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Pandora Shows That A Media Business Can Grow Around Mobile Ads
Source: https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome
Pandora reported total mobile revenue growth of 92% year-over-year, according to the company’s earnings released last week.
That puts Pandora’s mobile revenue at $116 million, almost 72% of total revenue, up significantly from a 65% share last quarter.
More than ever, Pandora is a mobile-first company, and its efforts to build a media business around mobile advertising make it a bellwether for the industry.
In the recent past, Pandora seemed to be struggling to monetize mobile effectively.
The company even saw its RPM rate, the amount of revenue it could command for a thousand advertisements, decline in recent quarters.
But this past quarter it accomplished a 180-degree performance turnaround.
Pandora’s RPM rate jumped 52% compared to the same quarter last year, and 39% compared to the prior quarter.
Pandora executives have attributed the impressive mobile numbers to app improvements and bulked-up efforts to sell locally targeted ads.
Pandora has improved its ad revenue picture enough that it now feels confident lifting its 40-hour-per-month listening cap for free mobile users, despite the increased content licensing costs that will bring.
The end of the 40-hour cap could also be seen as a preemptive defensive tactic against the expected September launch of Apple’s iTunes radio streaming service.
drag2share: How Tablets Are Driving A Huge Explosion In Mobile Video
Mobile video has begun to accumulate scale, and has also turned out to be one of the few types of mobile content — along with games — that monetizes reliably and drives premium ad rates.
That’s reflected in the much higher prices that mobile publishers can command for mobile video ads, compared to standard mobile formats like banners. eMarketer estimates mobile video will account for $520 million in ad spending in the U.S. this year, or 13% of the digital video ad market.
In a recent report, BI Intelligence breaks down the mobile video ecosystem, analyzing the behavior and devices behind the growth in consumption, and examining the demographics and behavior of mobile video consumers.
We specifically detail how mobile video monetization is booming, and look at the new video ecosystem that is taki! ng shape , with tablets — rather than television — at the center.
Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>
Take look at this chart from our report:
Here are some additional key points about tablet video habits:
- Video is one of the main reasons people use tablets: Two video-related activities — playing videos and sharing them — are among the top ten favorite things to do for tablet users. For smartphone users, neither activity cracks the top-10 list.
- Tablet owners are far more likely than the average U.S. consumer: to disconnect their pay TV subscriptions: and! use alt ernative streaming and download services like Hulu, Apple TV, iTunes, Netflix, and Google TV.
- Tablet users tend to have higher conversion rates than those on smartphones. This has already been borne out in the context of search ads and e-commerce, and the touchable surfaces and larger screens suggest that tablet video ads would enjoy the same benefit.
- Among younger viewers in the U.S., millennials aged 14 to 23: tablets are nearly as popular for watching TV shows as Blu-rays or DVDs. Twenty-five percent of respondents in this age group say they watch TV shows on tablets everyday or weekly, compared to 24 percent who do so on DVD or Blu-ray,
drag2share: CHART: How Tablets Are Driving A Huge Explosion In Mobile Video
Mobile video has begun to accumulate scale, and has also turned out to be one of the few types of mobile content — along with games — that monetizes reliably and drives premium ad rates.
That’s reflected in the much higher prices that mobile publishers can command for mobile video ads, compared to standard mobile formats like banners. eMarketer estimates mobile video will account for $520 million in ad spending in the U.S. this year, or 13% of the digital video ad market.
In a recent report, BI Intelligence breaks down the mobile video ecosystem, analyzing the behavior and devices behind the growth in consumption, and examining the demographics and behavior of mobile video consumers.
We specifically detail how mobile video monetization is booming, and look at the new video ecosystem that is taki! ng shape , with tablets — rather than television — at the center.
Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>
Take look at this chart from our report:
Here are some additional key points about tablet video habits:
- Video is one of the main reasons people use tablets: Two video-related activities — playing videos and sharing them — are among the top ten favorite things to do for tablet users. For smartphone users, neither activity cracks the top-10 list.
- Tablet owners are far more likely than the average U.S. consumer: to disconnect their pay TV subscriptions: and! use alt ernative streaming and download services like Hulu, Apple TV, iTunes, Netflix, and Google TV.
- Tablet users tend to have higher conversion rates than those on smartphones. This has already been borne out in the context of search ads and e-commerce, and the touchable surfaces and larger screens suggest that tablet video ads would enjoy the same benefit.
- Among younger viewers in the U.S., millennials aged 14 to 23: tablets are nearly as popular for watching TV shows as Blu-rays or DVDs. Twenty-five percent of respondents in this age group say they watch TV shows on tablets everyday or weekly, compared to 24 percent who do so on DVD or Blu-ray,
How Tablets Are Driving A Huge Explosion In Mobile Video
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/tablets-driving-explosion-mobile-video-2013-6
Mobile video has begun to accumulate scale, and has also turned out to be one of the few types of mobile content — along with games — that monetizes reliably and drives premium ad rates.
