Five Friday Facts #24
News
News
Google Maps loses lead in mobile mapping in China
According to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International, the Google Maps app now accounts for 25.3% of mobile client usage in China, a decline from 46.3% around the same time last year, and now second to Autonavi by a mere 0.2% in terms of the apps Chinese consumers turn to for their online mapping needs. Considering the rise of location-based social networks in China, such as location-based check-in app Jiepang and other photo-sharing apps that use geo-tagging, losing out on market share could be very disadvantageous for Google, considering its already diminished presence in China with Google search capturing a small percentage of the online search market dominated by Baidu.
Blackberry photo app PicMix on par with Instagram’s initial growth
Blackberry’s 60,000 apps in its App World may seem paltry compared to Apple’s App Store and Android marketplace Google Play, but Blackberry developers have been catching on to the photo-sharing craze as well. PicMix, an app that includes photo filters and photo-sharing functionalities, has reached 1 million users within the last two months, which its founder claims is progressing at a pace faster than Instagram in its initial stage. The app has had over 7.5 million photos uploaded by more than 1 million members thus far, with 32,000 new members signing up every day. Its user base is spread out all across the globe, with 40% of members hailing from Indonesia, 10% from Venezuela, and South Africa in third with 9%. Let’s see whether PicMix can indeed become the Instagram for Blackberry devices.
360Buy has over 40 million users
E-commerce is booming in China, with a total transaction value of 240.1 billion yuan or S$47.71 billion for the year 2011, and China’s second-largest B2C e-commerce site 360Buy.com is reaping the benefits. It has over 40 million registered users to date, and have been processing around 400,000 orders per month for the past two months. Its sales income is also increasing at a rate of about 200% per year, which may have received a boost due to its new hotel bookings and travel services additions. Judging by the current rate of growth for China’s B2C market, we don’t expect 360Buy’s growth to be slowing down anytime soon either.
Tumblr’s new ad revenue model
Having recently passed the 50 million blog mark, Tumblr announced its first foray into paid advertising at Ad Age’s Digital Conference on Wednesday. Tumblr will start offering ad units from 2 May 2012 via the “Radar” post that appears on a Tumblr user’s dashboard, which currently features an officially curated selection of images that highlights notable or popular posts. Prior to the repacking of Radar as an ad unit, Tumblr had 15 partnerships wherein Radar was used to promote content from brands. Radar placement currently receives 120 million impressions per day from users logging into their dashboard across devices. At present, Tumblr makes money by receiving a cut from sales of custom blog themes that are sold on its platform, as well as charge users to highlight posts for their followers within their dashboards for US$1.
US online video market
Data from comScore revealed that 181 million or 83.5% of the US Internet audience watched nearly 37 billion online videos in March 2012, with the average viewer having watched 21.7 hours of online video content. Considering that the duration of the average online content video was 6.4 minutes long, each viewer could have watched up to 203 videos in a month. Google Sites, driven primarily by YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property with 146.1 million unique viewers in March, followed by Yahoo! sites with 60.6 million, VEVO with 51.3 million, Facebook.com with 45.1 million and Viacom Digital with 44.3 million. The opportunities for brands to engage with its audience through video content seem pretty great, as is targeting their audiences via video ads.