Zynga Hooks Yahoo
Last week Facebook and Zynga resolved their differences and signed a five year deal to expand their partnership. This week, Zynga made sure it won’t be solely dependent on Facebook’s audience to power its social games.
Facebook Passes 500million Users
In February, Facebook notched more than 400m active users. According to comScore data reported by the WSJ, the social network hit half a billion in April.
According to ComScore, worldwide Facebook had 519m visitors in April. That staggering achievement was sufficient to make the social network the fourth largest web property in the world. Google, at 921m was the largest followed by Microsoft at 728m and Yahoo at 588m.
Facebook and Zynga Mend the Fence on Farmville
In recent days, multiple reports claimed wildly popular social gamer Zynga was locked in a high stakes game of chicken with Facebook over the social network’s planned virtual currency, Facebook Credits. Even with the two companies’ obvious needs for each other – seven of Facebook’s ten most popular games in April came from Zynga’s portfolio and the majority of Zynga’s revenue sources from Facebook derived users – the chatter was of a possible divorce.
Facebook was reportedly trying to lock Zynga into a long term revenue sharing deal. Possibly exclusivity. Zynga, some reports claimed, was resistant and threatening to bolt, maybe even start a social game network of its own.
The fight’s over now. Click to Read More
Yahoo Outlook Improves through 3rd Quarter
Every company that struggles inevitably reaches a stage in its life when managers introspectively ask: what kind of company are we? Yahoo in the Carol Bartz era decided it’s a media company. The company wants to be at the center of people’s online lives.
For the last two quarters Yahoo has trimmed costs and refocused to try and deliver that experience. The end is not yet within reach, but an apparently stabilizing ad market seems to be helping the cause.
Tuesday, Yahoo reported third quarter earnings up more than three fold over the same period last year. On revenue of $1.58b (down 12% year over year), Yahoo earned $186.1m or 13 cents a share.
The third consecutive double digit revenue decline was expected. The extent of earnings growth wasn’t.
Apple Runs Away with Another Quarter. Hints of New Product?
There comes a point when calling each successive performance a record starts to get a little ridiculous. Apple crossed that threshold a long time ago but the fiscal rocket ship flying out of Cupertino isn’t showing any signs of slowing down either. Even in spite of lofty expectations and market acceptance of Apple’s generally conservative guidance, Apple yet again flew by the benchmarks laid down to measure its performance.
Monday, Apple’s reported revenue for the September quarter up 25% year over year to $9.87b (the company’s second best total on record). Profits surged 47%.
For the fourth quarter, Apple earned $1.67b, or $1.82 a share, compared to $1.14 billion, or $1.26 a share, in the same period a year ago. Click to Read More
By The Numbers: Web Video Demand Accelerated in August
Web enabled TV’s are becoming more common and eventually, they or some comparable TV to Internet bridge technology, will be the norm. In the interim, though, consumers don’t seem to have any hesitation when it comes to satisfying their video cravings through today’s distribution platforms.
On September 28th, comScore Video Metrix released its measurements (release) detailing August viewing habits.
For the month, 161m US internet users watched online video. Up from 158m viewers in July, the draw set the current (and sure to be broken) record for the all time high.
App Store Passes 2 Billion Mark
When you talk about the magnitude of a business, there’s scale and then there’s SCALE. Apple unequivocally reached the second plateau with its App Store Monday.
In a short press release, the company announced customers have downloaded more than 2 billion applications since the store’s debut. That’s a jump of 500 million downloads since July, or an even billion since April.
Steve Jobs has to be happy in Cupertino.
To add some color and put 2 billion downloads in context, we’ve hit the spreadsheets. Crunching the numbers:
• Average Downloads Per Day – The App Store has delivered approximately 4.5m downloads per day since its debut in July 2008. Since mid July of this year, when Apple triumphantly announced it had delivered 1.5 billion downloads, the rate’s jumped to somewhere near 6.5m per day. (Ed. Note: averages are approximate due to inexact information about the days on which Apple crossed each download milestone. See table).
• Available Titles – Back in March, the App store had about 30k applications to offer. Since July, the number of available titles has jumped from 65,000 to 85,000 and the number of developers has advanced from 100,000 to 125,000.
• Free or Paid – According to an App Store product survey maintained by 148Apps, the App Store had 83,618 titles available for download in the U.S. on September 28th (just under Apple’s report of 85k titles). Of these 83.6k downloads, approximately 23%, or 19,514 titles were free.
