modes. This is helpful in areas where there is a tight concentration of several types of public transit."

Facebook is the second biggest video site in the US

"comScore’s monthly online video data is in and it looks Facebook passed Yahoo in July to become the second largest video site in the U.S. behind Google/YouTube. According to comScore, more than 184 million U.S. Internet users watched 36.9 billion online content videos in July, while video ad views totaled 9.6 billion.
Google/YouTube still outpaced the rest of the online properties with 157 million unique viewers in July, compared to 53 million from Facebook, 48.7 million from Yahoo, 44.8 million from Vevo and 42.7 million from Microsoft. Nearly 36.9 billion video content views occurred during the month, with Google Sites generating the highest number at 19.6 billion, followed by AOL with 665 million. Google also took the top spot for engagement as well."

Monday 20 August 2012

Dropbox users upload a billion files every 48 hours

"Over 50 million people currently use Dropbox, and users are adding files at a rate of one billion every 48 hours. But it’s not just viral growth, word of mouth growth, smart branding, and effective marketing."

Friday 17 August 2012

68% of linked-to pages on Twitter are in English

Source:  These and other stats are in this infographic based on data by DiffBot, featured on Mashable, 16th August 2012

Apple accounts for nearly 70% of the Tablet shipments

"We all know the iPad is king of tablets, but it would appear that Apple has extended its lead in the slate market shipping approximately 70 percent of all tablets in the second quarter of this year. Unfortunately for Apple, Google’s recently released Nexus 7 tablet isn’t included in these numbers as it only started shipping after the April-June quarter was over.
Up from a 58 percent market share in the first quarter, Apple now holds 69.6 percent of the market, according to research firm IHS iSuppli.
The firm claims that this is the largest share of the market that Apple has held since Q1 of last year, before everyone and their brother was making a tablet and sending it out into the market."

The average American buys 64 items of clothing a year

"The average American buys 64 pieces of clothing a year. That’s more new tank tops and jeggings than there are weeks in which to wear them. And we buy those items, often, with the tacit understanding that the pullover purchased in January isn’t going to make it to Christmas — or even spring equinox. Elizabeth L. Cline has one such typical American wardrobe. As she admits in her new book “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” an eye-opening exploration of our mania for bargain-basement fashion: “I paid less than $30 per item on average for each piece of clothing in my closet. Most of my shoes cost less than $15.” She describes an inventory of, “socks and underwear notwithstanding,” some 364 pieces of clothing."
Please let me know if you know the original source!

Unilever see sales of $8.41 for each $1 spent on advertising one range of products on Facebook

"Facebook, which previously only provided advertisers with the number of people who saw an ad on its site, soon gave Ms. Wakeling other data on how many people saw Facebook ads in a variety of areas. Facebook also figured out how many people in a region saw a paid ad versus other types of ads such as print, radio or TV.
The moves meant Ms. Wakeling could begin comparing how many people in one region were exposed to a paid Facebook ad against the number of people in a region who were exposed to a television ad. By comparing campaigns across regions, she could track the success of the ads with any resulting increase in sales in the specific regions. Ms. Wakeling said Facebook was "very collaborative."
Facebook's Mr. Smallwood also ran a series of test ad campaigns with advertisers between last October and this January based on the methodologies they were learning from each other. By April, Mr. Smallwood had conducted 63 such campaigns.
Later in the year, at another Facebook meeting with its Client Council in New York, Mr. Smallwood displayed a chart to the gathered executives. Out of all 63 test ad campaigns, only one campaign had a less than one times return on its investment. The majority showed a return on ad spending of three times or better.
One of the campaigns was for Unilever's Suave beauty and grooming products. Using the methodology Mr. Smallwood developed with Ms. Wakeling, Facebook was able to show that for every dollar Unilever spent on the social media site, the consumer products company got $8.41 back in sales."

An estimated 475m people in sub-Saharan Africa have no access to bank accounts

"The surprising fact is Africa’s poor represent a vast reserve of untapped capital waiting to be channeled into consumer and small-businesses loans, and for infrastructure development. By some estimates, 95% of the nearly 500 million adults in sub-Saharan Africa earning less than $10 a day have no access to bank accounts. If they did, the formal banking system could get its hands on as much as $59 billion in new deposits."

