What a month? General Motors starts selling cars through eBay, Murdoch's impatience boiled over into a unilateral call to charge for content, public defence of the UK's health service proved enough to crash Twitter, and major social media platforms were brought down by cyber-terrorist 'denial-of-service' attacks.

Who says August is the quiet month off in the media industry?!

What's clear throughout this month's news and research is that behind the scenes retailers are rebuilding their strategies for boosting web sales and their agencies are rebuilding the marketing mix to support this. Social media is proving its worth and strong digital strategies - not wishful thinking - will be the key to trading through the recession.

Here at Digital, many readers asked for more stories and more depth in Digital Intelligence - so that's what we've tested this month. With over double the stories, with full articles on click through to the Intelligence news pages and more graphs and data. It's a test, so mail me back if you'd like it to continue, or if you'd like a colleague to receive it.

Best from all @ Digital


Danny Meadows-Klue
Founder and Chief Executive
Digital Strategy Consulting

Consumer internet behaviour: UK
Monthly internet use: key indicators for UK web users, July 2009

Internet audience: UK
Time per person for top 10 parent companies, UK July 2009

Largest UK internet sites
UK audience reach for top 10 parent companies, July 2009

Top 10 websites: UK
Ranked by visits for the week ending 15th August 2009

Top 10 online video content properties: US
More than 100m US users watched on average 68 YouTube videos each in June 2009

Offline sales uplift from online advertising: US
Online advertising matches TV for brand uplift among consumer packaged goods, 2009

Total internet users: key markets
Active internet users connected at home, June 2009

