Week of November 24, 2008

More New Media Olympics

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

As mentioned yesterday, Britain's Office of Communications has just released a study on new media adoption and usage in 12 developed countries, plus up-and-coming giants Brazil, India, China and Russia. US usage of these technologies stands pretty high in most categories, although the US ranks #1 in relatively few categories. Here are a few more of the new media leaders:

* Social Networking: Canada leads with 55%. The US trails far behind with just 40% of online users utilizing social networks.

* Highest percentage of Female New Surfers: Italy with 56%. In fact, the majority of net users overall are female, although the US figure is just 48%.

* Talking on Cell Phones: Ireland with 179 minutes per month

* Text messaging: Also Ireland, with an average of 154 messages per month.

New Media Olympics

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Britain's Office of Communications has just released a study on new media adoption and usage in 12 developed countries, plus up-and-coming giants Brazil, India, China and Russia. Not surprisingly, the results show tremendous growth in various new technologies across the board. For example, broadband penetration has increased from 12% to 56% between 2002 and 2007. But what's most interesting is looking at which countries are the leaders in various technologies. Here's a sample:

* Highest Broadband Penetration: the Netherlands at 81%
* DVR Ownership: Britain at 30%
* Listening to Online Radio: France at 37%
* Time Spent Online: the US with about 15 hours per week
* TV Watched Online: the US dominates with 26 shows per week

Darwin Meets Don Draper

Monday, November 24, 2008

SnapAds is a new online advertising service which optimizes banner ads over time. Advertisers supply SnapAds with a variety of text and images, as well as rules for which assets can be combined. SnapAds then creates a campaign which combines these images and text (according to the rules) and places them randomly on websites.

Over time, SnapAds determines which combinations are most effective and evolves into using those combinations over the ones that are not as effective. Besides this "Survival of the Fittest" aspect, in the early stages the SnapAds approach has the advantage of creating multiple versions of the same ad, making them more interesting, and presumably more effective, than a static ad.