iPad users spend over $70,000 a day on newspaper & magazine content

"iPad users are willing to pay for premium content offered by newspapers and magazines in the Newsstand category. The category launched only six months ago, however more than 70k USD per day is already being made by the top 100 grossing Newsstand applications in the United States."

Source:  Distimo blog, 27th March 2012

Facebook refers nearly as much traffic to The Guardian as Google does

Click to enlarge

Source:  A chart used during a speech by Tanya Cordrey of The Guardian, reported by Journalism.co.uk, 21st March 2012
Note - see the full article for more stats & background

The New York Times has over 450,000 digital subscribers

"The New York Times wants to convert more of its casual web readers into paying subscribers. Starting in April, the company will reduce the number of free monthly stories offered to nonsubscribers to 10 from 20, a bet that clamping down on freebies will boost subscriptions and not decrease traffic, which would mean lower ad revenue.
The company also announced that a full year after erecting the paywall, it has 454,000 paying subscribers, making it one of the more successful mass publications to charge for web content. The Wall Street Journal, which started charging for its website in 1996, has 1.3 million subscribers."

Source:  AdAge, 20th March 2012

Newspaper print advertising revenue fell by 9.2% in the US in 2011

"The Newspaper Association of America has posted its final tally of newspaper advertising statistics for 2011, and as expected, it is not a pretty picture.
Total advertising revenue was down 7.3 percent, a percentage point worse than in 2010. Print advertising was off 9.2 percent year-to-year.
Digital advertising revenue, after a comparatively weak fourth quarter, grew 6.8 percent for the year.
So the industry posted total ad revenues of $23.9 billion, a decline of $1.9 billion from the previous year. NAA does not have current numbers on circulation revenue and is only starting to assemble data on revenue from such activities as contract printing, events, or social media assistance to businesses.
Figure that those add roughly $10 billion, making newspapers a $34 billion industry. Google alone, by contrast, recorded revenues of $37.9 billion for 2011.
In updating numbers released previously for the first three quarters, NAA identified two shifts occurring late in the year."

Source:  Poynter, 15th March 2012

Advertising accounts for less than 50% of the FT's revenues

"Two thousand of the FT’s new 2011 subs were corporate licenses. In the U.S., print circulation was overtaken by these digital subscribers for the first time.
[...]
Advertising is now the minority of FT revenue, with content sales 58 percent. And digital is now 47 percent of revenue."

Source:  Paid Content, 27th February 2012

Offline advertising spend grew 13% in China in 2011

"According to Chinese ad spend figures released by CCTV market research subsidiary CTR, China's traditional advertising market (comprising television, print, radio, and outdoor media) grew by 13% YoY in 2011, the same rate as in 2010. Television advertising revenues grew by 13%; radio advertising revenues, by 28%; outdoor media, by 1%, with 26% growth in subway advertising and 25% and 34% growth, respectively, in public transportation TV displays and LCD screens installed in office buildings. The top five industries by ad spending in 2011 were cosmetics and bathing products, business and service industries, beverages, foods, and medicine."

Source:  Xinhaunet, via Marbridge Daily, 14th February 2012

Nike's TV & press advertising budgets in the US have fallen, while marketing spend has risen

"Just try to recall the last couple of Nike commercials you saw on television. Don't be surprised when you can't. Nike's spending on TV and print advertising in the U.S. has dropped by 40% in just three years, even as its total marketing budget has steadily climbed upward to hit a record $2.4 billion last year. "There's barely any media advertising these days for Nike," says Brian Collins, a brand consultant and longtime Madison Avenue creative executive."

Source:  Fortune, 13th February 2012

The New York Times has 390,000 digital subscribers

"The New York Times ended 2011 with 390,000 digital subscribers, up about 20 percent from its third-quarter total. Some of the new subscriptions came from the publisher’s International Herald Tribune, which started digital sales last fall."

Source:  AllThingsD, 2nd February 2012

The Guardian receives 1m page views a day from its Facebook app

"Facebook has released some intersting stats on its Open Graph features for media partners, which include Yahoo! News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Daily,  that it announced at f8. We already know that Facebook is a major driver of news traffic with twice as many getting their news via Facebook than any of social network, but the amount of traffic it is driving on a daily basis is striking.
The Guardian is picking up around one million pageviews a day while the Washington Post is getting 3.5 million monthly readers for its social reader app. The Independent has in excess of one million monthly active users are connecting their Facebook accounts and Yahoo News has seen a 600% increase in traffic.
That provides traffic that papers like the Guardian can sell ads against and it is also sending younger readers their way.
[...]
The Guardian: Built an app for Facebook.com and has been installed by nearly four million people, generating, on average, almost a million extra page impressions every day. Additionally, over half of the app’s users are 24 and under, “traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organizations,” said Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group."

Source:  The Wall Blog, 30th November 2011

The Economist's apps are accessed by 650,000 devices each month

"The Economist apps are currently available on iPhone, iPad and Android Smartphone.
- Since our launch in November 2010, the apps have been downloaded to over 2m iPhones and iPads.
- Every month over 650,000 unique devices access The Economist app content."

