What’s happened this week:
- 2011 IAB online advertising figures were released showing 14.4% growth to GBP 4.8bn. Online ads now account for 29.7% of the GBP 16.1bn UK total ad spend.
- Facebook bought Instagram for USD 1bn. Alternatively they could have bought the New York Times Company outright and then funded Instagram’s entire final round of funding with the change.
- Microsoft has also spent USD1bn this time buying a wide variety of patents from AOL. Increasingly the technology industry is being defined by legal resources.
What we have learned:
- Google gross revenue was USD 10.65bn in Q1 2012, up 24% yoy.
- Mobile accounted for 11% of UK (8% of US) paid search spend in 2011. It is forecast to account for 15-20% of all paid search this year.
- Everything you need to know about the media and shopping habits of Generation C aka ‘The Millennial’, e.g. they are 3x more likely to follow a brand on a Social Network Vs. a family member.
Cool stuff:
- Google’s vision for glasses based augmented information: Project Glass.
- Boxfish creates a real time feed of everything happening on TV, to create a twitter like experience.
- Smart in Argentina have created a very cute twitter based animation (best viewed in Chrome).
Where to find more:
- How we will read in the future. Clay Shirky thinks reading is ever more a creative process constantly annotated and contextualized.
- Gabe Zichermann is one of the leading thinkers in ‘Gamification’, his latest thoughts focus on how it can drive brand engagement.
- 10 of the best books on Social Business condensed into a paragraph each.
