Mobile Fix: Twitter’s prospects
Simon Andrews, founder of Addictive! rounds up a week in mobile, with a look at Twitter’s future and Amazon’s new Login & Pay.
With the IPO under way, there is lots of coverage of Twitter and it’s prospects.
The best read is a long but fascinating look at the power struggle between the founders. As they always say, success has many fathers…
The focus of the management now seems to be on creating synergy with TV – and a new deal with Comcast aims to show that twitter can deliver viewers as well as capture the chatter amongst viewers.
The new data from Nielsen suggests Twitter causes a significant increase in ratings 29% of the time. But because Twitter and Nielsen are partners some are sceptical;
“I think it maybe adds a tenth of a rating point. I don’t think it’s significant.”
The other people watching this are Facebook who want to capture the synergy too – and with a much bigger user base could be in a better position. Except that on Twitter the behaviour is established and Facebook have had to emulate Twitter with hashtags and trending. But Twitter gets 22% of US internet users versus Facebook’s 72% reach and media buyers want more. If you want to dig deeper Techcrunch has taken a good look at Twitter and its mobile business in particular.
And here is a look at some of the changes that were made to the IPO filings as they were finalized. And they are making good money ($47m ) selling data to social analytics firms.
NewTV
The focus of Twitter and Facebook show the ongoing attraction of TV – its ability to aggregate huge audiences and capture the value of these audiences through CPMs that other media dream of. But change is afoot;
The BBC have shared their view of the future of TV – with the focus on improving iPlayer – and emphasising the importance of mobile;
40% of requests to the iPlayer now come from mobile devices – 40%. A couple of years ago the figure was just 6%.
Google are starting to list TV shows and their air dates in their search results.
Tesco have started advertising ClubcardTV – their online TV service where the ads are targeted based on your Clubcard purchasing habits. The holy grail here is the effectiveness of ads can be ascertained by changes to purchasing habits – measured through the Clubcard.
In a longish piece Forbes looks at newTV and talking of the Emmy success of House of Cards despite being shown on Netflix rather than a traditional TV channel;
“The seal has been broken,” says Larry Tanz, CEO of Vuguru, an Internet video studio owned by former Disney chief Michael Eisner. “It’s the first time the fact of what network it was on doesn’t matter to people.”
(It’s interesting to note that WPP are investors in Media Rights Capital – the people behind House of Cards)
Sky – finally – are rolling out their AdSmart technology, where advertising can be targeted at a postcode level. The economics of this are compelling both for brands and for broadcasters. Imagine telling a nappy brand you can eliminate the 90% of wastage in their TV buy by only reaching families with kids – and reduce the cost by x%. The only people who might have a problem with this is the media buyer – as the CPM shoots up – but every brand we know would happily take the cash saving. And the broadcaster has the ‘spare’ inventory to sell to another brand.
Looking a bit further forward, this article suggests PayTV will be dead by 2025;
“TV’s migration to the Internet is ultimately a matter of evolution, not revolution. There will be no explosions, no network chiefs diving out of windows onto Wilshire Boulevard. That’s because the TV content owners—networks like NBC and HBO, big studios like Sony TriStar, and cable network conglomerates like Viacom—hold the cards today, and they will still hold the cards when Internet TV becomes the norm.
“They own the TV shows. Everything else is just distribution.”
Well worth a read.
Viki plans to create personalised video channels for every user and has raised $200m from Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten to fund this.
The CEO of Freemantle, one of the biggest content producers, is investing in digital – they already have 135 channels on YouTube;
“We’re very bullish on digital, and our view of it is that you cannot ignore the views, the creativity and ultimately you cannot ignore the economics of it,”
The next big TV ad success is probably the new Dodge campaign. In an interesting collaboration with a new film these ads are really funny – with 67 films just made for the web to support the 6 TV spots.
And this great promo for the new Carrie movie on YouTube has got 15 million views in just 4 days; people have chosen to watch rather than seen it in an ad break or as a preroll.
If you have great content you probably don’t need to pay for media, unless you want to scale very fast. If you don’t have great content you should probably save the media budget, as it will probably be ignored anyway.
Money
Amazon have finally flexed their muscles in payments with Login & Pay. We will now see Amazon as a payment option on various websites – desktop and mobile.
215 million people have Amazon accounts so this alternative to PayPal and credit cards should get rapid adoption. They already offer a Login with Amazon service.
PayPal continue to innovate with Payment Code, that lets merchants accept payment by scanning a QR code that is generated on the customers phone or through a randomly generated four digit number on the phone. And they predict using voice recognition and visual recognition for security in the future.