Dark Google Vexes Publishers. Looking at their Web analytics, many publishers have seen an alarming shift: their search traffic has dropped, while their share of referrals from social has risen. Perhaps the era of social media has well and truly arrived. The truth, however, is less dramatic but potentially more troubling. The drops in search traffic is an analytics problem, caused by what some are calling “dark search” or “dark Google.” The issue is a technical one, but in simple terms, it’s caused by certain browsers blocking websites from tracking exactly how users arrived there. For example, when users of Safari on iOS 6 click on a search result, the site they’re visiting has no way of telling they found that content through search. Analytics packages typically lump this traffic in the “direct” bucket, giving an inaccurate picture of where their traffic is actually coming from. Many publishers and marketers are looking at this inaccurate and incomplete data and drawing conclusions based on it.
Taskmasters: how Israeli intelligence officers helped inspire the look of iOS 7. The power of two: Use your phone as a document scanner. For all the talk about a “post-PC” world, most people use smartphones and tablets as additions to their existing technological arsenal, rather than a replacement for a standard laptop or desktop. What many users fail to realize is that there are a number of ways to combine the capabilities of your PC and mobile device that can make your tablet or smartphone an even more powerful tool.
We've previously examined how to use your mobile devices to make your PC more useful: we talked about how to turn a tablet into a second monitor, how to make your phone a file server, how to use your phone as a keyboard and mouse, and how to easily stream your video library to your phone or tablet. This week, we'll talk about how to use your smartphone as a document scanner. While reading the comments to our review of Doxie's portable document scanner a few weeks back, I noticed that a few of you were eschewing scanners entirely in favor of these phone apps, so I decided to dig a little deeper. Young People Are Not as Digitally Native as You Think.
Kim Hong-Ji/ReutersMore than 90 percent of young people in many developed countries are digital natives, with South Korea leading the way at 99.6 percent, according to a new study. Everyone knows young people these days are born with smartphones in hand and will stay glued to the Internet from that time onward. Right? Well, not quite. Actually, fewer than one-third of young people around the world are “digital natives,” according to a report published Monday and billed as the first comprehensive global look at the phenomenon.
The study, conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the International Telecommunication Union, shows that only 30 percent of people ages 15 to 24 have spent at least five years actively using the Internet, the criterion used to define digital nativism. In many developed countries, more than 90 percent of young people are considered digital natives, with South Korea leading the way at 99.6 percent. That is especially true in developing countries. Daily chart: When in roam... The Price of 500MB of Mobile Data Across the World. Thompson's business ideas face mixed reaction from New York Times staff | Media. A New York Times-sponsored cruise to Europe with editors and reporters is one of the controversial money-making ideas being cooked up by chief executive Mark Thompson's new regime, according to a recent interview with the former BBC director general in the New York magazine.
Thompson is likely to meet much resistance to the idea among journalists who treat the divide between editorial and business as sacrosanct, but other ideas on developing revenue streams are worth noting in an industry struggling to secure its commercial future. In the interview Thompson talks about the "engagement curve" of the NYT's estimated 50 million readers, ranging from the full paid-up subscribers at the high-margin end to the long tail of casual website users who may click on a single link. Inventing ways of persuading readers up and down the chart to pay, especially those in the middle who might respond to lower priced products, is the big challenge, said Thompson. The Real Life Social Network v2. Why Developers Won’t Quit Facebook: Glassdoor Grows Registered Users 10X in 90 Days.
By Sarah Lacy On August 23, 2012 Like the arid Oakland hills, the blogosphere has spent the summer ablaze with developer anger, as it dawns on everyone what it means to build a company dependent on someone else’s platform. News flash: They have you by the cojones. But the reality is Twitter can put up as many two-by-two matrixes as it likes; Dalton Caldwell can write flame posts on Facebook’s untoward intentions with developers all day long. Even if hundreds of developers stop building apps for these platforms, hundreds more will rush in. Why? Because, particularly in the case of Facebook, no one has ever constructed a way to immediately reach 1 billion people through their social connections before.
