Can Google+ give Facebook serious competition?

Google has a long history of botching social networking efforts, from the fizzling Orkut to the privacy headaches of Buzz. Now it's trying yet another offering, Google+, directly aimed at Facebook. The highly anticipated service was rolled out to a limited number of users as an invitation-only product and will become more broadly available over time. Wired's Steven Levy admitted that at least part of Google+ looks uncannily familiar, but other components veer away from Facebook's platform, including an alternative to Facebook's news feed called the Stream, which is a "hub of personalized content." There’s also recommended topical content called Sparks, and a video-chat tool called Hangout. But the key feature is Circles, which Google touts as a way to place friends into groups to share selectively with different users. Can Google offer up something that will make users want to look beyond Facebook? "For Google's new platform to succeed in gaining social market share, it has to also entice users by letting them do new things," as PC Magazine's Jill Duffy noted.

But Google's late entry into the social networking game will mean it has a lot of catching up to do. In fact, "Google+ may already be too late," said the New York Times' Claire Cain Miller. A comScore study found that people are spending more time on Facebook -- 375 minutes per month, compared with 231 minutes on all Google sites including YouTube. "Advertisers pay close attention to those numbers," Cain Miller said, "and to the fact that people increasingly turn to Facebook and other social sites like Twitter to ask questions they used to ask Google, like a recommendation for a restaurant or doctor." ZDNet's Rich Harris agreed, adding that it will be too hard to get people to switch from well-entrenched Facebook: "The people have chosen their platform. The mainstream isn’t interested in, nor has the time, to maintain multiple networks." No matter how hard Google tries to deny that it's created a Facebook rival, whether it "wants to admit it or not … that’s exactly what Google+ is," said GigaOm's Matthew Ingram, "and the biggest hurdle for the web giant is that a collection of cool features doesn’t make a network. People do."

• Another Try by Google to Take On Facebook (NY Times)

• Socially Awkward Google Tries Biggest Facebook Challenge Yet With Google+ (paidContent)

• Why Google+ won’t hurt Facebook, but Skype will hate it (GigaOm)

• Wow, Google+ Looks EXACTLY Like Facebook (Business Insider)

• Google’s New Social Network, Google+ Takes Privacy Cues From Real World (Forbes)

• 6 Things Google+ Can Do That Facebook Can't (PC Magazine)

• Google Execs Explain Why They Launched Google+ Now, Before It’s Ready (AllThingsD)

• Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social (Wired)

• The first Google+ privacy flaw (Financial Times)

• Why Google should give up on social (ZDNet)

• Google+ has great features — now it just needs people (GigaOm)

• Can Google+ Overtake Facebook, Avoid MySpace's Fate? (PBS MediaShift)

MySpace becomes a 'casualty of changing tastes'

In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. doled out a heady $580 million for MySpace, the leader in the social networking space. News Corp.'s recent announcement that it will sell MySpace to Specific Media for a paltry $35 million shows just how quickly a social networking heavyweight can become a digital castoff, according to Ars Technica's Anders Bylund. MySpace has "cost Murdoch's empire something like $1.3 billion," he said. "Even if my assumptions are way off, the final cost can't be less than $1 billion." Bloomberg BusinessWeek's Felix Gillette blamed the downward spiral on "mismanagement, a flawed merger, and countless strategic blunders." Fortune's Dan Mitchell said MySpace was simply doomed from the start: "Predictions of MySpace's fall began circulating, even as the site was still growing. And not long after that, Facebook began to rise in popularity." News Corp. had been trying to unload itself of the faltering site since last winter, according to the New York Times' Brian Stelter. Wall Street “just wanted it done, because it’s been a real drag on growth,” analyst Michael Nathanson told the Times.

