TechCrunch
U.S. Share Of Mobile Ad Impressions Dips Below 50% On Worldwide Surge, Opera Finds
Opera Mediaworks today released its State of Mobile Advertising Report for Q2 2013, and the news from the largest mobile ad platform is that mobile ad impressions are growing globally, with U.S. share dipping to below 50 percent, though American impressions still account for just under 75 percent of revenue, meaning its dropping share doesn’t make it any less important for advertisers going after mobile users.
Impression volume grew overall worldwide, so the U.S. isn’t really shedding any share, but it is important to note that the rest of the world is becoming increasingly important to mobile marketers. The challenge now is to get more of those worldwide impressions to translate directly into revenue, but that’s something that could come as advertisers localize their content more to target new international growth audiences.
Other key data from the Opera report today include iPhone share, which is still tops among mobile devices. iPhone earns 36.4 percent of all revenue derived from Opera’s mobile ads, while Android accounts for 27.8 percent. iPhone and Android are nearly tied in overall ad impressions, but iOS is still the clear leader overall thanks to the iPad’s continued dominance of the tablet market, with 43.8 percent of impressions served. Samsung rules the Android roost, however, with 58.5 percent, but overall Google’s mobile OS still trails Apple’s considerably.
For advertisers, another key takeaway is that rich media ads are doing amazing in terms of click-through rate, where standard banner ads are falling off in terms of engagement. Rich media campaigns that run within apps now average click through rates of 1.53 percent on mobile, even though by and large standard banner ads are still the most popular option.
Opera says that the rise of new regions indicates we could see considerable changes in the breakdown of mobile ads and where they’re served. Firefox OS has also launched in earnest, with the aim of serving a lot of those new markets, and Ubuntu Mobile and other projects are also coming out in the same vein. All of this (not to mention new hardware on the horizon from Apple) could change not only where ads are seen most, but also how they’re served, as we move into the latter half of this year.
LinkedIn Expands Ad Program With Launch Of Sponsored Updates Program
LinkedIn just announced the launch of Sponsored Updates, where the companies and other organizations with Company Pages can pay to promote their content to LinkedIn users who don’t follow their specific page.
Asking advertisers to pay to give their content more visibility has become a pretty standard way for social networks to make money, and LinkedIn had previously said it was pilot testing this program. Today, however, marks the official launch. Here’s how LinkedIn’s David Hahn describes Sponsored Updates in a company blog post:
Marketers are increasingly leveraging content to inform, educate, and inspire their current and prospective customers. But the high quality content they’ve produced – slideshows, articles, videos, and whitepapers – does not always achieve enough reach and engagement on their own channels. With Sponsored Updates, marketers will be able to distribute this content directly to relevant professionals in a place their customers and prospects are already consuming professionally relevant content. Marketers can target Sponsored Updates to any segment of our premium audience based on professional profile data across more than 225 million members.
Hahn said the company has “taken a measured and methodical approach to create an experience that strikes the right balance for our members and companies.” Promoted content will be clearly marked as “sponsored,” but users will be able to interact with it like any other piece of content.
Sponsored Updates can be priced on either a CPM or CPC basis (i.e., based on impressions or on clicks), and advertisers should be able to view data on their campaigns and tweak their efforts as necessary. As for rolling the product out, Sponsored Updates are supposed to be available to any company with an account representative starting today, and to anyone with a Company Page by the end of the month.
The initial customers include Allstate Insurance, Box , Domo, Charles Schwab, General Electric, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan Motor Company, The Weinstein Company, Wall Street Journal, and Xerox, Hahn said. His post also looks at sample campaigns from Adobe, Telstra, and HubSpot — HubSpot, for example, saw 400 percent more leads from their LinkedIn campaign than from other paid efforts.
In its most recent earnings report, LinkedIn said that revenue from its Marketing Solutions ad products was $74.8 million, making up 23 percent of total revenue and up 56 percent from the same period last year.
LittleSnapper Becomes Ember As Realmac Software Overhauls Its Mac App For Digital Creatives
Ember is a new tool available today on the Mac App Store for collecting inspirational digital bits and pieces from websites, images, apps or anything else. It’s not entirely new, however – Ember was once LittleSnapper, popular in its own right, but with a somewhat limited reputation as an excellent advanced screenshotting tool. Brighton’s Realmac Software is refocusing its snapping and saving software with Ember, and decided a total rebrand was in order.