Global ad spend drops 5%
Worldwide spending on Internet advertising contracted for the second consecutive quarter, but the situation no longer seems likely to get worse, according to new research.According to research firm IDC, global spending on Internet ads contracted for the second consecutive quarter, by 5.9 %, coming in at $13.9 billion, which is down from $14.7 billion in the same quarter last year.
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Internet ads 'can be as effective as TV commercials'
The Internet can be as effective an advertising medium as television advertising, according to new research. The study, conducted by comScore in partnership with dunnhumbyUSA, looked into the effectiveness of online advertising in building retail sales of consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands.
Over the course of twelve weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 % of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 %. This compares to an average lift of 8 % for TV advertising as measured by Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) and published in their research paper "How Advertising Works."
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Monetising Facebook: mainstream ad vehicle as 8 out of 10 big advertisers say yes
Facebook is now attracting more than 4 in 5 of the biggest advertisers in the US, showing that social networking advertising is finally taking off. The social networking site said that 83 of the top 100 advertising spenders in the US, as ranked by the research group AdAge, use its site.
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Social network ads 'failing to engage users'
Adverts placed on the more mainstream social networking sites are unlikely to be effective as direct marketing tools, according to a new study. The research, from affiliate network Linkshare, surveyed 2,000 consumers, and found just 5% of respondents considered adverts on professional social networks, such as LinkedIn and just 9% of adverts on personal social networking sites, such Facebook helpful in assisting their purchasing decisions on the web. Only 4% of those surveyed had previously clicked through on a banner advert displayed on a social networking site, which questions the current effectiveness and quality of adverts used by brands in this less traditional marketing space.
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Google forces affiliate publishers to open AdSense accounts
Publishers using Google's affiliate network have been told they must link their accounts to its AdSense payment system by 21 September 2009. An email was sent to all publishers on the Google Affiliate Network yesterday, warning of the new requirement in order to get paid for July 2009 earnings without any delay. "Publishers can also manage their payment information in new ways and enjoy consolidated payments from Google if they use other Google products," says Product Manager Sheila Parker.
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OFT to probe misleading ads online
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to look into potential misleading adverts and their effect on consumers, with a particular focus on the internet. Set to launch this autumn, the watchdog will evaluate which online and offline pricing and advertising practices have potential to be most detrimental to consumers. It will also look at the practice of behavioural advertising - targeting adverts according to people's web surfing habits. Heather Clayton, senior director of the OFT's Consumer Market Group, asked business and consumer groups to come forward with suggestions for areas the study should examine. "The way that businesses advertise and price goods and services constantly evolves, and we need to keep up to date on how consumers view these adverts, and the types of advertising and prices which may mislead," she said.
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9 in 10 US drug ads on Bing are illegal - report
Almost 90 % of sponsored links advertising prescription drugs on Microsoft's new Bing search engine are violating US federal and state laws, according to a new report. The report, from KnujOn, an anti-spam company, and LegitScript, which offers a service that verifies the legitimacy of particular online pharmacies, will be the first in a series about US companies that profit from rogue pharmaceutical sites.
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Microsoft inks local ad deal with Wired publisher
Microsoft has made a further move into the local ad business, through a partnership with major US publishing firm Advance Internet. The company is the digital arm of Advance Publications, which publishes magazines such as The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair, along with Gourmet and the Newhouse Newspaper group. The deal will see Microsoft provide local and search advertising services for the news websites for the Newhouse Newspapers in the US.
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Landmark ruling forces Google to reveal blogger ID
A court ruling has forced Google to reveal the identity of a blogger who accused a model of being among "The Skankiest in NYC". The blogger was revealed as an acquaintance of the model Liskula Cohen. Google initially fought to keep the blogger's identity secret. The accused was using the Google Blogger service to run the website 'Skanks in NYC'. A judge ordered Google to hand over an IP address, rejecting the blogger's claim that the writing consisted of "personal opinions, including invective and ranting," rather than factual assertions.
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Bing gains ground on Google in US search market
Microsoft's new Bing search engine has gained nearly 1% market share in the US since its launch in June, while Google has lost ground, according to new research. The data, from comScore, indicates that Microsoft's search engine still remains a distant third in the US, which was the main reason for the search ad partnership with Yahoo set to start next year.
Bing ended July with a 8.9% share in the US, up from 8.4% in the previous month. Just before Bing's debut, Microsoft's search market share stood at 8%. Google retained a commanding US lead at 64.7% through July, down from 65 % in June, comScore said. Yahoo's market share dipped to 19.3% in July from 19.6% in June.
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500 publishers sign up to paid content platform
US firm Journalism Online has claimed that more than 500 newspapers and magazines have agreed to join its new content payment network. The platform, set to go live in the Autumn in the US, lets publishers sign up as 'affiliates' to the network, using a universal Journalism Online account. Readers then pay to subscribe to the platform, which gives them access to their choice of publishers on the platform. Affiliates can select their own approach to offering paid access, based on their respective brands, content and online readership. The company said the payment models would yield between $50 to $100 per year per subscriber for the publisher.
