Facebook announced last week that users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, have increased from 5 million to 15 million during 2008.
While this number constitutes less than 10 percent of total Facebook users, the growth indicates strong interest in mobile social networking.
Speaking at the MIPCOM Conference in Cannes, France, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley has compared online video to the early days of television. TechCrunch has published the full transcript on its site, but here are my main take-aways:
According to Hurley, online video provides content producers with four big ‘R’ opportunities: Reach, Research, Revenue, and Rights Management.
Firstly, online video enables producers to reach both massive and targeted audiences of millions of viewers. Secondly, it facilitates more accurate research, with analytic tools able to identify who, why and where content is being watched.
Thirdly, global distribution and analytics tools are giving content producers new revenue opportunities. And finally, online video tools are giving content owners better control the use of their content.
You had me until the last one, Chad.
Certain online video platforms, such as YouTube, may be trying to facilitate rights management… but other platforms, such as the various torrent sites, appear to be successfully undermining rights management!
Still, I do think online video and media convergence is something to be excited about. And that’s probably one of the messages Chad was trying to get across in his MIPCOM presentation.
Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel reports on some research by Forrester Research, Inc. indicating that RSS penetration among Internet users may have peaked at 11 percent.
Yes, you read that right: just 11 percent.
Sure, almost 50 percent of Internet businesses have added RSS feeds to their websites, and RSS adoption among Internet users has increased from 2 percent in 2005 to 11 percent now. But if Forrester Research’s findings are accurate then of the 89 percent of users who don’t use RSS feeds, only 16 percent are somewhat interested, and just 3 percent are very interested, in using them.
According to Forrester, marketers have not done enough to promote the benefits of RSS to their customers. Probably because they’re too busy promoting the benefits of RSS to other marketers! And there ARE benefits - just ask a guy like Peter Drew about the power of RSS in terms of search engine optimization.
But when it comes to consumers using RSS, maybe Steve Rubel is right when he says that “feeds are way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve.”
Rubel also makes a great point: just because RSS adoption may have peaked, it doesn’t mean other online optin communications aren’t working. Writes Rubel:
“The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehicles that bring content you care about to you… In each case, you’re total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you… RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.”
In 2000 it was the dot-com crash. Right now it’s the death of Web 2.0.
According to Michael Arrington, writing in TechCrunch, the recent crisis on financial markets has ended not just easy credit, but more importantly for many startups, easy capital.
Just as occurred following the dot-com crash, it seems that venture capital firms will have less capital to invest in startups, be much more choosy about which companies they do invest in, and will be more actively involved in how the capital they have invested in startups is used.
With less money available, Michael Arrington predicts startups will start laying off people, with the ‘bulging marketing and communications departments’ the first to go.
Apparently that’s not such a bad thing since these are not only ‘the very people who make Silicon Valley such a nasty place to be in the boom times’, but as ‘the number of startups dwindle, it won’t be so hard for them to get attention from press and users, so those marketing and PR flaks won’t be missed all that much.’
Of course, it’s my view that tough times call for more marketing and selling - and less techie perfectionism – so I’m not sure that slashing and burning in the marketing department is the best idea.
Then again, we’re talking about people who equate ‘marketing’ with fluffy, irrelevant, non-direct response advertising and PR. Hardly real marketing, is it?
Meanwhile, this quote from Michael Arrington is priceless:
“We’ll look back in later years and think of this most recent boom as the Web 2.0 period, when we were wowed by the magic of user generated content, copyright violations on a massive scale, and neat little widgety things that used Javascript and Flash to turn web pages into pretty close equivalents to the old desktop apps. Of course there were other evolutions as well. Advertising technology has advanced steadily, particularly in tailoring ads to an individuals needs, and tracking them properly. This is the period that social networking as we think of it today was born, and we’ll never be rid of it in our lifetimes.”
Dot-com. Web 2.0. Boom. Bust. At the end of the day, no business survives without… marketing.
An ABI Research study reveals that more people are accessing social networks via mobile (cell) phones and devices.
Based on an online survey of 500 users conducted in the second quarter of 2008, ABI Research found that 46 percent of those who used social networks also accessed them via mobile phone.
Of those sites visited, the most popular two by far were MySpace (70 percent) and Facebook (67 percent). All other sites came in below 15 percent.
Source: Enid Burns, “Mobile Web Visitors Flock to Social Sites”, The ClickZ Network, October 7, 2008
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