Marketing Pilgrim

From the “Did You Know?” category comes the statistic claimed by a report from Sysomos that says that 95% of the current Twitter accounts were created after January of 2009. So for you folks who had your claim before that time you were officially ‘way ahead of the curve’ to one degree or another. Here is chart that shows this growth. (Thanks to PCMag for bringing this to our attention).

Of course, I always want to know just how many of these accounts are placeholders to protect from Twitter handle squatters or names of small businesses who are still thinking about getting involved but that’s for another time.

The Sysomos report also showed some interesting charts relating to a variety of element in Twitter that are being utilized much more today.

It never feels good to write about this kind of thing around the new year but if there is one thing about writing about business one learns that it can be heartless at times.

Myspace, the perpetually troubled former social networking high flyer, is reportedly looking into the possibility of laying off up to to 50% of its existing staff of 1,000 employees. Liz Gannes from the NetworkEffect at All Things Digital reports:

While the decision of what cuts to make to its employee base have not been made yet, nearly the entire Myspace staff was given the last week of December off from work to save money.

Sources stressed that management was still working out the details of more drastic cost-cutting measures that owner News Corp. has been wanting from Myspace, as its revenues and traffic growth have declined.

If you are working today then, let’s be honest, you’re not really working. Right?

It’s the day before New Year’s Eve and your mind has already checked-out. So, rather than an in-depth, verbose post about how internet users are sharing online content, how about some eye-candy from AddThis instead?

(via)

Just how close Google was to handing over $6 billion for Groupon, no one can say for sure. What we do know is that Groupon has converted that interest (or perception of such) into a cool $500 million in venture capital funding!

According to an SEC filing (reported by Fortune.com), Groupon has found $500M of the $950M it is hoping to raise. What’s the purpose of such funds? Well, a good chunk of it will go towards a cashout for shareholders…

One purpose of Groupon’s massive new round is to provide liquidity for existing shareholders, including those who may have been ticked off that the company spurned Google. Fortune has learned that all Groupon shareholders recently received a letter offering to buy back up to 15% of current stock holdings, and the SEC filing indicates that $345 million of the $500 million will be used to cash out insiders (both investors and management).

Google is committed to its local Internet marketing efforts to lengths like we have not seen the search giant go to in a while. Searching for new revenue streams will do that.

What have they done recently?

-Moved Marissa Mayer to oversee the local search and advertising efforts

-Changed the face of their search results to focus on Google Place Pages

-Pissed off just about every site that has been feeding at the Google local search trough for a long time

When I first saw this report I was pretty surprised. By the title alone I was thinking about content in a content marketing manner. Either I was thinking about paid content in a far too narrow manner (paid subscriptions for newspapers etc etc) or Pew is looking at it too broadly. I think it’s a little of both.

In the overview the Pew survey says

Music, software, and apps are the most popular content that internet users have paid to access or download, although the range of paid online content is quite varied and widespread.