US Households with kids have an average of 10 media or communication devices

"According to the report, households with kids ages 4 - 14 own an average of 10 different devices, with kids using an average of five of those devices.
Televisions, computers and cell/smartphones continued to maintain the highest household ownership, while PDMPs saw the largest drop in household ownership with just 35 percent owning these devices in 2012 compared to 48 percent in 2011. Household ownership of console and portable VG systems, media tablets, and digital video cameras experienced the most significant increases.
Portable VG systems are the most popular devices personally owned by kids ages 4-14, with six years of age being the average age of adoption; this is slightly younger than 2011 where the average age was 6.4.
“Kids are using tablets to game, watch movies and TV shows, read books and listen to music-even occasionally for taking pictures- so they have embraced the utility of these devices quite rapidly,” said Russ Crupnick, senior vice president, industry analysis, The NPD Group. “Older kids also use the tablets for social media and communication, which squarely places these devices at the center for discovery and evangelism of new services and applications, as well as for brands and entertainment of all sorts.”"
Methodology:  "An online survey was fielded from March 6-21, 2012, to a representative sample of male and female adults ages 23 and over whom are members of NPD’s online panel and have children ages 4 to 14 in the household. In order to qualify, respondents’ children had to use at least one consumer electronic device measured in the study.  Respondents with more than one child in the specified age range were instructed to answer for a randomly selected child. The study is based on 3,235 completed surveys.  Final data is weighted to US Census metrics and is representative of kids ages 4 to 14."

More US teens listen to music through YouTube than any other source

"More teens listen to music through YouTube than through any other source
64% of teens listen to music through YouTube
56% of teens listen to music on the radio
53% of teens listen to music through iTunes
50% of teens listen to music on CD"
Note - lots of other music data in the report

Wednesday 15 August 2012

Stats from the official London 2012 sites and digital channels


Brand and publisher success from the London 2012 Olympic Games

"Brands who invest in digital marketing to connect with customers grow their own businesses and help make great content possible. A few campaigns that caught our eye:
Visa’s global “Go World" campaign invited fans to show their support for Team Visa athletes in the form of cheers across social media. The campaign generated more than 59 million cheers, and Visa’s YouTube channel accounted for more than 47 million views of Visa’s commercials and athlete training videos from around the world.
Insurance provider Zurich launched a successful “Share your Sports Moments” marketing campaign on Google and YouTube, featuring members of the German Olympic team. The result: a significant uplift in the number of leads who then signed insurance contracts.
Lloyds TSB Bank, presenting partner of the Olympic Torch relay, conducted a successful AdWords campaign that kept pace with the Olympic torch as it passed through towns in the U.K., resulting in more than 190,000 clicks and more than 2 million impressions over three months.

Higher traffic and increased investment in the web also helped online publishers in a big way:
In the U.S., across 2 million sites in our Google Display Network and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, ads shown on sports-related websites increased by 19 percent, while revenues (RPMs) for these sites increased by 14 percent, compared to the two previous weeks.
Our premium ad serving platform for publishers (DoubleClick for Publishers), which helps some of the web’s largest publishers make money from their content, broke a new record, with one major publisher serving more than 400 million ad impressions in a day across its website and mobile content—driving higher revenues and more free content."

Tuesday 14 August 2012

Groupon made a profit of $47m in Q2 2012

"Groupon, Inc. today announced financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2012.
Revenue increased 45% year-over-year to $568.3 million in the second quarter 2012, compared with $392.6 million in the second quarter 2011. Excluding the $32.4 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, revenue growth would have been 53% compared with second quarter 2011.
The second quarter 2012 was the first quarter that direct revenue, or the amount earned from the sale of products for which the Company is the merchant of record, was material to Groupon's overall performance. Accordingly, the Company's consolidated revenue presentation now includes third-party revenue, which is related to sales for which the Company acts as an agent for the merchant, as well as direct revenue. Third-party and direct revenues are recorded on a net and gross basis, respectively. Direct revenue was $65.4 million in the quarter, compared with $19.2 million in the first quarter 2012.
Gross billings, which reflects the total amount collected from customers, excluding any applicable taxes and net of estimated refunds, increased 38% year-over-year to $1.29 billion in the second quarter 2012, compared with $929.2 million in the second quarter 2011. Excluding the $75.1 million unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, gross billings growth would have been 47% compared with second quarter 2011.
Operating income was $46.5 million in the second quarter 2012, which included non-cash stock-based compensation and acquisition-related expenses of $25.4 million. This compares with a loss from operations of $101.0 million in the second quarter 2011, which included non-cash stock-based compensation expense of $38.7 million. Year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter had a $0.2 million unfavorable impact on operating income."

