Mobile ads, including smartphones and tablet computers, now represent over 20% of Facebook adspend – despite being priced higher than desktop ads.  When comparing ads placed on Apple iOS devices against those running Google Android, iOS represent 97% of spend on ads targeted through tablets, but Android accounts for 71% of ads delivered through smartphones.

This is more welcome news for Facebook and its well publicised problems of selling mobile advertising early that Mark Zuckerberg went some way to dispel in October when he said: “I want to dispel this myth that Facebook can’t make money on mobile. The most important thing to understand here is that we’re just getting started with our mobile product development and monetisation”.

The latest data comes from a study of two million Facebook ad clicks and conversions by global advertisers who use the Kenshoo Social marketing platform.

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If you haven’t seen this TEDSalon London talk from last month on the future of news it is well worth your time. In it Markham Nolan of Storyful shares why he thinks YouTube may soon overtake traditional news sources and how this represents a dramatic shift in the dynamics of news media. In his view YouTube, which adding 72 hours of video every minute, is becoming the most important platform of “documentary evidence about humankind in existence”.

He makes a good case for it, particularly as he talks about the war in Syria and how, as traditional news organisations struggle to get footage because of the risks involved, YouTube has become invaluable. Read More »

In 2001, two scholars of management and economics penned a book called ‘The Attention Economy’, exploring the notion of how human attention is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. Thomas Davenport and John Beck defined human attention as “focused mental engagement on a particular message or piece of information,” a process that advertisers and marketers compete for in their droves.

With the vast amounts of information available, content must focus on quality when hitting large audiences for it to get read. Much like advertisers, email marketers must be prepared to pay a fair price for a high return in attention and engagement.  Read More »

The Associated Press last night stirred up a small storm on Twitter as it announced that it will begin to run sponsored Tweets in the timeline of its main @AP Twitter account and signed Samsung as its first sponsor. The story has raised concerns among some journalists as to whether this would damage AP’s credibility as a news organisation. Some have gone as as far to say they were unfollowing AP, that it shouldn’t do it and that it devalues the brand (check out the Storify reaction below).

What these aren’t are official Promoted Tweets from Twitter, but rather promotional messages sent out as Tweets on @AP. Initially it plans to send out two a day this week timed with the 2013 International CES – the consumer electronics show — in Las Vegas. Hardly a huge deal. Read More »

I Tweeted recently that I’d received an invitation from someone working in social media to connect on LinkedIn who used the word “visionary” as a key word to describe themselves. I’m sorry, but you need to be a yogi, solve hunger or invent time travel to be a visionary. That or be a member of ‘Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light (left) and have an awesome moustache. Although a quick search on LinkedIn proves visionary remains a rather popular appellation.

This brings me neatly to a report on Ad Age on the growth of the social media gurus, which is a sub industry in its own right. The report says there are 181,000 social media ‘Gurus,’ ‘Ninjas,’ ‘Masters,’ and ‘Mavens’ on Twitter. Add to that a few visionaries.  Read More »