Displaying items by tag: Advertising

Saturday, 06 October 2012 09:18

Facebook reaches 1 billion users

facebook moneyMark Zuckerberg announced today that “This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month”, and around 600 million of those are mobile users. The average age of Facebook users continues to decrees, as now is 22. When they hit 500 million users back in July 2010 the average age was 23. Zuckerberg also posted an interesting fact sheet, so according to that there have been over 1.13 trillion “likes” since the launch in February 2009, 219 billion photos uploaded, 17 billion location-tagged posts (check-ins included), and about 210,000 years of music has been played on Facebook so far.

Published in News
Thursday, 27 September 2012 20:41

Google's 14th birthday

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Already 14 years have passed since the Google has been established, and they celebrated it with a cake doodle. Of course it has 14 candles, and after they are blown out the cake gets cut out and the remaining parts create the Google logo from the plate below. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were at Stanford University. It all started on September 4, 1998 when the company was first incorporated as a privately held company, while public the offering happened on August 19, 2004.

Published in News
Thursday, 27 September 2012 06:08

Facebook has started to delete fake accounts

facebook money

Looking at the picture below you are probably thinking “Whoa! Way to go Adele!” but that's not what is this post about. Apparently Facebook has started to massively delete fake accounts, and by those numbers it certainly looks like they have got their hands full. One of most impressive falls is Zyngas's Texas HoldEm Poker, they lost over 96000 fans after this operation started. Illegitimately created accounts, malware likes, or likes from compromised accounts are being removed.

Published in News
Sunday, 12 August 2012 16:09

Adverts coming to uTorrent

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One of the most popular torrent clients is uTorrent (used monthly by around 125 million users for downloading) will start to serve adverts within its software in the near future.  An announcement stated that ads will be linked with the content of the torrents a user downloads, whether it is a legal or illegal download. uTorrent already makes decent money, between $15-20 million per year, thanks to a toolbar for web browsers that is installed as a part of  the install package. However that doesnt seem to be enough for its directors so they hope to make more with the ads they will introduce in the new version

Published in News
facebook money

Although Facebook is a social networking giant with hundreds of millions of users there are two things that it has been unable to do so far. One if make a working mobile app for either iOS or Android and the other is to figure out how to make advertising work for them. Now the concept of social advertising is very old. It goes waaaayyyyy back to the days of daytime TV when advertisers would market their products to their perceived audiences. In fact because of the tendency to advertise washing powder during mid-day dramas the term Soap Opera was coined. So pushing the right ads to your audience is nothing new.

Published in Editorials

250px-Ardre_Odin_SleipnirIn our articles and editorials you have heard us use some interesting terms that are not commonly used in marketing or PR. One of these is the Corporate Personality another is the Corporate Mythology. Now, you are never going to hear PR or Marketing people use these terms as they are not always positive. However we feel they are accurate. In fact my first exposure to the term Corporate Mythology was in a class on economics and its impact in military strategy. In it the instructor asked us to identify certain key people in a corporate economy and describe their function in the business and how they affected the whole. When we were done he showed us how these central people formed the corporate mythology by comparing them directly to Norse, Greek and Roman Mythology. It was an amazing thing to see in practice.

Published in Editorials

facebook_moneyWow, the rumors have started early; it seems that some people are trying to push the “Facebook is going to charge you” rumor again after the social networking company tried out a new “pay to promote” feature. This compiled with some recent purchases (and a change in the “data use” policy) has gotten the gears turning. The problem is that we highly doubt they will ever do that after considering there are much better ways to monetize their users.

Published in Editorials

advertising-pottermoreIf you have not heard of Harry Potter then you have been living under a rock. The Boy Wizard has become this generations Star Wars. The series of seven books has amassed a serious number of followers (I have read them) while the movies have spawned a monster of a merchandising machine.

As I live in Florida I have visited the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure more than once and after being open for almost a year there is still a multi-hour wait to get into some of the stores.  However, even though the creator of this phenomenon makes a good deal of money from all of this it is not as much as she could.

The solution? Well J.K. Rowling has teamed up with Sony Entertainment to create an online virtual world called Pottermore. In this new virtual world they are extending the world created in the books to allow fans (both young and old) to take on new personalities and experience the world of Hogwarts (the best Wizarding School in Brittan and pretty much the central location in the books. Officially the new site opens up in October, but ever since it was announced they have teased about a close Beta beginning on July 31st. At first all you had to do was submit an e-mail before July 31st.

However, because of that most people submitted the e-mail and that was that. People still visited Pottermore.com but it was not as much as it could have been (at least from what we are hearing). So how do you fix that? Again a simple answer. You change your mind before the morning of the 31st.
Fans began to hear that for the Beta there was only going to be 1 million people allowed to enter. Now that is a pretty big number until you realize that more than a million people went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (the final film in the series) on opening weekend and it is still going strong many weeks later.

So, on the morning of the 31st at 8am London time fans flocked to Pottermore.com in the hopes to be one of the few to get in. However, the powers that be changed their minds once again. Instead of letting people in they were going to have a multiday (seven for the seven books to be exact) scavenger hunt (maybe they stole that idea from us…). On each day you would have to hit the site by 8am London time (3am Eastern Time in the US) and try to find something called the Magic Quill. Each day a clue (a question that could be answered if you have access to or have read the books) would be posted on Pottermore.com. This Clue would give you a site to go to at Pottermore.com. There you could click on a flash image that of the Magical Quill and you could put your name in for the Beta. Even if you had the answer you had to be quick. If you did not get your submission in before that days allotted number of positions was filled you were out of luck.
But wait! There were still four more days so everyone that did not get in check back tomorrow! As you can see what Sony has done is create a site that is going to have other companies clambering to put ads on it. Before the site is even live they have found a way to get multiple millions of hits (perhaps even tens of millions).  From what we are hearing although the early entries are done no one has actually gotten into the site. In order to do so you have to wait for an e-mail to arrive with a special link to gain access to the site. While everyone waits they are still going back multiple times every day to see if anything has changed. Can you imagine the advertising allure of a site like this, especially one that is already geared towards kids and teens? J.K. Rowling may truly want to create something for the fans of her books, but I am certain that the executives at Sony are seeing nothing but dollar signs at this point.

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*updated 08-08-2011 17:46PM EST with correction on number of days the magic quill was available

Published in Editorials
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