Want to see what the launch of a paywall does to a news site’s traffic? Take a look at this graph from Hitwise.
While other sites have held steady, the Times’ market share has dropped from 4.37% during the week ending May 22nd to 2.67% last week. Its average session time has also fallen from an average of five and half to three minutes. However, as Hitwise’s Robin Goad notes: “That figure is actually higher than many people would have expected, given that a lots of visitors will be spending very little time there if they are choosing not to register.”
The Times doesn’t strictly have a proper ‘pay’wall yet, it’s simply asking users to register to view content for the time being. When users have to pay, we can probably expect an even greater drop.
Of course, the Times shouldn’t be too worried by the drop. Introduction of a paywall was always bound to reduce the site’s audience. The fact that the Times gets a regular income from that smaller audience is much more important to publisher News International.
Original title and link for this post: Times Traffic Drops Off a Cliff After Paywall Launch
A recent survey of 2,733 mobile application developers has shed new light on the so-called Apple vs. Google battle that's taking place in the smartphone industry, pitting Apple's dominant iPhone/iPad operating system (iOS) against Google's mobile operating system, Android.
The survey, conducted by mobile app development company Appcelerator, asked a representative sample of its 51,000 customers to weigh the pros and cons of both the Apple and Google mobile platforms, among other things. According to the findings, developers view Apple's near-term outlook favorably, given its App Store, large market share and device line up. However, it's Android's adaptability as a platform that had developers pegging the OS as the best bet for long-term success.
It should come as no surprise that developers overwhelming picked Apple's iOS (formerly iPhone OS) mobile platform for near-term success, given its market dominance. But when asked for more details, 69% of developers said that Android's potential for long-term success was greater due to its ability to extend to other devices, including tablets, e-Readers and set-top boxes.
Appcelerator positioned this battle as one between "near-term momentum" and "long-term dominance," but there's a flip side to the fight which wasn't fully considered: the battle of the cons between the two platforms, which was a survey question that was left, for the most part, unexamined.
When reporting on the downsides to the two dominant OSs, developers said that Apple's worst "con" was its closed and controlling nature. iPhone (and iPod/iPad) applications aren't immediately accepted into the iTunes Application Store - they're "curated." Or at least that's how Apple CEO Steve Jobs describes it, referring to the company's complex app approval processes and lengthy developer agreements that describe, in detail, what Apple mobile apps may and may not do. And Apple changes its terms with alarming regularly, often to shut out competitors like Adobe and Google, the former whose iPhone app creation tool has been banned, and the latter whose mobile advertising venture competes with Apple's newly launched iAd program.
On the flip side, when it comes to Android, developers who were asked about the OS's downside came up with one major concern: fragmentation. Not only are there multiple versions of the OS out there, there are a plethora of form factors as well. LG alone announced it'll have 20 Android phones by year-end, noted Scott Schwarzhoff, Appcelerator's VP of marketing, and even Google itself is porting Android to other platforms, most notably Google TV.
In the end, the battle may not be a case of which is better (near-term dominance or long-term success) but which is worse: a closed and controlled ecosystem or a fragmented one?
In addition, the survey found growing interest in the tablet form factor among developers in terms of application development. In particular, interest in the iPad increased by 26 points since the prior quarterly survey to 84%, ranking it number two behind the iPhone. Android tablets, meanwhile, came in fourth at 62%. Other platforms, including Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Palm's webOS, Symbian, Meego and Kindle remained 30 points or more behind the platform leaders, iPhone, iPad, Android phones and Android tablets.

For more findings, including details on other platforms, iPhone 4 interest and insight into developer mindset in large organizations, you can read through the remainder of the survey here.
DiscussThis post was reprinted with permission from Digital Quarters.
Despite their coveted value, the great brands of old media aren’t proving out to be much of an asset online. And to the extent old media is relying on the value of their brands to ensure a digital future, they are headed in the wrong direction.
For this new analysis for Digital Quarters, we measured audience and visits (from comScore) for sites across the major media categories, comparing the metrics of sites operated under old media brands (e.g. ABC, Entertainment Weekly) in each category to those of new upstarts. Over the past year old media brands lost share of online audience to new media in nearly all of the traditional magazine categories (TV, entertainment, business, fashion, tech, and teens), while the offline brands in the News category grew share during that same period. Although total visits were up 5% for old media, new media visits grew far faster — 10% — from April 2009 to April 2010, leading to share loss for old media in six out of the eight categories that we tracked.

