McKinsey states that "Digital-media junkies" are three times more likely to be early adopters of new technologies. This segment makes up 19% of McKinsey's survey, up 7% from 2008. The "Traditionalists" meanwhile make up 24% of the survey respondents, the same as in 2008. Traditionalists overwhelmingly do not own smartphones. They also have not yet adopted online media devices, such as tablets and e-readers.

Probably the most interesting statistics are in the device ownership section. The Digital-media junkies own more devices than Traditionalists in every single product category. The highest ranking devices for the junkies are game consoles (85%), portable media players (84%) and smartphones (67%).

Just 12% of the Traditionalists own a smartphone. Many probably own so-called 'feature phones' - which are phones that don't connect to the Web, or do so in a very limited way. This tells us that despite the huge growth in the mobile Web market over the past couple of years, there is still a long way to go before about a quarter of the U.S. Internet population can participate in this revolution.

Consuming media online seems almost anathema to the Traditionalists. As noted in the 'media choices' section, they are still large consumers of print newspapers. But for tablets (2%) and e-readers (3%), Traditionalists trail well behind the Digital-media junkies.

Looking further at the media choices section, we can see that the Digital-media junkies are huge gamers: 89% compared to just 23% for the Traditionalists. There are also wide gaps in online video consumption (84% vs. 18%) and social media (82% vs. 32%).

Unsurprisingly, the only media surveyed which Traditionalists use more is print newspapers. 59% of Traditionalists read print newspapers, compared to 46% of Digital-media junkies. The (already well known) implication is that the print newspaper audience is aging and there are less younger readers.

Another stark difference is that the Digital-media junkies are 62% male, while the Traditionalists are 61% female. That could be more of a social issue than a technology one. Perhaps, for example, schools and families should do more to encourage geek girls. Let us know your thoughts on that - and the other statistics in this report - in our comments.

Photo credit: Antonio Viva

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?

According to the latest numbers, the iPad is quickly gaining ground on the dedicated e-Reader and the "market has essentially become a two horse race."

The survey looks at a number of points, including satisfaction, finding that iPad owners are more satisfied with their device than Kindle owners.

When the iPad was first released, we wrote a story explaining "Why Apple's iPad Will Beat Out Kindle as a News Reader" and now it looks like that has come to fruition. The survey compared device owners in terms of content and it found that Kindle users stick primarily to books and not much else.

This, of course, is where we see the real distinction between the two devices. The Kindle has the price point and the much sworn-by "e-Ink" technology, but the iPad has the functionality we really desire. Sure, we say we don't always want to be connected, but then when we read something and we want to share it, do we want to reach for another device? Likely not. The Kindle may hold onto some die-hard e-book fans, but for those of you (like me) who want a device that can play video and offer interaction, tablet devices like the iPad are going to win out.

What do you think? Will you be buying a Kindle or an iPad for the holidays?

As the number of mobile users in these countries growths in the next few years (from 65 million by the end of this year to - according to some estimates - 160 million in 2015), the mobile advertising industry will obviously continue to grow as well. While mobile Internet usage is dominated by social networking today, Lane thinks that the percentage of social networking traffic will fall over the next few years, "as users vary their browsing experience as their understanding of the mobile Internet increases."

Lane estimates that a majority of the increased spending will come from banner ads, but also from publishers who will try to monetize their growing mobile traffic. He also assumes that the arrival of more geotargeted advertising solutions will generate premium returns for publishers.

The main catalyst for mobile advertising growth in Europe in the next few years will likely be the 2012 London Olympics. While less than 3% of brands are currently active on mobile, this should change considerably over the next two years, as these advertisers gear up for the Olympics. By 2012, Europe's five largest economies will already have more than 100 million mobile users and Smaato expects that the investments of Europe's largest brands will "fuel revenue growth over the forecast period."

Bonus: As we are heading to 2012, Smaato's latest statistics show that are are still some differences between the U.S. advertising market and its European counterpart. In the U.S., for example, Windows Phone users leading the pack with regards to click-through rates, followed by Apple users, while in Europe, BlackBerry users are more likely to click on ads (also followed by iPhone users). In terms of fill rates, Europe is lagging slightly behind the U.S., though the numbers are growing in both markets.

Sadly, the Pew study did not ask users about their sentiments towards video calling. There is some anecdotal evidence that many people prefer voice calls and don't feel comfortable being on video. Qualcomm's senior vice president for Global Marketing Bill Davidson, for example, told us last week that he does not believe that video calling will be a killer feature for the next generation of wireless data networks as users simply aren't that interested in it. It would have been nice to see some data to either back this up or bust this as a myth.

Instead, the Pew survey focuses on the demographics of those who use video calls. There are no major surprises there. More affluent and younger users tend to use video calling more than others, for example, and urban users are far more likely to participate in video calls than users in rural regions (27% vs. 12%).

Twitter in Brazil: Highest Penetration in the World

Twitter is the fourth most popular social network in Brazil with about 8.6 million visitors in August. The service reaches about 23% of the Brazilian online population. According to comScore, this is the highest Twitter penetration in the world. Twitter is especially popular among younger users (15 to 24), while Facebook's popularity in Brazil is higher among older users (25 and over).

It is also interesting to note how popular the relatively new Q&A site formspring.me has become in Brazil. There, the service gets about 3.6 million visitors per month - making it the fifth most popular social network in the country.

Can Orkut Hang On to Its Top Position?

Due to the popularity of Orkut, Brazil has always been a slightly different market for social networks. Given the growing popularity of Facebook, however, we will have to see if Orkut can hang on to its top position in the long run.

Sadly, the researchers did not ask those who didn't download apps why they weren't interested in them. Kristen Purcell, the associate director for research at the Pew Internet Project, speculates that "it is clear that this is the early stage of adoption when many cell owners do not know what their phone can do. The apps market seems somewhat ahead of a majority of adult cell phone users."

App Amnesia: People Don't Know How Many Apps They Have

Among those adults who have used apps, half have actually paid for for them and they typically have around 10 on their phones, though there is clearly a group of very heavy apps users out there as well. Interestingly, most cell phone users - and especially those over 50 - don't actually know how many apps they have.

Only about 60% of all app users actually organize their apps so that their favorites are easily accessible. While Apple's new folders in the iOS 4 are a nifty feature for heavy users - there is clearly also a large market of users who only use a small number of apps and see no need to actually organize them in tidy little folders.

Most Popular Apps

Games are the most popular apps among adults (60%), closely followed by news and weather (52%), navigation (51%) and social networking apps 47%).

For more details, you can find the full report here.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Digg vs Reddit Market Share

Standoff

What is clear, though, is that Digg's users are not backing down - and neither is Digg's management. User revolts are nothing new for Digg, but this time it looks like Digg's management is not prepared to back down. According to former Digg engineer Ian Eure, Digg may not even have the ability to roll its service back to the old version anyway. Digg's CEO Kevin Rose does promise, however, that many of the old features Digg's users are now clamoring for will come back in one form or another. The question now is if the site's most fervent users will come back once all the issues with Digg v4 have been resolved, or if they will simply move on to another site like Reddit.

According to the study, customers are 9% more likely to renew a subscription if an interactive edition is available, and 30% of those renewing chose a bundled option with print and digital editions. Additionally, uptake among "device-owning non-subscribers" tripled from 5% to 15% with the presence of interactive editions in online stores.

This data shows that the digital publishing industry is indeed growing and attracting new subscribers from traditional print media. Many view digital editions to be supplementary to the print versions, and advertisers are keen on the ability of users to buy items directly from ads in digital publications, the study finds.

In terms of demographics, the study showed largely equal growth in interest for digital subscriptions among both men and women, as well as across all age groups. This just goes to show that, yes, readers do indeed want interactivity with their subscriptions and are enjoying the added functionality.

"The landscape for digitally distributing magazines and newspapers is about to rapidly change," said Martin Kon of Oliver Wyman, who helped Next Issue Media conduct the survey. "Our Future Marketplace Simulation shows significant consumer enthusiasm for interactive periodicals that offer enhanced features, personalization, multimedia content and optimized layout and navigation."

In other words, if you build it (better), they will come. This seems obvious but digital publications are still only growing at a slow pace. This will be bolstered by the wave of tablet devices likely to hit the market in the wake of the iPad. Android and webOS tablet devices continue to be rumored alongside the possibility of a "BlackPad" from RIM - all which could make for an interesting market for publishers.

