Five Friday Facts #46
News
News
Asia is Facebook’s largest continent
Asia has surpassed Europe as Facebook’s largest continent, with more than 242 million registered users, ahead of Europe by nearly 1 million users. This has occurred even though merely 6.26% of people in Asia are on Facebook, as compared to 29.72% of Europe’s population and 44.63% of North America. Of course, this is in part due to local networks that reign supreme in their home countries, most noticeably China, where microblogging services such as Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo are the more preferred social network of choice, and Vietnam with its local social network Zing Me.
Sina Weibo adds US$10 million to Sina’s advertising revenue
Sina reported net revenue of US$132 million (S$161.62 million) in the second quarter of 2012, of which US$103.1 million (S$126.11 million) came from advertisements. 10% of Sina’s total advertising revenue (about S$10 million) came from Sina Weibo. In addition to revenue growth, Sina Weibo also gained 10% growth in video advertising.
Mobile search adspend to surge in China
iResearch recently reported that mobile search adspend will more than double in China over the next three years from RMB 1.3 billion (S$0.25 billion) in 2012 to RMB 3.5 billion (S$0.68 billion) in 2015. Although early numbers are significantly lower than the RMB 18.9 billion (S$3.65 billion) earned in 2011 for PC-based online search adspend, analysts are optimistic that the mobile equivalent has unlimited growth potential. An interview with a panel of mobile web users revealed that 61.5% of them used search engines on mobile platforms, the second most prevalent usage after instant messaging at 69.5%.
LinkedIn referrals to Facebook jump by 1000%
After LinkedIn and Twitter parted ways, it seems the latter has unwittingly helped Facebook to obtain 1,000% more pageviews. PageLever explains that Twitter’s decision on 29 June 2012 to stop syncing updates with LinkedIn created a spike in referral traffic for Facebook pages as without the feed from Twitter, there are now less LinkIn updates to vy for the reader’s attention. Below is a graph showing the distribution of referral traffic from LinkedIn, Google and Bing to Facebook.
Twitter earns a larger share of social ad revenues
Predictions are for Twitter’s ad revenue to grow by 106.7% this year and eventually reach US$807.5 million worldwide by 2014.
Though ad revenue growth has fallen from 213% in 2011 to its current levels, Twitter has been stepping up activities to increase advertising sales outside of the US and its share of social network ad revenue. It is estimated that 12.7% of all social network ad revenues in the US will go to Twitter in 2014. In the meantime, it is worthy to note that the runaway leader as shown in the chart below is Facebook with a market share of 70.9% of social network ad revenue in 2011.
