Twitter is reportedly teaming up with Hollywood producers to create original video series for the social platform and, according to inside sources, the new endeavor could be coming as soon as this fall.
“Per sources, the show could live on a standalone Twitter page similar to the events page that Twitter launched in partnership with NASCAR in June, although the series’ page would more closely resemble a microsite in order to feature an expanded video player,” reports AdWeek.
“Another possibility is that the series would be distributed within tweets — promoted, organic or pinned to a brand’s Twitter page — with users clicking to expand the tweet into a full-fledged video player.”
The project is intended to enable real-time viewer participation. Moreover, tweets could even influence the show as it airs.
Twitter stands to gain more advertising revenue from the series, with product integration and promotions within the feed. Its core ad units like Promoted Tweets are frequently sold out, notes AdWeek.
Sources suggest that the move goes beyond launching a Web show to “changing the way people consume and discover media,” the article states. “Twitter wouldn’t be developing the content, but would instead serve as a distribution vehicle and advertising middleman.”
Increasing social customer engagement could mean doubling a company’s revenue growth, according to The Echo System, a company that measures the impact of brands’ social networking.
“Echo Rank tracks 500 e-commerce companies across various social indicators such as user engagement, social integration, and site performance,” VentureBeat explains. “Those include factors as diverse as follower/fan count, likes and retweeets, integration of social into a company’s site and services, and how effective a website is at converting shoppers into buyers.”
The average revenue growth since 2010 was 20.4 percent for the 500 companies in the Echo System index. However, the top five companies on the Echo Rank were able to turn social efforts into 45 percent revenue growth.
The top five companies successfully turning social into sales: FansEdge, Barney’s New York, Turn5, GameStop and Fossil.
“Our rankings show that the companies investing in social and particularly social commerce are seeing the largest gains in revenues,” says Lance Neuhauser, Echo System chief executive.
“Companies that increased their Echo Rank most over just the past two months saw year-over-year revenue growth of almost 30 percent,” adds VentureBeat.
A new study from Gartner predicts a 43.1 percent increase in global revenues from social media, hitting $16.9 billion in 2012.
Advertising accounts for $8.8 billion. Social gaming takes up the second largest portion at $6.2 billion and subscriptions will comprise another $278 million, Gartner reports.
“The advertising figure appears to be in line with a similar projection by eMarketer, which predicts $7.7 billion in social media ad revenues for 2012 and $11.9 billion by 2014,” reports Mashable.
“The U.S.’s share of such revenues will stay at around 53 percent over the next couple of years, according to eMarketer, which does not have an aggregate figure for social media revenues.”
“To put the figure in perspective, the Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates that global ad revenues for Internet advertising were $31 billion in 2011,” adds the post.
Television shows, older movies and children’s fare have become the staple for Netflix, as Hollywood studios have been hesitant to cut deals on new releases for the streaming service.
However, Netflix has an exclusive deal with Epix, a Viacom-controlled channel that provides the service with fairly new releases from Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM.
At the end of this August, that exclusivity ends when the upcoming Redbox Instant — and potentially even Amazon — will feature Epix movies.
Netflix often touts exclusive rights as a big seller when signing content deals. However, CEO Reed Hastings doesn’t seem that concerned. “Epix is not a particularly large source of total viewing,” he said in an earnings call this week.
AllThingsD suggests this could be a similar situation to when Netflix lost access to movies from Sony and Disney when its Starz deal ended. “Netflix said it was willing to pay big money to keep Starz. But when it didn’t get the deal, it told investors that few people watched the movies anyway,” the article states.
The current Netflix-Viacom deal will remain in place until mid 2015.
To protect the Internet against regulation, top Internet companies — including Google, Facebook, Amazon and eBay — are coming together to create The Internet Association, a lobbying group expected to launch in September.
“Those firms face a slew of regulatory issues that directly affect their businesses: privacy legislation, online sales tax reforms, cybersecurity and proposed anti-piracy and copyright laws,” reports The Washington Post.
Michael Beckerman, former deputy staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, will be the group’s appointed CEO.
“The Internet isn’t just Silicon Valley anymore, the Internet has moved to Main Street,” Beckerman said in a press release. “Our top priority is to ensure that elected leaders in Washington understand the profound impacts of the Internet and Internet companies on jobs, economic growth and freedom.”
If Twitter plans an IPO in a year or two, the micro-blogging service must first answer criticisms that the company can’t grow beyond tech geeks and narcissists. It seems Twitter CEO Dick Costolo aims to do just that by making the service more useful.
On the to-do list is creating a presence around major live events to help users to understand all the message blasts, improving the ability of third parties to organize Twitter posts around small events, and making it easier for companies to build off Twitter just as developers make applications for Facebook or Apple.