This isn’t really a debate about how developers would like to be treated. Consider Glassdoor, the site that lets you peer into the walls of companies to see how much they pay and how they treat employees. So back in April, it launched something called Inside Connections on top of Facebook. The End of the Facebook Like Bubble. There’s a new reality for brands in the digital space, and they’re finding out they’re not the ones holding the cards, especially when we’re talking about Facebook. In September, Facebook tweaked its newsfeed algorithm, a move that raised concerns it was putting the hurt to brands by cutting the number of messages that go through to their fans. This would figure, critics said, since Facebook’s ad model is dependent on brands paying to get more of their messages in front of their audience. Perhaps more importantly, brands are starting to realize they don’t call the shots in the digital world, like they do with other media.
Now, they have to adjust their expectations and even their approaches to play in the digital waters, and still it won’t be enough to get a free ride anymore, no matter what some social guru says about “creating engaging content.” And it appears brands need to recalibrate their Facebook approach. Business - Derek Thompson - This Graph Is Disastrous for Print and Great for Facebook—or the Opposite! If you work anywhere near media, you'll want to take a long look at this graph. It tells you where Americans direct our attention (in BLUE) and where advertisers pay money to capture our attention (in RED). -- Takeaway #1: We still love TV. -- Takeaway #2: Advertisers still love print.-- Takeaway #3: Audiences move faster than advertisers.
According to this chart -- adapted from a Mary Meeker slideshow excerpted by Bill Gross -- we spend more time engaging with mobile devices than reading print. But print publications still get 25-times more ad money than mobile. Either the eyeballs are moving faster than the advertisers, who will eventually stop paying for print ... or the ad teams don't think a minute spent around mobile ads is worth a minute spend around print ads. Those aren't mutually exclusive. We can take this chart in a lot of directions. Since the Facebook IPO, I've been thinking a lot about attention. But in one key measure of attention economics, it doesn't dominate at all. Relevance. Your Anti-Social Media Rant Reveals Too Much About Your Friends - Alexis C. Madrigal. The Times' Roger Cohen ran a not-even delightfully cranky column about that "scourge of the modern world": people sharing on social media. In this column, he lists what he sees his friends, acquaintances, and others he finds worthy of following talking about: So let us absorb the mass of unwanted shared personal information and images that wash over one, like some great viscous tide full of stuff one would rather not think about -- other people's need for Icelandic lumpfish caviar, their numb faces at the dentist, their waffles and sausage, their appointments with their therapists, their personal hygiene, their pimples and pets, their late babysitters, their grumpy starts to the day, their rude exchanges, their leaking roofs, their faith in homeopathy, their stressing out, and all the rest.
Now, I've been on Twitter for a long time, Facebook even longer, though in a more limited capacity. And I've never noticed these topics permeating my timeline. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. How to Get More Twitter Followers by Jenny Johnson: Humor. I'm frequently asked questions about my Twitter account. Things such as: How did you get so many followers? What can I do to get popular on Twitter? Have you ever murdered a homeless person (I haven't, but that doesn't mean I won't)? This is your lucky day, because I am going to tell you how to be super popular with total strangers on the internet. Don't be afraid to show some skin. Selecting your Twitter name. Whom to follow? What to tweet? How often to tweet? By following these easy instructions, you will become a true superstar among people surfing the Internet when they should be working. Mary Meeker's 2011 Web 2.0 Summit Presentation. Every time I come to a Web 2.0 conference, Mary Meeker's presentation is what I most look forward to!
She's been doing them for eight years now and they're always big on data, long on vision. You can view the presentation below, along with real-time notes taken while Meeker spoke. Mobile has been a big theme of her presentations over the past couple of years. Sure enough, mobile is a big part of this year's presentation. Although she says that mobile growth is still in "early innings" - perhaps continuing the Moneyball metaphor that her Kleiner Perkins colleague presented earlier today. Real-time Notes Almost a billion 3G subscribers now, just 17% of total mobile subscribers. iPad growth has been staggering, compared to iPhone. One very interesting slide was the one below, which states that 55% of Twitter's traffic comes from mobile devices.