Should MySpace's painful decline be a lesson for others? Stelter called MySpace a "casualty of changing tastes," adding that it "may be a cautionary tale for social companies like Zynga and LinkedIn that are currently enjoying sky-high valuations." Gillette explained that MySpace may not be alone when it comes to a quick rise and fall among users. "Fast-moving technology, fickle user behavior, and swirling public perception are an extremely volatile mix," he said. "Add in the sense of arrogance that comes when hundreds of millions of people around the world are living on your platform, and social networks appear to be a very peculiar business -- one in which companies might serially rise, fall and disappear." BBC News' Rory Cellan-Jones agreed, saying, "The sale of MySpace is a sobering reminder that even in bubble times, social networking is not always the road to riches." But the Chicago Sun-Times' Andy Ihnatko said MySpace is in a category all its own. "The company’s inability to respond to the popularity of up-and-comers Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr quickly turned it into AskJeeves," he wrote. "The successes of those other three services point to MySpace’s failures."

• News Corporation Sells MySpace for $35 Million (NY Times | Media Decoder)

• News Corp. Sells Myspace for a Song (Wall Street Journal)

• Doing the math on News Corp.'s disastrous MySpace years (Ars Technica)

• MySpace sale offers tough lessons in social networking (BBC News)

• The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

• MySpace is dead . . . long live Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. (Chicago Sun-Times)

• MySpace's doom was in its DNA (Fortune)

• Exclusive: Myspace to Be Sold to Specific Media for $35 Million (AllThingsD)

• News Corp Dumps MySpace for Pennies on the Dollar (Wired)

• Happy Now, Sumner? MySpace to Fetch Less than $30M in Sale (Forbes)

• Charting MySpace: The End Of An Era (paidContent)

• Specific Media CEO Talks MySpace and Justin Timberlake (Ad Age)

Amazon plans ultra-targeted ad network

Imagine if a massive retailer could take the history of everything you'd bought there, and then targeted ads based on your long buying history. That's what Amazon is planning to do, which has the potential to make it a leader in "retargeted" ads. The e-commerce giant recently announced it has partnered with Triggit, a San Francisco-based startup, to create its own ad network. Amazon has sold web ads in the past on Amazon.com and other sites it owns, but in a first, it's branching out into ads on third-party sites, according to AllThingsD's Peter Kafka. Amazon will buy web advertising inventory and resell it to marketers at a premium, he said. "It can add a mark-up to its ads because it’s using the data it collects about its visitors and shoppers to target likely prospects," Kafka noted. Just three months ago, Macquarie Group's Ben Schachter predicted Amazon's entry into display advertising. Schachter told the Wall Street Journal's Stu Woo that Amazon could be a display-ad power broker on the level of Google, Yahoo and Facebook because of “the fact that Amazon has so much customer data.”

The key here, explained Benzinga's Jonathan Chen, is that "Amazon can use the vast knowledge it has about you, such as what you've looked at, bought and then charge a higher premium for the ads than other networks do," and that could give it a leg up on the competition. paidContent's David Kaplan agreed, saying the company is as "well-positioned as any of the established players in the space to take advantage of the continued growth of display and real-time bidding." However, one stumbling block could be privacy concerns of people who don't want the e-tailing giant sharing purchase information with advertisers. Kaplan notes that Amazon has always been fairly careful about privacy, and has learned from a Zappos retargeting glitch and adjusted the way ads were retargeted to stop annoying consumers. Going deeper into display ads could pay off for Amazon as the overall U.S. display market will grow at a rate of 24.5 percent this year, according to eMarketer, with Yahoo's U.S. online display business alone rising 13.6 percent. Analyst Schachter told PaidContent the margins for Amazon's display business could be in the 20% to 25% range.

• Amazon Starts an Ad Network, Powered by Your Data (AllThingsD)

• Amazon’s Retargeting Expansion Could Make It A Bigger Display Ad Player (paidContent)

• Amazon Starts Selling Ads Based on Your Browsing History (Time Techland)

• Amazon Launches Its Own Ad Network (PC Magazine)

• Did Amazon Just Go After Google? (Benzinga)

• Amazon customer data to fuel companies’ new ad network (Digital Trends)

• Facebook to surge by Yahoo as No. 1 in display ads (CNET News)

