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According to a new report from consumer researcher Nielsen, Net advertising saw the biggest increase among all ad spending worldwide in the first quarter, with a 12.1 percent increase compared to a year ago at the same time.

The report, called the Global Adview Pulse, also found increases in all other media, except magazines. Radio was second with a 7.9 percent increase, followed by outdoor advertising with 6.4 percent, ads in cinemas at 4.1 percent, newspapers at 3.1 percent, and 2.8 percent for TV. Magazines dropped 1.4 percent in ad spending.

Globally, advertising was up 3.1 percent in the first quarter year-over-year to US$ 128 billion, following a strong finish last year.

To date, there are still more installed PCs in the world than there are smartphones or tablets. Next year, that's likely to change.  According to projections from mobile analyst Ben Evans, the number of smartphones in use around the world will pass that of PCs for the first time next year. According to a chart from Evans, the estimate of installed PCs in the world is a little north of 1.6 billion. The global install base of smartphones is near 1.3 billion and growing at a much faster clip than PCs. If you add tablets into the equation (with a tick more than 200 million installed across the world) then mobile devices are almost on par with PCs already. Evans predicts that the total number of installed smartphones in the world will eclipse PCs in 2014 sometime in the second quarter.

IDC predicts that 314.2 million PCs (desktop and laptop/notebook) will be shipped in 2013, down from 349.4 in 2012. That is a 10.1% shortfall year-over-year, the biggest single year drop in PC history.  On the other end, smartphones are predicted to eclipse one billion shipments this year. IDC shows smartphone shipment growth of 39.3% year-over-year with little sign of slowing down.

IDC predicts that 1.7 billion smartphones will ship in 2017, versus estimated PC shipments of 305.1 million. Shipments, of course, don't equal sales of actual devices to consumers. It is also important to note that even sales do not mean an addition to the installed base, as many as older models are replaced by newer ones. In aggregate, the install base rises over time—just not at the rate of shipments or sales. 

Only 34% of websites use a serif typeface for body copy.

Two thirds of the websites we surveyed used sans-serif fonts for body copy.

the most popular font sizes ranged from 18 to 29 pixels, with 18 to 20 pixels and 24 to 26 pixels being the most popular choices.

paid social media advertising will increase from $4.6 billion this year to $9.2 billion in 2016

"native" ads running on social media sites—contextual promotions that are baked into sites in a customized fashion—will total $1.53 billion this year while growing to $3.85 billion in 2016

During that time, BIA/Kelsey prognosticates, social display ads will grow slightly slower, lifting from $3 billion to $5.4 billion. It's the first time the 25-year-old company has broken out social native versus social display spend.

The social network has now passed 1.23 billion monthly active users. Of those, daily active users passed 757 million on average during December 2013, and the number of monthly active mobile users hit 945 million

Daily active users (DAUs) were 757 million on average for December 2013, an increase of 22% year-over-year. Mobile DAUs were 556 million on average for December 2013, an increase of 49% year-over-year. Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.23 billion as of December 31, 2013, an increase of 16% year-over-year. Mobile MAUs were 945 million as of December 31, 2013, an increase of 39% year-over-year.

76.83 percent of Facebook’s total monthly user base now accesses the service from a mobile device.

This year, for the first time ever, the amount of time UK consumers spend with digital media (desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones) will surpass the amount of time spent viewing television

This year, for the first time ever, the amount of time UK consumers spend with digital media (desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones) will surpass the amount of time spent viewing television

This year, for the first time ever, the amount of time UK consumers spend with digital media (desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones) will surpass the amount of time spent viewing television,

Market-research outfit eMarketer projected that Facebook will account for 21.7 percent of the global mobile ad market in 2014, up from 17.5 percent in 2013 and just 5.4 percent in 2012. Google still commands the lion’s share of the sector, with eMarketer pegging it for a 46.8 percent share in 2014, and attributing its drop from nearly 50 percent in 2013 to the social network’s growth. eMarketer also predicted a modest gain for Twitter, to 2.6 percent in 2014, from 2.4 percent in 2013 and 1.5 percent in 2012. For the sector as a whole, eMarketer projected that mobile advertising will jump 75.1 percent in 2014, to $31.45 billion, accounting for nearly one-quarter of total worldwide digital ad spending.

In 2012, only 11 percent of Facebook’s net ad revenues worldwide came from mobile, and last year, that figure jumped to 45.1 percent. In 2014, eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 63.4 percent of Facebook’s net digital ad revenues. Mobile accounted for 23.1 percent of Google’s net ad revenues worldwide in 2013, and eMarketer estimates this share will increase to 33.8 percent this year.