Overall visit growth was positive in all media categories other than TV, but despite this, old media brands experienced an absolute visit decline in Entertainment News and Teens which are rapidly shifting towards new media sources.
Conventional wisdom has held that building a brand is a momentous challenge in developed spaces such as media; and that disproportionate returns accrue to the most established brands. But my new analysis shows that legacy brands are on the defensive, far more threatened by new entrants than the other way around. The upshot appears to be that upstarts’ execution is earning new audiences (and building their new brands), drawing audience on average away from more established players.
The reason for this shift, and the dominance of new media in categories such as Tech News is simply that the old media magazine model is ill equipped to compete with more nimble online competitors. For the most part, weekly and monthly publications are struggling to keep up with the new pace of information exchange and social interaction demanded on the web. Understandably, the value to consumers of days, weeks, or months-old “news” on fashion trends, celebrity gossip, and technology is far lower in the presence of up-to-the-minute coverage from new sites.

However, the success of offline brands in the News category offers hope for other old media brands. Companies such as The New York Times, BBC, and ABCNews have grown their online presence and are clearly investing in digital as core to their business. They are actively experimenting with rich media, social marketing, and engaging their audience. But while news outlets have always operated on a fast pace, magazines are at a particular disadvantage in that they are not structured to turn information around quickly. For old media magazine brands to maintain or grow share, they’ll need to go further by transforming their organizations, incentives, and sources and embracing the new definitions of publishing quality to provide the experiences that consumers are now seeking online. With online share falling — in some cases dramatically — now is the time for offline legacy publishers to take action and get their brands working harder before it’s too late.
Methodology
Source: comScore panel-only visit data for April 2009, July 2009, September 2009 (panel only was unavailable for October), January 2010, and April 2010, including only properties with more than 500,000 monthly unique users. Properties were manually categorized into old media if they originated offline, and new media if they are entirely online or originated online (e.g. TMZ and MSNBC are considered new media). comScore category names: Business News/Research (Bus News); Entertainment – News (Ent News); Beauty/Fashion/Style (Fashion); Lifestyles; News/Information (News); and Technology – News (Tech News); Teens; Entertainment TV (TV).
Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a platform for social web sites, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in various media and e-commerce companies.
Join the conversation about this story »
The latest global survey from research house Nielsen shows Australia and Brazil are the top Social Media users in the world.
Australia leads the table of most time spent, with each user spending on average 7:19:13 hours per month on Social Networks/ Blogs (SN/B).
Brazil leads the countries with the greatest reach, with 86% of their Internet population active users of SN/B.
While Brazil and Australia share some of the best weather and lifestyle in the world (which might at first seem at odds with time spent on SN/B) the two countries got to the top on the back of different Social Networks – Facebook in Australia and Orkut in Brazil.
Below are the results from other countries included in the study:
It’s a bit odd that Nielsen only includes Japan, Switzerland, France, Germany, Brazil, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, United States and Australia in their “global” report, but you’d think that they’ve picked a good sample of countries to demonstrate the difference across territories.
Other interesting data from the study shows that
Original title and link for this post: Social Media usage worldwide: Australia / Brazil lead the way
Today in a special session of the Facebook Developer Garage London event series, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a few executives provided more details about the company’s product plans, and some updated statistics.
A location service is indeed on the way — “we are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon,” Zuckerberg said. While he referred to an application, a variety of hints point to a broader federated system where third parties would share location data back and forth with Facebook, rather than compete with it.
Here’s a quick recap of recent Facebook location news. McDonald’s is reportedly building location data into a custom app for a Page-based marketing campaign. Facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol allows third parties to share specifics like address, and latitude and longitude. Facebook has also had discussions with location-based services like Foursquare and Loopt — possibly about acquisitions and possibly about partnerships — and it even recently hired a Loopt engineer to work on its mobile team. It has meanwhile reportedly been looking into ways of getting more location data straight into it system.
Facebook has experimented with many location ideas since at least last year, but concerns about privacy, the newness of location services in the consumer market, and other product priorities have contributed to the delays.
An in-house Facebook location app, in any case, could be more of a conduit for location data, sort of like its Events app is for third-party events services. You can export Facebook events data to third-party apps like Apple’s iCal or Google Calendar, for example, so you can imagine being able to import and export data like a list of local destinations where you regularly check in.
Aside from location, the company provided some other meaningful details, mostly stats related to Europe. The company said that it has 26 million monthly active users in the United Kingdom, 16 million in Italy, 15 million in France and 10 million in Germany and Spain, respectively — this pretty much matches up with the country numbers we recently reported in our May Global Market Monitor report.
Among the more than 300,000 web sites that have integrated Facebook’s new social plugins, “a disproportionate amount” of the development with them is “coming from startup” in the region, according to Zuckerberg. European users are responding, apparently, as he said they’re generating nearly half of all Likes via the Like Button. This is even though European users comprises a smaller minority of Facebook’s 500 million or so users.

