LouisJvR.com | Finding pockets of digital excellence

This via Techcrunchies.com (fast becoming one of my favourite sites online):

How big is Facebook? With nearly 400 million members on board, the company is a pretty big subset of the internet. With such a massive audience, the revenues from behavioral targeting, social gaming, partnerships can bring a lot of revenues.

According to a study by Inside Facebook, the social network could have well made over $600 million in 2009 and can make close to $1.1 billion in 2010*.

Estimates for 2009 per revenue segment:

That is…

·         Performance advertising: $350 million

·         Brand advertising: $225 million

·         Microsoft ads: $50 million

·         Virtual goods (Credits): $10 million

Personally, as consumer trust in social networks goes from strength to strength, it won’t surprise me if the biggest revenue growth for Facebook in the coming years would be found in the Virtual Goods (Credit) segment.

*that is 1/5^th of what Google made in 2009 (http://investor.google.com/releases/2009Q1_google_earnings.html)

> LouisJvR's writings on web: www.louisjvr.com | Email: jvrlouis [at] gmail dot com | Twitter: @louis_jvr

Right, with the launch of Buzz a month ago, I just had to revisit my prediction in December last year and again affirm that by 2013 GMAIL will rival Facebook as the biggest social network online:

My original post: Can I be so bold as to make a prediction around Gmail and Social Networking?

An excerpt…

“Considering established user profiles and user information, status updates, avatars and instant messaging, all Gmail (read: Google) needs to do still is organize user profiles to better indicate relationships between profiles and consequently facilitate sharing of experiences/content between profiles.”

Yes, Buzz is still very much broken. Currently lots, and lots, of noise. A bit uncomfortable. Almost like a 1^st date.

(In fact, Techcrunch (here) said it best: "Buzz Is A Broken Instrument Capable Of Beautiful Music")

However, you have to admit – the signs are there. The foundations are being laid. The organising and inter-connectedness of Gmail profiles are starting to take shape… now it just needs to happen a bit more elegantly*.

I’m waiting with bated breath.

*At Davos in 2007, Mark Zuckerberg told a room full of high profiled delegates that the key to Facebook’s success wasn’t about creating communities, but rather taking existing communities and apply “elegant organization”.

> LouisJvR's writings on web: www.louisjvr.com | Email: jvrlouis [at] gmail dot com | Twitter: @louis_jvr

(reposted from our Heavy Chef blog)

The Nielsen Company recently released research results on the age breakdown of members on 3 of the largest social networks around: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The study used the following age brackets as a base:

·         Kids: 2-11 years old

·         Teens: 12-17 years old

·         Young adults: 18-24 years old

·         Adults1: 25-34 years old

·         Adults2: 35-49 years old

·         Mature adults: 50-64 years old

·         Seniors: 65+ years old

The results are as follow (diagrams below):

1. FACEBOOK

2. TWITTER

3. LINKEDIN

Although it is no surprise that Adults form the nucleus of most of the network’s member bases, what interests me is the prominence of the 50-64 (and 65+) year olds - the ‘Silver Surfer*’ demographic as it often referred to.

With Silver surfers becoming the fastest growing Internet demographic group in South Africa (source: Online Publishers Association), it is indeed a relevant demographic and has become quite a hot topic of discussion in recent times.

Overall though, I think we can all agree that within the South African context Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – though, especially Facebook and to a lesser extent, Twitter – are dominant forces within our online and mobile web space.

It would thus make sense to do your due diligence and understand the digital habits of your customers online.

(via BNET)

*An adult, generally 50 years of age or older, who frequently surfs the web and spends time online (”silver” refers to the colour of their hair)

Indeed this is one of my favourite topics – free content vs. paid for content?

Needless to say this is a very intriguing debate and not at all an easy decision to make for content publishers.

Enter The Economist with this article on The year of the paywall* – an excerpt:

In the coming months Rupert Murdoch, News Corp’s boss, is expected to make good on his promise to introduce paywalls on the websites of the bigger publications in his stable, such as the Times of London and the Sun. Last month Axel Springer, a large German publisher, began charging for some of its newspapers. Variety, a trade publication for Hollywood, has begun demanding money. The New York Times is pondering a similar move. Even the Guardian, a British newspaper that has long been an evangelist for free news online, has launched a paid-for iPhone application (though accessing stories is free once the app has been downloaded). The Economist recently introduced a paywall for the print-edition contents list on its website.

Content publishers (read: media owners) are on the threshold of getting to grips with profiting from digital whilst balancing reader expectations.

I do believe this is an exciting time to be involved in the content business. Scary yes, but exciting nonetheless.

*Paywall is defined as: A feature of a website that only allows access to certain pages or data to paid up subscribers OR… as www.urbandictionary.com puts it: “The techy part of a web system that makes you pay dosh to get to the goodies...”

This excerpt was taken from the diligent work of leading analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, who provides us with a peak into the future of the Internet, particularly the future of the social web. I’ll highlight some of the main points of his analysis:

The term online community is something that’s thrown around a lot these days… and legitimately so.

Creating community isn’t something new…

• Politicians have been doing so for centuries.
• Churches in my mind have always lead the way in this regard.
• Schools rely almost everyday on their communities for support.
• Brands are constantly trying to engender loyalty.
• Even the local hair salon depends on its community of customers to keep its doors open.

Not something new.

Enter the Internet, essentially a very flexible mass communication tool, at its core designed to create a network of connections between electronic devices, which behind each device sits a human being.

So, today people can use the Internet to do what they’ve always done before, create communities – only now referred to as online communities.

One thing the Internet did change though was the means and scale to which a person, organization or business can start, manage and grow their community of followers. Have the right message, get the right people to join, align the stars and the opportunity is their today for any community to scale to the likes of which its organizers never imagined. This guy realised this to great success.

To my formula, which to my mind helps a great deal in setting the foundation for planning online community:

Online Community = [Message + Internet(People + Interest + Organization)] x Marketing

(for the mathematicians out there: OC=[Ms + I(P+In+Org)] x M)

Thus, creating online community is a product of:

1. Crafting a message (e.g. we create profitable websites)
2. Using tools provided by the Internet (e.g. blogs, social networks, forums etc)
3. To organize people and their interest in your message, vision, brand or business
4. All supported by a pervasive marketing drive.

Testing this formula, in any situation if you ignore your Marketing (i.e. M=0), your community will diminish.

I’ve found this formula useful to add to your ROI report-backs as well.