Week of June 8, 2009

Loyalty Rewards Programs Increasing

Friday, June 12, 2009

The 2009 Colloquy Loyalty Census, a study about loyalty rewards programs shows impressive growth in this area from the last survey, conducted in 2007. When adjusted for changes in the industries included, the number of such memberships in the US has grown from 1.3 billion to 1.67 billion in 2 years. The Colloquy data shows that the average US household has signed up for 14.1 programs, but only actively participates in less than half of them (6.2). In the 2007 survey, those numbers were 12 total memberships with 4.7 of them actively participated in.

This means that the number of active memberships in the US stands at just under 800 million, or roughly 2.5 memberships for every man, woman and child in the US. Here are the top 10 industries for rewards memberships, with the estimated number of active memberships (in millions) in each:

* Financial Services 422.0

* Airline 277.4

* Specialty Retail 191.3

* Hotel 161.8

* Grocery 153.3

* Mass Merchants 124.8

* Gaming 106.0

* Dept. Stores 92.8

* Drug Stores 73.9

Mobile Music Growth Forecast

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Juniper Research in the UK is predicting steady growth for mobile music, even as the overall music business shrinks. Juniper's forecast is for growth from $11 billion in 2008 to $14.6 billion in 2013. Not surprisingly, the increase in broadband mobile access and the fast growth of smartphones are fueling this growth.

Juniper's report goes on to predict that ad-supported services will not be successful and that subscription and paid a la carte downloads will be the most successful economic models. Other findings include the fact that Full-length song downloads and streaming services will drive the growth and that overall interest in ringtones, including truetones, is dropping noticeably.

Video Gamers Now Outnumber Moviegoers

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Market research firm, NPD Group is reporting that the percentage of regular video game players now exceeds the number that has gone to the movies in the last 6 months. The percentage of gamers is now 63% while the percentage of those who have gone to the movies is just 53%. What makes this even more impressive is that the movie industry has held up well in the face of the economic crisis.

Along with the top line data, here are some other interesting data points from the NPD survey

* 1/3 of the gamers bought a new console or portable game in the last year.

* 10% of US consumers played a video game on a social network

* 5% paid to download a video game on the Internet

Canada Leads World in Online Video Viewing

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

ComScore recently released a repot showing that Canada is the "global leader in online video viewing." 21 million Canadians watched 3.1 billion online videos in February, for an average of 10 hours each. US viewers watch more in total, due to a much larger population, but Canada's per capita online viewing beat the US significantly in every area measured:

Latest from the Video Wars

Monday, June 8, 2009

Blockbuster remains the giant in the video business in terms of sheer revenue, but Netflix has increasingly been gaining ground. It's estimated that Blockbuster ($5 billion) generates almost 4 times as much revenue as Netflix ($1.4 billion), yet Netflix saw its business grow 12% last year, while Blockbuster's revenue dropped by 5%.

Both companies are aggressively trying to gain the upper hand in alternate channels of distribution. For example, Netflix recently announced an expansion of its agreement with MTV Networks, this time to allow its subscribers to stream more than 400 episodes of shows like South Park, Blues Clues, Dora the Explorer, iCarly, True Jackson, VP, and SpongeBob SquarePants. For its part, Blockbuster Announced that it will rent and sell movies through TiVo several weeks before they become available on Netflix.