Twitter plans for bolder ads as founders depart

Twitter's founders and early leaders could never really explain how the micro-blogging service would make money, so they won't be the ones who will figure that out. Instead, co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone are now largely out of the company, and are back running the old incubator Obvious Corp. with Twitter's former product chief Jason Goldman. Another co-founder Jack Dorsey is still executive chairman at Twitter but he's also the CEO of Square, which recently raised $100 million in funding. Stone and Williams have been stepping away from Twitter as CEO Dick Costolo and his staff are pushing for more advertising revenues at the service. Some have raised eyebrows at Stone's departure, saying it's premature. "I can’t help thinking that Biz is leaving Twitter before Twitter has really proved it has a biz at all," said the Financial Times' Andrew Hill. ZDNet's Tom Foremski agreed: "If there is anything I have learned about successful startups it’s that it’s important to have a founder or someone senior in management that has the passion to lead the rest of the team. I don’t see that at Twitter."

Meanwhile, those left behind at Twitter are trying to figure out its ad business. The company is considering putting Promoted Tweets right into the stream of tweets, according to the Financial Times' Tim Bradshaw. The move to place ads in the main tweet feed could be controversial among "users who have seen only limited and unobtrusive marketing messages so far in Twitter’s five-year history," Bradshaw surmised. So will a major firestorm erupt among users? Possibly. But "Twitter’s got to start somewhere, and expand from there," said TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis. As Search Engine Watch's Rob Young noted, the company has a "surprisingly low revenue stream," and social media isn't about being unobtrusive, "as beautifully idealistic as that is. It's about establishing a revenue stream that lets Twitter pursue greater enhancements and spread in the future, while allowing advertisers to take more direct advantage of a powerful medium."

• Twitter Co-Founders Start (or Restart) a Company (NY Times | Bits)

• Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Moves On (Wall Street Journal)

• Twitter Finds Itself Without Full-Time Founders (Bloomberg)

• The afterlife: When founders leave (GigaOm)

• Twitter Co-founders Take the 'Obvious' Next Step (Time Techland)

• Biz Stone’s premature exit from Twitter (Financial Times)

• Predictable: Twitter loses another co-founder as it searches for business model... (ZDNet)

• The Last Twitter Founder Leaves, and Obvious.com Is Reborn (AllThingsD)

• Twitter plans bolder advertisements (Financial Times)

• Twitter Pushes to Monetize with Potential Ad Formats (Search Engine Watch)

• In-Stream Ads Are Coming to Twitter, Will A User Revolt Follow? (TechCrunch)

Tablets surge, but can they catch e-readers?

From People magazine to Wired, more publications have been eyeing tablets, hoping to ride the wave of consumer enthusiasm for iPads and similar devices and bring in more revenues. According to a study from the OPA done by research firm Frank N. Magid Associates, 12 percent of the U.S. online population between 8 and 64 years old uses a tablet, and of those users, nearly all (93 percent) have downloaded apps. Approximately 87 percent of tablet users access content and information, and 56 percent who watch videos watch full-length TV shows. The study also indicated that people prefer doing various online activities on a tablet versus a PC by a wide margin, such as watching videos or Internet browsing. “Seventy-nine percent of app downloaders paid for content in the last year, which provides a great opportunity for publishers to generate new revenue streams,” said OPA honcho Pam Horan.

But while more people are turning to tablets for media consumption, the devices are still playing catch-up with the booming sales of e-readers. A study from Pew Internet found that the number of U.S. adults who own an e-reader, such as the Kindle or Barnes & Noble's Nook, doubled to 12 percent in May 2011. That's up from 6 percent in November 2010. Tablets owners, on the other hand, increased by only 60 percent in the same period. PCWorld's Ed Oswald explains that severe price cuts for e-readers likely had something to do with the growth. "You can now get a reader such as Amazon's ad-supported Kindle for as little as $114 -- this time last year, prices were nearly twice that," he noted. "What will be interesting to watch over the next few months is whether this trend continues, and whether the release of the iPad 2 results in a jump in tablet ownership." Increasingly, the line between tablets and e-readers is blurring as the Color Nook runs on Android and most tablets have e-reader functionality, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld pointed out.

