Facebook risked driving users away by showing more ads in the news feed last year, but to Mark Zuckerberg’s surprise, a big increase in their presence during 2012 only reduced Likes and comments by 2%. Users are staying loyal, which during the 2012 Q4 earnings call Zuckerberg called a sign of the value Facebook provides.

Whether or not users are clicking or even noticing feed ads, they’re not using Facebook less because of them. While there’s plenty of people who complain about seeing the marketing messages crammed between content from their friends, they seem happy to just skim by rather than closing their app or browser window.

Zuckerberg explained that his company was intently focused on whether more ads meant less engagement. It even expected it, but that hasn’t been the case. Its news feed quality improvements around showing more relevant posts helped increase Likes and comments roughly 50% during 2012. That was only offset by a 2% reduction in engagement due to ads.

That means Facebook might be able to get away with showing even more ads. That could keep mobile revenues growing. This quarter it hit $305 million in mobile ad revenue, counting for 23% of total ad revenue, up from about $150 million and 14% in Q3. The real feat would be if Facebook could make its ads so helpful for discovering apps and products that users who see them actually use the service more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple’s minor bug-zapping update for iOS 6, iOS 6.0.1, is already making up 7.5 percent of mobile web traffic as measured by ad network and analytics firm Chitika, just 24 hours after release. If you’ve been following, you’ll note that that’s just half of the 15 percent adoption rate iOS 6 saw a day after being in the wild, but this is a minor update, without anywhere near as much hype and fanfare as iOS 6, and 7.5 percent uptake is therefore impressive.

For a more direct comparison, consider that iOS 5.1.1 took around a week to accrue a 12 percent adoption rate of iOS-based mobile web traffic, as measured by the millions of ad impressions seen by Chitika during any given 24 hour period. iOS 6.0.1 was available either through iTunes or over-the-air (despite a minor hiccup on iPhone 5 devices that required an additional install), which likely helped spur greater adoption, but that’s been the case since iOS 5 was introduced, so other factors are likely at play.

6.0.1 is the first maintenance update since iOS 6, and as such carries a number of bug fixes for well-publicized issues reported early by users who upgraded, including Wi-Fi connectivity bugs. The prospect of generally improved stability and performance likely drew a number of users to jump on board quickly, which could help to explain the relatively speedy adoption curve. Whatever the case, Apple appears to be doing a better and better job of getting all users on the same page software-wise even with minor incremental updates, which is good for the health of the platform as a whole.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Way to blow your own horn, Google. Yesterday a newspaper in the UK, the Independent, ran a short item about how Google was about to reach an app milestone — 15 billion apps downloaded. So we reached out to Google to ask about this… and guess what? It already happened.

A Google spokesperson, Gina Weakley Johnson, tells us the milestone was passed “a few weeks ago.”

The last number that Google released with more public declaration was 11 billion downloads, when the store was still called the Android Market, which it announced during its Q4 2011 earnings in January. In April, when Google reported its Q1 2012 earnings, it didn’t mention downloads on Google Play, the newly-rebranded store.

Apple reached 15 billion downloads in July 2011, and the most recent number for Apple is 25 billion downloads in March 2012.

Doing the basic math, that roughly means that Google is seeing about 1 billion downloads of Android apps per month, while Apple is seeing about 1.25 billion app downloads per month.

So there is still a gap in aggregated downloads between the two platforms, despite that fact that Google has nearly caught up with Apple in terms of total number of apps: Currently Google Play has some 500,000 apps, while Apple has 600,000 apps in its app store.

There are other areas of disparity, it seems: Up to the end of January 2012, analyst Horace Dediu notes, Google has paid developers $320 million compared to $4 billion from Apple.

On the other hand, there seems to be other evidence pointing to the fact that Apple’s download rate is slowing down: Fiksu, for example claims that Apple’s app download rate fell by 30 percent in March.

For Google, the drive to have high volumes of app downloads is two-fold: it demonstrates to developers that this is an active and used platform, so that they continue developing for it. And it gives Google a bigger inventory from which it can potentially make more from advertising, which is the company’s real money spinner.

Data revealed in the Oracle v. Google trial over Java patents last week pointed to how Google’s Android effort was money-losing throughout 2010. Documents in the same case also showed that Google projected that it would make a profit on its mobile effort in 2011 and beyond — although we don’t have updated figures from Google that testify to whether that has been the case or not.