Logitechs tv-accessoire Revue brengt Google TV naar je tv en maakt van je mobieltje je nieuwe remote.
De Logitech Revue is een nieuwe settopbox die via HDMI is aan te sluiten op hd-tv's. Het kastje werkt met het nieuwe Google TV, dat allerlei videomateriaal beschikbaar maakt op het grote scherm. Ook laat Google TV je programmagidsen doorzoeken en komen er diverse tv-apps beschikbaar voor het systeem. Google TV biedt waarschijnlijk ook ondersteuning voor videobellen, nu LG, Samsung en Panasonic ook al speciale Skype-camera's voor gebruik met hun tv's verkopen.
De Logitech Revue is niet alleen te bedienen met Logitechs universele Harmony-afstandsbedieningen, maar ook via smartphones. Je mobieltje wordt hierdoor je nieuwe afstandsbediening. Logitech werkt aan apps voor zowel Android als iPh! one.De Revue verschijnt deze herfst. De prijs en technische specificaties zijn nog niet bekend. Meer apparaten met Google TV komen volgens Google vanaf dit najaar op de markt. Ook Sony is van plan het Google-systeem te installeren op zijn televisies.

Two weeks after releasing the desktop version of Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe now launched Flash 10.1 for mobile.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that users will actually be able to install it right away. Flash 10.1 will be immediately available for phones using Android 2.2 (or Froyo), but that version of Android hasn’t been deployed to devices yet. Adobe has shipped Flash to its other device partners, too, which means it’ll soon be available on Symbian, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, Palm webOS, and other platforms. Adobe says it’s hoping to bring Flash 10.1 to more than half of all smartphones by 2012.
One platform is, of course, absent – Apple’s iOS4. Steve Jobs and Apple have decided that Flash simply isn’t good enough for mobile devices, and it will probably never be supported on the iPhone and the iPad.
The question is: can Adobe prove that Flash is good enough for mobile on the new, powerful generation of smartphones (other than the iPhone)? We won’t know that until the final version of Flash 10.1 for mobile is properly tested, so for now it’s still a battle of words, and Adobe has thrown in a lot of those.
According to Adobe, Flash 10.1 for mobile has been completely redesigned from the ground up; it supports multi-touch operation, smart zooming, and accelerometer-aided device rotation. It’s been thoroughly optimized to work with “all major chip and mobile platforms;” in short, we can expect better CPU, battery, and power consumption. Finally, Adobe claims that most existing Flash content will “just work”.
If Adobe delivers on these promises, who knows, maybe after a couple of years Apple will reconsider its stance and embrace the platform once again?
Tags: adobe, flash 10.1, Mobile 2.0

Google has started reaching out to publishers in Italy asking them to test a new content-payment solution called "Newspass," according to La Repubblica (via Bealoud):
The platform will be launched by the end of the year and users will be able to access content behind paywalls with a single click, directly from the search engine results page.
Newspass will be integrated with Google Checkout and will use a single login that would in fact compete with Facebook’s virtual currency, Facebook Credits.
Starting with the fact that Checkout itself is basically dead, it's hard to see this one taking off. Consumers hate to be nickeled and dimed. And why would you click to read an article before you knew whether it was any good or not--especially with so much free stuff around? (And once you knew, you wouldn't need to read it again).
But it's worth a try. Especially because it will allow Google to position itself as a friend to newspapers instead of a "parasite."
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:

Ongeveer de helft (46%) van jongeren tussen de 18 en 25 brengt inmiddels evenveel tijd door met het bekijken van online video als met het kijken naar televisie. Daarmee lijkt online video hard op weg het traditionele televisie kijken in te hal......