Ember is a digital scrapbook at heart, but it’s more about a productive, interactive creativity than a static collection of things you happen to like. The drag-and-drop interface allows you to grab anything from the web and anything local to your app and drop it into your library, tag the stuff and then build collections around that and other metadata built right into the content. There are already a few simple collections built in, organizing content from its original source – whether it came from a screenshot, the web, a photo or a tablet or phone device.
You can create your own smart collections based on words contained in the title, when they were taken or captured, keywords in the web address if they’re saved pages, tags, device type or star rating, as well as any combination of the above. For hardcore organizers, it’s a comprehensive content management system, but it also works equally well as a general grab bag for lazier users like myself.
Ember also does take screenshots, and these autotag with the application they’re grabbed from. Plus you can subscribe to websites to browse the web visually and easily take images from those websites to make site-specific libraries. Safari and Chrome extensions allow you to save entire websites, and adheres to specific layouts as represented by your current browser window size when grabbing the capture, but you can adjust to check out how a page behaves dynamically, as well.
All content can be shared with others via AirDrop, Messages, Twitter, Tumblr and more, and you can sketch and annotate captures to better explain why you’re sharing things or what you want to flag about the items you’ve collected. All of this can be done in fullscreen mode, too, for a distraction-free environment, and that should become even more handy with OS X 10.9′s new multi-monitor support.
Ember is a brand new app, and LittleSnapper users will have to fork over $49 just like everyone else to pay the price of admission. I expect some of them to be a bit sore about the change, but the classic Catch 22 of software is that you can’t give something away forever and continue to make new stuff or improve it. Also, people might get a little sticker shock at a near-$50 price tag for a piece of software in the age of the App Store, but Realmac has delivered nothing but winners and Ember is no exception to that rule.
Flipboard Brings Its Mobile Magazines To The Web
Flipboard started on mobile devices, but the magazine app is moving to the web today with the launch of a new site. Its 75 million registered users will be getting access to its superior formatting and curation features for articles, photos and video on their desktops and laptops.
But why the web?
The company has already added 25 million registered users since launching a do-it-yourself mobile magazine creation tool in late March, for a total of around 75 million people to date. If it stayed mobile-only instead of becoming mobile-first — a decision many tech entrepreneurs are considering these days — it would probably continue to grow just fine.
The answer is that the web is still core to how many users behave, particularly around features like easy-access share buttons for distributing articles across social networks and email. If you click on a Flipboard link that you see from a friend on Twitter, for example, you’ll now open a dynamic web page instead of being directed to the mobile app like you would had been before (ex: here’s our TechCrunch Weekly magazine of our top stories, updated every Friday).
Browsing is also at least as easy as the touch interface offered on Flipboard’s iOS and Android native apps, courtesy of work from Charles Ying and others working on the HTML5 experience for the company. You can use your mouse, magic mouse or trackpad to quickly flip left or right through the stories. If you have a clickwheel, each click turns a page. A navigation scrub bar at the bottom of each magazine lets you quickly browse through the compilation.
“It doesn’t matter if the web site cannibalizes native app traffic,” founder Mike McCue says about the web version. “We don’t care where the user comes from. We’re trying to curate awesome content on any device, as optimized as possible.”
Beyond distribution and a better user experience, being web friendly fits into the Flipboard business plan. The company has begun selling full-page ads mixed in with regular content like what you might see in a high-end print magazine. Larger professional publishers, including the owners of this publication, currently have revenue-sharing agreements in place for their own magazines, but the company plans to expand that to other content and curation creators.
Around two million magazines have been created since the March launch of the DIY tool, and many of the top ones are being curated by enthusiasts rather than pros — photography, maritime shipping, beer, and GIFS are some example themes. There’s a lot of additional reader attention to sell against.
But what about the publications trying to figure out their online (and mobile) business models? Why should they want Flipboard to get a piece of their precious few remaining ad dollars via alternative destinations like native apps and now its own web links?
For some of them/us, the answer is going to be that they don’t have the resources to build good web sites and mobile apps anyway. For others, it’s that they can build their own products but don’t know how to monetize them well.
