Netbook Demand Seems Weaker: Issue is Why

A ChangeWave survey of 3,108 consumers during October suggests essentially-flat demand for desktop PCs, unchanged levels of demand for laptops and lower demand for netbooks. Most observers will be quick to point to stronger demand for tablet devices as the reason for the lower interest in netbooks.

The percentage of respondents saying they plan on buying a desktop over the next 90 days (six percent of respondents) has ticked up one point since ChangeWave's survey in August, while planned purchases of laptops (eight percent ) remain unchanged.

Consumer interest in netbooks (14 percent of respondents) is down about 10 percentage points since the June 2009 survey.

Changewave survey - tablet pc and apple ipad

North American Operator Non-Voice Revenues to Approach $100 billion by 2015

Service provider revenues from non-voice services will almost double to $96.7 billion by 2015, up from $56.0 billion in 2010, driven by consumer adoption of data-hungry devices, such as, smartphones and tablets, Juniper Research estimates.

Despite the growth, total operator revenues will slow year-over-year, as a result of the decline in voice revenues. Meanwhile, according to report author Daniel Ashdown, "voice revenues are deteriorating as the subscriber market saturates and competition places pressure on voice bundle pricing."

North American Operator Non-Voice Revenues to Approach $100 billion by 2015, says Juniper Research

100 Ways to Get Rid of a Telemarketer

Most people can discourage unwanted telemarketing calls by signing up on the "Do Not Call" list at https://www.donotcall.gov/.

Of course, if you have an existing business relationship with a firm, or have had one in the last six months, the calls are legal. So here's a list of 100 ways, most of them funny, to "get rid" of a telemarketer.

Landline Phone Service: 100 Ways to Get Rid of a Telemarketer

T-Mobile USA Defends Network

Neville Ray, the Chief Technology Officer of T-Mobile USA, says the company is in "no rush" to activate a fourth-generation network right away.

Observers will point out that T-Mobile USA is making the best of a bad situation: it has no 4G spectrum, and continues to work on how to get it. So making a virtue out of necessity is not a bad way to go. Beyond the positioning, there are some practical issues.

T-Mobile USA points out that handset selection initially will be limited, and that it is possible battery life and other issues could complicate end user experience.

Also, to the extent that the immediate advantage for a user is "more speed," so long as T-Mobile USA can keep up in the bandwidth area--actual experience, not marketing headlines--the advantages of broader handset availability and possibly price should prove advantageous.

And, as a practical matter, T-Mobile USA's HSPA+ network should perform credibly compared to the WiMAX and Long Term Evolution networks operated by Sprint, Clearwire, Verizon and AT&T. That should immediately raise questions for mobile marketers. So far, 4G promises "faster speeds." Most would agree that is the case.

The broader issue is whether end users value the "faster access" offers a big enough marketing platform to drive use of devices and applications using the "4G" networks, or whether other factors, including handset desirability, pricing and packaging, unique applications or other elements of service are equally, or more, important.

So far, a reasonable observer might say that 4G, in a network sense, has not changed end user experience all that much. There has been more differentiation in service plans, terms and conditions. Of late, device differentiation has been a bigger factor. But all that is fairly subtle stuff.

Most people would find it hard to give a concise, compelling reason for why a 4G experience is better than a 3G experience, with the exception of "speed." If a 3G network can match 4G speed, lots of people might turn their attention to handsets and packaging as the key drivers of choice.

T-Mobile USA criticizes rivals' high-speed plans | Reuters

U.S. Smartphone Penetration Now at 28%

Smartphone penetration in the United States reached 28 percent in the third quarter of 2010, according to The Nielsen Company.

The growing popularity of smartphones like Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry devices and a variety of Google Android-based models on the market has accelerated the adoption rate.

Among those who acquired a new cellphone in the past six months, 41 percent opted for a smartphone over a standard feature phone, up from 35 percent last quarter.

Mobile Snapshot: Smartphones Now 28% of U.S. Cellphone Market | Nielsen Wire

Mobile Couponing: Glass Half Full or Half Empty?

According to some predictions in 2009, mobile couponing was ripe for takeoff. While relatively few mobile users had redeemed a coupon through their phone, many were interested, and Yankee Group predicted an increase in the number of mobile coupons redeemed in North America in 2010 from 200,000 to 2.3 million.

But some might argue consumers have been slow to respond. Others might say redemption rates and actions are well above what might be expected from other sorts of campaigns.

According to a September 2010 survey conducted by OnePoll for mobile transaction network mBlox, fewer than 15 percent of US mobile subscribers have redeemed a mobile coupon. This is about twice the penetration Yankee Group found in 2009.

So is that a glass half full, or half empty? An active response of 15 percent is considered quite good for other types of campaigns. Some would point out that a coupon redemption rates ranging from one percent to three percent would not be unusual for other types of traditional coupons.