Monetate's US Ecommerce Quarterly Report


Eq2 2012 final from Donna Tam

Includes data on ecommerce and conversion for social, search and email referrals, plus ecommerce benchmarks for different devices

52 million people in the UK saw at least 15 minutes of BBC TV's Olympic coverage

"The BBC's Olympics coverage was watched by 90% of the UK population, delivering what BBC1 controller Danny Cohen described as the "largest TV audiences since the pre-digital age".
A total of 51.9 million people watched at least 15 minutes of the London games on BBC TV, which offered blanket coverage of the Olympics on BBC1 and BBC3 and 24 dedicated Olympics channels on satellite, cable and online.
The corporation said 24.2 million people (42% of the UK population) watched at least 15 minutes of the games via the BBC red button.
The top 10 Olympics events all had peak audiences of more than 12 million viewers.
Cohen said: "The fact that Team GB did so well created a huge public interest and momentum.
"It's been a real breakthrough moment for the BBC in terms of digital and our relationship with audiences in a digital environment.
"I doubt there has been a sustained period since the mid-1990s when we have had such consistently large audiences, the largest since the pre-digital age."
[...]
Initial BBC figures suggested the closing ceremony, which had an average audience of 23.2 million viewers, was watched by even more people than Danny Boyle's opening ceremony, which had an original overnight rating of just over 23 million.
But on Monday, the day after the games finished, the corporation gave a belated boost to the audience for Boyle's opening spectacular, and said it was actually watched by an average of 23.4 million viewers when viewing on digital channels and BBC News was taken into account. The BBC also upped its peak audience from 26.9 million to 27.3 million.
The BBC said the London Games was the "biggest national television event" since current Barb methodology was introduced in 2002.
Reaching 90% of the population, it eclipsed the 81% of the population who watched at least 15 minutes of the 2002 football World Cup, the 69% who watched the BBC's coverage of the Queen's diamond jubilee earlier this year and the 61% who saw last year's royal wedding."
Note - Clearly it's not all that helpful to compare aggregate viewing figures for a 16 day event with a single football match or a Royal Wedding...

The BBC Sport websites received 55 million visits during the Olympic Games

"BBC Sport online registered a record 55 million visits from devices around the world during the Olympic Games.
Some 37 million were from within the UK, the BBC said. The figure includes both mobile and computer access.
The peak traffic moment was on 1 August, when cyclist Bradley Wiggins won his gold medal in the men's time trial.
But 3 August - the start of the women's heptathlon featuring Jessica Ennis - was the busiest day as a whole.
There were also 106 million requests for online video during the games .
This was up from 32 million during the Beijing Olympics.
Nearly two million people downloaded the BBC's Olympics smartphone app on both Apple's iOS and Google's Android platforms.
"Our aspiration was that just as the Coronation did for TV in 1953, the Olympics would do for digital in 2012," said Phil Fearnley, General Manager, News and Knowledge, BBC Future Media."

