Thursday, June 18, 2009

Big Brand Online Advertising Grows 27% in First Quarter: Momentum Shift?

Anamolies always are interesting, and sometimes they are important. No doubt advertising is down overall because of the recession. 

But ad spending for display ads placed by some of the biggest brands actually increased 27 percent in the first quarter this year, compared to the first quarter of 2008.

And note where that spending went: YouTube. In fact, display ad impression volume on the site jumped by nearly 580 percent year-over-year, says Nielsen. 

Large consumer packaged goods brands have generally been incrementally increasing their digital spending. The latest shift indicates some momentum for online video and online venues generally.

Online Video Viewing Up 49%, Nielsen Online Says

People who watch online video spent 49 percent more time doing so in May 2009, compared to May 2009, says Nielsen Online. The "average" viewer watched 189 minutes of video during the month.

Unique viewers grew 13 percent over the same period, while total streams viewed grew 35 percent and streams per viewer also grew 20 percent.

None of that would surprise anybody.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

U.K. Officials Expect 10 to 100 Times Digital Content Growth in 3 to 5 Years

U.K. officials believe the volume of digital content used by consumers will increase 10 times to 100 times over the next three to five years.

So officials at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have proposed an interim goal of 2 Mbps connections to all U.K. residences by 2012, and also propose a new tax of 50 pence per month on all fixed copper lines to fund the next generation of access networks.

The "Digital Britain" report suggests the funds raised by the tax will be available to fund construction to the one third of U.K. homes that are unlikely to get next-generation access because costs are too high.

"We are at a tipping point in relation to the online world," the report says. "It is moving from conferring advantage on those who are in it to conferring active disadvantage on those who are without."

The report also notes that the broadband "problem" has a few sources, not just "access." Though availability is an issue, affordability, ability to use the Internet and PCs, as well as the perceived relevance of broadband all are issues.

Building facilities addresses one of the problems. The others are more difficult, ranging from disinterest to the price of service. Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, points out in a recent survey of its own that 42 percent of U.K. residents say they would not use broadband even if the service were provided free, and they also got a free PC to use.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Buyers are Shfiting Behavior: Will They Keep Those Behaviors After the Recession Ends?

Recessions are important not only because people spend less money, but because they sometimes change their buying behaviors, and the behaviors persist even after the immediate recession driver has past.

In the telecom space, there already is some indication this is happening in mobility services, where more users are shifting to prepaid plans, comparted to postpaid. There is evidence of a slowdown in uptake of new handsets overall, though perhaps not of smart phones in the North American market, at least.

But everyone should be prepared for other shifts, if recent sentiment is any indication.

Some 75 percent of U.S. consumers, for example, say they are making big changes in their supermarket shopping, GfK Custom Research North America says. Among the changes, more than 30 percent say they are buying more store brands. In 2006, 22 percent of respondents said they were buying more store brands.

Nearly 23 percent say they will be purchasing more private label goods next yera.

Nearly 55 percent of respondents in the GfK study say they buy private label “frequently,” up
substantially from the 41 percent who said they bought private label frequently in 2006.

About 75 percent of shoppers surveyed now say store brands are as good as national brands.

While traditional supermarkets are still the most popular place for grocery shopping, 59 percent of respondents say they now shop at someplace other than a traditional supermarket.
In 2006, 70 percent of consumers said they preferred supermarkets for their main shopping.

What people do, not what they say they will do, will prove decisive. People might not continue to behave the way they now are, they might permanently shift their behavior or they might simply express new behaviors more than they did prior to the recession.

So far there is no strong evidence that behavior in other entertainment or communications areas is changing significantly. It does not appear there has been a pronounced change in use of multi-channel video services, or some change in IP telephony adoption rates, or evidence of customers downgrading broadband services to dial-up, for example.

But it would be unusual if some permanent shifts in behavior did not occur elsewhere in the communications business, even if such changes primarily are of the market share shift variety.

A Few Tough Years for Online Advertising Ahead in EMEA, Microsoft Says

Microsoft sees a few tough years for online advertising, at least in the European, Middle East and Africa markets, with a recovery not happening until 2012 "at the earliest," says John Mangelaars, Microsoft regional VP, consumer and online International division, EMEA.

"From a Microsoft view, we don't believe budgets will go up any time soon, and I'm talking the next three years," he says.

"Not a lot of people are making money from online at the moment," he says.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Will ARRA Broadband Stimulus Actually Spur Much Broadband Use?

The U.S. federal government spends about $7.3 billion a year, every year, to foster broadband and telecommunications deployment. But "additional federal investments in broadband deployment...do not necessarily guarantee increased adoption," says the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO says "representatives from four organizations that provide broadband told us that between 80 percent and 90 percent of the residences in their service areas had access to broadband, but fewer than 60 percent subscribed."

For some providers, the subscribership rate was less than 40 percent.

Separately, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 75 percent of Americans use the Internet. About 57 percent use the Internet at home through broadband, nine percent use the Internet at home through dial-up connections and eight percent use the Internet from work or the library.

The Pew report also found that some Americans, particularly elderly or low-income persons, choose not to use the Internet, even when broadband technology is available.

A separate study by U.K. regulator Ofcoms found similar results. Even if given free PCs and broadband, 43 percent of adults who currently do not have Internet access would not use it.

BT Wants to Charge YouTube, Hulu, Others for Access

BT has publicly said it hopes to charge content owners for delivery of their programs over its broadband access network.

The issue has been circling around the industry for several years, and perhaps the major reasons it has not yet occurred is end user resistance, the fear that some competitors will gain share at the expense of ISPs who do charge content providers for access or other competitive responses by content owners. But the problem is very real.

A text message might consume just 140 bytes. A three-minute voice call might consume 1,800 bytes, an order of magnitude (10 times) more bandwidth than a text message.

A three-minute PC video clip might represent 33,750 bytes, another order of magnitude increase (100 times more than a text message).

A two-hour standard definition movie might represent 3.6 million bytes, an increase of five orders of magnitude (10,000 times more bandwidth than a text message).

And that's the problem. Video imposes loads far beyond anything networks have been expected to handle so far. Engineering a network for text or voice is one thing. Engineering it to handle video is something else again.

"We can't give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the service they want at the price they expect," says John Petter, BT Retail managing director.

Broadband providers such as Tiscali have been complaining for two years about the burden placed on their network by bandwidth-hungry video services.

BT says the trade-off could be quality of service guarantees for content providers.

To be sure, the issue of how to match the cost and revenue associated with broadband access is bedeviling. Consumption is growing while revenue per gigabyte is falling. Sooner or later the demand and revenue curves will converge, at which point the business model is destroyed.

Without changes in user behavior or pricing, the only question is how it takes before the converge point is reached.

European regulators also have been much more active than their North American counterparts in the area of compelling Internet service providers to assist in curbing content piracy. So it might not be surprising that BT is among the first European ISPs to publicly suggest matching video consumption with access fees.

The logic there is analogous to proposals some have made about pricing email to curb spam. Even slight charges "per message" are enough to destroy spam economics. Perhaps the same would prove true for charges to view content, one might suggest.

Net AI Sustainability Footprint Might be Lower, Even if Data Center Footprint is Higher

Nobody knows yet whether higher energy consumption to support artificial intelligence compute operations will ultimately be offset by lower ...