the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Web Tidbits - IE and Internet Status

The Global Information Technology Report was released today.  The report prepared by INSEAD and sponsored by the World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. as fourth in Internet infrastructure following Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland.  China advanced in the rankings to 57th.  Other country rankings show up in their table "The Networked Readiness Table 2007 - 2008".  Ranking at the bottom of the list was Chad.  The Executive Summary of the report finds a world of growing interconnectivity with Less Developed Countries leapfrogging older technologies with the installation of WiMax. 

In other interesting statistics, Forrester Research reported a precipitous drop in Internet Explorer's market share with a drop of 11% in 2007 from 88.7% to 77.7% as Mozilla Firefox continued to gain share not only in the consumer market, but also in the enterprise market according to Information Week.  The article also reported that many companies had not migrated to IE7 sticking with the less robust IE6.

Global Tastes - Chinese Internet Use

The Wall Street Journal reported on official estimates from the China Internet Network Information Center that the number of Chinese Internet users now exceeds that in the United States.  The US is estimated to have 217.1 million users, while the CINIC data shows that China now has 225 million Internet users.  This data is supported by other research from BDA China, Ltd, that found 228.5 million Internet users in China.  While the absolute number is now reportedly higher, as a percentage of the total Chinese poplulation it is only 19.1% according to CINIC.  BDA also reported that only 5% of advertising spending in China is on the Internet.

In other Chinese Internet news, Reuters reported on how Chinese bloggers have for the most part been very nationalistic in their coverage of the unrest in Tibet.  While the Chinese mainstream media has not covered this in much depth apparently the "freedom" in the blogosphere has precluded the shut down of opinions from bloggers.

Web Tidbits - global and hispanic blogs, e-cards

I've been catching up on my blog reading and doing some general Internet exploration.  As part of this effort, I've come across a few posts that offer information on some interesting developments in e-business and marketing.

Innovation.net references IdeaBlob, a social network for idea sharing where community members vote on the best idea of the month, resulting in a potential award of $10,000.

Curious about marketing developments around the world?  Take a look at GlobalThoughtz, a consortium of bloggers from ten countries around the world (Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Russia, Scandinavia and the UK).

For a slice of the American demographic pie, you might want to take a look at Juan Guillermo Tornoe's Hispanic Trending blog.

Want to send a racier e-card?  Check out Someecards. (hat tip to Ad Freak)

Web Tidbits - Online Advertising

Online advertising continues to grow as mainstream advertisers shift their marketing budgets to where the eyes are.  The options for online advertisers continue to grow with video ads, banner ads, in-text ads, out of banner ads, interstitials, sponsorships, PDF ads, etc all being part of the available options.

According to statistics from the Newspaper Association of America reported in a recent Business Week article, newspaper advertising continued to decline last year to $46.6 billion, a decrease of 1.7%.  The article also quoted eMarketer statistics that showed online advertising grew 27% to $19.6 billion. 

The same article focused on one of the growing areas for online advertising - in text ads.  These ads are found within the editorial content and are triggered off a highlighted keyword that when rolled over generates a related ad.  One of the firms discussed in the article that delivers these ads was Vibrant Media, "the in-text advertising leader" and an Inc. 500 firm in the last two years. Vibrant Media provides publishers with up to three ads per article and has set up technology to try and avoid ad placement in negative stories according to Business Week.

Meanwhile Inc. Magazine reviewed some of the ways that publishers could make money from their site in a December article "Clicks for Cash".  Among the services referenced were Google AdSense, AdBrite, AuctionAds, Vizu and ValueClick. 

In other advertising developments, Adobe has announced a partnership with Yahoo!, that will allow for the placement of ads in PDFs according to published reports in CNET and other sources.  The ads will also be keyword triggered and will appear in a righthand panel of the PDFs.

Web Tidbits - Social Networks, Wikis

One year old Citizendium is hunting for a piece of the content pie seeking to be a reliable alternative to Wikipedia through the use of expert contributors.  According to the Financial Times they still have a ways to go given that the site only has 3,300 articles (compared to Wikipedias 2 million in English alone) and is growing at 14 new ones a day.  With the viral and network effects of the Internet the projections for the site are positive according to the founder Larry Sanger.

