Last week, Ignite Social Media published a fat social network demographics report which covers more than 40 of the top sites (PDF).

Ignite’s numbers were culled from search data, so they have to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do highlight some popular conceptions that might have to be reexamined, especially in regards to the idea of Twitter’s population being considerably older and more male than Facebook’s.

Continue Reading »

If spam were the economy, all would be golden.

“If the economy could rebound as spam has done in second quarter, we would all be much happier with our retirement accounts,” according to the Q2 McAfee Threats Report (PDF), which notes that, after recovering from the high profile shutdown of the McColo botnet last November, spam has increased nearly 80 percent over Q1.

Spam and zombies — hijacked computers — reached record levels in Q2. Fourteen million new zombies were found by McAffee during this quarter, meaning that more than 150,000 new zombies were created each day.

Continue Reading »

The convergence continues, as dumb phones and desktops cede passage to smartphones and notebooks, two devices that in a few years’ time will likely become one.

Mobile phone shipments fell 10.8 percent year-over-year in Q2 2009, dropping from 302.2 million unit shipments in Q2 2008 to 269.6 million in Q2 2009, according to IDC.

“The challenges from the previous nine months – aggressive channel destocking, foreign exchange volatility, and uncertain demand – continued to plague the mobile phone market in the second quarter, but were not as severe as before,” says IDC’s Ramon Llamas.

Continue Reading »

If you don’t already know about this online personal finance management tool, I encourage you to check out Mint.com.

Unlike previous Google killers, Microsoft’s Bing has impressed enough people out of the gate that it has not been ripped to shreds as the world’s worst fail, the fate bequeathed to any new search engine that doesn’t immediately dethrone Google.

Bing’s success is far from universal; people have found plenty of problems with it. But some are truly impressed. ComScore reports that Microsoft’s search penetration has jumped three percent since Bing launched June 3.

The rebranded search engine rose 2.1 percent the week of its launch to 15.8 percent penetration. The following week, it grew to 16.7 percent.

Continue Reading »

Social media activities are big with female US Internet users, and one fast growing portion of this is women who use blogs. In a March survey from BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners, “2009 Social Media Study,” 55 percent of women on the Internet interact with blogs in some way. This number is dwarfed by the percentage that use social networking services, 75 percent, but does trump message boards or forum usage - forty percent, and status updating services (read: Twitter) use - sixteen percent.

In the same study, published in eMarketer today, twelve million social media users (29 percent) post to blogs and eight million (19 percent) publish blogs. Since 54 percent of female social media users read blogs, that means that more than a half post and more than a third publish their own content.

Continue Reading »

So it looks like Twitter’s still not catching on with the kids. While 99 percent of Gen Y respondents in new study are on social networks, only 22 percent use Twitter.

“This is a classic ‘glass half full’ scenario for Twitter because it’s clear that Gen Y has an appetite for social networking, but still hasn’t fully embraced micro-blogging,” said Michael Della Penna, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Participatory Marketing Network, which conducted the study along with Pace University’s Lubin School of Business’ Interactive and Direct Marketing (IDM).

“There is a tremendous opportunity now for marketers to develop strategies to get this important group active on Twitter too,” Della Penna said.

Continue Reading »

It’s easy to forget how recently that video became the ubiquitous media of choice on the Web. Just in the span of 2005 through 2006 came the popular proliferation of YouTube in the US, DailyMotion in Europe, and Tudou in China. These sites set the direction of online video with Flash Player technology for streaming instead of downloading, with a simple interface where anyone can upload content, as well as convenient code for sharing and reposting on Web pages and blogs.

According to Lightspeed’s research released yesterday through eMarketer, video is bigger than blogging or social networking - 72 percent of US Internet users watch video clips at least once a month. 62 percent view at least one video per week, which Lightspeed translates to 97 million weekly viewers.

Continue Reading »

Mobile sales dropped in Q1 2009, but smartphone sales surged, according to research firm Gartner.

Global mobile sales dropped 14.5 percent to 269 million units between 2008’s fourth quarter and the first of 2009. Year-over-year sales were down 8.6 percent.

“There were some signs of a recovery in markets such as North America and China, but overall sales in the first quarter of 2009 registered the biggest quarter-on-quarter contraction since Gartner began monitoring the market on a quarterly basis in 2001,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director for mobile devices at Gartner.

Continue Reading »

With multiple copyright lawsuits against Google’s Book Search, and high visibility of Amazon’s Kindle, public interest in digital reading devices is gaining back the spotlight. According to Piper Jaffray, worldwide Kindle revenues will reach $405 million by the end of 2009, and more than double to nearly $1 billion in 2010.

In the study “eCommerce State of the Union: A Bright Spot in a Difficult Environment,” released April 2009, Kindle revenues were compared worldwide. In 2007, device and book revenues combined were $5 million, in 2008  they reached $117 million.

Continue Reading »