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Week of May 11, 2009
May 11, 2009
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MLB's Mobile Success Stories
Friday, May 15, 2009
As we mentioned yesterday, Major League Baseball has been the most successful sports entity in the world with respect to is various digital initiatives. It was aggressive early on in getting all teams together under one roof. Their success started with the extremely popular web portal, MLB.com. However, they've continued to branch out into other platforms; in particular, they've pushed hard into the mobile space.
From the website, bizofbaseball.com, here are some of the impressive stats on baseball's mobile initiatives:
- The MLB.com network of mobile sites recorded 31.1 million page views on April 25, 2009, setting a new record for a single day. It marks the seventh day this year that it has surpassed the 20 million page view mark, including the previous record of 26.2 million established on April 25, 2009.
- MLB.com's mobile sites have totaled 381.7 million page views across all internet-enabled devices, a 254 percent increase from the 2008 comparable time period.
- MLB.com has delivered more than 4.1 million video streams to mobile devices over the first three weeks, including real-time highlights to team alert subscribers. Compared to 2008, team alert subscribers are up 35.5 percent.
- Fans have downloaded more than 1.1 million MLB.com and Club icons to their BlackBerry smartphones for easy one-click access to the MLB.com network of mobile sites.
- MLB.com At Bat 2009, an application built exclusively for iPhone and iPod touch, remains the top-selling sports application in the Apple app store. It also has retained its ranking among the top 20 overall paid applications nearly a month after becoming available.
MLB.com Sees Record Traffic
Thursday, May 14, 2009
The NFL may have supplanted major league baseball as the real national pastime, but no one beats baseball when it comes to digital initiatives. Major League baseball Advanced Media ("MLBAM"), baseball's digital arm, has been spectacularly successful since its launch in 2000, generating billions of dollars annually in revenue for the 30 major league teams.
MLBAM was very aggressive about bundling all major league teams' digital services together from the start. They started by putting the sites for all teams under one banner, then creating a subscription model for online radio broadcasts, on up to the present day with various video services streamed from the website.
According to the website, bizofbaseball.com, after the first 3 weeks of the new season, MLB.com has registered huge increases in traffic. Here are some of the impressive figures:
- MLB.com has delivered 127.2 million video streams, representing an increase of 136 percent over the 53.8 million video streams delivered over the season's first three weeks in 2008.
- Over 400,000 subscribers have signed up for MLB.com's premier live game products, MLB.TV and Gameday Audio, through April 26, a 45.7 percent increase of sales over the comparable time period in 2008.
- MLB.com has totaled 2.2 billion page views, an increase of 73 percent over the 1.3 billion page views accumulated over the first three weeks of the 2008 season.
- MLB.com has averaged 9.4 million visitors per day, representing an increase of 30 percent from the comparable daily average over last year's first three weeks.
- RIM BlackBerry Curve (all 83XX models)
- Apple iPhone 3G (all models)
- RIM BlackBerry Storm
- RIM BlackBerry Pearl (all models, except flip)
- T-Mobile G1
- All Internet Usage + 18%
- All communities + 63%
- Facebook + 566%
The Changing Demographics of Social Nets
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Recently we detailed the gains made by social networking in 2008, according to Nielsen's "Global Faces & Networked Places" report. Not surprisingly, the biggest gains in usage were in older demographics. In 2008 Facebook added more users in the 35-49 demo than in any other. Also, there were twice as many 50+ users who joined last year as there were in the under-18 segment.
But Facebook's changing profile attracts a lot of the headlines, but it's only part of the story. The rise of social networks specifically targeting older users is the more significant part. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the number of US adults with a social networking profile increased from 7% in 2005 to 35% in 2008. Many keep multiple profiles, using sites like Facebook for personal reasons, and others like LinkedIn for professional purposes.
Blackberry Curve beats iPhone 2:1
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Market research firm NPD release a study that shows that there were twice as many Blackberry Curves sold in the first quarter as iPhones. The Curve is Research In Motion's older Blackberry model. The new one is the Blackberry Bold. The real curve came from Verizon, which offered a "Buy one, get a model of equal or lesser value free" promotion during February and March. This increased RIM's market share by 50%!
Here are the top 5 handsets for Q1 2009 according to NPD:
More On Social Networking's Explosive Growth
Monday, May 11, 2009
Nielsen "Global Faces & Networked Places" report on the impact of social networking shows that the growth is due to both reach and frequency. The reach of communities increased by 5 percentage points in 2008, but the gain in time spent on these sites increased by 18%. Social networking now accounts for almost 10% of all time spent online, according to Nielsen.
This is a significant development since, as we've reported in the past, time spent on sites is increasingly becoming more important to online advertisers. Not surprisingly, the single biggest factor in this increase is Facebook. The #1 social network in the world saw an enormous increase in the last year:
Online gaming was another sector that saw big increases in time spent. The biggest loser? Instant messaging.
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