go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Facebook dropped $19 billion on WhatsApp, Snapchat is valued at $15 billion, and even the anonymous messaging app Yik Yak, despite being a little over a year old, is already valued between $300 million and $400 million. Messaging apps are big business, and here’s why.

Based on new data from mobile analytics firm Flurry charted for us by BI Intelligence, messaging apps retained nearly six times as many users they attracted in their first months compared to the average user retention across all applications. The average retention rate for all apps was 32% in the first month, and fell to 11% by the 12th month. In contrast, messaging apps held onto 68% of their new users after the first month, and slipped just a little bit, down to 62%, by the 12th month.

But that’s not all: According to BI Intelligence, people also use messaging apps more frequently and for longer periods of time, too.

Despite a soaring global economy, Prada, Gucci, and LVMH all seem to be stumbling, with revenues flat or in decline. Stagnation in the business of luxury goods is a surprise: Both the US and Europe are experiencing decent economic growth. China’s economy is still growing at 7% a year.

When times are good, people ought to be splashing out on high-priced handbags and premium labels. But they’re not.

Prada, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and Gucci are hurting. 

Prada is suffering the most.

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drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

If you’ve ever been saved from visiting a virus-laden website by Chrome’s malware-blocking technology, we have good news: You can expect to see this safeguard in other apps, too. Google has added tools for spotting “unwanted software” to its Safe Browsing developer kit, so any program can stop rogue web downloads. It’ll take a while before you see this show up elsewhere, but don’t be surprised if future apps with built-in web viewers are smart enough to raise a red flag.

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drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Despite the massive library of content on Google’s YouTube service, Facebook was able to claim more videos with more than 1 million views in the last 30 days, according to data from Tubular Labs charted for us by BI Intelligence. This is a pretty impressive feat considering YouTube’s search functionality is far ahead of Facebook’s, and YouTube also offers fewer restrictions and more opportunities to make money through ads.

Yet, Facebook is becoming a more attractive place for people to upload their videos. Between auto-play and the lack of pre-roll ads, Facebook videos are getting lots of engagement: New data suggests more videos have been uploaded directly to Facebook than shared on the site via YouTube, which is pretty impressive, and the company on Wednesday announced a new video player that should improve engagement by letting any website embed its new video player, just like YouTube’s.

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drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Source: Spencer Stuart

Notes: CMOs see themselves as having greater responsibility for company strategy in years to come, and one sign of that increasing influence might well be their longer tenures. Indeed, Spencer Stuart’s late! st annua l study of CMO tenure finds that the average tenure for CMOs at leading US consumer brand companies has grown from 23.6 months in 2004 to 48 months last year, still a ways behind the average CEO’s tenure of 80 months but nevertheless signaling that “CEOs are confident in giving their CMOs the task of truly leading dramatic change within their organizations.”

As with years past, the average tenure of a CMO differs widely across industries, highest among those in the technology industry (65 months) and lowest among those in the automotive sector (26 months). The largest year-over-year percentage change was observed for CMOs in the communications/media (+30% to 44 months) and healthcare (+23% to 52 months) industries. By contrast, the average tenure for a CMO in the retail/apparel industry shrunk by 25%, to 40 months.