Monday 13 August 2012

More than 150 million Olympic-related Tweets were posted in 16 days

"We saw more than 150 million Tweets about the Olympics over the past 16 days. Let’s take a look at some of the big trends within that massive conversation.
The biggest moments of competition, as measured by Tweets per minute, were:
-Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt) of Jamaica wins gold in the 200m sprint: 80,000+ TPM
-Bolt wins gold in the 100m sprint: 74,000+ TPM
-Andy Murray (@andy_murray) of Great Britain wins gold in the men’s tennis singles: 57,000+ TPM
-Jamaica wins gold and sets the world record in the men’s 4x100 relay: 52,000+ TPM
-Team USA beats Spain to win gold in men’s basketball: 41,000+ TPM
The biggest tweeting moments that came during the heat of competition (not at a medal-winning conclusion) included Kobe Bryant’s dunk towards the end of the USA-Spain basketball game, and Hope Solo’s (@HopeSolo) land-diving save in the women’s USA-Japan soccer match.
In addition to inspiring the biggest conversation spike with his 200m win, Usain Bolt also took home the record for being the most discussed athlete of the Games. But he had company — nine other Olympians garnered more than 1 million Tweets each:
1.Usain Bolt (@UsainBolt)
2. Michael Phelps (@MichaelPhelps)
3. Tom Daley (@TomDaley1994)
4. Ryan Lochte (@ryanlochte)
5. Gabby Douglas (@gabrielledoug)
6. Andy Murray (@andy_murray)
7. Kobe Bryant (#GetKobeOnTwitter)
8. Yohan Blake (@YohanBlake)
9. Lee Chong Wei (@Lee_C_Wei)
10. LeBron James (@KingJames)"
Source:  Blog post from Twitter, 12th August 2012

Traffic to the BBC website on key days of the Olympics exceeded all the traffic for World Cup 2010

"The BBC's promise was to deliver coverage of every sport from every venue, and we certainly achieved this with our digital coverage: from the blue ribbon events like the 100m final all the way to the first taekwondo heats, the multi-faceted entirety of the Olympics was available to watch throughout the day across online and Red Button.
Overall, this comprehensive coverage drove very large amounts of traffic to the Sport website and to Red Button channels.
BBC Red Button - BARB reach (people aged 4+), with threshold "watched 15 consecutive minutes or more" - in line with BBC TV channel standard metric. Cookie churn means the BBC Online figures will include some unavoidable duplication over this period.
And the peak audiences for Team GB's medal moments were bigger than anything we've ever seen. Over a 24 hour period on the busiest Olympic days, Olympic traffic to bbc.co.uk exceeded that for the entire BBC coverage of FIFA World Cup 2010 games. On the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold and we shifted 700 Gb/s.
BBC Sport Online's most requested live video stream was of the Tennis Singles Finals, where Andy Murray and Serena Williams were victorious."
Note - Click on the link to see the top 10 events

The Women's Football Final between USA & Japan was the most streamed event in Olympic history

"1.467 Million Video Streams for Team USA-Japan is Most-Streamed Event in Olympic History
More Than 210 Million Total Viewers for the London Olympics, Surpassed Total Viewership for Atlanta for 2nd Most-Watched Event in U.S. Television History
31.9 Million Average Viewership and 18.0 Household Rating for the First 14 Nights of the London Olympics is Most for any Non-U.S. Summer Olympics in 36 Years
22.9 Million Viewers in Primetime Last Night; 13th Time in 14 Nights that Primetime Viewership Topped Comparable Nights from the 2008 Beijing Olympics"

Friday 10 August 2012

In the past 30 days Facebook referred people to mobile app stores 146 million times

"Facebook has increasingly become a way for iOS and Android developers to grow their apps. In the past 30 days, we have sent people to the Apple App Store and Google Play 146 million times, via clicks from channels such as news feed, timeline, bookmarks and App Center.
Mobile ads are an additional way to drive people to apps. When a person clicks on one of these ads, if they do not have the app installed they will be sent to the App Store or Google Play to get it."

The vast majority of Americans who are following the Olympics are doing so on TV

"Large majorities of Americans are following coverage of the Olympic Games in London. Nearly eight-in-ten (78%) say they have watched or followed Olympic coverage either on television, online or on social networks.
Television remains far-and-away the leading platform for Olympic coverage; 73% say they have watched coverage on television. Still, 17% say they have watched online or digitally and 12% report they have followed Olympic coverage on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Most Olympic followers (68%) say they are watching events in the evening after they have already occurred. At the same time, almost a quarter (23%) say they are watching live during the day.
The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Internet & American Life Project, conducted August 2-5, 2012 among 1,005 adults, finds that NBC’s coverage of the Olympics receives high marks from the public."
Source:  Research by Pew Internet & American Life Project, 6th August 2012

119m Olympics-related 'Tweets' were made on Sina Weibo during the 2012 opening ceremony

"While much has been made about this being the 'Twitter Olympics,' it should be noted that China has its own version called Sina Weibo (meaning "microblog" in Chinese) that is making a strong case to call this the "Weibo Olympics" as well.
While Twitter counted almost 10 million tweets during the Olympic opening ceremony, which was more than during the whole of the Beijing games, Sina Weibo counted 119 million opening ceremony tweets. What makes these numbers even more impressive is that Twitter has half the users of Twitter, but generated over 10 times the number of comments, writes Sam Flemming, Shanghai-based president and founder of social business intelligence provider CIC."