In the social networking space, Google announced the launch of OpenSocial, a consortium described by the Financial Times as "The technology that Google unveiled will let developers spread applications across any of the social networks that adopt it, removing the need to rewrite them for each one".  CNet is reporting that there are 26 companies that have joined the consortium including Google's Orkut (popular in Latin America), Hi5, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning, Beebo, Oracle, Salesforce.com, etc.

For more on social networks see my article "The expanding world of social networks" on Wisconsin Technology Network.

Web Tidbits - Mobile Marketing

Mobile Metrics
M:Metrics and AdMob have released research that finds that 65.5% of the recipients of ads delivered over the AdMob mobile network of over 2000 mobile sites delivering 1.4 billion ads found they are in the hard-to-reach 18 - 34 year old age group.  The research results include audience composition by age segment based on the network web site type - community, downloads, entertainment, news/info and portals. 

Mobile Marketing
In a related story, James Briggs, CEO of Briabe Media, points out that African American and Hispanic 18 - 34 year olds "consume far more mobile services than other groups". Among their activities are downloads, SMS, MMS and web browsing.

Declining Growth in Broadband

The Wall Street Journal has an article "Is High Speed Internet Growth Slowing" that shows that the growth in broadband home users shrank to 1.2 million in the last quarter, a decline of 21% over the same quarter last year.  According to the article over 50% of homes have broadband access, leading to the number of new subscribers is flattening out.  In other broadband penetration datam, Pew Internet reported in their June 2007 Home Broadband Adoption Study that 47% of all adult Americans have broadband access at home, a number that lags in the rural areas where only 31% have broadband access.  They also reported that 40% of African Americans now have broadband access.

Of some concern for marketers is that the U.S. now stands 25th in the world in terms of broadband penetration at 50.1% of households lagging #1 South Korea at 89%, our Canadian neighbors #11 at 63% and even France at 55.5% according to a chart compiled by Point Topic and WebsiteOpitmization.com.  This lower number could mean that aggressive plans to utilize video, audio, podcasts or other web 2.0 technologies could be stymied by the lower penetration rates depending on the segments that companies are trying to reach.

Web Tidbits - e-Mail

Wireless e-Mail Access
Gartner analysts are predicting that wireless e-mail access will reach commodity status by 2012.  Given that only 2% of business e-mail accounts are currently wireless enabled this is a significant increase in a relatively short period of time.

e-Mail Marketing Trends
38% of companies have a centralized e-mail marketing department according to Jupiter Research. 

83% of companies are using e-mail marketing according to Forrester Research.

e-Mail Usage is lower and declining among teens as they substitute instant messaging, text messaging and social network messages according to a recent iMedia Connection article. The article references that even among college students we're seeing a declining usage of e-mail as they engage with the immediacy of alternative message delivery.

Pew Internet on Online Video Trends

Pew Internet has released their latest research findings on the use of online video.  According to the research report (PDF), 57% of Americans have downloaded online video with 19% doing so on a daily basis.  Not too surprisingly, the numbers are even higher among those using broadband Internet access at home or work where 74% of users watch or download online video.

In terms of content types that were being watched news video was number 1, followed by comedy, music and education.  The research also found that more than half of users watching video were sharing the video clips with others showcasing the viral or word of mouth marketing aspect of this medium.  In addition it was found that few users were paying for online video and preferred professionally produced video to user generated content.

With the CNN Youtube Democratic presidential debates that were recently held we can see how even in politics online video is taking off.

B2C e-Commerce Sales Growth Slows Down

The New York Times reports on a slowing down in the torrid pace of growth for online sales of consumer goods.  With online sales now at around 5% of all sales, the article reports on how rapidly growing categories like books, airline tickets and apparel are beginning to see a slowing in their growth rates.  The article attributes this to some Internet fatigue and also a desire for greater interactivity found through live shopping experiences.  Analysts cited in the article project that online sales will reach 7% of retail sales by 2011.