Despite Android’s size, do advertisers and developers really see the OS as the most effective platform for their (monetary) needs? A new study by ad-buyer Nanigans suggests that Facebook ads on the iPhone generate 1,790 percent more return than equivalent advertising on Google Android (hat tip to VentureBeat for the link). “Retailers are realizing significantly greater return from audiences on iOS than audiences on Android,” that study reported.
Tag Archives: market analysis
Mirror’s online traffic soars in wake of Sun paywall
Mirror Group Digital enjoyed a surge in daily browsers of nearly 20% last month, after the Sun introduced its website paywall
via Mirror’s online traffic soars in wake of Sun paywall | Media | theguardian.com.
The STEM Crisis Is a Myth
To parse the simultaneous claims of both a shortage and a surplus of STEM workers, we’ll need to delve into the data behind the debate, how it got going more than a half century ago, and the societal, economic, and nationalistic biases that have perpetuated it. And what that dissection reveals is that there is indeed a STEM crisis—just not the one everyone’s been talking about. The real STEM crisis is one of literacy: the fact that today’s students are not receiving a solid grounding in science, math, and engineering.
The Locust Economy
Once locusts acquire an informed kind of market mobility through better discovery mechanisms, they can range over a much larger area of wheat fields or restaurants. You can continuously derive savings at the expense of other economic actors wheat farmers or restaurant owners.
via The Locust Economy.
To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits. The result is that even under normal business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up.
Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business.
Mobile VoIP: No Profits, Big Problems
But in joining the OTT VoIP crowd, mobile operators are quickly discovering that being popular doesn’t make mobile VoIP profitable — far from it. Infonetics’ estimation of the revenue per mobile VoIP subscriber is a mere US$7.13 annually.
For the OTT VoIP crowd, that reality means looking for other ways to make money — possibly through ad insertions or by providing the voice segment of a mashup that pulls in other third-party apps for which people will pay, such as presence or gaming, or by charging extra for video-conference or multi-party video.
Why are US cell carriers suddenly pushing you to upgrade faster? For the money
So why is this happening all of a sudden? Put simply, the American mobile market is highly saturated—there are fewer and fewer new customers for these carriers. Only 1.1 million Americans got mobile phones for the first time in the first quarter of 2013—the lowest ever growth for that market. Q1 2012 saw around 1.83 million new additions, which shows a quarter-over-quarter loss of 60 percent this year. Meanwhile, there was a modest quarter-over-quarter gain in prepaid customers.
via Why are US cell carriers suddenly pushing you to upgrade faster? For the money | Ars Technica.
Dropbox Offers a Way to Free Data from Mobile Apps with New Sync API Feature for Developers
He found in a recent survey that Apple and Dropbox are the two cloud services most used by U.S. consumers, with 27 percent and 17 percent of just over 2,000 respondents, respectively. Allowing people to control their content across devices from different companies provides one way for Dropbox to stand out, he says.
Steam Box’s biggest threat isn’t consoles, it’s Apple
That’s Valve’s goal for the Steam Box, its own Linux-based gaming hardware which will bring Steam’s Big Picture mode to living room televisions at an affordable price point. Valve is also teaming up with several hardware manufacturers, who are also trying to put together the most attractive hardware at the most attractive price, in order to make the PC platform’s jump to the living room as painless as possible.
via Gabe Newell: Steam Box’s biggest threat isn’t consoles, it’s Apple | Polygon.
I’d like to see more numbers. Having Apple at the high end and Linux at the low end seems like an OK solution and everyone makes money.
100G Land Grab Is Well Underway
At the end of the third quarter of 2012, the analyst put AlcaLu at the top of the 100G leader board, followed by Ciena and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
via Light Reading – 100G Land Grab Is Well Underway.
It’s nice to see some wins for AlcaLu.
Facebook Mobile User Counts Revealed: 192M Android, 147M iPhone, 48M iPad, 56M Messenger
While Facebook for Android may have more absolute users than its iPhone counterpart, the iPhone has a much better penetration rate. Facebook’s native app is actively used by 73.6% of the estimated 200 million iPhone install base. Only 35% of the estimated 550M Android install base see monthly usage of Facebook’s native app. This may be in part due to the popularity of Android in China where Facebook is blocked. However, it may also show Facebook’s lagging penetration in emerging markets like India where Androids are common.