That might strike you as quite low, but 81 percent of the units purchased using manufacturer coupons came from just 19 percent of U.S. households during the twenty-six week period ended June 27, 2009, for example, according to Nielsen.

The most avid users, called “coupon enthusiasts,” are households that purchased 104 or more items using manufacturers’ coupons. The 10 percent of shoppers that fall into this category accounted for 62 percent of manufacturers’ coupon units. They also accounted for 16 percent of total unit sales making them a very attractive and important consumer target.

Still Waiting on that Mobile Couponing Explosion - eMarketer

The Rise of the Gigabyte Phone

It might not seem obvious today, but we might soon be consuming nearly one gigabyte of data every month on our smartphones. That isn't much by wireline standards. But it is a pretty steep increase for smartphone users who have been consuming 200 megabytes a month or less.

Nor is it so much data compared to mobile broadband dongle usage, which might range about 2 Gbytes a month or so.

This is a similar growth pattern we saw on wired broadband networks; the faster the speeds, the more data we consumed.

The Rise of the Gigabyte Phone: Tech News

The Times U.K. Lost 4 Million Readers to Its Paywall

Whether a content provider decides to put up a "paywall" or not is a business decision any company can make. Whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen.

According to comScore, the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by four million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop.

Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to four million in September, 2010.

People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

That doesn't necessarily mean the decision is wrong. The Times might be willing to trade higher subscriber revenues for lower potential ad revenue. But it has been a wrenching decision so far.

The Times U.K. Lost 4 Million Readers to Its Paywall -- Seeking Alpha

Smartphone Data Will Grow 700% Over 5 Years

Smartphone users are generating two thirds of total mobile cellular traffic worldwide despite the fact that only 13 percent of mobile subscribers use smartphones, according to Informa Telecoms & Media.

And as these smartphone users spend more time on the Internet, the traffic that each one generates (Informa calls it "average traffic per user") will increase by 700 percent over the next five years.

Informa Telecoms & Media estimates that average traffic per smartphone currently averages 85 MBytes per month.

InformaTM :: Press Releases

Typical U.S. Mobile Ad Campaign is 2-3 Times Bigger than Similar European Campaigns

The United States is the second largest mobile advertising market in the world, behind Japan, Nick Lane, mobileSQUARED chief analyst says. In 2010, the US mobile advertising market will be worth $797.6 million, rising to $5.04 billion in 2015.

As with other forms of online advertising, most users exposed to ads do not actually "click" on mobile ads. (Click on image for a larger view of the data)

In and of itself, that is not a particular problem, as nearly all forms of advertising involve much "waste" (users are exposed who are not actually "prospects").

Because of the country’s vast population, the average mobile campaign spend is significantly larger than anything witnessed in Europe, for example. In the United States, the average mobile advertising campaign spend is between $75,000-100,000.

On average, creatives receive 10 percent to 15 percent of the budget which could total $15,000, for example.  In the UK for instance, the average creative budget would be approximately $5,000 maximum.

In the United States, this equates to a little under 8,000 mobile advertising campaigns, and an average of 21.8 new campaigns each day.

According to ZenithOptimedia, part of the Publicis Groupe, the US is set for a 2.4 percent increase in advertising spend to $151.5 billion in 2010, with global ad spend for 2010 expected to be worth $449.5 billion. For the U.S. advertising industry, mobile represents one percent of total spend.

Is "Times of London" Paywall a Success?

News Corp. says it has gotten 105,000 paying customers to the digital versions of "The Times" and "The Sunday Times of London" since it started charging for access to their Web sites in June 2010. Of course, the paper's website used to get three million unique viewers a month.

The company said “around half” of these were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest are occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, News Corp. said.

When it switched to a paid model, News Corp. estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent.

In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the pay wall went up.

You have to draw your own conclusions about which model--paywall or not--makes more sense for a content provider. To the extent that News Corp. expected a 90-percent drop of visitors, the 42-percent drop is better than expected. But News Corp. also has an advantage: it publishes media such as the Wall Street Journal that arguably have high value and a readership for whom subscription prices are not generally an issue. That will not be case for most other print media.

Roughly 50,000 web-only paid subscription readers might be considered a success, or not, depending on how highly a media firm values reach and readership that create ad revenue, compared to direct subscription revenues that could come at the expense of ad potential.

Times of London Reports More Than 100,000 Paying Customers for Web Site - NYTimes.com

Tablet Market Share: iPad Dominates

Apple's iPad has jumpstarted the market and rapidly captured 95 percent global share during the third quarter of 2010.

However, Apple's huge lead will be shortlived, as a wave of Android models is set to flood the market in the fourth quarter, says Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston.

