Mike Butcher

The BBC reports on research by Danah Boyd which found that Facebook users come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college while MySpace users tend not to have gone on to further education. While “class” in the US does not map directly to income it is more about social life and networks. Hence Facebook users tend to be white and education oriented while MySpace teenager tend to come from families from immigrant backgrounds.

This rings true in my view, and maps to my view that in the future the really powerful networks will be closed ones. You can’t get to a Facebook profile unless you are registered and it’s not open to the Web. On MySpace anyone – logged in or not – can reach you, and it also reflects a teenager’s general “posture” to the outside world much more because of its public nature.

Mobile handsets capable of displaying TV will hit 244 million by 2011, according to the Multimedia Research Group in the US. That’s double the number previously forecast for the uptake rate expected in 55 countries. Big leaps are expected in 2009 when 53 million broadcast TV enabled handsets are expected to ship. The bulk of the 80 mobile TV trials all over the world will become genuine services. Most will be good enough to watch for 30 minutes at a time. According to the report, service revenues from the global mobile TV market will exceed $24bn annually by 2011, with Western Europe likely to lead in revenue terms at over $10bn, followed by the USA and Canada at $7.7bn, and China and the Far East at $5bn. The question is, are technology start-ups positioned for this new media platform or are they still thinking in terms of the Web only?

Mobile handsets capable of displaying TV will hit 244 million by 2011, according to the Multimedia Research Group in the US. That’s double the number previously forecast for the uptake rate expected in 55 countries. Big leaps are expected in 2009 when 53 million broadcast TV enabled handsets are expected to ship. The bulk of the 80 mobile TV trials all over the world will become genuine services. Most will be good enough to watch for 30 minutes at a time. According to the report, service revenues from the global mobile TV market will exceed $24bn annually by 2011, with Western Europe likely to lead in revenue terms at over $10bn, followed by the USA and Canada at $7.7bn, and China and the Far East at $5bn.

Nic Mitham at the K Zero blog (a marketing and branding company) has posted a map of all the real-world brands he could find operating in the virtual world of Second Life. It’s a hard-wired map which would well do with uploading to Flickr so that people could start to tag it with their own knowledge. This needs a little crowd sourcing… Here is the link to the big version. It’s interesting how some brands cluster. Why are Adidas and Reebok so close? The same question could be asked of Sony Ericsson, Vodafone and CHannel 4. And again of Sun, Intel and Comcast. I guess they are trying for the high traffic areas, which is clearly a tactic which mimicks the real world.

Hamburg-based research firm Komjuniti has published the first extensive survey of Resident attitudes toward marketing in Second Life. MTV, Coke, Dell, American Apparel – they are all at it.

The results [PDF] are that 72% of 200 respondents said they were disappointed with real world company activities in Second Life; just over 40% considered these efforts a one-off not likely to last. Only 7% of respondents in the Komjuniti study say that SL-based promotion would have a positive impact on their future buying behavior.

It gets worse.

As GigaOm reports:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtualautomotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

Guy Phillpson of the Internet Advertising Bureau spoke at The Media Guardian's Changing Media Summit.

He said the IAB doesn't push any one publisher when talking about online advertising. The IAB has large and smaller members, he said.

"We're format agnostic about it. We talk more in terms of disciplines like rich media advertising, not about platforms."

"If there's something [and advertising format] that's proprietorial then a publisher might get mentioned."

The mbites.com podcast this week looked at how digital music is impacting both on music fans and the artists themselves. The guests (pictured) were Laura Lee Davies, former editor of Time Out magazine in London and a music journalist of 20 years experience, and Ben Drury, founder and managing director of 7digital.com, which provides digital downloading services to many leading brands and artists’ web sites.

Download the MP3 file here (approx 18MB, 20 minutes long) or subscribe to the podcast feed and download it automatically into your favourite podcasting software and/or mobile media player device (ok, iPod then), or even subscribe direct from iTunes.

This is the third in a series of regular mbites podcasts, hosted at London private members club, Adam Street.

If you’d like to be a guest on the next Bitecast, where we’ll be documenting some of the most interesting new developments in digital and mobile media, contact Mike Butcher.

Some interesting new research from Jupiter:

Jupiter thinks the European music industry is facing “a demographic time bomb”. In its report “European Music Consumer Survey, 2005″ it says that European consumers who download music from illegal file sharing networks currently outnumber those downloading from legal services such as Apple’s iTunes Music Store by a factor of three to one.

Some 15% file share while just 5% pay to download. Uh oh.

Jauntily upbeat however, Jupiter says “there is solid demand for paid downloads”, with 10% of European consumers willing to pay, rising as high as 31% in Sweden.

But file sharing penetration in Europe is highest among younger consumers (34% of 15-24 year olds) and is impacting the way they value music with many having little concept of music as a paid commodity. Among the 46% of European online 15-24 year olds who use the Internet to consume music, the CD is becoming increasingly irrelevant: 40% do not consider the CD to be a good value for money and 43% prefer to copy rather than buy CDs. Unless these consumers are encouraged to develop music purchasing behavior soon they may never develop meaningful music buying habits.

In a release Mark Mulligan, Analyst at JupiterResearch said: “Illegal activity is a key threat. The Digital Youth of today are being brought up on a near limitless diet of free and disposable music from file sharing networks. When these consumers age and increase spending power they should become key music buying consumers. But unless the music industry can transition these consumers whilst they are young away from free consumption to paid music formats, be they digital or CDs, they may never develop music purchasing behavior and the recording industry could suffer long-term harm.”

The San Francisco Chronicle (R.I.P. CDs) argues that there’s no reason to buy another compact disc ever again now that we have iPods, satellite and digital radio and the Net. MP3 blogs like The Hype Machine and Largehearted Boy offer daily links to free music available online.Online radio stations are “becoming a safe haven for anyone who just wants to hear some good music.” With subscription digital music services like Rhapsody and Napster, “Owning music is so last century.” Social networking sites like MySpace.com can showcase 55,000 unsigned bands (of varying quality of course). In the US, satellite radio like Sirius offers more variety than “even a 60-gig iPod and more unpredictability”. Of course, there#039s the iTunes Music Store and BitTorrent. Even Amazon is touting free music MP3s to entice people to buy new music.