If people are seeing stories from these papers on Google+, they either don't like them or they aren't bothering to tell Google. The New York Times, with over 360,000 followers, receives an average of 26,665 +1s per week. That's fewer than one +1d article a week for every 10 followers. The Times only posts to Google+ a few times per week, and it's not always posting links to NYTimes.com pages. But few of its Google+ posts have more than 50 +1s, and they theoretically reach 360,000 people.

What's even weirder is that The Washington Post, with 5% of the followers The New York Times has, gets more +1s than any other newspaper. With 33,206 +1s per week on average, the Post is the only major U.S. paper (with more than 200 followers) that gets a significant multiple of weekly +1s per follower. It gets 1.7 +1s per person encircling it, and the rest of the leaders get a small fraction of their follower count.

But so does WSJ.com, the #2 U.S newspaper in terms of Google+ followers, and its +1s are still a small fraction of its number of followers. All these papers have about the same level of activity on their Google+ pages, and their +1 activity on those posts is about the same.

Facebook does provide good reach and its audience of loyal fans is good for market research and word-of-mouth advocacy.

If there's an overall caution, it's against, in the words of Ms. Nelson-Field, "putting a disproportionate amount of effort into engagement and strategies to get people to talk about a brand, when you should be spending more time getting more light buyers."

the percentage of People Talking About to overall fans to be 1.3%. If you subtract new likes, which only requires a click and in the minds of the researchers are akin to TV ratings, and isolate for more engaged forms of interaction, you're left within an even smaller number: 0.45%. That means less than half a percent of people who identify themselves as like a brand actually bother to create any content around it.

Study after study after study shows that more people are using the internet to consume video. In April 2012, ComScore reported that the average viewer watched nearly 22 hours of video in a single month. Most likely, those 22 hours were broken into many short-form videos, each being watched for just a few minutes at a time. The market is moving more toward catering to the Facebook generation's attention span--quick videos that are aimed to inspire, provoke, or excite. Likewise, the viewing experience on tablets devices such as the iPad make short-form content even more enjoyable.

TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.”

According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.

Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.

Overall desktop ad spending set to decline in 2014 while mobile grows 83.0% Desktop search in the US is poised for a significant decline this year as paid clicks on Google shift toward mobile devices, according to new figures from eMarketer. US mobile search ad spending grew 120.8% in 2013, contributing to an overall gain of 122.0% for all mobile ads. Meanwhile, overall desktop ad spending increased just 2.3% last year, according to eMarketer.

desktop search ad spending will drop $1.4 billion this year, a decrease of 9.4% from 2013, while mobile search will increase 82.3% year over year. Mobile search will total $9.02 billion, compared with $13.57 billion for desktop search. Overall, US spending on advertising served to desktops and laptops will decline 2.4% in 2014 to $32.39 billion, down from $33.18 billion in 2013. Google will have a notable influence on the overall shift from desktop to mobile search spending. In 2013, 76.4% of the company’s search ad revenues came from desktop. However, that share will fall to 66.3% in 2014 due to a $770 million decrease in desktop search ad revenues year over year, eMarketer estimates. At the same time, the company’s mobile search revenues will increase $1.76 billion, totaling approximately one-third of Google’s total search revenues.

Up from 19.4% in 2013, mobile search will comprise an estimated 26.7% of the company’s total ad revenues this year. Desktop search declined to 63.0% of Google’s ad revenues in 2013, having already fallen from 72.7% in 2012.

Alisa Leonard, director of strategy and planning at iCrossing, expressed doubt that people on Google Contacts were as influential as Facebook friends. “In Facebook, my social graph is highly qualified and much more intimate,” she says. “On Google, my contacts may be less intimate and less qualified.”

Digg sent 1.4 million referrals to publishers in February 2013, compared with 75,000 referrals in February 2012.

While Digg remains behind both StumbleUpon and Fark, which sent between 2 and 3 million referrals to publishers in February, it's growing while these platforms are not. And to put the referral numbers in additional context, Digg is now on par with Tumblr, a platform with more than 100 million users, in terms of referral traffic. Tumblr sent 1.3 million referrals to network publishers in February.

Value Exchange Is the content valuable to the end user in some way? Entertainment has value, but so does utility. In either case, you need to understand what your audience values rather than just assuming they have an innate fascination in your brand talking about itself.

People want news they can share around the vending machine at work or via their Twitter handle.

When we see others doing something, we are often more apt to make that same choice ourselves.

According to the ITU's "facts and figures" publication, mobile penetration rates (pdf) are now about equal to the global population - including an 89% penetration rate in "developing countries," which currently have the highest mobile growth rates.

nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone - or will have one soon enough.

"mobile broadband" subscriptions have grown from 278 million in 2007 - when the iPhone was first introduced - to 2.1 billion in 2013 - an annual growth rate of 40%.