OSAMA BIN LADEN
BILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND BILLIONS
A MISGUIDED MARKETING MYTH
ANOTHER MYTH MYSTERY
COCKTAIL CHATTER – ROYAL WEDDING AND DR WHO
OSAMA BIN LADEN. Not surprisingly, the announcement about the killing of the Al Qaeda leader drove a lot of traffic to news websites. Somewhat surprising though, the traffic volume reached a three year high, according to both Hitwise and comScore. Even more surprising, the number one search item was actually "bin laden wives" followed by "bin laden dead." The 'bin laden mansion' was the third most searched for item, followed by 'seal team six,' according to Hitwise. Thirty of the top 100 search items were Bin Laden related. Traffic to the news websites doubled, tripled and even quadrupled in some cases. Leading search site, Yahoo news, went from nearly 9 Million the previous Monday to nearly 27 Million the Monday following the announcement. MSNBC was the second highest with nearly 15 Million visits compared to just over 4 Million the week before. After that it was the Huffington Post (8.6 Million visits), CNN.com (6 Million),and ABCNews.com (3 Million). Oddly (to me) Yahoo News had more than ten times the amount of visits as Google News (2.3 Million), and the New York Times website had one of the lowest increases, jumping 'only' 50% from 1.2 Million the week before to 1.8 Million. Not oddly, even though Fox News consistently gets more viewers than CNN, CNN's website, as usual, more than doubled the traffic of Fox News (2.8 Million).
BILLIONS AND BILLIONS AND BILLIONS. And you could add a few more billions to that and you still would not have come up with the amount of data in the world today. According to an analysis by a team led by a professor at the University of Southern California, the amount of data stored around the world adds up to 295 Exabytes, which translates to 295 Billion Gigabytes. This includes everything from papers to books and newspapers, videotape and hard discs, all the way down to the microchips on your credit cards. In an article in the journal Science, professor Martin Hilbert and co-researcher Priscilla Lopez Chavez of the University of Catalonia in Santiago, Chile, note several milestones in the world's data (r)evolution. According to them, the semi-official start of the digital age is the year 2002. That's when the amount of data stored digitally exceeded the amount of analog data stored. The next big milestone came five years later in 2007. That's when the vast majority of our memory (94%)was in digital form. In an accompanying article in the magazine, the editors note another milestone that I have not seen cited elsewhere. According to the editors, we have reached the point that we are generating more data than we can store. And that is even though Hilbert and Lopez estimate that the storage capacity of computers doubles every 18 months. What the Science editors call the "data deluge" cuts across all scientific disciplines. The challenge, and the opportunity, according to them, lies in better organizing and accessing the data.
Regular readers of the message know that I love a factoid as much as the next person, but Hilbert comes up with some doozies. For example, if all the data were converted to CD's, the stack would reach to the moon and beyond another quarter of the distance. If you put the same information in books, it would spread over the entire United States in layers 13 thick. Hilbert and Lopez Chavez spent four years calculating not only the amount of data stored but also the amount communicated and computed. They calculate that the amount of data broadcast worldwide daily (that includes television and GPS devices and everything in between) would be the equivalent of every person in the world getting 174 newspapers every day. The amount of bi-directional data (talking, for example) generated daily would be the equivalent of six newspapers a day. He even calculates the amount of 'pigeon posts' that the data equates to, but that is so esoteric that I don't get it.
Hilbert also provides some kind of cool perspective factoids as well, drawing comparisons to that great scientist, Mother Nature. For example, all that information stored worldwide is a pittance compared to the information stored in the human body. Hilbert says the information stored in the DNA of one human body is 300 times larger than all the information stored in all the technological devices in the world. And another one of those weird factoids – he says if every star in the heavens were given a name, we wouldn't have the capacity to store all those names. I know. It takes a little bit to wrap your head around that one. Here's another – the nerve impulses generated by the human brain in one second is equal to all the computers in the world being run simultaneously in one second. But at the same time, Hilbert and Lopez Chavez note that the storage and calculation capacity of computers continues to grow while we humans have pretty well peaked out.
A MISGUIDED MARKETING MYTH. For some time, AARP ran an ad campaign that said marketing and advertising people had declared old people dead, in essence because they didn't advertise or sell to anybody over the age of 55. Well, no more. The so-called Baby Boomers have changed all that. The latest example comes from a series of reports by Nielsen looking at local news in various markets. One of the key findings is that the 55 and over crowd are becoming an important audience for both advertisers and media companies because a) the demographic is growing, b) they maintain an active lifestyle, c) they're using media to stay connected and, here's the kicker, d) they control three quarters (77%) of all financial assets. The report contains a number of interesting, and sometimes odd, insights. For example, iPhone owners are more likely (53%) than iPad owners (44%) to access news regularly. Three quarters of App downloaders say they are willing to pay for news apps and just under half (40%) perceive the price of news content on the iPad as too low. Here are two factoids from the report for you to try and reconcile. During the late news time period (11pm), little more than a third (40%) of all household rating points to broadcast stations are generated by homes with incomes over $100K, but nearly two thirds (62%) of all household rating points for cable news operations come from those higher income homes. During the early evening news daypart (6pm), just under half (44%) of all household rating points for broadcast stations come from homes with no landline service, but for cable news operations the percentage drops to a third (33%).
ANOTHER MYTH MYSTERY. In today's 140-character Twitter world, it's accepted belief that consumers all have short attention spans. Well, maybe not, says advertising agency JWT in its latest monthly Intelligence report. They argue that the ability to shift reading time and location in the digital age allows people to consume longer form material at their convenience. The latest example is Jon Krakauer's Three Cups of Deceit which raised questions about Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson and which generated considerable publicity. Amazon has launched a Kindle Singles section for long-form journalism as well as short fiction. But it's not the only one. The JWT editors note that there are several start-ups, offering the same long-form service, including ByLiner which published the Krakauer piece, Atavist which adds multimedia elements to the offering, along with Longform.org, LongReads and InstaPaper. As a footnote, the same JWTIntelligence report notes that a second TEDx conference to be held in a slum is being held in Cidade de Deus in Rio De Janiero.
COCKTAIL CHATTER: Americans were apparently more interested in the royal wedding than the Britons, or at least the American media were more interested than British media, according to data compiled by Nielsen. U.S. media had twice as much coverage online of the royal wedding as U.K. media. The royal wedding racked up 0.20 percent of all coverage online for American newspapers and magazines but only 0.08 percent of the coverage in their British counterparts. And as long as we're on a British kick, TVGuide.com reports that the first part of the new Dr. Who series on BBC America was the network's highest-rated and most-watched telecast for live and same day viewing. But here's the kicker – that 'only' amounted to 1.27 Million viewers. In the interest of transparency, I should note that number includes one of my daughters who is a treasure trove of trivia about Dr. Who.
It doesn't match some of the milestones noted above, and it may be something of an apples and oranges comparison, but a tipping point of sorts has been reached with video services and cable operators. Video service Netflix has the same number of subscribers as the country's largest cable company, Comcast, has viewers . 22.8 Million. The New York Times Media Decoder blog notes that the service did that by adding 1.1 Million subscribers a month since the beginning of this year. So it will continue to grow. The blog notes, of course, that the two don't directly compete.
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