• OPA Releases Findings of New Tablet Study and Implications for the Online Advertising Industry (OPA Release)

• Tablets Beat PCs In Media Consumption (MediaPost)

• Tablet Users to Nearly Double by Early Next Year, According to Study (AdAge)

• e-Reader ownership surges since last November; tablet ownership grows more slowly (Pew Internet)

• Pew: Adoption of E-Readers Doubles in 6 Months, Bigger Than Tablets (TechCrunch)

• E-Readers More Popular Than Tablets: Because They're Cheaper (PCWorld)

• Pew: E-readers outpacing tablets (CNET News)

Smartphones, tablets outpace computers on Wi-Fi

Goodbye laptops, hello mobile devices! When it comes to accessing the Internet on Wi-Fi networks, more people are using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, increasingly overshadowing desktops and laptops. Nearly 60 percent of Americans now access the web via Wi-Fi through mobile phones (Apple's iOS and Google's Android), compared with 33 percent last year, according to a new report from Meraki. The increase comes as more people are upgrading to smartphones, according to TheStreet's Olivia Oran, "which they are increasingly using to access data-heavy, media-rich programs." iPhones and iPads make up the largest amount of Wi-Fi usage, but Android devices are catching up from its meager 1 percent in 2010, Meraki said.

A recent comScore survey laid out just how much more iPhones and iPads are using Wi-Fi than their Android rivals. iPhone users apparently are consuming nearly half of their information using Wi-Fi -- 47.5 percent of iPhone data traffic in the U.S. happened over Wi-Fi, compared with 21.7 percent for Android handsets, comScore found. That difference was even more notable with iPads versus Android tablets, with 91.9 percent of iPad data traffic occurring via Wi-Fi, compared with 65.2 percent for Android tablets. As AllThingsD's John Paczkowski put it, "People who own iOS devices tend to use Wi-Fi a hell of a lot more than Android users do." What's the reasoning behind that? "The iPad is by far the dominant tablet," he said. And for smartphones, it could be that iPhones are more proactive in pushing people onto Wi-Fi connections, he surmised.

• Mobile devices overtake computers on Wi-Fi networks (GigaOm)

• For Wi-Fi, PCs and Macs are Now a Minority (PC World)

• Wifi, Smartphone Usage Swelling (TheStreet.com)

• Apple, Android Owners Diverge on Wi-Fi Usage — But Why? (AllThingsD)

• 47% of the devices on Burger King's Wi-Fi networks run iOS (Fortune)

Is Tumblr the new Facebook or the new MySpace? (GigaOm)
Will Tumblr ever figure out how to make money from its massive user base? Other social networks have grown just as large and still failed

What to Expect When You’re Expecting a Zynga IPO (Insider Selling, Natch!) (AllThingsD)
Exactly how fecund is FarmVille? Find out what the yield will be from the online gaming phenom Zynga

RockMelt Raises $30M More for Social Browser. But Could It Be More Than Social? (AllThingsD)
It's a considerable amount for a company with just hundreds of thousands of users and gigantic and fast-innovating competitors

Yahoo Chief Executive Faces Unhappy Shareholders (NY Times | Bits)
The company's shareholder meeting turns contentious when an investor makes a scathing attack on Yahoo’s direction and calls for Carol Bartz to be replaced

Hulu's Owners Weigh Cons of a Possible Sale of the Site (Wall Street Journal)
The online video pioneer plans to meet with a range of potential buyers in coming weeks

FTC, Senate rachet up Google antitrust probes (CNET News)
The FTC is planning to serve the Net giant with civil subpoenas as part of an examination of market power in the company's search advertising business

If journalists are using social media to any extent (which they should be), then they are in the process of becoming a brand whether they like it or not.

Matthew Ingram, GigaOm

Note to media: We are all brands now, so get used to it (GigaOm)

The OPA Intelligence Report is a bi-weekly email summarizing and commenting on important news and research for the online publishing industry. As always, feedback is welcome at feedback@online-publishers.org.