Bloggasm

What is amazing is where Facebook’s new members are based. The social network has tapped the United States and is focusing most of its efforts on growing overseas. A lot of Facebook’s growth over the past month has been in Brazil and India, two huge countries where Orkut, another social network, dominates. Orkut has more than 100 million active users, but nearly half of those are in Brazil, with another 40 percent in India. Only about two percent of the service’s users are based in the United States, which is why you may not have heard about it. What you have heard about, though, is Orkut’s parent company, Google, which should see Facebook’s move into its territory as a direct challenge.

With Orkut’s Network Breached, Facebook Nears 700 Million Users

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.

The overall numbers for 2010 were impressive, with total online ad revenues reaching $26 billion. Search made up 46 percent of that total in 2010, followed by display ads at 38 percent. But display advertising grew twice as fast as search (24 percent growth versus 12 percent), and, today, Karsten Weide of IDC says, display advertising continues to grow faster than search advertising…

…Also of note: Google overtook Yahoo as the leader in display advertising, with 14.7 percent of the market compared to Yahoo’s 12.3 percent share. Microsoft declined to 6.5 percent, while Facebook rose to 8.8 percent, according to Weide.

Online Advertising Revenues Up 23 Percent Since Q1 2010, Reach $7.3 Billion

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.

When you look at it that way, you begin to realize that perhaps the only real issue is that one segment of the industry is becoming obsolete. But the other parts of the industry are more than making up for it — indeed, the larger music industry has grown from $1.26 billion to over $1.4 billion. So why are we wasting so much time around the globe trying to pass laws to buck up that one obsolete segment? And why do politicians and the press buy this false story that the industry is in trouble?

Oh Look, The Overall Music Industry In Canada Has Been Growing As Well…

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.

Graph via Denton

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.

Full-time, human hosting of a brand’s main Twitter account is unquestionably a better approach, said Zach Seward, the main voice behind The Wall Street Journal’s @WSJ account.

The @WSJ account has been run by people since January 2010, Seward said. “The metrics went up considerably and almost immediately after switching from automated to personal. We’ve seen the same effect with several other accounts.”

Why The New York Times replaced its Twitter ‘cyborg’ with people this week

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.

The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.

People who sign in with Facebook at The Huffington Post view 22% more pages and spend 8 minutes longer than the average reader.

Users coming to the NHL.com from Facebook spend 85% more time, read 90% more articles and watch 85% more videos than a non-connected user.

ABCNews.com, Washington Post and The Huffington Post are said to have more than doubled their referral traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins.

By The Numbers: How Facebook Says Likes & Social Plugins Help Websites

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.

At Media Matters’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., scores of headphone-wearing staffers spend their days (and nights) staring into their television screens and computer monitors, waiting for the latest bits of “conservative misinformation” to emerge from the Fox News Channel and other corners of the right-wing media landscape, all of which are saved on “the big TiVo”—270 terabytes’ worth of hard drive that store over 300,000 hours of TV shows—so that the offending clips can be uploaded to Media Matters’ website. Are you in need of a compendium of the “50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said on Fox News”? Fear not, Media Matters’ site has one.

You can follow me on Twitter or go ahead and hire me.