But those records also indicated that the vast majority of that revenue will be coming from advertising, with small but growing percentages also coming from app sales. In 2011, Google projected it would make $492.5 million in ads on Android with only $14.5 million in app sales. For 2012, Google projected $804.3 million in ad sales with only $35.9 million from app revenue.

Figures from those documents also showed that Google expected a loss of $113 million in 2010 from Android and that it expected to have profits of $64 million in 2011; $248 million in 2012; and $548 in 2013.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Netflix just released their Q1 2012 earnings report [PDF], and managed to beat analyst estimates by reporting losses of $0.08 per share on $870 million in revenue.

In the weeks leading up to the release, analysts projected a net loss of $0.27 per share on $866 million in revenue thanks to the company’s pronounced push for international growth.

That works out to a $5 million net loss for the quarter, though the brass are preparing themselves for better days to come. According to their release, CEO Reed Hastings and CFO David Wells expect to return to global profitability next quarter, and are gearing up for their launch in a still-unknown new European market in Q4.

Perhaps more importantly, the company also reported that they picked up “nearly 3 million” new subscribers for their streaming business, a full 1.21 million of whom are international customers. This quarter’s bump also puts Netflix’s domestic streaming numbers at 23.41 million customers, falling right in line with the company’s expectations.

Netflix’s streaming selection took a substantial hit earlier this year when their four-year licensing deal with Starz finally expired, and it was feared that they loss of content could affect the growth of their streaming subscriber base but that doesn’t seem to have been the case — there has been “no discernible change in churn or viewing levels” since the deal expired.

That frankly comes as a bit of a surprise considering the strength of the Starz media porfolio, but apparently users ended up migrating toward Netflix’s remaining catalog of episodic TV. To that end, Netflix’s focus on original programming is becoming more an area for expansion rather than an experiment, though they’re still unsure whether or not they’ll ever spend more than the previously stated 5% of their content buy on the endeavor.

Considering Netflix’s focus on the streaming end, the company’s physical disc business (as you may imagine) hasn’t fared as well — the company posted a loss of 1.08 million domestic DVD customers in Q1, after having lost 2.76 million of them last quarter. If you’ve yet to sate yourself with Netflix’s financials, stay tuned — the company will be hosting an earnings call at 3PM Pacific/6PM Eastern, and we’ll keep you abreast of any juicy developments.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

February was a big month for Kickstarter. Not only did they have a number of record-breaking projects, but they were shoved into the mainstream consciousness with a flood of traditional news coverage.

But there was always the question of whether these thousands of pledges would have any lasting effect on the site. Could such a rush of attention actually have negative effects, increasing competition and bringing in more projects than the site’s population of donors can handle?

Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. The site’s big month appears to have made a lasting increase in both projects, users, and funding.

There are a ton of details at Kickstarter’s blog post, but the gist is this: the two biggest projects lately, Double Fine Adventure and Order of the Stick, brought in millions of dollars themselves, but have also produced a halo of funding where there was very little before.

In the gaming category, for instance, only one project had reached $100,000 in funding before last month. Since then nine have. And in webcomics, where the Order of the Stick book was categorized, the number of pledges per week, on average, has doubled.

They’re not just staying in the original category, either: 22% of each group of original backers have been busy in other categories, backing nearly 2000 projects with over $1m all told. Many of the backers were on Kickstarter for the first time to back the big projects, and these big names on the marquee ended up working as advertisements for the site itself as well.

It just goes to show that crowd-funding is a space with a ton of room to grow as new models and ideas are found to be applicable. Before last month, many would have thought that raising millions via Kickstarter was a fantasy. But the scale of the site is growing and naysayers are constant casualties. What remains to be seen is how long Kickstarter itself can remain on top. Just as it brought a change to the world of funding and launching products, another could bring yet more changes to the still-nascent field of crowd-funding.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This ia a guest post by Justin Davies, founder of NinetyTen, a UK-based consultancy providing mobile community and location aware solutions to companies. Davies also founded the now defunct BuddyPing, an early mobile social networking community based on the realtime location of users, and thus has few opinions about the rise of Foursquare and others…

Not to sound too much like my grandad talking about the War, but when I was doing this, it was all about sending a text message to a person walking past Starbucks with a half price voucher.

Back in my day, we had to pay for location information, none of this “SimpleGeo” or “Google Latitude” malarkey you youngsters have these days.

The only phones that had a GPS chip was a prototype N95 I had to beg Nokia for, and some Blackberry phones.

Yes dear Location Based enthusiast, these are bright times, and this does finally seem to be the year of location (though, admittedly, this has been the case for the past 3 years).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch