The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele's popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current "swear jar sweepstakes" promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit limited at this point.

The main site, the awkwardly named SocialMedia-live, updates Facebook Page data on 90,000 "big players" every 10 minutes - including Eminem, Coca Cola, YouTube and other very popular brands. A further 1.8 million "medium-sized pages" are updated every 12 hours. The other 36 million or so "little pages" are refreshed every 5 days.

There's a special page for "Hip Fanpages," those Facebook Pages "that have distinguished themselves in terms of layout, navigational ease, interactive fanpage features, etc." Current members include Adidas Originals, Snooki, Livestrong, Star Wars and a German comedian named Linda P. That last pick is a clue that SocialMedia-live hails from Germany.

There are some useful comparison tools, too. Below is a chart comparing the growth of Adele, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry over the past 90 days. We can see that the popularity of Adele's Facebook Page spiked in January of this year. She has about 12.6 million fans at time of writing. Meanwhile Lopez is growing faster than Perry. Although note that Perry has more fans than Adele and Lopez combined. She has 37.6 million fans, while Lopez has 8 million. A likely explanation is that Perry is much nearer to peak popularity on Facebook than either Adele or Lopez. Growth rate could also be affected by when the fan pages were started. So, as always, take these statistics with a grain of the proverbial salt.

The big thing missing from SocialMedia-live is search. I could find no way to get statistics about our own ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page, for example. There also seems to be no easy access to the 36 million or so "little pages." Both of those issues severely limits the usefulness of the site for marketers, who would be a prime audience for this data.

But this is a beta site, so we hope it will expand over time. For now, if you're interested in finding out how fast certain brands are growing their Facebook Page fan bases, then SocialMedia-live offers an interesting set of statistics.

Of the non-computer traffic, much of it comes from Netflix (on TVs), Facebook and YouTube (both mostly on mobile devices).

Looking first at overall traffic - which includes both computers and other devices - real-time entertainment accounts for 60% of peak downstream Internet traffic in North America. There's been a steady increase in this figure over the past few years. It was 50% in Sandvine's March 2011 report, 42% in 2010 and just under 30% in 2009.

Netflix alone accounts for 32.7% of total peak downstream traffic in Sandvine's latest report, a relative increase of more than 10% since U.S. spring. YouTube accounts for 11.3% of peak traffic.

Post-PC Habits

The report notes that people are watching real-time entertainment on an increasing number of screens - including smartphones, tablets and "a TV with direct (smart TVs) or indirect (via a game console or set-top) Internet connectivity."

Interestingly, the report states that when people watch online video, "they generally choose to watch content on the largest screen available to them." So they will choose a TV over a computer, a tablet over a smartphone, and a smartphone over nothing at all. What's more, screen size has direct correlation to data usage:

"For example, when watching a video on a 60-inch HD capable plasma screen, most subscribers will opt for the highest video fidelity available. In that same scenario, higher- quality audio might also be provided to the home theatre system."

What's behind the increase of consumption of real-time entertainment on devices other than computers? Sandvine claims it is mainly due to game consoles, "through manufacturers partnering with content producers." As an example, it cites this month's announcement by Microsoft of "a massive expansion in the list of content providers that will be available on the Xbox 360, including such heavyweights as Bravo, Comcast, HBO, BBC, Telefonica, Rogers on Demand and Televisa."

Mobile Devices

Looking specifically at mobile devices (which effectively means smartphones), Sandvine reports that real-time entertainment generates 30.8% of peak demand on mobile. Web browsing is next, on 27.3%, while social networking is 20.0%. Most of the latter comes from Facebook, which represents 19.3% of peak mobile traffic. YouTube gets 18.2%.

These statistics correlate with other data that we've been hearing. For instance, in September Google announced that mobile devices are responsible for 10% of all YouTube downloads. Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 Summit presentation attributed 33% of Facebook traffic to mobile devices. Meeker also pointed to Pandora and Twitter, which have 60% and 55% respectively of their traffic going to mobile devices.

