Global household access to television technology, 2012

With 801 million households, Asia Pacific has multiple methods of household access to television, including cable, 45 percent; terrestrial, 33 percent; satellite, 19 percent; and IPTV, 3 percent. Europe is the second largest television region, with 282 million households, and an almost equal distribution of household penetration for cable, satellite and terrestrial. Cable dominates TV access for North America, with more than half of households subscribing, while one-third choose satellite, especially in outlying regions. Latin America, the Middle East and Africa are almost evenly split between satellite and terrestrial television access, by household, according to IDATE in 2012.

Digital and Pay TV, including pay-per-view and subscription-based television, are most popular in North America, with about 89 percent of households paying for TV, while digital TV is also popular in Europe, followed by Pay TV at 60 percent.

Comparatively, digital TV is less popular in households in Latin America (55 percent), the Middle East and Africa (46 percent) and Asia Pacific (40 percent). Pay TV is more popular in Asia Pacific and Europe, with 56 percent and 60 percent of households counted, respectively, while Pay TV is less popular in Latin America and the Middle East and Africa, with 34 percent and 20 percent household penetration, respectively, according to IDATE in 2012.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.

Share of global adspend, by medium, 2012 and 2015

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.

Gross Domestic Products’ impact on television revenue, by region, 2008-2012

Gross Domestic Product measurement has always been considered a prognosticator of advertising spend across platforms. IDATE calculated global TV revenue and GDP growth from 2008 to 2012 to show the similarities of growth and decline, and also TV revenue as a share of GDP by region. The data show that GDP tracks at about 1 percent of GDP for North America, and significantly less in other parts of the world, especially MENA, Asia Pacific and Europe, but shows a promising uptick for growing Latin America, with LatAm’s TV revenue-GDP ratio at 0.8 percent in 2012.

Meanwhile, the television access channels have changed significantly from 2008 to 2011 worldwide, with the most prominent shift occurring from terrestrial television, down 111.2 million households to satellite TV, up 108.9 million households from 2008 to 2011. Meanwhile, cable TV is up 55.5 million households, while IPTV is up 26.4 million, particularly in France and the United States, according to IDATE data. When comparing each year’s growth and decline for each TV category, 2011 and 2012 saw significant drops in terrestrial TV, as digital TV formats rose in popularity, particularly satellite and cable TV, according to IDATE.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.

Download or music access

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.

NYT offers a sneak preview on its soon-to-launch mobile app ‘NYT Now’

The New York Times soon plans to launch an app that puts the paper second and this subscription based app will be priced at $8 per month. With the help of this new ‘NYT Now’ app, readers will be able to access curated feed of stories with specially crafted blurbs of key points, allowing readers to scroll down without tapping to get an idea of the most important news of the moment.

The Times gave Mashable a sneak preview of its soon-to-be-launched app, which in its sole intent is meant to attract an audience—the mobile-first reader with further acceptance of the fact that the strength of the product alone will not be enough in itself for The Times to counter the growth of mobile consumption. The visuals of the new app have not been released yet.

Executive editor Jill Abramson said that a team of 10 to 15 editors had been assembled to work specifically on the product. The main stream of the app is designed to be scrollable while providing the reader with the essential news of the moment. A user can tap on a story to get the full text. The investment along with the price point—about half as much as the full $15 per month digital subscription—positions NYT Now not as an addition to a full subscription, but as a standalone product. Subscribers will also be able to save stories on the app to read later. Any story available through NYT Now will be available to subscribers online.

The idea behind the launch of this app is to give readers a synopsis of the most important stories across the web on mobile, as seen by veteran editors at the Times, "a mini-newsroom for mobile," said Clifford Levy, a two-time Pultizer prize winning reporter to Engadget. This move from the Times comes following the recent spike in mobile traffic, especially when big stories break out. People want information at their finger tips during these times.

You can expect short and more visual stories on NYT Now with bulleted points and minimal paragraphs to get to the core of a story very quickly. The app will feature an “Our Picks” tab that highlights content from across the web curated by Times editors. There’s also a ‘Save for later’ tab that lets you bookmark articles and if you want access to all articles on the desktop rather than the curated selection than you will have to shell out $15 , but current NYT subscribers can access the NYT Now gratis.

By: Savita V Jayaram

Freedom to launch new Spanish weekly for Southern California

Freedom Communications plans to pursue its expansion plans aggressively by now launching a new Spanish weekly newspaper for Southern California called, ‘Unidos en el Sur de California.’ This new weekly will debut on March 21, according to a report by MediaPost.