And for the publishers who have figured web and mobile design *and* monetization, Flipboard has another answer. You’ll be able to adjust your administrator settings to decide how Flipboard links behave, McCue tells me. If you don’t want them to go to the company’s pages, you can set them to resolve straight to your home site URLs, and keep the ad revenue and maybe subscription funnel intact.
He hopes, however, that the Flipboard ad format will appeal so strongly to so many advertisers that they’ll eventually be spending money more like they did in the golden age of print and less like they do on web and mobile publishers these days.
Professional-grade content has generally not been something that Silicon Valley types want to take bets on, so it’s unusual (and pleasant) to see a company led by a veteran tech entrepreneur and backed by top investors working on solutions to our product and monetization problems.
Flipboard also has another launch today, a nonprofits section featuring topical magazines curated by Doctors Without Borders, UNICEF and the Larry King Cardiac Foundation among others. You can find them all via a red ribbon inside the Flipboard interface, under “Big Ideas” category.
The new web versions are supported by the latest versions of all the main desktop and mobile browsers, including IE9+, Safari, Chrome and Firefox, and are offered in 11 languages including English, Chinese, French, German and Japanese.
Flurry: China Accounts For 24% Of The World's Connected Devices, With 261.3M Active Smartphones And Tablets
Flurry last year noted that China became the world’s fastest growing market for iOS and Android devices and today there is no sign of that slowing down. China now accounts for 24% of all of the connected devices in use worldwide, with 261,333,271 smartphones and tablets among them. Flurry released the data as part of a new report on smartphone usage in China, released today to coincide with a new deal with Renren Games, the online gaming distribution platform of the Chinese social network of the same name.
While Flurry has made a name for itself in charting worldwide and U.S. trends in app store usage, this is the first time that the company has drilled down into what is getting used in China. That is a service that Flurry may be providing more regularly now that it is working with Renren, where it will be providing developers on Renren’s platform more information about games usage following a lot of the metrics hat Flurry provides to other app developers, including active user numbers, player retention stats and other information about in-app events. It will also offer its AppSpot monetizing platform alongside Renren’s own Ader ad network.
Concentrating more on China, however, should come as no surprise. Given how much the market there is growing, developers offering apps there will be looking to get more sophisticated data on how the market is performing overall.
Here are some of the key takeaways from Flurry’s report, which is based on a random sampling of over 18,000 iOS and Android smartphones in the market.
Gaming is by far the biggest app activity in China today. On Android, some 56% of users’ time is spent in gaming apps, compared to 47% on iOS. Both are fairly far ahead of the next-most popular categories on each platform. There, the numbers begin to diverge and point to how each platform appears to be aimed at different platforms, with entertainment the next biggest on Android (20%) and Newsstand at 30% on iOS — no small part due to the Newsstand being a very popular destination on iPad tablets. With Apple’s earnings out today, it will be interesting to see if iPad usage or Newsstand performance specifically come up in Cook’s regular remarks on how China is performing.
For now, it looks like gaming is proportionately more interesting to Chinese consumers compared to those in the U.S. Figures from April 2013 found that consumers here only spent about 32% of app time in gaming apps, with 18% on Facebook. That still made gaming the most popular category, but far less so. Telling that social networking is only grabbing a couple of percentage points on time on either platform, too small to even get a breakout number in Flurry’s graphic.
Yes, it’s an Apple/Samsung race right now, but eyes out for Xaomi. Last week Xiaomi, the Chinese Android handset maker whose flagship device is likened to the iPhone in terms of form factor, reported over $2 billion in revenue for the first half of the year, passing its total revenues for all of 2012. Flurry provides some numbers that is showing how this is playing out in terms of handset penetration. It is at 6%, the only other brand big enough to be worth breaking out after the big two. Interesting to note that while Samsung is clearly the biggest Android device maker, in terms of the installed base, there are significantly more Apple devices than Samsung devices in circulation, even if overall Android is far bigger, at 65% to Apple’s 35%.
Again, tablets are proving to be a significant engine for growth or iOS in China in terms of device penetration. Flurry notes that some 21% of all iOS devices were iPad tablets, compared to only 4% of Android devices; Xiaomi is reportedly eyeing up releasing its first tablet, as well as extending outside of the Chinese market.
More to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment