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The company now boasts 175 million registered users. According to Pandora: Listener hours for Pandora during the month of December 2012 were 1.39 billion, an increase of 54% from 906 million during the same period last year. Share of total U.S. radio listening for Pandora in December 2012 was 7.19%, an increase from 4.71% at the same time last year. Active listeners were 67.1 million at the end of December 2012, an increase of 41% from 47.6 million during the same time period last year.

"While at least Life-magazine-killer TV has served as a platform for the creation of some great artworks (HBO's "The Wire," created by newspaperman-turned-TV-auteur David Simon, comes to mind) and inspired the creation of new art forms (see the upcoming Smithsonian retrospective of the work of "father of video art" Nam June Paik), it's hard to imagine what of lasting value hot web-native media brands like Gawker and BuzzFeed are contributing to visual culture and art history. Which brings me to an email I got last Wednesday from Gawker promoting its "top story" of Dec. 5., titled "The 13 Most Powerful Images of Naked Celebrities of 2012," which quickly racked up more than a million page views. It was a sequel to a Gawker post from the previous day titled "The 19 Most Powerful Images of 2012," which was mostly a shameless, edited-down rip-off of a BuzzFeed post titled "The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2012," consisting of intense wire-service photojournalism from Reuters, the AP, Getty and others, which derive most of their support from old-school print-centric publications around the world. Gawker's excuse for its act of, uh, curation: "Who has time to scroll through 45 pictures?""

Nielsen 2012 Social Media Report

 trends marketers need to keep an eye on in 2012.

"According to the recent BIA/Kelsey forecast, U.S. social media ad revenues will reach $9.2 billion in 2016, up from $4.6 billion in 2012, representing a compound annual growth rate of 19.2 percent. According to the U.S. Local Media Forecast, the local segment of U.S. social media advertising revenues will grow from $1.1 billion in 2012 to $3 billion in 2016 (CAGR: 28 percent)."

Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Internet Trends of 2012

Activated by gestures, touches and movements, visitors can be trigger different sounds such as "athletes' heartbeats, shoes squeaking, arrows hitting a target, etc" which will then be synced up to remix Mark Ronson's "Anywhere in the World." But for what purpose is Coca-Cola doing this? The company's official statement: The visionary pavilion has been inspired by Coca-Cola's global campaign for London 2012 - Move to the BeatTM - that aims to connect young people to the Games by bringing together their passions for music and sport. The pavilion forms part of Coca-Cola's Future Flames campaign for London 2012, which aims to recognise and reward the best of the nation's youth and shine a spotlight on emerging talent to inspire other young people to pursue their passions.

Among the US marketers surveyed: Viral online video (e.g., use of YouTube) has registered the sharpest increase of all media platforms: 80% are using the channel in 2012, compared with 64% one year earlier. Social media use has remained nearly flat, up slightly to 90% in 2012, from 89% in 2011. Mobile marketing use is also holding steady, now at 74%, compared with 75% in 2011.

Called Samsung London 2012 Predictor, this app makes it fun to predict winners of events by letting you go up against your friends on Facebook.

From NM Incite: Social media discussion about Black Friday peaked in 2012, accounting for 2.6% of online buzz, up 15% from 2011. Cyber Monday buzz almost doubled relative to 2012, accounting for 1.4% of online buzz. The overwhelming majority of social media conversation about Black Friday and Cyber Monday was driven by consumers sharing deals and talking about deals. 10% of Black Friday conversation, specifically, was negative, driven largely by consumer complaints about crowds, violence and lackluster sales. The top shared link within Black Friday buzz was the Amazon Black Friday Deals page.

"SundaySky's 2012 "State of Video in E-Commerce" report compiles data from internal and external studies to uncover the latest trends in online video marketing. SundaySky found that a short-form video advertisement without personalization had a 50 percent consumer completion rate. However, according to the study, a slightly longer long-form video advertisement with added consumer personalization will garner 2.5 times longer viewing times. "2012 will be remembered for the first online Olympics and the first digital election, perhaps not the year of personally relevant video, but we did learn that personalization is the key to increasing video engagement," said SundaySky VP of Marketing Kelly Ford in a blog post."

State of Online Video 2012 from Sunday Sky

ZenithOptimedia predicted that total global spending will grow 4.8% in 2012, reaching $489 billion by year-end. Its December forecast had been for 4.7% growth for 2012. At the time, the firm revised global forecasts down from an earlier version in 2011.

Free-to-play games are taking off in mobile. In those games, users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods, such as the virtual dresses that CrowdStar sells in its It Girl game on Facebook. In social games on networks such as Facebook, virtual goods revenue is expected to be $2.9 billion in 2012. That means that mobile is catching up at a pretty good clip and it explains why so many startups are diving into mobile games.

The over-the-air update starts this week on Google-TV enabled Sony TV and Blu-Ray players, then moves to the Logitech Revue set-top box. But Google will miss the all-important holiday season when it comes to new hardware, instead waiting for 2012. The company says it has deals in place for new devices at "new pricepoints." SEE ALSO: Dialing For YouTube Dollars: W

"Almost as many Americans (236.5 million) watched TV on their phones during the second quarter of 2012, as watched it on a conventional TV set (283.3 million), albeit for much shorter durations. While the average American spends nearly 145 hours per month watching TV on a traditional TV, Nielsen didn't even report the average time they spend watching on their phones. But mobile subscribers watching video on their phones -- a smaller sub-segment of about 37 million Americans -- spend an average of five hours and 20 minutes watching TV on their phones each month, an increase of 31 minutes over the second quarter of 2011."

"In terms of m-commerce, the proportion of sales through mobile devices (including tablets) reached 10.7% -- exceeding 10% for the first time in 2012 -- up from 9.9% in September. That figure is also more than double the share of sales from mobile in the year-earlier period. Excluding tablets, about 4% of sales in October came through handsets."