Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

More bad news for the newspaper industry: 2007 saw the biggest decline yet in advertising revenues for the nation’s top newspapers. The year saw an 8% drop in revenues, and 2008 is forecast to be even worse.

The Internet, however, saw a gain in ad revenue of 33%, which roughly correlates to the lost revenue in other sectors. Print’s loss is the web’s gain.

To make matters worse for newspapers, a very poor housing market in states like Florida and California are leading to big hits in classified ad revenues. Additionally, with free classified services like Craigslist increasing in popularity, one of the biggest money-spinners for newspapers is quickly going south. Hearst estimates The San Francisco Chronicle is losing $1 million a day at this point.
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While Facebook has overtaken MySpace as the world’s number one social networking site by widening their global reach, other social networks have more significant regional strangleholds that will be hard to crack. For example, Orkut is weak in much of the world but dominant in Brazil.

The most glaring example of this regional favoritism my be in Asia, where Friendster remains the top dog and isn’t abdicating its advantage anytime soon. With many complaints about the site having been addressed, and the rapidly emerging connectivity of Asia’s nearly 4 billion residents, Friendster is a much ignored behemoth in social networking.

According to comScore, Friendster has increased its monthly unique visitors from 23 million in April last year to around 40 million this year, with the vast majority of new visitors coming from the Asia-Pacific region. Friendster doubled Facebook and MySpace in April for unique hits in Asia, and tripled Hi5 and Orkut.
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YouTube is now allowing certain users to submit far longer videos than the old ten-minute maximum that has been the case for the site since its inception. Videos of up to 1GB are now going to be shown on YouTube, which would allow for clips that approach an hour and a half in duration.

Concurrently with this announcement, YouTube is courting directors at the Los Angeles Film Festival, attempting to get young and up-and-coming directors to put their content on the site.
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Dan Lyons, also known as “Fake Steve Jobs,” has signed up with Newsweek, where he will take his much heralded alter-ego to the mainstream press.

Lyons, who has been the tech editor for Forbes Magazine for the last ten years, will start with Newsweek on August 1. “We’re hoping he’ll develop some new blogs, maybe new sites. He’s clearly shown an amazing kind of creativity,” said Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham. “It’s part of a broader strategy of hiring a voice that [one] can’t get anywhere else.”
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It was bound to happen at some point, but MySpace has been caught by Facebook in the number of worldwide unique monthly visitors.

While Facebook’s push for a wider foreign audience is having some success (I even see them advertising at English Premier League matches), they are still lagging behind in the United States by a significant margin and aren’t doing much at this point to chip away at it. MySpace’s unique visitors double Facebook’s in the US, and that number hasn’t changed much over the last year.
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