Live video streams of the Olympics are >300% higher in 2012 than in 2008

"With the Olympics halfway over, NBC has begun to release the success of their digital properties, which includes live streaming of all the games on their iPad apps. The web changed completely between 2008 and 2012, enabling a more social Olympics who’s coverage can be found way beyond the TV screen. Here are details on the NBC Olympics digital success.
The results are in for NBC’s digital footprint for the Olympics. Here are the main stats:
75 Million Total Videos Streamed, Up 182% vs. Beijing in 2008
34 Million Live Streams, Up 333% vs. Beijing
744 Million Page Views, Up 160 Million from Beijing
NBC Olympics Live Extra & NBC Olympics apps Peaked at No. 1 & 2 as Top Free Apps for iPhone & iPad on App Store
6.2 Million Devices Verified by Cable, Satellite and Telco Customers
Regarding NBCOlympics.com’s mobile website, the total unique viewers for the 2008 games were 2.8 million and for London 2012 there have already been 5.2 million, proving smartphone penetration. The NBC Live app has already had 7 million unique users and the NBC Olympics app has had 2.7 million."

'As many as' 10,000 phones are stolen each month in London

"As many as 10,000 mobile phones are stolen every month. Two thirds of the victims are aged between 13 and 16. Many phones are also stolen from unattended cars. Here are some practical measures you can take to keep your mobile phone safe."

Facebook produces six times as much code per day as in 2008

"When I wrote about Facebook's release process earlier this year, I stressed how fast we build things here and described how we push new code to facebook.com every day. In fact, I closed with the advice to "ship early and ship often.” Last week, in conjunction with the opening of our engineering office in London, we decided to double the release speed of facebook.com and indeed "ship often."
We will roll facebook.com onto new code twice a day now, with a push driven by a recently-hired release engineer in our New York office in addition to our standing daily push managed by our California release engineering team. The New York-based push will give much more power to our engineers who aren’t based on the west coast of the U.S. and will ensure they're able to move and ship as quickly as any other engineer in the company. It will also give California engineers two chances to get code shipped and features launched each day.
When I came to Facebook in 2008, I was the only release engineer, supporting around 100 developers in one location. Now that we’ve added more people and offices around the world, my small team in California (and now New York) is supporting hundreds more developers who are producing 6 times the amount of code per week. We’re making this change to keep our release process as quick and efficient at 1000 engineers as it was at 100."

Apple has spent over $1 billion on advertising for the iPhone and iPad

"Are Apple products truly superior to the competition? Or are they just marketed a lot better? Either way, there’s no denying that Apple can build hype around a product like no other tech company on the planet, but all that superb marketing ain’t cheap.
Testifying during the Apple vs Samsung trial today, Phil Schiller revealed that Apple has spent over $1 billion marketing the iPad and iPhone since their respective launches.
Covering the trial in-person for Wired, Christina Bonnington tweeted -
Apple has spent over $647M for iPhone advertising expenditures since its launch. $457M for iPad.
All Things D breaks down the spending by fiscal year to give a better picture of how Apple’s marketing has ramped up each year:
In fiscal 2008, the company spent $97.5 million on iPhone ads in the U.S. alone. That figure climbed to $149.6 million in 2009 and reached $173.3 million for all of fiscal 2010. On the iPad, the company spent $173.3 million in 2010."

Facebook makes 84% of its revenues from advertising

"Facebook posted it first quarterly earnings statement post-IPO yesterday and one number pops out: 84%. That is the percentage of revenue the company made from advertising, representing $992 million of the total $1.18 billion it brought in during Q2. To maintain stable growth, Facebook must diversify its revenue stream and become less reliant on advertising - a goal that has plagued competitors like Google for years."

