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Posts Tagged ‘annual-growth’

The online advertising industry saw growth accelerate in the first quarter, with the combined advertising revenues of the four largest players (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) jumping almost 15 percent to $8.8 billion. This compares to 10 percent annual growth in the fourth quarter, and negative growth the first two quarters of last year (aka, the Great Advertising Recession of 2009).

Overall growth would have been even stronger if AOL didn’t have such a rough quarter. It was the only one of the four companies to show a decline in advertising revenues, down 19 percent. Google’s ad revenue was up 21.5 percent, Microsoft’s was up 8.8 percent, and Yahoo’s was up 3 percent (although the display portion was up 20 percent). As a result of AOL’s poor showing, the combined $8.8 billion total was down 2.6 percent from the fourth quarter’s $9 billion

I keep track of these numbers every quarter for these four companies, which turns out to be a good proxy for overall online advertising revenues since they represent a majority of the industry’s revenues. The numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For Microsoft and AOL, I include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.

Below is a table with all the numbers:

Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)

One of my major gripes with the Android platform is a lack of apps that are on-par with the iPhone. Sure, the total number of apps is getting up there, but for the most part, in my opinion, they’re nowhere near as good. One area where this was evident was with Twitter clients. While the iPhone has a number of great ones (led by Tweetie, which Twitter just bought), Android’s options are pretty weak. Seesmic is pretty nice, but wouldn’t be in the top 5 on the iPhone. Today, Twitter may have just solved this problem.

The service has just launched it’s own Android client. We noted they were working on it just a few weeks ago when CEO Evan Williams made the announcement at the company’s Chirp conference. Now, just over two weeks later, it’s here.

Twitter has just announced the client on its blog. When we first wrote about it, it wasn’t exactly clear how they would make it (all internally, or a partnership), now it appears that just as with the BlackBerry one, Twitter’s team of developers and designers worked closely with the Android team over at Google to get the client out there. But they also note that they’re hiring an Android engineer, so you can expect that person to be in charge of future versions.

Some cool-sounding features:

Twitter for Android is a fantastic application to use, and sharing any link or photo is super simple too – just look for the share button in your favorite application and choose Twitter.

Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone. Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar.

It clearly looks as if thanks to Android’s more open nature, the Twitter client can be deeply integrated into your phone. For example, there’s a seamless way to sync with the contacts on your Android phone. For Twitter addicts, this level of integration is very nice. “This is just the beginning,” Twitter notes.

A word of warning, this client is apparently only for Android phones running version 2.1 and above of the software. For older Android phones, Twitter suggests using the standard mobile site.

Online advertising revenues among the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) ramped up 10.2 percent in the fourth quarter to $9 billion.  This marks the second quarter of positive growth following last year’s advertising recession, and growth accelerated from 1.2 percent in the third quarter.

Unlike in the third quarter, Google didn’t account for all the growth. All four companies showed decent sequential increases, indicating that display advertising is beginning to regain its health, and not just search advertising. But search is still driving the gains. Google had another blowout quarter, for instance. And Microsoft showed some strength compared to the previous quarter, perhaps due to Bing search advertising revenues starting to kick in. On a sequential basis, Microsoft’s advertising revenues grew the fastest at 18.6 percent. But the other three weren’t exactly slouching, with growth rates between 11.5 percent and 13.7 percent each

I keep track of these numbers every quarter for these four companies, which turns out to be a good proxy for overall online advertising revenues since they represent a majority of the industry’s revenues. The numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For Microsoft and AOL, I include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.

Below is a table with all the numbers:

Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)

VoIP services juggernaut Skype has seen its share of international calling minutes jump to 12% in 2009, a 50% increase compared to the year before. And as you can tell from the pie chart below, 54 billion minutes out of 406 billion in total were accumulated by users calling each other Skype-to-Skype last year. Are you listening, carriers?

The numbers hail from a report published by TeleGeography, a benchmark research service for the international long-distance telephony industry.

TeleGeography says international call volume from telephones has grown at an annual rate of 15 percent over the past 25 years, but that growth has been slowing for the past few years. In the past two years, specifically, international telephone traffic annual growth has reportedly slowed to a mere 8 percent, growing from 376 billion minutes in 2008 to an estimated 406 billion minutes last year.

Skype’s traffic, however, has soared. The service’s on-net international traffic (between Skype users) grew 51 percent in 2008, and is projected to grow 63 percent in 2009, to 54 billion minutes.

TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert refers to Skype’s estimated volume of traffic as “tremendous” and goes on to say that Skype is now by far the largest provider of cross-border communications in the world.

Just yesterday, Skype Journal reported that the service has seen an all-time record number of concurrent logged on users: 22 million people signed in to Skype at the same time.

Or what the disruption of an industry looks like in figures and charts.

