Index of trends

Based on the latest stats from M:Metrics, the iPhone is delivering on its hype, radically changing what people are doing with the mobile Web.

Check out some of these figures:

• The iPhone is already the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web, with 85 percent of iPhone users accessing news and information in the month of January.
• 30.9 percent of iPhone owners watched mobile TV or video, versus a 4.6 market average, and more than double the rate for all smartphone users.
• 30.4 percent of iPhone owners accessed YouTube, compared to 1 percent of all mobile phone users.
• 36 percent used Google Maps, compared to 2.6 percent of all mobile users.
• Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average.
• Twenty percent of iPhone owners accessed Facebook, one of the first Web properties to customize its content for the iPhone, versus 1.5 percent of the total mobile market.

The iPhone offers a taste of the future; iPhone users are using the devices in all sorts of leading edge ways. It also shows how mobile users will use Internet media when they get capable devices and unlimited data plans.
“The iPhone has certainly delivered on its hype,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Beyond a doubt, this device is compelling consumers to interact with the mobile Web, delivering off-the-charts usage from everything to text messaging to mobile video.”

“While the demographics of iPhone users are very similar to all smartphone owners, the iPhone is outpacing other smartphones in driving mobile content consumption by a significant margin,” said Donovan. “In addition to the attributes of the device itself, another important factor to consider is the fact that all iPhones on AT&T are attached to an unlimited data plan. Our data shows that once the fear of surprise data charges is eliminated, mobile content consumption increases dramatically, regardless of device.”

Wizzard Software, the parent company of Liberated Syndication and several podcast hosting services, announced today that revenues for the fourth quarter of 2007 were $1,540,992, a 108% increase over revenues of $739,551 in the fourth quarter of 2006.

For the full year of 2007, the Company recorded revenues of $5,163,491, a 75% increase of $2,195,967 from revenues of $2,943,578 in 2006. Wizzard posted a gross profit of $1,562,703, a 47% increase versus a gross profit of $1,064,115 in the full year 2006.

The company noted several podcasting-related accomplishments in its announcement:

• Acquisition of Podcast Company Liberated Syndication (Libsyn) 3/19/07
• Completed Raise of $7,500,000 for its Podcasting Business 7/9/07
• Adds Nielsen//NetRatings’ Site Census to Advertising System 9/12/07
• Announces Largest Ever Industry Ad Campaign 11/14/07
• Ends Year with Approximately 10,000 Podcast Publishers 12/31/07
• 1 Billion Download Requests in 2007 12/31/07

In 2007, Wizzard Media surpassed download request forecasts with one billion podcast download requests achieved, surpassing the 450 million download requests for 2006.

“Podcasting is becoming a necessary audience expansion tool for content publishers and brand advertisers seeking cost effective, high return outlets to capture the migration of audiences from traditional media outlets to the internet,” says Chris Spencer, Wizzard CEO. “We are seeing an increase in advertiser understanding of the high quality, subscription and episodic benefits of podcasting versus other internet video offerings. We believe that our ambitious undertaking of targeting similar audiences through interesting, engaging podcast micro-communities is a very compelling advertising opportunity and we expect advertising revenues to grow substantially in 2008.”

We’ve noted before that bad advertising is holding back the development of Internet television.

Advertisers aren’t sure where to advertise on the Internet, how to advertise in new media or how to measure their success, and they’re spending their money on old media as a result, even though they know traditional advertising is becoming less effective.

Incredibly, for every $1 advertisers spend on ads in Internet video, they spend $100 on TV ads.

This is despite the facts that:

• Most people get their news from the Internet.
• Kids aren’t watching TV like they used to.
• While TV is declining, Internet TV is set to grow 42% this year.
• Television networks are failing to deliver the audiences they have promised, because people are watching Internet videos.

If It Keeps On Rainin’, The Levee’s Going To Break

Advertisers know that they need to move their money into new media, but they are clueless about how to do it:

Spending on online video ads represents less than 4 percent of all Internet advertising and just 1 percent of the amount spent on TV, according to eMarketer. But growth is expected — with the research firm forecasting U.S. spending more than tripling to $4.3 billion in 2011 — especially as more viewers embrace full-length TV episodes and other video online.