Thursday 9 August 2012

Olympic sponsorship and advertising has driven adidas' sales in the UK

"Olympic sponsor Adidas has hailed its biggest ever UK marketing campaign ‘Take the Stage’ for lifting sales of London 2012-related merchandise to around around £100m.
It means that the sports manufacturer has already recouped its £100m investment in sponsoring the Games, with further sales expected.
The ‘Take the Stage’ campaign launched earlier this year and has featured British athletes and celebrities including heptathlete Jessica Ennis, footballer David Beckham and comedian Keith Lemmon."

Starbucks processes more than 1 million mobile payments a week

"Starbucks already processes more than 1 million mobile purchases a week in the U.S. through its smartphone app, and has logged more than 60 million since its introduction, Mr. Schultz said."

Wednesday 8 August 2012

Usain Bolt's 100m final generated 1,233 Tweets per Second


Note - this works out at approx 1,233 Tweets per Second (tps), far below the 15,358 tps for the final goal of Euro 2012

Update - slightly higher for the 200m final:

Google & Apple passed on payments of $5.4bn to developers in 2011

"The total revenue paid to app developers by Apple and Google in 2011 was $5.4bn (£3.5bn), slightly more than the GDP of Guinea or Liechtenstein, according to statistics from Flurry. The company forecasts the figure to rise by over 60 per cent to $8.7bn in 2012.
The figures reveal that in-app advertising accounted for $980m, or 18 per cent of revenues in 2011. This figure is forecast to increase by more than 100 per cent to $2bn in 2012, equating to 23 per cent of total 2012 revenues."

Shazam users have tagged 5 billion songs

"Shazam®, the world’s leading media engagement company, today announced it has reached a major milestone – fans around the world have used the service to identify songs and experience more with TV shows and ads over five billion times.  P!nk’s new song “Blow Me One Last Kiss” marked the five billionth tag.  In addition to its leadership in music discovery, Shazam’s rapid expansion into television has given people new opportunities to use the app to engage with their favourite shows and ads for additional content and exclusive offers."

Fifty Shades of Grey reached 35 million people more quickly than Instagram did

Earlier today I saw a stat quoted (with no source) on Quora:
"50 Shades of Grey grew to 35 million 'users' more quickly than Instagram did."
I looked in vain for a single source myself, so I decided to try to verify it myself:

Instagram:
The Next Web has detailed the growth of Instagram from it's start, taking Instagram's own reported numbers, since it's launch in October 2010.
"Oct 13 2010: 100,000
Oct 20 2010: 200,000
Oct 28 2010: 300,000
Dec 21 2010: 1 million
Feb 01 2011: 1.75 million
Feb 15 2011: 2 million
May 03 2011: 3.6 million
May 26 2011: 4.4 million
Oct 31 2011: 12 million
Dec 5 2011: 14 million
Jan 24 2012: 15 million
Mar 11 2012: 27 million
May 1 2012: 50 million"

Fifty Shades of Grey:
Yahoo! quotes a figure of 'nearly 40m sold' on 7th August, while the publisher reported 12m sales in the UK alone.  Since it was originally published on 20th June 2011 (Wikipedia), this means that this has happened in less than 14 months.

14 months for Instagram was at December 2011, so at the same point since launch Instagram had only 14m-15m 'sales' (it's a free app).

So yes, Fifty Shades did hit 35m people a lot quicker than Instagram.

Except that...  The 50 Shades figure is for 3 books, and I'd expect a lot of people have more than one of the trilogy, so it might have reached fewer than 20m people...

Mobile Search and the Olympic Games

Google have looked at some stats across the world, combining tablet and mobile to create this chart.