Tomorrow, eBay is set to release its latest quarter earnings, which means we’ll be able to match these traffic growth numbers with reported revenue figures. In October 2009, we reported on Skype hitting 521 million users and $185 million in quarterly revenue.

(Via Skype blog)

This morning, after many months of rampant speculation over the enigmatic Tablet, Apple officially invited scores of press to a special media event to be held January 27. The debut of the Tablet seems all but a given according to most reports, but there are some secondary announcements that also stand to be huge — especially the rumors that we may also see the launch of iPhone 4.0. This afternoon, Fox News “confirmed” that we’d being seeing the latest iteration of Apple’s hugely popular mobile OS for the first time. Should that be the case, there’s also a good chance we’ll see launch of a very important new feature: background applications.

First things first. While the title of the Fox News article is “Apple Tablet, iPhone 4 Launch Confirmed for January 27″, the body of the article later says that it’s “likely” that Apple will unveil those two products (along with an updated iLife suite), and also notes that Apple is known for suddenly removing features or products from their announcements at the last second — none of which makes the news sound totally concrete. That said, there are plenty of reasons why iPhone 4.0 could be making an appearance alongside the Tablet, and why it will bring background apps with it.

We’ve discussed the probable connection between the Tablet and the iPhone OS since as early as last May. With iPhone OS, Apple took Mac OS X and stripped it down to the basics to turn it into a compact and powerful mobile operating system. The tablet will almost certainly have more horsepower than the iPhone, but it would still stand to gain from the power and space saving attributes of the mobile OS (albeit a modified version). Our suspicions got further support less than a week ago, when we saw reports that the newest releases of the iPhone OS was actually being held back because some of its code alluded to the unannounced tablet device. Given these ties, it would be logical for the iPhone 4.0 OS to make its debut alongside the tablet.

But the Tablet OS will need to bring some new features with it. For one, it will probably need to allow users to run multiple apps at the same time. Most people don’t particularly care (yet) that they can’t do this with their iPhones, because the screen real estate is so limited and they don’t view the device as a handheld computer (even though it is one). But that won’t be true with the tablet — in light of its larger screen, users will expect more functionality, and the inability to run multiple apps would grow frustrating quickly. With that in mind, if Apple has already established a paradigm for running background apps on the tablet, it would make sense to finally bring it over to the iPhone too.

The iPhone’s current lack of background applications is one of its most glaring weaknesses compared to other mobile operating systems, most notably Android and Palm’s WebOS. Apple’s reasons for withholding the functionality before now were obvious: running multiple applications can drain the device’s already-strained battery more quickly, and forcing users to manage which apps are open adds an extra layer of complexity. It was the right choice then, but it’s time for things to change.

Plenty of developers have already had their applications hampered by their inability to run in the background. Messaging clients have to rely on the iPhone’s Push notifications, which can only display a single alert at a time. Music players (other than the built-in iPod app) close down as soon as you try to do anything else on the phone. And location based apps have to rely almost exclusively on the “check-in” model popularized by Foursquare, because they have no way to passively monitor your location. Consumers may not be frustrated by these restrictions yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they look enviously at their Android-toting friends streaming Pandora and running Skype or Meebo in the background.

And Apple knows it. As far back as last May we were hearing that Apple was having serious discussions about how to implement background applications.  As it did with copy and paste (which iPhone users had to wait years for), Apple is clearly taking its time to get it right the first time.  Now, with the imminent release of the tablet, Apple may have finally settled on a solution.  If the Fox News report is correct, that could be revealed as soon as next week. But even if iPhone 4.0 isn’t announced for a few more months, it seems highly likely that background apps will come with it.

Image via Gizmodo. And no, it isn’t real.

The recession in online advertising, which began in the first quarter of 2009, continued into the second. Every quarter we keep track of the combined advertising revenues of the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL), which together represent the lion’s share of all online advertising revenues and is a decent proxy for the market as a whole. In the second quarter of 2009, their combined global ad revenues were $7.864 billion, down 3.4 percent from a year ago.

In economics, a general rule of thumb is that two down quarters marks a recession. Last quarter saw the first annual decline in advertising revenues of 2.1 percent. And the annual decline this quarter got a little worse. However, on a sequential basis compared to last quarter, it is actually pretty much flat (but still down 0.18 percent). So we now have two down quarters on both an annual and sequential basis.

Will this recession continue into the current quarter, or did we just witness a fundamental “reset”, as Steve Ballmer likes to call it. What that implies is that advertising revenues have been reset to a lower level from which they can once again grow. We’ll see what happens in the third quarter, but anecdotally I am hearing from advertising startups that the worst is behind us.

This may be wishful thinking, of course. But barring any new economic catastrophe, the advertising levels of the past two quarters seems like the new floor. But how long will it take to get up off that floor?

These numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For the other companies, we include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.

Below is a table with all the numbers:

Online Advertising Revenues (in millions)

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