We’re only a little way into paywall territory at the New York Times after it went live on March 28, but Hitwise has put out some figures giving an early indication of how the paper is doing with its social media powered metered model.

Hitwise took a look at total visits to NYTimes.com for 12 days before and after paywall launch. There’s absolutely no surprise that there has been an overall decrease, but what’s interesting is this has not been as large as some might have predicted (in visits at least). Read More »

Last year, Twitter reported that their users went from primarily being based in the US to being mostly international – and this trend is on the increase.

Read More »

Great idea from the New Yorker. In an effort to boost engagement with its Facebook fan page it is putting some top notch exclusive content up that you can only access if you like its page.

In the first instance it is from an essay by the author of The Corrections and Freedom, Jonathan Franzen.  Now that is going to be a hit. Read More »

Barack Obama launched his 2012 Election campaign last week and no surprise to see that his team chose to do so online. The US President’s 2008 campaign signaled a dramatic – and social – change to the way politicians campaign for office.

What will be interesting is to see how Obama’s team move the conversation forward, this time round with a tested candidate who’s revealed over the past couple of years that he is human and fallible, after all. What they and their supporters did prove last time around is that social can play a dramatic role in motivating communities of millions. Read More »

One of the most common questions I get asked when delivering my talks is.. How Do Twitter make their money? Well up until now they really have not been making a lot of money. They have raised approx $360m in funding which presumably will sustain their business whilst they develop their products. Read More »

Facebook is reported to be planning to launch a standalone Chinese service, its second attempt, in a partnership with China’s biggest search engine Baidu.

According to reports the deal follows meetings between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Baidu CEO Robin Li and could help Facebook reach its billion user target.  Read More »

How many people do you know that use an Apple iPhone, an iPad or iTouch? Probably quite a few. Figures estimate that there are now 130 million users of the Apple iOS platform (15 million iPads alone) that powers all these formats.

As a result advertisers have to create campaigns that work across all these new devices, but there’s a significant problem. Read More »

Desperados: her arm comes out of the frame!

Did the Tippex YouTube ad rock your world? Well, this one is supposedly going to do the same (although, for me, somewhat less so than the Tippex ad).

It’s for the tequila-flavoured beer brand called Desperados and, like the Tippex ad, it plays around with the familiar YouTube video page in a nice way. In this case, you’re invited to a party which is so … I want to say ‘jumping’ but is that what parties did in the 1950s? … that it actually cracks open walls – and the YouTube video page.

Read More »

Is there nowhere we won’t see the face of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg? He’s been the subject of Hollywood movie,‘The Social Network’, in January he made a guest appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, and later this month he is to turn coverboy (okay so he’s already seen a few of those) on satirical magazine Mad.

Usually we are see Zuckerberg on the cove of series magazines like Time (person of the year 2010) or Fortune. Read More »

Blogger Kevin Sablan from the Almighty Link, which studies ‘how people, journalists, and companies connect through links and social tools’, reckons it could be as low as 39%.

This rather knocks the wind out of the sails of the story I posted the other day about Lionel Messi getting an amazing seven million Likes on his Facebook page. Maybe that should have been 2,730,000. Good, but not quite as impressive. Read More »