Slide from Mary Meeker's 2011 report

These statistics from Sandvine, backed up by Mary Meeker's data, clearly show that devices other than computers are not only having a big impact on consumption of real-time entertainment - they're now the primary way to consume such content.

Let us know in the comments about your own usage patterns for consuming real-time entertainment on the Web. Are you finding that most of that is through a connected TV, mobile device or tablet?

This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.

Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.

A better comparison these days is between Tumblr and Wordpress.com, the leading full blogging platform. While Wordpress.com still gets more visits (but not page views, as we'll see below), Tumblr is drawing ever closer.

Tumblr vs. Wordpress.com, in visits per month.

The two services offer different things, so this is somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison. Wordpress.com is a fully-fledged hosted blogging platform, while Tumblr is a light blogging and curation service. I myself use both products. However, both are blogging services and so it's worth comparing the statistics.

At the end of last year we estimated that Wordpress.com was larger than Tumblr in terms of unique visitors and number of bloggers. However we noted that Tumblr had about twice the number of page views per month.

On the page view front at least, Tumblr has exploded in recent months. Quantcast puts it at 12 billion per month currently, compared to 1.4B for Wordpress.com. So Tumblr now gets 8.5 times more page views per month than Wordpress.com (at least according to Quantcast, which in my experience tends to be the most accurate public web statistics tool).

Before we get too excited, we should remember that Facebook is still a blue whale compared to both Tumblr and Wordpress.com. Quantcast has Facebook at 7.4 billion visits per month in the U.S. alone.

What's the upshot of all this? Maybe just that Tumblr has scaled incredibly well and shows no signs of slowing down. Wordpress.com hasn't had the same exponential growth, but it's certainly been no slouch either. Both services are enormously popular and many people use them side by side.

Let us know your thoughts on Tumblr compared to Wordpress.com in the comments. Should Wordpress.com be worried?

As one participant in Latitude's study noted, traditionally gamers have been thought of as the "stereotypical, petulant and portly adult playing a viscerally violent game in his parents' basement." According to the report findings, that stereotype of the anti-social, immature gamer is outdated. Today's gamer is "social, tech-savvy, goal-oriented" and is much more social than they're usually given credit for. For example, 84% of the study participants use social media "at least several times per week."

Click here to view large image.

The following visualization answers this question: How Would You Like to Interact with Games in the Future? Gesteral systems, such as Microsoft's motion-controlled gaming system Kinect, is the most popular request.

This visualization asks: Where Would You Like to See More Games Applied? Education and healthcare were the two most popular answers.

Finally, check out this video analysis of the findings:

For other research on gaming demographics and usage, see these ReadWriteWeb posts from earlier this year:

• Mobile Gaming Audience is Younger, Has Strong Female Presence
• Gaming and Entertainment Dominating Mobile Usage [Infographic]
• Do Video Game Developers Ignore Women Gamers?

When I first started at ReadWriteWeb, the updates to Facebook were automatically posted via a Facebook application. It was an easy way to make sure our fans got to see our posts, but it didn't foster community discussions so after I got my bearings around here, I stopped the app (or at least I thought I did).

I'm a glass-is-half-full kind of gal, so rather than stress about the accident, I decided to look at this as an opportunity to compare apples-to-apples and determine which was better, auto-posted or manually posted items on Facebook.

As you'd probably guess, I found that automated posts saw significantly less views on Facebook. An auto-posted story that received x views on Facebook would receive, on average, 2.5x views on Facebook when published manually. Because more people saw the manually posted stories, their engagement was roughly doubled (likes and comments).

This does compare apples-to-apples because these were the exact same stories. The auto-posted content was posted first, within minutes of posting to our blog. To make sure that the data was representative, I went back a month and looked at average views, likes and comments and the auto-posted content's stats during this period is almost exactly in line with previous months' performance.