That’s reflected in the much higher prices that mobile publishers can command for mobile video ads, compared to standard mobile formats like banners. eMarketer estimates mobile video will account for $520 million in ad spending in the U.S. this year, or 13% of the digital video ad market.
In a recent report, BI Intelligence breaks down the mobile video ecosystem, analyzing the behavior and devices behind the growth in consumption, and examining the demographics and behavior of mobile video consumers.
We specifically detail how mobile video monetization is booming, and look at the new video ecosystem that is taking shape, with tablets — rather than television — at the center.
Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>
Take look at this chart from our report:
Here are some additional key points about tablet video habits:
- Video is one of the main reasons people use tablets: Two video-related activities — playing videos and sharing them — are among the top ten favorite things to do for tablet users. For smartphone users, neither activity cracks the top-10 list.
- Tablet owners are far more likely than the average U.S. consumer: to disconnect their pay TV subscriptions: and use alternative streaming and download services like Hulu, Apple TV, iTunes, Netflix, and Google TV.
- Tablet users tend to have higher conversion rates than those on smartphones. This has already been borne out in the context of search ads and e-commerce, and the touchable surfaces and larger screens suggest that tablet video ads would enjoy the same benefit.
- Among younger viewers in the U.S., millennials aged 14 to 23: tablets are nearly as popular for watching TV shows as Blu-rays or DVDs. Twenty-five percent of respondents in this age group say they watch TV shows on tablets everyday or weekly, compared to 24 percent who do so on DVD or Blu-ray,
drag2share: Shazam Is Driving $300 Million In iTunes And Amazon Sales
Shazam Is Driving $300 Million In iTunes And Amazon Sales
Feb 27, 2013
It’s a long time since Shazam was just that useful app to identify (or “tag”) music playing in the real world. In 2013, the company has a burgeoning business based around people tagging TV shows and adverts too.
Shazam recently announced a major milestone: 300m users. That’s all the people who’ve ever tagged something using the company’s app. An impressive figure, but not one that reveals what Shazam’s current active userbase is.
CHART OF THE DAY: The Curious Case Of Apple’s Flattening iTunes Revenue (AAPL)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/itunes-revenue-2013-1
Apple, if it were just a media company, would be pretty fearsome. Its iTunes business is on pace to do $8 billion in annual revenues.
But, fund manager Eric Jackson at Forbes noted something interesting about iTunes this quarter. It was flat on a sequential basis, despite the fact that Apple added 75 million new iOS devices. iTunes revenue was $2.1 billion.
Over the last four quarters iTunes revenue is basically flat going from $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion. Meanwhile, iOS devices have gone from 365 million to 529 million, a significant jump. Pulling further back, as we did in this chart, over the last 11 quarters, iOS devices are up 5.3X, while iTunes is only up 2X.
Why is iTunes sputtering relative to iOS? We assume part of it is Apple’s international iOS growth where iTunes items like songs and movies aren’t available. We also assume services like Netflix and Spotify are cutting into iTunes sales.
What this means for Apple is unclear. But a big part of Apple’s strength is its ecosystem. Part of that ecosystem is music, movies, and apps bought through iTunes. If people are buying fewer movies and less music, they will be less locked in to Apple’s platform.
If You Love Your Retina Display, This Will Be Your New Favorite App (AAPL)
The iTunes Movie Trailer app has been updated to support the new iPad’s Retina display.
Users can watch a pretty extensive collection of movie trailers in HD and with the new display, it’s never looked better.
The app is available for free right here.
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See Also:
- 12 Weird And Cool iPad Modifications
- CONSUMER REPORTS: The New iPad Runs Up To 12 Degrees Warmer Than iPad 2
- The New iPad Is Already Crushing Owners’ Data Plans
Rice University And OpenStax Announce First Open-Source Textbooks
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/rice-university-and-openstax-announce-first-open-source-textbooks/
When we think about the distribution industry being disrupted, we tend to think about music and movies, whose physical media and vast shipment infrastructure have been rendered mostly obsolete over the last decade. To a lesser extent, we hear about print, and the effect of e-readers and web consumption on books and magazines. No one is making the change particularly gracefully, and the same can be said of the textbook business, which does millions of dollars of business every year selling incredibly expensive items to students — who likely consider them anachronisms.
Rice University, which has been pushing alternative distribution mechanisms for scholarly publications for years, has announced a new initiative, by which they hope to publish free, high-quality textbooks in core subjects like physics and biology via a non-profit publisher called OpenStax College. It’s the polar opposite of Apple’s iBooks textbooks, which, while they too help drag this dusty industry into the present, amount more to a new sales vector for the publishers than competition.
Rice and OpenStax aren’t the first people to propose open-source or free textbooks. There are collections here and there, like Flat World Knowledge and Apple’s iTunes U — but they’re decidedly short on the type of books a freshman might have to buy for their year of survey courses: Biology 1, Physics 1, Sociology 1, Psychology 1. And 11 Learning has a similar idea of collaboration producing a book, but their creation model may not be economically feasible.
And of course there are the many companies that want to remove textbooks from the equation entirely. Setting up textbook platforms on new devices like Kno and Inkling, making an environment for meta-curricular activities and non-traditional learning like Khan Academy, or virtualizing the whole education experience, something with which many universities are tinkering.
But textbooks are still big business, and their utility in the education system is difficult to argue with right now. So OpenStax splits the difference: fueled by grant money from a number of private foundations (i.e. not government grants), they’re putting together full-on textbooks, peer-reviewed, professionally laid out, and all that. These textbooks will be provided for free in file form. But supplementary materials — quizzes, videos, presentations, and the like, presumably — cost money.
It would be petty to call this a bait and switch, since the bulk of the material is being provided for free. And a savvy professor or TA can scrape quite a few supplementary materials from the web already, thanks to those post-textbook services already mentioned. Providing the meat for free and the potatoes for a price is perfectly reasonable.
What remains to be seen is the quality of the textbooks. So far OpenStax has signed up “in the low tens” of colleged and universities to use the books. Institutions probably are waiting to see how the next year or so plays out: everything is in flux and to commit to one platform over another when the true costs and benefits are still unclear would be a bad move.
OpenStax’s first textbooks, for physics and sociology, will be coming in March, with others following later in the year. A strange time to make a debut, in a way, as the school year is well underway and many intro courses won’t be offered. But it will give time for the creaking machinery of academia to notice, acknowledge, examine, and judge the OpenStax offering. It may be that they can demonstrate their agility in fixing, improving, and expanding the content on the fly, which could either impress or terrify nodding faculty members who use the same text for a decade at a time.
How These Guys Went From Making Music For The Terminally-Ill To Launching An iTunes-Like Startup
It’s the perfect example that doing what you love — and knowing what the market lacks — will eventually pay off.
Alex King-Harris, Craig Kohland and Amani Friend met through the yoga community, but what’s unique about the trio is that they were all musicians making music for those who were terminally-ill or facing chronic illness. King-Harris had been involved in a bad car accident years ago which introduced him to yoga.
As yoga increased in popularity, the co-founders realized there wasn’t a platform for instructors to get recommended healing music or share their playlists with one another or with their students. All three guys immensely believe that the right music is essential for various sequences in a yoga routine.
After initially raising $150,000, YogiTunes, which works a lot like iTunes, but is catered specifically to the yoga community, launched in July 2011. The site currently has around 6,000 artists to choose from and the downloaded music can be played through any medium — unlike iTunes, which requires Apple products.
But people are used to getting their music through iTunes and other popular sources:
“You’re up against people who have really strong habits of consuming through iTunes, or consuming through Pandora,” King-Harris told us. “It takes a little while to shift people’s habitual ways of consuming.”
Eventually, the company wants to grow beyond music and become a community for health and wellness enthusiasts.
“We definitely want to draw people in with the music and then extend to other products, other services, other things that we feel are valuable for people’s lifestyles. It’s kind of taking the Amazon model. They were really good at selling books and now they do everything.”
“We can also scale quite quickly beyond yoga to the health and wellness market. A lot of massage therapists, fitness teachers, tai chi people use our music. I think the yoga market is particularly interesting because, in general, the median income is high so we know we have an broad enough audience.”
For inspiration, the company looks at Beatport, a private company that offers music for the DJ community.
“It’s a similar way that we see ourselves servicing the yoga community. They’re a very successful enterprise, very well-known and well established in what they do. They really know their niche. And that’s what we want to do.”
NOW SEE: A complete guide to what not to do when launching a startup>
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See Also:
- These Guys Launched A Startup For Entrepreneurs And Then Got Turned Away By Entrepreneurs
- INSTANT MBA: Know Your Competitors Broadly And Your Users Narrowly
- How Gossiping At The Workplace Can Improve Your Health
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Learn Everything You Need to Know About Meat with Meat Master Pat LaFrieda’s Big App for Meat [Video]
Pat LaFrieda, the master butcher and man behind the best burgers in the world, has created an iPad app that’s pretty much the definitive guide to all things meat. Aptly named Pat LaFrieda’s Big App for Meat, you’ll learn about all the cuts and dry aging and grinding techniques with awesome visuals and in-depth videos.
LaFrieda really knows his meat too, he supplies Shake Shack and Minetta Tavern with the most delicious burger patties known to man, so his advice is like canon in the meat world. The app, which is super slick, is deliciously visual, you’ve never seen meat like this before. Each cut of meat (and it details cuts from beef, pork, poultry, veal and lamb) comes with a real life gallery with amazing pictures, a little blurb on the cut, a location of where it can be found on the animal and a 360 degree view.
What’s also great about Pat LaFrieda’s Big App for Meat is how much video content there is. From teaching you Steaks 101 to learning about dry aging to discovering how to grind meat and sharpen knives, LaFrieda himself reveals his secrets. There’s even a fun meat quiz to test yourself on! If you love meat, and I totally expect you to, you’re going to learn everything you need to know. If you’re a vegetarian, I’m sorry. $7 [iTunes]
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drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)
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