According to ChangeWave, iPad owners mostly use their devices to surf the Web (83%), check email (71%) and use apps from the app store (56%). About a third of iPad owners use their tablets to read e-books.

Focus: E-Books, Newspaper and Magazines

Among those respondents who already owned an e-reader, the Kindle is still the most popular device (62%). After just a few weeks on the market, however, the iPad already registered a 16% share in this survey, which puts it far ahead of the Sony Reader family and Barnes & Noble's Nook.

A lot has been written about how the advent of e-readers, the iPad and similar tablets will change the magazine and newspaper industry. While the exact extent of the iPad's influence on these industries still isn't clear, it's worth noting that iPad owners are far more likely to use their tablets to read newspapers and magazines than those who own any other kind of e-reader.

About half of all iPad owners read newspapers on their tablets and more than a third read magazines. For other e-readers, these numbers hover slightly above 10%. This low number doesn't come as a surprise, as these devices were clearly designed as e-book readers and don't offer a convenient way to read newspapers on the Web. Even on these devices, however, the number of people who use them to read newspaper and magazines has almost doubled in the last few months.

In the company's last report, Taptu estimated that the size of touch-friendly Web would reach half a million sites by the end of the year and about 1 million by the end of 2011. Given these new numbers, however, Taptu now estimates that there will be 1.1 million touch-optimized sites on the Web by the end of 2010.

The reason for this rapid growth is surely the increasing popularity of touch-screen phones and touch-screen enabled devices like the iPad. As touch-enabled mobile devices become more common, having a touch-optimized site is now becoming a necessity for online publishers and retailers, especially as more and more users simply expect these organizations to have sites that are optimized for mobile usage. In Taptu's analysis, shopping and services sites now make up 22.1% of all touch-friendly sites.

These retailers and publishers could obviously also opt to just develop native apps (and many currently do both), but thanks to HTML5 and other new technologies, it will become increasingly possible for developers to create mobile web apps that will feel more and more like native apps. There will always be a role for native apps, but given the choice between developing numerous native apps for an increasingly diverse mobile ecosystem or one mobile web app that works everywhere, many companies will surely opt for developing a touch-friendly website instead of mobile apps.

What's even more interesting than the small number of user pairs is that 68% of all Twitter users aren't followed by a single person they are following. As the researchers rightly note, this makes Twitter more like a broadcast medium than a social network.

Given that Twitter was set up for these kinds of non-reciprocal follower/following relationships, it doesn't come as a surprise that many users would use Twitter to follow breaking news channels and celebrities. The fact that almost 80% of these relationships are one-way relationships, however, does come as a surprise and hints at how Twitter's mainstream users use the service more as a news medium than as a social network.

Get the Raw Data

If you would like to analyze this data yourself, but don't want to crawl 41 million Twitter accounts yourself, the Korean team also created two torrent files: one (very) large file that includes all the 41 million accounts and connections and a second file that only includes the data for Twitter users with over 10,000 followers.

Given that only about 85% of Americans have access to the Internet, this means that more people know about Twitter and Facebook than there are people who can actually use it.

Of course, using Twitter takes far more effort than just creating a profile on Facebook, so it doesn't come as a surprise that most Internet users would be more likely to keep a social networking profile on Facebook than on Twitter.

This low usage number, however, also highlights Twitter's enduing problems with turning visitors of the site into regular users. Of course, this also means that Twitter still has a lot of room to grow if it manages to find a way to convert more of its visitors into regular users.

How Can Twitter Convert More Visitors into Regular Users? Emphasize SMS and Private Pages

As the authors of the Edison report point out, one way to increase Twitter usage could be to highlight the parallels between status updates and SMS messages. About 70% of Americans now regularly send and receive SMS messages and according to a recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, half of all teens now send 50 or more text messages per day. Twitter just bought the SMS technology provider Cloudhopper, so Twitter is clearly aware of this opportunity. This move towards emphasizing SMS makes sense for Twitter, which, after all, was born as a group SMS service.

The authors also note that posting status updates on other social networks has now become a mainstream activity on Facebook and other social networks. While people still consider Facebook to be a private network where they communicate with their close friends, however, most users see Twitter as a broadcast medium. As the authors of the report note, Twitter currently doesn't highlight the fact that it also offers its users the ability to create closed networks and private profiles.

