10 things I learnt from Mary Meeker’s slides
- Apple iPhone + iPod Touch + Apps is the new ecosystem. Apple Mobile share of market will surprise on the upside in near-term.
- Mobile Internet will outpace desktop Internet and grow faster than most people expect.
- Facebook, and other social networks, on mobile will explode.
- Celcos will face serious bandwidth/traffic issues as mobile Internet use explodes.
- Celco portals and walled gardens (Maxis, Digi take note) may die in favour of apps from App Store, Android Market and direct browsing.
- Mobile and online ad spending will grow in 2010.
- Mobile users will pay for premium services.
- Location-based services will be the ‘secret sauce’, as real-time, cloud-based mobile services grow rapidly.
- Mobile Internet revs will mirror that of Japan’s mix today with mobile ecommerce*, paid services* and advertising growing faster than mobile data.
- There is moolah in mobile – it’s an ATM in your pocket, and it’s a very, very deep pocket.
Link: Mary Meeker’s presentation
*Mobile ecommerce = retail sales of physical and digital goods ie. music, games, ringtones, wallpapers, avatars. Mobile paid services = real-time banking, brokerage, hotel + travel booking
eMarketer: Shift to online ads speeding up
The credit squeeze has begun to slice off earlier projections, but Internet ad spending continues to rise.
From eMarketer’s latest report:
eMarketer projects online ad spending to reach US$42 billion by 2011, more than doubling from the estimated US$21.4 billion this year.
Those numbers are slightly down from eMarketer’s previous estimates of US$21.7 billion in spending for 2007 and US$44 billion for 2011.
Under the revised projections, online ad spending for 2007 is expected to increase 26.7 percent from the US$16.9 billion spent last year.
By contrast, advertising spending on all media is only expected to increase 2.1 percent.
“Don’t expect any large growth in total media,” eMarketer’s David Hallerman told InternetNews.com. “The shift away from traditional media is accelerating.”
Hallerman cautions that percentage growth changes can be deceptive, as they are bound to taper off as an industry builds mass.
While “Internet’s total growth is going to be decelerating,” he said, the digital share of the advertising pie will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. Hallerman offered no predictions on how large that share will become down the road.
The study found that search advertising will remain the strongest of digital ad spending through 2011, holding steady around 40 percent. Spending on display ads also is projected to remain at around 20 percent, followed by online classified spending at about 17 percent.
The biggest proportional gainer will be rich media, driven by video ads, which is expected to jump from 8 percent this year to 13 percent in 2011.
Hallerman admitted that eMarketer’s estimates may be conservative in areas where businesses models are still developing, and said he expects to revise his projections in rapidly developing sectors like video.
“I think we’re going to see some of the largest growth in video ads on televisions stations’ Web sites,” he said.
Gauging your gaze
[via PCWorld]
Nielsen/NetRatings will be using Total Time Spent as a primary measure versus the old pageview to gauge the popularity a website.
The switch will be in favour of sites that stream video ala YouTube and use AJAX for constant updates as in a live scoreboard.
“Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, ‘How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?'” said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen’s.
For example, MySpace may have 10 to 11 times more page views than YouTube, but myspace.com users spend only three times more minutes on the site, Ross added.
Total Time Spent will make it easier for advertisers to mould their ads to how users are actually accessing content, he said.
“On YouTube there will be more ads flowing in based on duration (on videos),” he said. “The more time I spend on YouTube … [advertisers] will figure out a way to monetize that.”
Nielsen/NetRatings will still report page views as a secondary metric, but will champion minutes if you are comparing two sites. The change will affect the rankings of some companies immediately, Ross said.
For example, AOL will get a boost because of time spent on its popular instant messaging application, while Yahoo and MSN likely would maintain their current rankings, but Google will probably ratchet down because its users don’t usually spend much time there, according to Ross.
Meanwhile, Followthemedia’s Philip Stone suggests that news sites might stuff their pages with more videoclips instead of carrying jumps:
NYTimes.com would still remain number one with 12.535 million visitors spending an average 27:34 minutes on the site giving it more than twice the time than any other newspaper web site. But when the rankings are based on the number of visitors multiplied by the average time they spend on the site then USAToday, currently second, change places with washingtonpost.com, currently third.
The Los Angeles Times site, currently fourth in the rankings based on visitors alone would drop to ninth based on the average time each visitor spent on the site; Boston.com, currently fifth in page views moves up to fourth when time is taken into account and The Wall Street Journal site, currently sixth based on visitors, moves up a notch to fifth when the time ranking is used.
So now editors need to change direction and organize their site around keeping visitors there for as long as possible. It won’t matter if they have call up four pages to read a long story – that can now be sprawled on just one page – but now editors will want to ensure they have the one or two minute video to go along with that story so that by getting the complete multimedia story people linger on the site.
Online ads growing in Europe
BBC news item on Forrester findings:
The annual value of pan-European online advertising is set to reach 16bn euros ($22bn; £10.8bn) by 2012, more than double that of 2006, says a study.
The report by research body Forrester said online adverts would leap to 18% of market share, up from 9% currently.
The UK will continue to see the most online advertising in the next four years, ahead of Germany and France
It said 52% of people were now regularly online, spending more time doing so than watching television. European internet users now spend 14.3 hours a week online, compared with 11.3 hours watching TV, and 4.4 hours reading newspapers or magazines, the research group said.
As a result of this increased internet usage, 36% of people who go online said they spent less time looking at the television as a result.
The report said search engines would continue to dominate online advertising spend, followed by display advertisements and e-mails.
“After five years of dipping their toes into the online marketing waters, firms have come to realise that the net is a valuable medium for client acquisition, retention and market expansion,” said the study.
