With the Daily, Rupert Murdoch has launched an iPad-only mass market ‘newspaper’ with a fifth of the journalists and just 15% of the revenue per reader of a conventional popular newspaper. Whether it succeeds or not, this sort of radicalism may be essential if the spirit of newspapers is to survive
The Daily is using every tool Apple and the social web can give it to drive adoption, but for all the video and twitter feeds it remains at heart a print product on a tablet. The first truly native iPad news voice has yet to come
The Daily and its peers are discovering that a platform owner such as Apple has power the print unions never dreamed of, with the payment models they want conflicting with bigger strategic objectives at technology companies ten times their size
French ISPs are about to enter a disruptive four month window of penalty-free broadband subscriber churn, triggered by the VAT rise on IPTV
SFR has followed Iliad’s Free by offering unmetered fixed-to-mobile calls at the risk of ARPU decline
We expect Free’s market share to stabilise, whilst those of SFR and Bouygues should rise to the detriment of Orange
Smartphones are rapidly moving to become a majority of UK mobile handset sales, driving a surge in mobile internet use. Even if usage per user (currently growing) flattens out, we forecast mobile internet usage to grow from 1.8bn hours in 2010 to 7bn in 2015: 28% of total online time
This should drive the long promised growth in mobile advertising and we project UK spend, including search and display, will rise to £420 million by 2015, equivalent to 10% of PC internet search/display advertising
We expect the majority of this usage to be incremental to PC-based consumption, as users find new things to do and buy on the mobile web, driving the overall online advertising market to further growth
By 2015 we expect internet-centric smartphone penetration in the UK to reach 75% and mobile internet use to reach 28% of total time spent online. The dynamics and ecosystems of the mobile internet, and in particular the app model, will become a significant part of overall digital strategies
First seen as an interim reaction to slow networks and small screens, mobile apps have become a major new route to market for publishers and ecommerce providers, and are likely to spread to new areas
However, Apple is likely to continue to lose share in the internet-centric smartphone market, and publishers will face a far messier, fragmented world of competing platforms, app stores and payment systems