The Power of Retweets

This also highlights the power of retweets. A retweet really doesn't have to propagate very far to reach a very large number of people. Of course, chances are that not all of your friends and friends of friends will retweet your message - and even then, appearing in a Twitter user's stream doesn't guarantee that your message will actually be seen.

The Sysomos team also looked at how far Twitter users would have to roam to meet a follower of their own. According to the company's data, it only takes 3.32 steps on average (standard deviation is 1.25 steps) before you will find someone who is already following you. As Sysomos' Alex Cheng notes in the report, this means that "there are many small, circular connections on Twitter."

When compared with some of the other smartphones on the market, owners of phones running Google's Android mobile operating system are predominantly male. This finding comes from analytics firm AdMod's latest Mobile Metrics Report, which revealed that 73% of Android users are male. Meanwhile, on the iPhone, iPod Touch and Palm platforms, the ratio of male-to-female owners was more even. However, males were still in the majority even on those devices, accounting for 54% to 58% of the users.

This was only one of the findings from the firm's January report, which also examined ages of smartphone owners, propensity to download and pay for mobile applications and interest in purchasing the upcoming Apple iPad.

Most of the statistics AdMob revealed weren't all that shocking. For example, iPhone owners are more likely to purchase an iPad than owners of other smartphones. And while 16% said they intend to buy Apple's new slate computer when it arrives in March, only 11% of Palm webOS users and 6% of Android owners said the same. This finding can easily be attributed to the so-called "fanboy" syndrome among Apple hardware owners - that is, the tendency of those who own Apple products to want to buy more Apple products. Sometimes described as fanaticism, it's really just a testament to the popularity of the brand and its repeat customer business.

Another interesting, but still explainable, statistic involves the buying habits of iPod Touch and iPhone owners. Those who own the less-expensive iPod Touch devices tend to download more free applications than those who own an iPhone. And they download a lot of apps, too. On average, iTouch owners download 12 apps per month - that's 37% more apps than iPhone and Android users. They also spend more time playing with their apps - 100 minutes per day, 25% more time than iPhone or Android users.

At first, those figures may have you scratching your head - after all, isn't the iPod Touch the exact same mobile operating system as the iPhone? And doesn't its Wi-Fi-only connectivity actually limit the functionality of a lot applications since so many require an Internet connection to work? The answer to both questions is yes. But the reason why the iPod users appear to be more active and engaged is explained in another section of the report. According to the demographics, they're much younger. 78% of iPod Touch users are under 25 (compared with 25% of iPhone users) and they're often students, too. These are the very sort of users who have time to play with a ton of apps. They're also, not surprisingly, the least likely to pay for them. iPod Touch owners download an average of 10.5 free apps per month and only 1.6 paid apps during that same time. iPhone owners, however, download 7.0 free apps per month and 1.8 paid ones.

Why are So Many Android Owners Male?

The only truly odd statistic to arise from this report is the gender variance among Android owners. With a 78%/22% male-to-female ratio, the question that comes to mind is why are so many owners male? There is a wide range of Android-powered smartphones for people to choose from, including everything from sleek-and-shiny HTC devices to keyboard-ready Droids from Motorola and Verizon. In other words, there's an Android handset out there for everyone.

Our only guess as to why the statistics are skewing male for Android may have something to do with the latest Droid marketing efforts. Commercials for Verizon's Droid send the message that the phones are the equivalent of having a "robot in your pocket," and the latest show a robot's finger quickly typing out searches on the phone's on-screen keyboard. While arguably, some females are sure to love robots, too (especially those interested in reading about smartphone statistics here!), a campaign that uses robots and reminds you of all the things the Droid does that the iPhone doesn't, is a not-too-subtle attempt to play to the male ego and that gender's stereotypical desire for constant one-upmanship among their peers. And that's not the worst of it, either. Another Droid ad, spotted by CNNMoney blogger Elmer DeWitt in December, targeted the male demographic in the "most testosterone-heavy TV commercial to date," he noted at the time.

The ad copy read:

So congratulations, marketers. It appears you have successfully attracted the males to your handset. But in ignoring the potential female users, you're doing smartphone owners a disservice. The Droid, and other Android-based phones too, are powerful, attractive and easy-to-use handsets that should have a broad appeal. It may be time to remind the women of that.