My assumptive explanation for this behavior is EdgeRank. EdgeRank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine where a post shows up in a user's stream. It seems to push content that gets reactions higher up the stream. I'm not sure if my manually posted entries got a better reaction because I worked hard to craft a pithy call-to-action on them (thereby moving them up in EdgeRank) or if some other secret sauce caused them to move up in EdgeRank, which in turn gave them more reactions.

Whatever the cause, the manually posted entries saw more than double the views and a little more than double the engagement. We did eventually get the app completely turned off and I posted the remainder of the month's stories to Facebook manually. This again showed a definite increase in traffic back to our site from Facebook (nearly double).

Manual posting is a chore. What takes the app seconds to post may take me 10 minutes. And, because I am not continually at the computer, some of our content isn't posted immediately after posting. There are definitely cons to manual posting, but the increase in engagement and page views back to our site is worth the additional labor.

Have you tested your Facebook posting methods? I'd be interested in learning if this obvious increase in performance was the same across other sectors.

For the last two weeks, it seems like anything anyone can talk about is the fact that our GPS-enabled smartphones are tracking our location. First, it was the iPhone, then the Android and finally Windows Phone 7. Why has this struck such a chord?

According to a study by TRUSTe, a leading Internet privacy service provider, privacy is the leading concern for smartphone users, with security following close behind.

TRUSTe's survey points out why this story erupted so quickly. The survey, conducted in 2011, "revealed a strikingly high level of concern around personal information and data privacy," the company writes.

Privacy concerns weren't only the primary concern stated by respondents, but 77% said that they don't want to share their location with app owners and developers. Beyond that, 85% of respondents said that they were uncomfortable with advertiser tracking. If 77% of respondents don't want to knowingly share their location with apps

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about a study last week that had similar findings. According to that study, published by Portland, Oregon digital marketing firm White Horse, 56% of smartphone owners surveyed said they knew about location-based services and 39% of respondents said they used them.

When it comes to predicting the future, we don't need a crystal ball anymore. These days, we just need to look at how people act online - what they share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter - to predict things like box office success or the stock market.

With that in mind, we're here to see if some social media statistics and science can help us call some Oscar winners a couple days early.

First, a little background. About six months back, HP Lab's Bernardo Huberman released a study titled "Predicting the Future with Social Media." According to Huberman, "social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes."

"We use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies," wrote Huberman in the study's introduction. "We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media."

Let's look at the most recent buzz, according to Clearspring:

If we look at this alone, the obvious conclusion would be that Jesse Eisenberg is going to run away with the award for Best Actor, but his recent appearance on Saturday Night Live might be something to keep in mind. Let's take a look at what movies have been lighting up the Internet.

It looks like "Black Swan" with Natalie Portman is well ahead of Jesse Eisenberg's "The Social Network." And if we consider the fact that "127 Hours," which features James Franco, is in second place for movies, we might instead choose Franco for Best Actor.

What do you think? Can social media mentions predict the outcome of this weekend's Oscar Awards? Will Franco and Portman take it away, with Black Swan leaving with Best Picture? Or are the graphs telling the truth and showing a landslide vote for Jesse Eisenberg?

When you think of Twitter and influence, you might think that the most obvious metric used to measure would be the number of followers a user has. Time and again, influence on Twitter has been shown to be not a direct function of how many followers one has, but a number of other factors.

One of those factors, according to a report by HP, may be just as obvious as follower numbers: long-standing status as a source of information and news. Having millions upon millions of followers may be fun, but it doesn't set the Trending Topics.

According to Bernardo Huberman, director of HP Lab's Social Computing Research Group, it isn't the "most prolific tweeters or those with most followers" as you might expect.

"We found that mainstream media play a role in most trending topics and actually act as feeders of these trends," said Huberman. "Twitter users then seem to be acting more as filter and amplifier of traditional media in most cases."