Click to enlarge

Source:  Google Mobile blog, 6th August 2012
Note - lots more background at the original link

Tuesday 7 August 2012

McDonald's mobile app has been downloaded more than 1m times in the UK

"McDonald’s is seeing strong results for its mobile efforts in Britain, with its local smartphone application having achieved more than one million downloads in less than 12 months.
The fast-food giant is a leader in mobile marketing across a variety of strategies, including using QR codes on packaging and engaging in mobile advertising, in addition to creating leading mobile apps and Web sites. In Britain, the numbers show McDonald’s is also bringing customers back again and again, with more than one in ten customers returning to the app each month."
Source:  Mobile Marketer, 1st August 2012

Fifty Shades of Grey is the best selling book in UK history only 14 months after publication


Note - The book was first commercially published on 20th June 2011
Note - Some confusion here!  Random House say it's the best selling book, but then give sales figures for the trilogy?  Random indeed.

They've since deleted the tweet, but this one still exists:

45% of smartphones sold in EU5 are made by Samsung

"The latest smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech shows that Samsung, buoyed by the release of the Samsung S3, is now the top selling brand across Europe with 45% share.
Samsung’s success has hugely benefited Android, with its share of the big five countries growing from 42.7% in July 2011 to 65.7% in July 2012. Android has also retained its number one position in Great Britain in the latest 12 weeks of sales (12 w/e 8th July 2012) with 59.5% share, up from 47% a year ago.
Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, comments: “While the majority of noise is focused on big-name products such as the S3 or S2, it’s easy to forget that Samsung is selling smartphones across all tiers. As a result it now makes up five out of the top ten best selling smartphones in Great Britain – with even the smartphone/tablet hybrid Samsung Galaxy Note making it into the top ten.”
Elsewhere, Apple continues its strong performance in the US with share up 9.5% over the past year to 38.2%. Dominic Sunnebo explains further: “As the iPhone 4S nears the end of its lifecycle, and rivals such as Samsung & HTC bring out new flagship products, we inevitably see big changes in share. However, Kantar Worldpanel ComTech data clearly shows that the proportion of Apple consumers who have owned their device for at least 18 months and not upgraded has increased markedly over the last quarter, indicating current owners are holding off upgrading until the release of the iPhone 5."

eBooks outsell physical books on Amazon UK

"Amazon.co.uk has said that sales of its Kindle ebooks are now outstripping its sales of printed books.
Underlining the speed of change in the publishing industry, Amazon said that two years after introducing the Kindle, customers are now buying more ebooks than all hardcovers and paperbacks combined. According to unaudited figures released by the company on Monday, since the start of 2012, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold on its site, customers downloaded 114 ebooks. Amazon said the figures included sales of printed books which did not have Kindle editions, but excluded free ebooks.
In a surprise move in May, the company went into partnership with the UK's largest bricks-and-mortar books retailer, Waterstones.
Much to the consternation of the publishing industry, Amazon has refused to release audited figures for its digital book sales, something it does for printed books. It told the Guardian that the company would not discuss future policy on the matter."

The world's first website was published on 6th August 1991

"Even if you can't name the inventor of the World Wide Web (It's Tim Berners-Lee!), you'll probably want to celebrate one of the information network's most important milestones. On August 6, 1991 -- 21 years ago -- Berners-Lee published the world's first website from a lab in the Swiss Alps.
So Happy 21st Birthday, WWW! Have a drink on us. As our friends over at HuffPost UK point out, the world's first website can still be visited today, more than two decades after its creation.
The site, originally found at the clunky URL "http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html," was updated frequently after launching; therefore, images of its earliest versions were never saved. Nevertheless, a later copy from 1992 is still preserved and welcoming visitors.
The bare-bones website was created, appropriately, to explain the World Wide Web to newcomers. "The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents," the site reads, going on to explain how others can create their own webpages."
Source:  Huffington Post, 6th August 2012

Monday 6 August 2012

EL James is the best selling author of all time on Amazon UK

"After four months of increasingly astronomical sales, EL James's Fifty Shades trilogy has today officially outsold JK Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter series on Amazon's UK site.
James has sold more than four million copies of her books in print and on Kindle since they went on sale in March, making her the bestselling author of all time at Amazon.co.uk.
JK Rowling's final book in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is being outsold by the first book in the James trilogy, Fifty Shades of Grey, by more than two to one on the website.
EU director of Kindle Gordon Willoughby said: "If JK Rowling was the literary phenomenon of the last decade, then EL James looks certain to take that mantle in the current decade.""