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US regulators investigate Apple's App Store
Apple is facing scrutiny from US regulators for the first time, following accusations that the firm is monopolising its iPhone App Store. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has written to Apple, Google and AT&T, Apple's exclusive carrier in the United States for the iPhone. Apple self-regulates its App Store, which sells software created by independent developers. The FFC move follows Apple's decision to block Google's 'Voice' app from its store last month.
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Yahoo woos FMCG advertisers with Sainsbury's Nectar data
Yahoo is planning to launch a UK service that would enable advertisers to use Nectar data from Sainsbury's, as well as its Yahoo's sales records to target potential customers with online campaigns. Set to launch in October. the new service is designed to help FMCG brands tailor online ads based on consumers' shopping habits.
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eBay to sell new cars via GM deal
The expansion in scope of the auction giant took another big step today with the announcement of a deal with General Motors that will see eBay become a major retailer of new cars. The scale of the deal suggests a strategic move into primary retailing, alongside the second hand market the brand started out in. 20,000 cars from over 200 Californian dealers will be available from today, in a move that is clearly a pilot ahead of a wider repositioning.
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Google speeds up search with 'Caffeine' boost
Google has begun testing 'Caffeine', a new search engine that indexes content faster, in a bid to compete with real-time search services offered by Facebook and Twitter. Web developers have been invited by Google engineers to test the new search engine and give their feedback. Caffeine looks and functions in a similar way to Google's standard engine, but the back end technology will index new content faster and reduce the time between new content being published online and it then appearing in a Google search result.
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Microsoft sells ad agency Razorfish for $530m
Microsoft has sold Razorfish advertising agency for $530m to Publicis Groupe, the parent company of the Saatchi and Saatchi ad firm, following a bidding battle. The other bidders in the race included WPP, Dentsu, Omnicom and three others. Microsoft bought Razorfish in 2007 as part of its $6bn purchase of AQuantive. The agency designs digital ad campaigns and its clients include McDonald's and Levi Strauss. Razorfish also works with Microsoft rivals Google and Yahoo!.
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ITV sells Friends Reunited for £150m less than buying price
ITV has sold Friends Reunited for £25m to publisher Brightsolid Limited, after buying the pioneering social network for a total of £175m back in 2005. Brightsolid is owned by DC Thomson, Dundee-based publisher of comics such as the Beano. Friends Reunited will become part of Brightsolid's publishing portfolio, which includes a good match in findmypast.com, which operates the official 1901 and 1911 census websites.
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Surveillance society: government sanction snooping, email intercepts
Councils, police and the intelligence services made more than 1,500 requests to snoop on the public every day last year, including phone, email and text messages, it has been revealed.
The figures were published in the annual report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner, Sir Paul Kennedy. It showed 504,073 requests for communication data were made (and approved) last year, or nearly 10,000 every week. The statistics constitute a 44 per cent rise in requests over the past two years.
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Brits 'more likely to buy online at work than at home'
Online shoppers in the UK are more likely to make a purchase at work than when at home, according to a new study by comScore Europe. While online shoppers spent three times as much time browsing the Internet at home than they did at work, their total e-commerce spend was twice as much during work hours than home.
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Third of youth market 'won't pay for online content'
One third of Europeans aged 16 to 24 have no intention of paying for online content such as video and music - more than twice the average for the EU as a whole, according to The European Commission's Digital Competitiveness report. Only 4.8 % of the 16-24 age bracket have bought audiovisual content in the past three months. 9.8 % of all Europeans have done so.
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Murdoch to charge for online content
News Corp is to start charging for online content across its news sites, including the Sun, The Times and The News of the World, according to chairman Rupert Murdoch. Commenting on the company's half-year results, Murdoch said: "An industry that gives away its content is cannibalising its ability to do good reporting. Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites."
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Twitter to track location of Tweets
Twitter is planning to add a location feature to its micro-blogging platform, opening up new opportunities for marketers in the process. Commenting on his blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said: "A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet." The opt-in tool will let users switch to the tweets from near their location, even if they do not follow them.
Stone said the service would also be of use to Twitterers at events "like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake. There will likely be many use cases we haven't even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting.
The move will be particularly useful to mobile phone users, and could open up new channels for marketers to reach consumers, such as informing users of events in their immediate proximity or offering them limited-time discounts from nearby retailers.
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Now hiring: Facebook to increase workforce by 50%
Facebook is to increase its staff number by 50%, as the social network looks to capitalise on the wealth of skilled professionals available for work amid the recession. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has told Bloomberg in an interview that he wants to the company to reach around 1500 employees by the end of the year, up from around 1000 at current levels. The current recession has hit Silicon Valley very hard which means that there is a surplus of talented engineering workers looking for work.
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MySpace snaps up social music service iLike