The challenge is finding the right formula — in the creative approach, the format or the frequency with which the ads appear — so visitors notice the pitches without getting so annoyed that they never come back.

“Users love free content and advertisers love to fill up every minute and pixel with the messaging, and publishers do have to find that balance,” said Geoffrey Coco, an advertising executive with Microsoft, which has a video news partnership with The Associated Press. “There’s been a lot of innovation but I don’t think we’ve settled down yet.”

There’s going to be a flood of money coming into new media very soon, but nobody’s sure what path it will follow.

Where do you think it’s going to go?

Podcasting startup PodShow has laid off one-third of its staff, according to a report Valleywag:

PodShow, the San Francisco-based online-video network best known for launching the career of CNET’s Natali Del Conte, is laying off about 20 employees, or as much as 30 percent of its staff.

“There are no secrets, only information you don’t yet have,” is the slogan for former MTV VJ Adam Curry’s podcast. Curry, a PodShow cofounder, didn’t show up to deliver information about the firings; we’re told he left that to middle managers.

This looks like the end of the podcasting hype.

None of the heavily hyped podcasting startups have delivered on their promise, despite a one-year jump on the mainstream competition and inexorable trends driving people to podcasts and other Internet media.

Expect more podcast hype backlash in the next year, while forward-thinking organizations and early-adopters push podcasting technology to mainstream adoption.

More: Our take on the podcasting hype cycle.

One-third of all Internet videos watched in the US were on YouTube, according to the latest research from comScore.

January 2008 data shows that YouTube.com accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during the month. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007.

Top Five Internet Video Sites:

• Google Sites - 34.3% share of videos viewed. (YouTube.com accounted for more than 96 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.)
• Fox Interactive  - 6%
• Yahoo! Sites - 3.2%
• Microsoft Sites - 2%
• Viacom - 2%

Other notable findings from January 2008 include:

• More than three-quarters of the total U.S. Internet audience (75.7 percent) viewed online video.
• 78.5 million viewers watched 3.25 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.4 videos per viewer).
• 49.4 million viewers watched 534  million videos on MySpace.com (10.8 videos per viewer).
• The average online video duration was 2.9 minutes.
• The average online video viewer consumed 70 videos.

New research from comScore confirms one of the more important new media trends - that young people are abandoning newspapers for Internet media.

As a result, newspaper readership is getting smaller and older.

“That current generations are growing up getting their news online for free is an indicator that print circulations are likely to continue their decline,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore.

Younger News Consumers Less Likely to Read Print Newspapers

Heavy print newspaper readers show a strong skew towards older age segments, while the non-newspaper reader segments skew younger.

• Those age 65 and older are nearly 3 times more likely (index of 296) than average to read the print edition of newspapers 6 times per week.
• Those age 18-24 are 38 percent more likely than average to not read a print newspaper at all during a typical week.

If you ever doubted that there was a future in podcasting, then doubt no more.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Douglas Sarine (L) and Kent Nichols (R), the creators of the hit video podcast Ask a Ninja, are making the jump to the big screen. The two are writing an adaptation of the 1978 cult monster movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!, which Nichols is set to direct:

“Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is the masterwork of a generation,” Nichols said. “We can only aspire to recapture that magic.”

No changes to the original plot have been revealed, but it still is expected to revolve around killer tomatoes.

Nichols and Sarine’s satirical “Ninja” shorts have garnered more than 80 million Web views and won best series at the 2006 YouTube Video Awards. Their “Ninja” commentator has appeared on National Public Radio and VH1’s “Best Week Ever.”

The original “Tomatoes” spawned the Fox Kids Network’s “ATV” cartoon series and the feature sequel “Return of the Killer Tomatoes,” which helped launch George Clooney’s career.

Nichols and Sarine are repped by UTA and John Elliott of Mosaic Media Group.

You can find out more about Sarine and Nichols in our interview with them.

The LA Times has published an article by thirtysomething creator Marshall Herskovitz that responds to criticism of his show quarterlife, which was hyped beforehand as the first television-quality production for the Web.

The show bombed on YouTube and went on to bomb on network television.

