Wednesday October 15, 2014

• Pinterest has engagement; wants to monetize with its 'Promoted Pins' ad format. The site - that lets users create bulletin boards based on themes like sports, travel or food - has 2 formidable strengths that justify its $5B valuation: 75 percent of its usage is mobile and it has a largely female demographic. It has partnered with a few big brands—including Target, Unilever and Procter & Gamble—to work with Pinterest on its "Promoted Pins" advertising format. Link here

• Facebook monetizes spectacularly well, but worries about engagement: a pretty dramatic new report out from Piper Jaffray — an investment bank with a sizable research arm — rules that the kids are over Facebook once and for all, having fled Mark Zuckerberg’s parent-flooded shores for the more forgiving embraces of Twitter and Instagram. Between fall 2014 and spring 2014, when Piper Jaffray last conducted this survey, Facebook use among teenagers aged 13 to 19 plummeted from 72 percent to 45 percent. In other words, less than half of the teenagers surveyed said “yes” when asked if they use Facebook. Link here

• NetFlix: TV News :: Tomorrow:Yesterday: ~50% of millenials in the US are Netflix subscribers, while median viewers of TV news are ~60 years old. A Comscore survey shows Netflix's dominance: ~50% of American millenials subscribe to Netflix;  19% percent to Hulu, and 9% to Amazon Prime. Among all surveyed users (not just millenials) 32% subscribed to Netflix. In the US, TV news channels have median viewer age of ~60. Netflix demographics here; TV demographics here.