The newspaper will function by combining the staff, production and editorial resources of two of its existing Spanish-language newspapers, the Excelsior in Orange County and La Prensa, serving the Los Angeles metro area. Unidos en el Sur de California will publish four zoned editions every Friday targeting Orange County, Inland Southern California, Coachella Valley and Los Angeles. The fourth Los Angeles edition is set to debut on March 28. It will focus on communities in the San Gabriel Valley and southeast Los Angeles.

When compared to Excelsior and La Prensa’s existing circulation, total circulation for Unidos en el Sur de California will expand by more than 100,000 to 323,476, which includes copies distributed to Orange County Register and The Press-Enterprise subscribers who request it, the press release stated. The news weekly will offer expanded coverage on three main sections titled, “Noticias” (News), “Deportes” (Sports), and NEXT, an entertainment section targeting young Hispanics with bilingual celebrity news, movie and music reviews, gossip, nightlife, fashion, and Twitter trends, among other things. A robust list of events will also be included in the section, to offer suggestions on things to do and places to go throughout the weekend and coming week.

This new weekly newspaper will be distributed through businesses in areas with larger Hispanic populations, which include those with grocers, clothing stores, toy stores, electronic stores, coffee shops, restaurants, beauty salons, and entertainment venues. While all of the information in the newspaper will be reported in Spanish, except for the headlines and movie information which will be in English.

Orlando Ramirez will be the publisher of Unidos and Tiffany O'Hare is the new publication's General Manager. The final editions to publish under the Excelsior and La Prensa names run this Friday March 14, PortadaOnline reported. A new website called unidossc.com will also launch soon with breaking news and related information from Unidos en el Sur de California. Another strong contender in the Southern Californian Hispanic newspaper market, although with little editorial content, is El Clasificado a weekly classified newspaper published by EC Hispanic Media, along with the largest circulated #1 Spanish-language home-delivered newspaper in the U.S Tribune's Hoy Los Angeles Fin de Semana and impreMedia's La Opinion Contigo.

“A local newspaper plays an incredibly important role in terms of uniting, connecting and building communities, and our Spanish-language newspapers have done a wonderful job going beyond standard news of the day to reflect the personality, culture, interests and achievements of Southern California’s Hispanics,” said Aaron Kushner, Freedom co-owner and CEO. “As Southern California’s Hispanic community grows in population and influence, Unidos en el Sur de California will build off our rich history in serving Southern California to become an even more robust community-building newspaper that fosters a strong sense of pride in community and speaks directly to multigenerational Hispanics.”

PortadaOnline quoted Hoy Los Angeles publisher Roaldo Moran say that “the launch of Unidos en el Sur de California, validates the good health of Spanish-language print media. It will help the industry because a larger number of properties will be promoting Hispanic print."

While print media is coming to a standstill world-over, Freedom seems to continue its expansion and further foray into print by also launching a daily newspaper, the Los Angeles Register. This daily will be published and distributed using the resources of the OC Register, in and around Los Angeles, but will have its own LA office. Unidos is the latest in the series of upcoming new print launches from Freedom.

By: Savita V Jayaram

Boston Globe to shift towards a metered paywall, launches a new tech-news site BetaBoston.com

The Boston Globe has launched a new standalone news site for technology start-ups in the Boston community called BetaBoston.com. This is an offshoot of a sub domain, Beta.Boston.com which was originally launched in 2011. Launching of this tech news site as a separate domain instead of clubbing it with its newspaper brand, under the fear of losing out on the most relevant traffic to its parent site and taking away emphasis from the mothership, is indeed a bold move by the Boston daily, TalkingNewMedia.com reported.

Post its launch, BetaBoston will focus on companies and people who are the game changers of the industry, be it a three-person start-up or a multinational. “Boston’s wealth of consumer technology, life sciences and biosciences companies is reshaping the economy and culture, locally and globally,” said Brian McGrory, Boston Globe editor. “We will cover, in-depth, not only the technologies themselves, but the broader social impact of those technologies.”

The news site will cover the tech and biotech industries and will utilize work from the current Globe writers such as those from Innovation Economy columnist Scott Kirsner and Globe business reporter Callum Borchers. Furthermore, it has hired two new staffers to its team to update content on the tech news site, Kyle Alspach and Dennis Keohane as the senior writers.

According to a recent blog post on Politico.com, The Boston Globe has taken down its paywall and is now shifting towards a metered system, Editor Brian McGrory announced in a memo this week to its staffers. This move will put The Globe in line with other publications such as The New York Times that allows readers to access and read 10-articles in a 30-day period before requesting subscription to their services.

From 2011 until now, the Globe content was available on Boston.com but BostonGlobe.com was behind a paywall. However McGory now believes that the site can bring in more paid membership with a metered paywall in place. Boston.com and BostonGlobe.com are all set to become nearly completely separate entities and at some point of time they might compete with each other. There have been staff moves within the organisation, and among them is the departure of Ron Agrella as editor of Boston.com. Also, in the weeks to come all Globe-originated content – staff blogs, chats, videos will be moved to BostonGlobe.com. The content can then be accessible by a larger audience and widely read without the paywall barriers. The redesigned boston.com will launch on mobile later this month and on desktop in early April.