According to Huberman's report, there are 22 Twitter users who dominate the Twitter Trending Topics. Bauley describes a bit of the work behind the report and its findings:

The HP team collected data from Twitter's own search API over a period of 40 days in the fall of 2010.  From the resulting sample of 16.32 million tweets, they identified 22 users who were the source of the most retweets when a topic was "trending."  Of those 22, 72% were Twitter streams run by mainstream media outfits such as CNN, the New York Times, El Pais and theBBC.

Although popular, most of these sites have millions of followers fewer than highly followed tweeters such as Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama or Lady Gaga.

Similarly, the research showed that just having an active Twitter account was not a factor in creating a trend.

What were these 22 accounts? Take a look.

For the intellectually curious, the report is embedded blow in its entirety.

Over the last year, Facebook has become increasingly dominant in terms of being used as the user identity and login on third-party sites. Last summer, we reported that Facebook had dominated as the third-party login of choice, surpassing sites like Twitter, Google and Yahoo in all realms but one - news. News sites saw users logging in almost twice as often using Twitter.

Now, it looks like another site is gaining ground in another realm. Career-centric social network LinkedIn is growing as the login of choice for business-to-business (B2B) sites, proving once again that users prefer certain identities for certain online activities.

"LinkedIn has a strong case that a single social graph through Facebook is not sufficient," said Peterson. "Professionals want to apply different profile data to business oriented sites and share that content with a different group of people than their FB friends."

So, if you're thinking of taking  your site the way of eHow and forsaking all other logins for the one, true Facebook login, you might want to take a gander at the following graphic and see where your visitors lie. Maybe you should be working on that LinkedIn presence a bit more and Facebook a bit less.

Just in case you haven't been paying attention, yesterday was national "Let's Willingly Watch TV Commercials" day. Some people also call it Super Bowl Sunday. More than 100 million people tuned in yesterday to watch the annual handegg championship match, guffaw at TV commercials and tweet about the experience.

So, the big question then is who won? No, not the Packers, silly. We're talking about ads and their impact online. Who got the most mentions on Twitter? TweetReach, a Tweet-tracking media analytics tool, kept track and says that some of the usual brands were lacking, while others made a big splash.

We tracked Twitter mentions of the 30+ major Super Bowl advertisers, measuring tweet volume and overall impressions generated for these brands during the game. [...] We ranked the top-performing advertisers by overall tweet volume generated during the Super Bowl. Some of these brands ran one ad (Chrysler), while others ran multiple ads (Doritos).

It then lists the top 10 brands, with the caveat that "due to high tweet volumes about these ads during the Super Bowl, Twitter at times imposed some collection rate limits," noting that counts may actually account for just 70% to 90% of all possible tweets. "The numbers [below] can be interpreted directionally, just know that they are slightly lower than the true number of tweets for each brand." With that said, here are the top 10 brands, according to their presence on Twitter:

1. Doritos - 56,000+ tweets
2. Chrysler - 39,000+ tweets
3. Pepsi - 32,000+ tweets
4. (tie)Best Buy - 26,000+ tweets
   (tie). Volkswagen - 26,000+ tweets
5. Anheuser-Busch - 25,000+ tweets
6. Groupon - 22,000+ tweets
7. GoDaddy.com - 19,000+ tweets
8. Chevrolet - 18,000+ tweets
9. Audi - 14,000+ tweets

What's interesting about this list? Well, Groupon made it big, if you go by the mantra "any press is good press." It aired three commercials during the event yesterday, with at least one considered quite offensive, not only by ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick, but many others on Twitter. Take a look at a word cloud created using Wordle that looks at tweets about Groupon during the Super Bowl.

Besides "Tibet", it looks like Groupon took a big hit on Twitter yesterday, with "bad", "offensive", "fail" and "kenneth" all standing out. "Kenneth" is a reference to the Kenneth Cole tweet from last week that tried to leverage the Twitter conversation on protests in Egypt. Many thought the tweet was in poor taste and the company soon apologized and removed the tweet.