Source:  The Economist Group, retrieved 28th November 2011

The Daily Mail online had nearly 79m unique visitors in October 2011

"Daily Mail website Mail Online set a new monthly traffic record in October, recording just less than 79 million unique browsers during the period.
The figure, reported in the latest results from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, represents a 58 per cent year-on-year traffic increase for the site, which has been Britain's highest-traffic news site for the past 13 months consecutively.
According to Associated Newspapers, which publishes the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online, just 27.8 million of its monthly unique browsers come from the UK.
In terms of traffic, Mail Online is the second largest English-language news website in the world, after the New York Times site.
The Guardian was the second most popular site, with an average of 3.3 million users per day, compared with Mail Online's 4.6 million. The Guardian didn't report a monthly figure.
The Telegraph was the second highest traffic site, averaging 2,292,052 unique browsers a day and 45,310,524 for the month."

Source:  ABC figures, reported by Journalism.co.uk, 24th November 2011

20% of the page views at FT.com come from mobile devices

"The Financial Times has registered another digital milestone with the FT Web App seeing over one million users since its launch in June.
Available on the iPhone and iPad by visiting app.ft.com directly from the device’s web browser, almost half of its users have downloaded a shortcut to their iPad or iPhone home screen, replicating a native app experience.
The launch of the FT Web App has significantly boosted mobile and tablet traffic. FT.com now sees 20% of total page views and 15% of new B2C subscriptions each week coming directly from mobile and tablet devices. These readers are also more engaged, with FT.com users who register on mobiles and tablets 2.5 times more likely to subscribe, as well as being more active in giving feedback."

Source:  Blog post from the Financial Times, 18th November 2011

The average number of links for UK newspapers shared on social sites per week

"Average Social Links per Week of UK Newspaper Web sites
1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk (2,908,779 links/week)
2. www.guardian.co.uk (2,587,258 links/week)
3. http://www.telegraph.co.uk (879,783 links/week)
4. http://www.independent.co.uk (617,148 links/week)
5. http://www.thesun.co.uk (195,311 links/week)
6. http://www.ft.com (83,382 links/week)
7. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk (82,151 links/week)
8. http://www.mirror.co.uk (54,881 links/week)
9. http://www.heraldscotland.com (13,063 links/week)
10. http://www.express.co.uk (9,600 links/week)
11. http://www.dailystar.co.uk (702 links/week)
12. http://www.thetimes.co.uk (256 links/week)"
Source:  Research by Searchmetrics, carried out over 10 weeks, reported by The Drum, 8th November 2011

TV advertising in the UK delivers an average return of £1.70 per £1.00 invested

"Amid gloomy economic forecasts, a new study has revealed how advertising performed during the economic downturn in recent years. It shows that TV advertising created the most profit (an average return of £1.70 for every £1 invested), and that its return on investment (ROI) has increased by 22% in the last five years.
Payback 3, an independent study commissioned from Ebiquity by Thinkbox, is an econometric analysis of 3,000 ad campaigns across nine advertising sectors between 2006 and 2011. It compares, on a like-for-like basis, the sales and profit impact during the last five years of five forms of advertising: TV, radio, press, online static display and outdoor.
Other key findings include:
TV advertising is 2.5 times more effective at creating sales uplift per equivalent exposure than the next best performing medium (press);
TV advertising has a ‘halo effect’ across a brand’s portfolio. 38% of TV’s sales effect is felt by products not directly advertised;
TV’s ‘halo effect’ also makes other forms of advertising work harder;
TV is responsible for 71% of attributable sales in Ebiquity’s database, but only accounts for 55% of spend.
Effective profit
Ebiquity found that TV advertising’s ROI is on average 22% higher than five years ago, despite the recession. This is because TV’s effectiveness (sales uplift per exposure) has remained undiminished while the cost of advertising on TV has been falling in both absolute and relative (inflation-adjusted) terms.
TV also delivers the most extra profit, Ebiquity found: an average return of £1.70 for every £1 invested (ROI of 1:1.7). This compares to £1.48 for radio, £1.40 for press, £1.06 for online static display, and £0.45 for outdoor advertising."
Source:  Research by Ebiquity for Thinkbox, reported in a press release, 13th October 2011

The BBC news sites send over 6 million click-throughs to other sites per month

"Last year we were tasked with doubling the number of click-throughs to external sites from the BBC News website by 2013, as part of the BBC's Strategy Review.
This was something I discussed at a panel session I was taking part in at yesterday's News:Rewired conference, organised by Journalism.co.uk, and I wanted to write briefly here about our ongoing efforts to improve the ways in which we link externally from our news articles.
Having asked for the figures from our research team for my presentation, it was great to hear that we appear to be well on track to achieve the goal set for us.
Looking back at the third quarter of 2010, we had an average of around 2.9m external click-throughs per month from UK users. That period - last year's July, August & September - was around the time of the redesign of the News website. That meant, among other changes, that the 'From other news sites' and 'Related internet links' sections moved from the right-hand side to the bottom of news stories. And we have also been doing more linking to external sources from within the text of story pages.
The figures for the third quarter of this year show that all this has had an effect, and it looks as though we've been getting something right. The monthly average is now around 6.1m click-throughs i.e. more than double what it was last year. One caveat is that there have been some big news stories over this period, including the August riots, Norway shootings and Amy Winehouse's death. Another caveat is that we are using a different method to measure the figures now, so whilst the comparison should be pretty accurate, there's a small margin for error."