BetaBoston editor Michael Morisy stated in the press release, “BetaBoston is a standalone, branded site that embraces a specialized but very significant community in Boston. BetaBoston’s focus will be on companies and people that change the game in their industry, whether they’re three-person startups or multinationals.”

The site’s focus not only serves the substantial tech and science community in Boston and beyond, but also gives advertisers a unique platform for reaching an influential and targeted base of readers that is expected to include: Start-ups, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, life science researchers, tech experts, college students, residents of Kendall Square and surrounding areas in Cambridge and the Boston Innovation District, and other professionals. Also events and job listings will be accessible for free at BetaBoston.com

By: Savita V Jayaram

Washington Post to work with Polar’s MediaVoice for their native advertising initiative

The Washington Post will be working with Polar’s MediaVoice to empower their native advertising platform, which will be used to place native ads in-stream across desktop and mobile websites.

Washington Post’s native ad program, WP Brand Connect, is adopting the multimedia long-form template to be used in the newsroom for features. “WP Brand Studio is used by content marketers to create high-quality content for The Washington Post’s unique and influential audience,” Kevin Gentzel, Chief Revenue Officer, Washington Post explains to TalkingNewMedia.com. “MediaVoice is the tool used by WP Brand Studios to efficiently and relevantly service brands and connect them to global thought and opinion leaders however they read the Post.”

The Washington Post has chosen Polar’s MediaVoice native advertising platform to empower their sponsored content program “BrandConnect,” which was launched in early 2013 and is used by premium advertisers to include Audi, IBM, CVS, Land Rover, and Mercedes-Benz to connect with The Post’s quality audiences for better reader engagement. With this MediaVoice initiative, Post has introduced a new in-feed mobile native ad placement for their clients to extend reach cross-platform, while providing opportunities for marketers to engage with high-quality audiences and  provide better campaign insights to their advertisers who are increasing their investment in content marketing, FinancialPost reported.

The MediaVoice will further enable Post to deliver native ad content using its existing CMS tools and serve the ads using their existing ad servers that include DoubleClick, said Polar in its announcement. Polar’s MediaVoice will allow for campaign reporting, while promoting solution reach of their native ad programs through paid promotion on various search and social media outlets.

The BrandConnect ads will continue to be labeled “sponsor generated content” with a different background color and font from the newsroom. The first advertiser for the native ad platform is PhRMA, the trade group for the pharma industry. The sponsored content division of The Post further advised PhRMA to create articles that will be launched on March 3. This isn’t the first time that the sales side has peeked over the editorial side to get some inspiration for generating revenues from advertising, AdWeek.com reported. The New York Times has followed a similar pattern with its Idea Lab. The tweaks to BrandConnect initiative are just the beginning of a cosier relationship between news and advertising.

Furthermore, The Post is offering its advertisers the advantage of its Truth Teller Video Project, which was originally used to cross-check politician speeches and has now expanded to include trailers of movies such as Wolf of Wall Street and so on. Gentzel further assured that this collaboration between news units and the advertising platform will not allow compromise on The Post’s editorial integrity. He told AdWeek, "The credibility and trust of the investigative journalism that occurs in our newsroom is holy. We’re just saying, we can create a better, fulsome experience through design and engineering that includes advertising in an innovative and inventive way.”

BrandConnect ads will start appearing in the news stream on the Post’s mobile site with the PhRMA campaign as the first launch on its native ad platform. With publishers slowly migrating advertising models to the mobile platform, this move by The Post signals this shift but Gentzel wanted to be further certain about the paper’s native product before venturing into the mobile space; since half of the newspaper’s traffic comes from the mobile sites.

According to the recent digital trends reported by the Financial Post, the adoption of native advertising across the market is showing encouraging signs with eMarketer predicting digital sponsorship ad spends to increase to almost $2.3-billion in 2014, an increase of 20 percent over the previous year.

By: Savita V Jayaram

Mobile and Wi-Fi connection activity

The United States bucks the trend of Android domination in the smartphone market. In most countries of the world, Samsung and HTC rules with their popular smartphones. While Samsung rules in the total mobile phone market with a 27.1 percent share, Apple dominates in the smartphone market with a 36.3 percent share, according to the comScore MobiLens study from December 2012. Samsung comes in second place with a 21 percent market share in smartphones, followed by HTC with 10.2 percent, Motorola with 9.1 percent and LG with 7.1 percent. Smartphones predominantly use a mobile connection for Internet access while tablets almost exclusively use Wi-Fi connections, according to the comScore Device Essentials study in the United States from December 2012. Android smartphone Internet access is driven by a mobile connection two-to-one while iOS slightly favors Wi-Fi over mobile connections to gain Internet access.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.