Now, Groupon is getting a similar response to its Super Bowl ads, but it sure did get people talking about the company. GoDaddy followed closely behind Groupon with its yearly display of moderately offensive, misogynistic advertising. In terms of mentions on Twitter, the new Motorola Xoom tablet and the PlayStation phone didn't even breach the top 10. If the numbers are right, then it surely seems that Groupon and GoDaddy have found the way to get mentioned on Twitter.

What do you think - is it worth it? Is any press good press? It seems that at least two tech companies think the answer is a resounding yes, and if their Twitter mentions are any indication, then they are correct. But is the Groupon brand irreparably damaged in your mind or will this just be a blip on its path to global, coupon-clipping domination? After all, this, right here, is yet another mention of Groupon in the press.

When it comes to statistics, it seems that you can find anyone to back whatever opinion you might have. Just yesterday, Android was named the number one smartphone platform worldwide...when you look at shipments. Today, however, we've come across a stat that is equally good and bad for everyone involved, because everyone is the same.

According to Nielsen,  "the competition between smartphone operating systems is a heated one" with a three-way tie between Blackberry, Android and iOS.

Of course, what the company doesn't note is the obvious trajectories for these three companies. Blackberry is on a continual downslope, Android is on a upslope, while Apple has been hovering in a sine wave fashion around the 30% mark for the past two years.

As it notes, however, "Analyzing the preferences of those who purchased a smartphone in the past six months paints a different picture."

Here, the image almost looks identical, but with each platform continuing its curve. Android takes the lead among new smartphone owners with 43%, Apple hangs around with 26% and Blackberry rounds up the pack with 20%.

What do you think? Will the second image soon stand in place for the first when it comes to mobile OS adoption?

If you're looking for a new Internet Service Provider, why rely on anecdotal accounts from Yelp or Reddit? When it comes to how fast data moves from one point to another, there's perception, and then there's numbers...and Netflix has the numbers.

"We find ourselves in the unique position," wrote Ken Florance, director of content delivery at Netflix, "of having insight into the performance of hundreds of millions of long duration, high-definition video streams delivered over the Internet."

As we use a number of CDNs, and our clients can adapt to changing network conditions by selecting the network path that's currently giving them the best throughput, Netflix streaming performance ends up being an interesting way to measure sustained throughput available from a given ISP over time, and therefore the quality of Netflix streaming that ISP is providing to our subscribers. Obviously, this can vary by network technology (e.g. DSL, Cable), region, etc., but it's a great high-level view of Netflix performance across a large number of individual streaming sessions.

Take a look at Netflix chart of the top 16 ISPs in the U.S.:

The company also offers a chart for Canada, where it began offering streaming-only service last year. Florance says the company will update the charts monthly.

More and more, both TV networks and app developers are relying on the fact that watching TV is no longer a passive act to which we apply our undivided attention. From check-in apps like Miso and Get Glue to TV shows like Glee and Community, they want to assure that we watch our TV with our smartphone or tablet in hand, a-tweeting and a-checking in all the while.

According to a recent study by Yahoo's advertising division, the TV watching crowd is ripe for this type of prime time interactivity, with 86% of mobile Internet users fondling their mobile device while watching the old boob tube.

Last week, we looked at how the TV show Glee's use of in-show, character tweeting had caused viewers to rally around watching the show in real-time, instead of time-shifting it by recording it on their DVR and watching it later. With this many viewers watching TV with their mobile device in hand, expect tactics like this to be on the increase.

As Yahoo notes, this presents "a compelling opportunity for content providers and advertisers alike to complement the viewing experience on the mobile platform."

Yahoo, of course, wants a piece of our divided attention. Its upcoming Internet TV product, which we saw at CES, works to create an interactive experience that you can experience using both your smartphone and your tablet. ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_86_use_mobile_devices_while_watching_tv.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_86_use_mobile_devices_while_watching_tv.php Internet TV Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:15:26 -0800 Mike Melanson

When Facebook recently added Clicker - the TV guide for Internet video - to its Instant Personalization program, we wrote that it was a "smart next step for the program" because now you could find out what your friends were watching and, in Facebook's words, "spend less time channel surfing and more time socializing."