However, these add-on services are required to be unique, not simply imitations of what Twitter already offers — a qualification that seems slightly enigmatic.
The updates could also threaten media partners like NBCUniversal, the Wall Street Journal suggests.
“Twitter’s goal of making sense of the tweet flood could put the company into more direct competition with media companies that also edit and prioritize news and information, and sell ads to people who come looking for the information,” notes the article.
However, Costolo downplays the potential competition, describing Twitter as a “technology company in the media business.”
When Google acquired Sparrow last week, the creator of the successful email app, many customers were concerned that the app won’t be getting any new features, that the anticipated iPad version won’t be coming out, and even that the Sparrow crew won’t be working on their own, preferred projects.
The Verge takes a look at the perspective of other app developers and asks whether it may be time for a new distribution model.
“Sparrow did everything right. They built an incredible email app with broad appeal and released it into the hottest software market the world has ever seen. And yet it was a financial flop,” wrote David Barnard, the founder of App Cubby. “The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end,” disrupting consumers’ desire to get “more and more value from software while paying less and less for it.”
Marco Arment of Instapaper agrees the current climate explains Sparrow’s decision to sell: “In the reality of our fast-paced, boom-and-bust industry, even very strong support from customers may not be enough for many companies to stay in business,” he wrote in a post.
“The Sparrow guys have homes, and families,” wrote developer Matt Gemmell. “They have every right to cash out and take new jobs. They’re winners.”
If Barnard is right and the one-time fixed price is on its way out, could new app start-ups have a better chance of going it alone and being profitable?
“Surveys of U.S. travelers confirm tablets are still all about about consumption of content,” reports ReadWriteWeb. “That has big implications for tablet makers and apps developers.”
One recent survey of 1,200 people conducted by Cloud Nine Media provides some insight into how people are using their tablets. Most importantly, content consumption remains dominant over creation, which challenges the notion of tablets as laptop killers and suggests possible areas for expansion.
“When asked what they do on the tablets themselves, the largest block (36.6 percent) of respondents said they were conducting online searches, followed very closely by checking e-mail (32.1 percent). Social network activity (13.3 percent), playing games (8.4 percent), and listening to music (4.1 percent) were the next favored activities,” explains the post.
Additionally, many respondents admitted to using their tablet just to kill time.
A related survey by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners also found only 21 percent of new iPad owners use their tablet for business.
“Those figures should serve as a signpost for tablet app developers as to what kinds of things most people are doing with their tablets,” the post says, adding that the business-oriented Microsoft Surface tablet, “may either kick open a door to a new opportunity, or crash into the reality that most people don’t really want to do serious work on a tablet.”
Amazon is expanding its digital media R&D efforts with a new 47,000 square-foot facility in Central London.
The company is bringing together design and development teams from streaming rental firm LOVEFiLM and Pushbutton (which creates digital media interfaces for Amazon’s platforms) at its Digital Media Innovation Hub.
According to Amazon, the main goals for the Hub are “the creation of interactive digital services for TVs, game consoles, smartphones and PCs; the development of the digital media experience on Amazon websites around the world; and the building of services and APIs that power that digital media experience.”
SlashGear explains that digital media is the “cornerstone” of Amazon’s Kindle products that are “primarily intended to encourage users to buy or rent more content.”
“That same strategy is tipped to be at the heart of Amazon’s upcoming smartphone,” notes the post. “The handset would be Android-based but heavily reskinned, ousting Google’s own content stores in favor of Amazon’s own media and app distribution.”
YouTube is cleaning up its act. The popular video site will now push users to use their full names when commenting or uploading. The site will also ask users to display the identity associated with their Google+ account.
For those users who decline to use their full name or Google+ identity, Google pushes for an explanation, requesting users to select from options such as “my channel name is well-known for other reasons.”
“Making commenters use their real names and Google+ accounts was the obvious first step toward bringing civility to YouTube, which Google is eager to polish into a venue more attractive to business owners, advertisers, and creative filmmakers,” writes Wired.
“It’s easy to imagine that offering Google+ YouTube accounts is just a first step toward hiding, and eventually eliminating, comments from anonymous accounts,” notes the post. “Such simple steps would do more to improve the perceived quality of YouTube content than any upgrade to surround sound or high-definition video.”
“Of course, forcing people to own their identities can help to elevate the discourse on YouTube videos, which is definitely in dire need of a makeover,” adds BetaBeat. “But can a community that has relied on anonymity for so long really be convinced otherwise?”