U.S. mobile original equipment manufacturer share

The United States bucks the trend of Android domination in the smartphone market. In most countries of the world, Samsung and HTC rules with their popular smartphones. While Samsung rules in the total mobile phone market with a 27.1 percent share, Apple dominates in the smartphone market with a 36.3 percent share, according to the comScore MobiLens study from December 2012. Samsung comes in second place with a 21 percent market share in smartphones, followed by HTC with 10.2 percent, Motorola with 9.1 percent and LG with 7.1 percent.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.

Bloomberg View Gets A Makeover and Relaunches As A Standalone Site

Bloomberg View, an online opinion play created by Blommberg L.P in 2011, relaunches its own URL, bloombergview.com, with a new slick and mobile-friendly layout. This is the second property from the Bloomberg Empire that has a standalone site, along with the company’s marquee glossy, Bloomberg Businessweek.

The revamp of Bloomberg View, which until now was home to Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg Pursuits and Bloomberg TV, reflects the evolving consumer strategy at the company and generates most of its revenue from the sale of high-priced financial-data terminals, according to a report by CapitalNewYork.com.

Bloomberg is also reviewing its print magazines and cable-news channel under the able leadership of former Atlantic Media executive Justin B. Smith. Additionally publisher Tim O'Brien pointed out that there are traditional ad units and that the goal is "to be self-sustaining. ... We want to monetize the site in any way that's logically available to us and doesn't intrude on the editorial mission." He further added that this new standalone site will allow the company to track the digital performance more closely with View’s current audience being pegged at around 1.5 million unique monthly visitors.

The very reason for this revamp of Bloomberg View is to battle against the perception that the nearly three-year-old commentary hub hasn't exactly set the media world ablaze and on a sneak preview of the newly relaunched website, the text-heavy template has been replaced with a more simplified one with responsive design that is optimized for mobile devices and customizable (from the back end) by way of square, photo-centric "tiles" that can be combined when the editors want to make a splash. Furthermore, users can now expect more data visualization and video content, while the article pages allow entry points for a core group of columnists.

According to Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton, this new redesigned site of Bloomberg View resembles the NBC News redesign this month with story cards that stack nicely on smart phones and arrange themselves into four- or five-column grids on the site’s widest, desktop view, Poynter.org reported. This is the latest mobile-first site to embrace the grid and shun visual hierarchy.

By: Savita V Jayaram

Tribune invests $700,000 on tech news website Mashable

Mashable plans to become much bigger than just a tech news site. It is the first time that the site has taken funds from outside the company. The newspaper and TV conglomerate has invested $700,000 in Mashable, the tech news site founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005, Recode.net reported.

This funding is part of the same round announced by Mashable in January, wherein the company said it raised $13.3 million and that this new investment brings the total investment received to $14 million. The news site, which initially started out with a focus on social media sites like MySpace, has broadened its ambitions over the years to provide all kinds of news content, much like a general news site with an easy-to-digest style that boasts of more than 13 million readers every month.

While the newspaper and media conglomerate Tribune is in the process of spinning out its newspaper groups – the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times – it adds this new asset to its spin out. Mashable content will now be seen in the newspapers and vice versa. Shashi Seth, President of Tribune Digital Ventures stated in the press release, “Tribune Digital Ventures looks forward to collaborating with the talented folks at Mashable and assisting with the company’s growth.”

“Tribune Digital Ventures’ leadership has roots and expertise in both technology and media, and we’re thrilled to have them on as investors,” said Pete Cashmore, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Mashable. “Their focus on premium content and digital advertising, across all platforms, aligns well with our core values and strategy.”

The recent developments at Mashable in 2014 include the expansion of its editorial team with the addition of Andrew Freedman, as Mashable’s first Climate Reporter, Brian Ries, Real-Time News Editor and Jessica Plautz, Travel Editor. The tech news website further experienced rapid growth in advertising sales through integrated partnerships with blue chip clients and announced global expansion with a new New York headquarters and might further expand into Los Angeles and London.

By: Savita V Jayaram

The Huffington Post to be published in 14 countries in 2014

The Huffington Post has just launched its 11^th international edition in Korea and has plans to be published in 14 countries by year-end 2014. Graham Moysey, Head of AOL International, told Beet TV that AOL plans to exert push on its international brands around marquee content and is considering half of the company’s traffic coming from outside U.S. The percentage is expected to grow.

Meanwhile, a larger untapped potential for growth is the tech publications of AOL – Techcrunch and Engadget will soon reach some 40,000 monthly unique globally.

By: Savita V Jayaram