There might once have been some doubt about whether tablet devices would succeed as a distinct product category, or as a segment of the notebook PC market, or something else. Perhaps the most important conclusion so far is that consumers like the devices, and that there does seem to be demand, whether as a substitute for existing products or as a brand new product category.

If that is the case, rival suppliers are not going to sit around and watch Apple grab 90 percent global share, as it has done in the MP3 player market, or significant share, as it has done in the smartphone market.

Global Tablet Vendor Market Share

Enterprises Dominate Mobile Ad Spending

More than a third of interactive marketers have implemented or plan to pilot mobile search and display advertising in the next year, according to Forrester Research analyst Melissa Parrish. And just about everyone believes such spending will grow.

For that reason, Forrester Research expects that interactive marketer spending on mobile search and display will grow at a 28 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years.

Forrester expects that mobile Internet usage will increase at a compound annual rate of 12.7 percent, with 117 million people — 36 percent of the US population — searching and browsing while using their mobile devices by 2015, Parrish says.

Mobile marketing opportunities will grow as more people use the mobile Internet, of course. At the end of 2007, only 10 percent of U.S. adult subscribers used the mobile Internet. In 2010, mobile Internet usage is up to 27 percent of mobile subscribers, representing 64 million consumers in the
United States market.

Mobile Internet users also are learning to use their mobiles to make purchases. And they aren’t just looking for the nearest coffee house; they’re buying airline tickets, researching cars, and receiving coupons for products like coffee or detergent.

Forrester forecasts that mobile search and display dollars will grow to $2.8 billion by 2015, at a
28 percent CAGR.

But critical mass still is lacking. Though mobile Internet usage is increasing rapidly, marketers still can’t get enough eyeballs on content to justify spending big bucks in the space, says Parrish.

Currently, 78 percent of the US population access the Internet at least monthly while only 21 percent access the mobile Internet. By 2015, mobile Internet usage is expected to reach 43 percent of total desktop Internet usage, making the mobile medium a much more viable channel.

Inability to track performance against spend. More than half of interactive marketers feel they have no capability to measure the ROI or brand impact of their mobile marketing campaigns.

Interactive marketers prefer performance-based campaigns and are willing to pay more for these metrics. Vendors like Google and Bing offer cost-per-click pricing for click-to-call and click-to-get-directions type activities, but mobile display is still largely based on potential impressions, an unsatisfactory metric to most marketers.

Additionally, the holy grail of mobile is location-based marketing, but it’s still unclear how the connection between location-marketing efforts and in-store purchases will occur. Vendors must develop the tools for marketers to track performance and then help marketers understand the value and how to use these new tools.

·Spending by small and mid-sized business is not having too much impact, says Parrish. Forrester’s data suggests that fully 95 percent of mobile advertising dollars currently come from companies with more than $100 million in revenue.

Though the value of mobile advertising is highly relevant to small and mid-sized businesses, which benefit greatly from local and location-specific advertising, smaller budgets and less marketing
expertise will make the percentage of overall spend from SMBs consistently less than eight percent of total mobile spend.

Concerns over privacy, specifically location and carrier information, could provoke a backlash among consumers, leading to some caution as well. Consumers consider mobile phones personal devices to a greater extent than PCs and, for that reason, might continue to expect greater privacy in a mobile context, Parrish suggests.

Faster Upstream Cable Speeds Arriving In 2011

The first incarnation of the cable broadband DOCSIS 3.0 standard is theoretically capable of 160 Mbps downstream, and 100 Mbps upstream, on a shared basis. But upstream channel bonding has been hard to perfect, some would note.

For that reason, cable broadband tiers like 50 Mbps down and 5 Mbps upstream, or even in some cases 100 Mbps downstream and just 2 Mbps upstream. Such problems tend to get resolved over time, and new gear might be part of the solution.

Faster Upstream Cable Speeds Arriving In 2011

Will Streaming Displace More Radio Listening?

A new study of 12 to 24 year-old Americans reports Internet usage of two hours and fifty-two minutes per day, roughly triple this age group's reported usage from 2000 (59 minutes).

Radio continues to be the medium most often used for music discovery, with 51 percent of those 12 to 24 reporting that they frequently find out about new music by listening to the radio. 

Other significant sources include friends (46 percent), YouTube (31 percent) and social networking sites (16 percent). Some 20 percent of users 12 to 24 have listened to streaming radio provider Pandora in the last month, with 13 percent indicating usage in the past week. 

By comparison, six percent of those 12 to 24  indicate they have listened to online streams from terrestrial AM or FM stations in the past week.

It is difficult to predict how overall radio listening might change as these users grow older, since much U.S. radio consumption occurs while people are in their cars commuting to and from work. 

The American Youth Study 2010 - Radio's Future