Source:  BBC News blog, 7th October 2011

The death of Osama Bin Laden created huge levels of internet traffic

"As news of Osama bin Laden's death made its way across the globe Sunday night, Internet traffic exploded.
Twitter: At the news event's peak, Twitter said that users were sending off 5,106 tweets per second. That makes the volume of tweets surrounding the event the second-highest in Twitter's history.
It also represented the highest sustained rate of tweets per second in the company's history -- from 10:45 p.m. ET on Sunday through 2:20 a.m. on Monday, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second
The 5,106-peak tweet-per-second peak was still far short of the 6,939 tweets per second record set when Japan brought in the 2011 new year.
[...]
News sites: The bin Laden story resulted in a peak of more than 4.1 million page views per second on the news websites supported and tracked by content delivery network Akamai (AKAM). Akamai delivers about 20% of the Internet's content, and it supports popular news sites like nytimes.com, reuters.com, bbc.com and usatoday.com.
The peak occurred at about 11:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, right as President Obama's made his live, televised statement. Just an hour before the news broke, there were roughly 2.5 million page views per second on those pages.
Despite the unusually high volume of traffic, Akamai said it did not rank in the company's top 10 news events for highest page-view peaks.
The largest peak in Internet traffic came at noon on June 24, 2010, when there were simultaneous World Cup qualifying matches as well as the longest-ever Wimbledon match -- all being played at the same time. Those events resulted in a peak of 10.4 million page views per second on the news sites Akamai supports.
Last week's royal wedding ranked sixth on Akamai's list, with nearly 5.4 million page views per second. It was the second-highest non-sports-related Internet event, right behind the 2010 U.S. mid-term elections.
All of the largest peaks in the top 13 were from events that occurred in 2010 or 2011 -- which is unsurprising, since Internet usage continues to rise globally. But ranking at No. 14 is the election of President Obama, which occurred in November 2008.
The biggest Internet spikes tend to overwhelm servers and rendered some websites unresponsive. News of Michael Jackson's death famously brought down Google News, TMZ.com, latimes.com and even AOL Instant Messenger, thanks to high traffic demands."

Source:  CNN, 2nd May 2011
Also - official tweet from Twitter:
"Last night saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 - 2:20am ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second [1/3]
At 11p.m. ET, there were 5,106 Tweets per second. At 11:45p.m. ET, when Pres. Obama finished his remarks, there were 5,008 TPS [2/3]
Note: The TPS numbers we reported last night were incomplete [3/3]
An even more precise update: Twitter averaged 3440 TPS from 10:45 to 12:30pm ET last night"
& a chart of the Twitter levels on Flickr

StumbleUpon gets one billion 'stumbles' a month

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

Source:  TheNextWeb, 6th April 2011

Times & Sunday Times paid online subscribers increased by 29,000 in 5 months

"The Times and The Sunday Times had 79,000 monthly digital subscribers at the end of February - up 29,000 over the previous five months.
The figures, released by the publications' owner News International, are closely watched to see if the 'paywall' model is making progress.
There were 228,000 joint print/digital and digital-only subscribers to The Times and Sunday Times.
Chief executive Rebekah Brooks said she was "delighted" with the figures.
The company said the total number of people paying to read The Times - print or digital - had increased by 3%."
Source:  BBC News, 29th March 2011

Data on Facebook 'Likes'

The Like Log Study from Yury Lifshits on Vimeo.

Source:  The Like Log Study, Yahoo Labs, 2011
Click on the link for tables etc

65% of American internet users have paid for online content

"Nearly two‐thirds of internet users – 65% – have paid to download or access some kind of online
content from the internet, ranging from music to games to news articles.  Music, software, and apps are
the most popular content that internet users have paid to access or download, although the range of
paid online content is quite varied and widespread.
[...]
In this survey we asked the following question: “Please tell me if you have ever paid to access or to
download any of the following types of online content?” And we found:
33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
33% have paid for software
21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
19% have paid for digital games
18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
15% have paid for ringtones
12% have paid for digital photos
11% have paid for members‐only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
10% have paid for e‐books
7% have paid for podcasts
5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games
5% have paid for “cheats or codes” to help them in video games
5% have paid to access particular websites such as online dating sites or services
2% have paid for adult content
And 6% of internet users said they had paid for another kind of content that had not been mentioned in
the list of 15 we offered."
Source:  Pew Research Center, Paying For Online Content, 30th December 2010