The New York Times group makes more revenue from subscriptions than from advertising

"Advertising revenue continues to sink at the New York Times Company, which reported a second-quarter net loss of $88.1 million today. But a glimmer of hope can be seen in circulation revenue, which has actually gone up through print subscription price increases and the online paywall. At the company's big three papers — the Times, International Herald Tribune, and Boston Globe — print and digital ad dollars dipped 6.6 percent to $220 million, while circulation revenue was up 8.3 percent to $233 million. The historical rebalancing, which occurred at the News Media Group for the first time in Q1, may indicate a sea change in an industry that has long relied on advertising to stay afloat. "They're probably the first major paper that has crossed that line," media analyst Ken Doctor of Newsonomics told Daily Intel. "It is an interesting moment.""
Source:  NYMag, 26th July 2012

85% of Facebook users create content

"As of yesterday, Facebook claimed 955 million monthly active users, that is, people who have either visited the social network through its website or mobile site or clicked one of those ubiquitous share buttons distributed on countless third-party sites, like AdAge.com.
Anyway you cut it, the scale is vast. But just how many of those people are actually doing something on Facebook? Now the company is telling us.
In a recent interview, Facebook Head of Audience Insights Robert D'Onofrio said that about 85% of those monthly active users are creating some form of content. It needs to be said that Facebook defines content creation broadly and includes everything from uploading a photo or video to writing a status update to less time-intensive actions such as becoming a fan of something or liking a friend's post. Messaging and check-ins aren't included."
Caution - creating content includes 'Liking'.  I'd love to see the stats excluding Liking - i.e. actually writing something, uploading a photo, or doing something more demanding.

Each generation of the iPhone sells approximately as many all all previous versions combined

"We're being shown a chart with cumulative unit sales for both the iPhone and iPad. When assessing sales for a new model of the iPhone, Apple used an easy shorthand: "Each new generation sold approximately equal to all previous generations combined.""

Friday 3 August 2012

Yelp users have posted over 30m reviews

"Yelp Inc. shares rose as much as 12% after the online review website reported second-quarter sales that topped analysts' estimates, as an expansion into new regions helped widen its user base.
Revenue rose 67% to $32.7 million, the San Francisco-based company said yesterday in a statement, beating the average analyst prediction of $30.5 million compiled by Bloomberg. The net loss was $1.98 million, or 3 cents a share. Analysts on average were projecting a loss of 5 cents.
[...]
Money spent on sales and marketing, the company's largest expense, increased 65% to $20.3 million in the second quarter after surging 67% in the previous period. Yelp expanded into eight new markets in the quarter, including Finland and Norway, bumping total active markets worldwide to 90.
At the same time, more users are coming to the site and reviewing businesses more often. Reviews increased 54% to more than 30 million, while average monthly unique visitors grew 52% to more than 78 million, Yelp said. The company's mobile applications were used on 7.2 million unique devices a month on average.
In last year's second quarter, the company posted a net loss of $1.17 million, or 8 cents a share, on sales of $19.6 million. Third-quarter revenue will be $34.5 million to $35.5 million, Yelp said, compared with the average analyst estimate of $34.3 million."

83m Facebook profiles are not 'real'

"Facebook has more than 83m fake profiles, including millions created for users' pets and a large number of accounts the company deems "undesirable", it has admitted.
The figure emerged in Facebook's first quarterly report to US financial regulators since the world's biggest social network made its much-criticised stock market debut in May.
The company said 8.7% of its 955m global users were not real.
There were 83.09m fake users in total, which Facebook classifies into three groups. The largest is made up of almost 46m duplicate profiles, accounting for 4.8% of all accounts. The company defined that category as "an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account".
What were deemed "user-misclassified" profiles amounted to 2.4%, almost 23m, where Facebook says "users have created personal profiles for a business, organisation or non-human entity such as a pet".
Finally, "undesirable" profiles accounted for the remainder, about 14m, which are deemed to be in breach of Facebook's terms and conditions. The company said this typically means accounts that have been set up to send spam messages or content to other Facebook users.
In March, when Facebook last gave an estimate of the number of fake or duplicate accounts, it said the proportion was in the region of 5% or 6%, which at the time meant between 42m and 50m."