MySpace has bought social music discovery service iLike for an undisclosed sum. MySpace already runs its own popular music services, often used as a promotion tool for both upcoming and established acts. The company said iLike users and the artist community should expect the iLike experience to be 'unaffected by the acquisition'. Brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi founded iLike in 2006, and in just two years made it the largest music application across all social networks with 55 million total users and 1.5 billion monthly impressions.
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Twitter to launch 'retweet' feature
Twitter is to implement a 'retweet' feature on its micro-blogging platform, following popular demand. Company co-founder Biz Stone has posted a pen and paper sketch of his proposed implementation on the Twitter blog. The move means that users who want to broadcast a tweet from one of their friends to all of their followers will be able to click a 'retweet'.
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Transatlantic NHS row crashes Twitter
Thousands of people have joined a Twitter campaign defending the NHS from attacks in America, causing the micro-blogging platform to crash. The row was sparked by US President Obama's $100bn plans for reforming healthcare in the US, away from private medical plans and towards a state-run system akin to the NHS. The move has drawn criticism from Republicans, who have branded the NHS as "evil and Orwellian". This in turn has sparked a transatlantic debate that spilled over to Twitter. A hashtag campaign #welovetheNHS campaign was launched by Britons keen to counter the allegations, and the sheer number of messages added apparently crashed the Twitter site on Wednesday.
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Click-throughs on Facebook fan pages soar
Click-through rates for posts and newsfeeds on Facebook fan pages could be higher than 6%, according to new research. The research, from social media management firm Vitrue, looked into how fans interact with links appearing on fan pages and in their newsfeeds. Vitrue has developed a system which tracks URLs for Facebook wall links to measure the eventual click-through rate. The study, quoted in AdAge.com, indicated that average click-through rates for wall posts to be 6.49%, a figure higher than the average email or display ad campaign.
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Facebook tests 'Lite' version
Facebook is testing a new version of its social network tailored for mobiles and narrowband web connections. Facebook Lite is a cut-down version of the social network, aimed at countries where broadband is limited. The site is currently on trial in India and it is thought there are plans to extend this to China and Russia. Lite offers only basic functionality such as making comments, accepting friend requests, writing on Walls, and viewing photos.
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Twitter hacker target was pro-Georgian blogger
A pro-Georgian Blogger was the target of a co-ordinated hacker attack that resulted in Twitter going offline for 2 hours last week. The blogger, known online as Cyxymu, said he was targeted for "telling the truth about the Russian-Georgian war", and how now asked Russian President Mr Medvedev to find the culprits. As well as Twitter and Facebook, search giant Google and blogging platform LiveJournal - all sites where the blogger holds accounts - were also affected last Thursday (6th August) by the Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack. Security experts at Facebook confirmed that the attack was directed at an individual "rather than the sites themselves".
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Facebook buys Twitter rival FriendFeed
Facebook has bought online sharing service FriendFeed for an undisclosed sum. FriendFeed provides Twitter-style status updates and real-time search capabilities, giving Facebook new technology to compete directly with both Twitter and Google. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed's four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams.
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40% of tweets are "pointless babble" - study
A large number of messages posted on Twitter are 'pointless babble' according to a new study. The research, from US firm Pear Analytics, examined how people use the micro-blogging platform. The market research firm found 40.5% of Tweets could be classified as "pointless babble", 37.5% as "conversational" and 8.7% as having "pass-along value", classed as news of interest. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.
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73% of Twitter users also use Facebook
Nearly three-quarters of Twitter users in the US also regularly use Facebook, while only 11% of Facebook users also use Twitter, according to a new study looking into cross-platform social media use. The study, from BIGresearch, looked at over 22,000 social media consumers to see how they used various platforms. The research indicated that social media users are likely to use more than one platform, some at a higher rate than others. For example, 60.2% of MySpace Users (those who regularly use the application) regularly use Facebook. On the other hand only 24% of Facebook Users utilise MySpace.
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Young people 'sticking with elders on Facebook'
More young people are visiting social networks versus year ago, although they are spending less time browsing across multiple sites, according to new research. The study, from comScore, suggests that while the average 15-24 year old is spending less time overall on social networking sites, it appears to be due to greater consolidation around a primary site, such as Facebook. The number of 15-24 year olds visiting social networking sites reached 6.8 million in June, up 14 % versus the previous year.
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Just 16% of Twitter users under 25
Twitter is vastly under-represented by the US youth market, with most of its users aged between 25-54, according to new data from Nielsen. Despite Twitter's huge growth, now reaching 10.7 % of all active US Internet users in June, the micro-blogging site hasn't been a hit with young people.
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Mobile

Online sectors with greatest audience growth: UK
Number of Brits visiting mobile phone sites up 58% year-on-year, July 2008-09

Low cost Vs high tech: Mobile demand set to polarise
The mobile handset market is becoming increasingly polarised between low cost handsets for emerging markets and high-end smartphones for developed regions - with the mid-range handset market being squeezed, according to new research. The findings, from Juniper Research, indicates that low-cost handsets and Smartphones will together account for almost 79% of all new mobile phones by 2014, or just over 1 billion units in all. Operators and vendors are preparing to deal with a massive influx of new users from low-income socio-economic groups in developing markets and a rising demand for complex 'smart' devices from affluent users in developed markets.
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