Some interesting thoughts on Steve Jobs. Before Steve Jobs... computers were utilitarian tools for computation. KPCB Internet Trends (2011) Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile. By Hamish McKenzie On April 27, 2012 When they look back at this era, Internet historians will mark Facebook’s Instagram acquisition as the symbolic moment when the Great Shift was confirmed. Significantly, it also came soon after Steve Jobs’ death. The device that Jobs created had, within the space of five years, allowed a 551-day-old company with 14 employees to become worth $1 billion. On April 9, 2012, Web 2.0 lost its mantle as the most important Internet paradigm. The momentum has been shifting for a while, but now the trend is emphatic.
This is a new phenomenon. They know this much themselves, and they’re worried. We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. In his latest earnings call, meanwhile, Larry Page was bullish on mobile, even as Google revealed that the average price of its bread-and-butter cost-per-click ads dropped by 12 percent year on year.
I agree. How Your Wireless Carrier Overcharges You. When your wireless carrier charges you for the amount of data you used on your cell phone in a given month, how do you know the bill is accurate? It very well might not be, according to a new study. This question is more important to consumers than ever. Over the past year, the growth in the popularity of smartphones has led the largest U.S. mobile carriers to replace unlimited data plans with ones that place caps on data usage, and charge extra for exceeding those limits. Working with three colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, computer science PhD researcher Chunyi Peng probed the systems of two large U.S. cell-phone networks.
She won’t identify them but says that together they account for 50 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers. The researchers used a data-logging app on Android phones to check the data use that the carriers were recording. The researchers determined that even typical use of a phone could lead the data to be overcounted by 5 to 7 percent, Peng says. Research: Mobile Web Ads Beat Apps. Consumers engage with mobile Web advertising significantly more than they engage with advertising on ad supported apps, according to statistics for the month of April included in Jumptap’s Simple Targeting & Audience Trends (S.T.A.T.), a monthly report that examines trends in mobile advertising. The report, which is based on information culled from Jumptap’s ad network, indicated that more than 58 percent of mobile internet users are engaging with ad content through their browser versus 42 percent from ad-supported apps.
The research seems to suggest that although applications may be a good way to reach a company’s most loyal customers, they may not be the best way to engage a more casual consumer. A small percentage of loyal customers may be willing to download the ad-supported app of a favorite retailer. But consumers accustomed to the online model are more comfortable connecting with advertising that they encounter on mobile-optimized websites. The Naysayers are Wrong: Mobile Will Monetize Better Than Desktop. Fixing Mobile Platforms. I wrote an article recently on why mobile app-first companies are doomed to fail due to their inability to close viral loops and retain users effectively. I pivoted my own company’s new product Origami to focus on the web and build mobile as a companion. The article centers on data regarding onboarding and our inability to optimize onboarding in a timely manner. I’d like to propose a couple changes for Apple and Google to consider that I believe would make mobile a viable platform for startups going forward.
I’ve ordered these from most plausible to least plausible. 1. Ability to pass parameters from a download URL to an app “I have no idea why people are downloading my app, or how they found out about it” is the response given by most app developers when asked where their mobile downloads are coming from. On the web, there are a number of ways to track a user from page to page: Referrer header that tells you what page someone clicked to get to the current page. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. BII REPORT: Here Are The Two Keys To Making Mobile Payments Work.
Samsung Regains Smartphone Sales Top Spot, Overtakes Apple. The first quarter of 2012 saw Korean mobile firm Samsung overtake Apple to regain its position as the biggest seller of smartphones across the world, according to a report released by Strategy Analytics. Samsung’s 31 percent market share saw it out-gun Apple’s 24 percent over the three month period, flipping the duo’s positions after the Cupertino-based firm led the previous quarter.
Samsung has not revealed its sales figure for the quarter, though analysts estimate it be in the region of 44 million, while Apple this week disclosed that it sold 35 million iPhones. Retailers remain keen on Samsung’s range and the firm’s global smartphone shipments rose by 253 percent (year-on-year) to account for 44.5 million devices. In particular, Strategy Analytics notes that “demand surged for its popular Galaxy models such as the Note, S2 and Y.” Apple’s brief time at the top of smartphone sales ranking coincided with the launch of the iPhone 4S. 2012 Internet Trends.