According to SideReel, an online service similar to Clicker that helps you find content and TV shows online, that isn't necessarily what users want. The company surveyed 1,800 users and found that TV wasn't as social an experience for its users as it used to be, among interesting findings.

Click for full view.

Sidereel conducted a similar survey of its users in 2009, at which time 50% of respondents said that they were interested in sharing what they're watching with their friends. This time around, only 25% said they wanted to share. Among the social apps, only Twitter made a significant appearance in the results, with 29% saying they used Twitter as part of sharing their TV watching socially. (See yesterday's article, "What Glee Means for Twitter & Television" for more on Twitter's interesting relationship with Internet TV.)

"None of the check-in services," writes the company, "including GetGlue, Miso, Clicker or Foursquare have significant usage among SideReel's TV watchers. Only 10 percent of users want to broadcast what they are watching or want to watch to their friends."

According to the company, this wasn't the only interesting finding, which came from 1,800 of its 10 million monthly unique users.

"People are mixing new technologies with familiar ones to get a personalized TV experience that includes all of their favorite shows," said SideReel CEO Roman Arzhintar. "For many, traditional TV watching is starting to supplement online watching, rather than the other way around."

According to the survey, 5% had used devices like Boxee or Roku, whereas 40% had connected their computer to their TV in the past month, a threefold increase over the previous year. Both Boxee and Roku are relatively new to the market and Sidereel says this number is evidence that these sorts of devices are beginning to gain traction.

As a testament to Netflix's continued popularity, SideReel found that 70% of users who do stream video via the Internet to their TV do so using Netflix, whereas the other 30% use other sources.

What do you think? Do you want to share what you watch with friends, and vice versa, in order to figure out what's good on television? Or is this something that just the device makers and advertisers hope users want to share?

Twitter really does seem to be the stand-out exception when it comes to social television watching, though is this different from "sharing what your watching with friends?" It seems that Twitter and TV go together more in being able to interact around a piece of content, not necessarily just sharing the fact that you indeed like a certain TV show.

The time we used to spend sitting on the train on our way to work in the morning, reading the trusty local rag, has changed. Now, we whip out the iPhone, Android or iPad and catch up on all the blogs and online articles we found but didn't have time to read the day before. On the way home, we do the same for those bits we found at work.

According to Read It Later, the app that lets users tag content on their computer to be, well, read later, mobile devices are helping people avoid the constant barrage of information and relegate reading back to the most comfortable time slots and locations of the day.

According to Read It Later, those users with iPhones and iPads are shifting their reading times back to the most comfortable times - during breakfast, the morning commute, the commute back home and the very end of the day. The first graph the company offers is when users encounter content, according to when they tag it in Read It Later.

The graph of computer users (that is, desktops - you remember those, right?) isn't much different. It follows the same general arc. iPhone users, however, show the greatest difference.

There are obvious spikes at the times previously mentioned - breakfast, the commutes, and the end of the day. iPad users, on the other hand, are primarily a prime-time group.

Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg wasn't so far off when he quipped that the iPad isn't mobile?

Read It Later suggests that "When a reader is given a choice about how to consume their content, a major shift in behavior occurs.  They no longer consume the majority of their content during the day, on their computer.  Instead they shift that content to prime time and onto a device better suited for consumption."

Fine. So, if you have a mobile device, you likely read content on a different schedule than if you don't. What does this really mean? How does it affect the 24 hour news cycle? Although the focus has increasingly been put on real-time information and getting there first, could user behavior shift media back to a focus on quality rather than speed and quantity? I know that when I tag something in my Read It Later queue, it isn't because it's breaking - it's because it sounds like an intelligent, in-depth piece that I want to take time to digest and it's exactly that type of time-shifting of media consumption that, on a larger scale, could help assure the quality of online content.