Despite the show’s poor performance, Herskovitz thinks quarterlife is not just successful, but a hit, and challenges the coverage it has received from Podcasting News, the LA Times and others:

IT was a surreal moment when I learned of the “demise” of my online series “quarterlife” on the front page of Tuesday’s L.A. Times. Mark Twain notwithstanding, reports of said demise are not only premature but laughable.

To be fair, the paper printed a correction the next day, but the error didn’t happen by accident. The headline referred to the Big Picture column by Patrick Goldstein in that day’s Calendar section, and while Patrick didn’t write that headline or the one on latimes.com [” ‘Quarterlife’ Gets a Web Smackdown”], both reflect the sentiments in Patrick’s piece.

Goldstein — whom I like, by the way, and think is a very smart writer — put forth the thesis that “quarterlife” represents a “culture clash” between old and new media, wherein two old media types — Ed Zwick and myself — had “arrogantly” blundered into the new media world with the message that we could do it better, and as a result had received an astonishingly negative response online.

He described charts Podcasting News published about our performance on YouTube as looking “like a graph of Ron Paul’s delegate count” and quoted PN’s claim that we were getting fewer views than “sleeping kitties, graffiti videos or even a clip of Sims in labor.” With no other performance figures cited in the article, one was left to assume that “quarterlife” had in fact tanked on the Internet.

Yes, we did call quarterlife a bomb.

We did say that quarterlife episodes were getting fewer views than “sleeping kitties, graffiti videos and even a video of Sims in labor.”

And we did print a graph that showed the viewing trends for quarterlife on YouTube:

Herkovitz doesn’t really challenge the facts here; instead, he says that they aren’t important.

There have been a lot of headlines over the last few days about iCrime - the idea that the popularity of iPods is leading to a surge in violent crime.

The source for these stories is actually a nearly six-month old paper (pdf) by the Urban Institute research group. The paper argues that the recent surge in violent crime defies easy explanation, and then goes on to propose that the rise in violent offending and the explosion in the sales of iPods and other portable media devices is more than coincidental.

In fact, they argue that “America may have experienced an iCrime wave.”

Here’s the meat of their case:

In the fall of 2004, a new generation of iPods was introduced and consumer demand exploded. By the end of 2005, more than 42.3 million units had been sold, and by the end of 2006, the total was almost 90 million.

In 2005, for the first time in 12 years, violent crime increased—a trend that continued in 2006. This followed a relatively long period of decline. From 1993 until 2004, the violent crime rate fell every year, for a total decline of 38 percent. At the same time that violent crime rates began to rise, America’s streets filled with millions of people visibly wearing, and being distracted by, expensive electronic gear. Thus, there was a marked increase in both the supply of potential victims and opportunities for would-be offenders.

Past crime waves are thought to have occurred in a similar way—triggered by the introduction of a new high-status and expensive product. For instance, in the 1980s and 1990s, the proliferation of such valuable products as expensive basketball shoes or North Face jackets may have led to new crimes. However, in past instances where the supply of crime creating products increased, the consumer population purchasing these goods—and the would-be offenders coveting those products—made up a relatively small part of the U.S. population. By contrast, iPods are everywhere, and, unlike a jacket or a sneaker, one size fits all.

Unfortunately, the Urban Institute’s paper doesn’t make a very strong case; it’s not clear if the popularity of iPods and the rise in crime is coincidence, correlation or causation. In fact, the paper doesn’t tackle the most obvious question: is some significant portion of the increase attributable to ipod-related crimes?

The Urban Institute has found an iMeme, but it makes more headlines than sense.

Image: polpulux

Tech publisher Ziff Davis Media filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday, citing a decrease in revenue from print advertising and subscriptions as contributing to its decline.

The company, which publishes PC Magazine, Electronic Gaming Monthly and a variety of web sites, has half a billion dollars in debt, but only $313 million in assets.

The company’s troubles are likely a bellwether for other media companies that fail to capitalize on the Internet. Ziff Davis’ tech focus meant that its readers quickly transitioned to getting their news and information online. It also meant that Ziff Davis was faced with competing with blogs, audio podcasts and video podcasts.

As a result, the company’s revenue from print advertising fell from $215 million/year in 2001 to $40 million in 2007.