“However, we realize that using your full name isn’t for everyone,” notes the YouTube blog. “Maybe people know you by your YouTube username. Perhaps you don’t want your name publicly associated with your channel. To continue using your YouTube username, just click ‘I don’t want to use my full name’ when you see the prompt. Stay tuned for more ways to use this username in other Google products and services in coming months.”
Only one-third of Web users are comfortable with Facebook’s use of personal information for providing targeted ads, suggests a new poll by Harris Interactive.
By contrast, Amazon faired much better with 66 percent saying they trusted the online retail giant with their personal data for product recommendations.
Google came in just above Facebook, with 41 percent of those polled feeling comfortable with Google’s ad offerings based on past searches.
“Facebook, owner of the world’s largest social network, uses data about people’s preferences to help advertisers market their wares,” reports Bloomberg. “It agreed in November to settle complaints by the Federal Trade Commission that it failed to protect user information or disclose how the data would be used.”
The survey of 2,262 American adults online also found that 81 percent of people trust grocery stores’ use of their information for tailoring coupons.
A new study from analytics firm RapidBlue has found that online ads have a strong effect on offline sales, showing “double-digit increases in both the number of shoppers and the amount of time they spent in the stores when stores ran Google AdWords campaigns,” VentureBeat reports.
“In fact, we found that the brick-and-mortar impact of online ads could be bigger than their online impact,” explains RapidBlue chief operating officer Sampo Parkkinen.
The findings should be comforting to offline retailers competing with competitive pricing from online giants like Amazon.
“We’re not really tracking the individual person,” says Parkkinen. “We’re installing our solution, which tracks mobile phones in retail outlets. Then we look at the sales metrics and how they’re fluctuating.”
“This result is astonishing and could upend the way the online advertising industry traditionally tracks costs and measures return on investment,” the article suggests, noting the success of ads are typically measured in terms of online results.
According to a new report by advertising network Chitika, Apple not only dominates the tablet market in terms of sales, but also in regards to usage.
The report indicates that 94 percent of ads are viewed on the iPad, outpacing the Web usage of its competitors by an impressive margin.
“For every 100 iPad impressions, Chitika is serving slightly more than one ad to a Samsung Galaxy and Asus Transformer Prime and under one ad to the Motorola Xoom, BlackBerry PlayBook and Kindle Fire,” reports AllThingsD. “The Nook Tablet share is even lower, though clearly both the Nook and Kindle are marketed less as Web browsing devices and more as media consumption tools.”
“It shows that not only are iPads outselling their rivals, but each one that is sold is also more heavily used, at least when it comes to Web surfing,” explains the article.
“Going forward the competition is going to be hard pressed to find a way to overthrow the seemingly omnipotent Apple,” adds Chitika. “Not only do they offer a great product, they have the undying devotion of their enthusiasts.”
At the end of 2011, Amazon sold 4.8 million Kindle Fires, showing it was the “right product at the right price at the right time,” ReadWriteWeb suggests. But the online retailer’s luck stopped there.
“According to IDC, Amazon’s share dropped from nearly 17 percent of the tablet market to 4 percent, with fewer than 700,000 units sold compared to Apple’s 11.8 million,” explains ReadWriteWeb.
While Amazon still beats out Barnes & Noble’s Nook by a fair margin, it now sits in third place, lagging behind Samsung Android tablets and Apple’s iPads.
The first quarter of 2012 was good to Apple, which increased its market share to 68 percent (up from 54.7 percent in Q4) with the sale of its new iPad and continued success with cheaper versions of older models.
Overall however, the tablet market has slowed quite a bit. “IDC had predicted overall tablet sales to be 1.2 million units higher than they were this quarter, with the shortfall mostly attributed to Amazon’s slip,” the article states. “Tablet sales have grown 120 percent from last year, but were still lower than IDC’s predictions. Whether tablet sales continue to slow in Q4 will be interesting to see.”
IDC predicts Amazon will try to come back with a larger-screened model. Android continues to stagnate at about one-third of the market, unable to reproduce the same adoption it has secured in the smartphone sphere.
Tablet sales are expected to reach 424.9 million by 2017 and will surpass shipments of notebook PCs by 2016, suggests a new report.
“According to NPD DisplaySearch Senior Analyst Richard Shim, a growing diversity of operating systems is driving the increase in demand for tablets, as well as rapidly evolving features,” TG Daily reports.
Shim says, “as the market matures and competitors become better attuned to consumer preferences and find opportunities to break new ground, we expect the landscape to change dramatically, giving consumers more choices, which will drive demand for more devices.”
The iOS platform is expected to drop off in dominance by 2017 but will still hold half of the market — the rest to be taken up by increasing Android adoption and Windows growth.
Already, estimates for 2013 have jumped from 168.9 million to 184.2 million.
