In June, Apple’s new ‘iAd’ unit will begin serving ads within iPhone apps. iAd will compete with Google’s AdMob, paralleling Google Android’s competition with the iPhone, as the two companies contend to shape how people will use the mobile internet

The iPhone’s success is underpinned by apps, which draw in both consumers and publishers in a virtuous circle, but undercut Google’s search model. With iAd, Apple seeks to make sure iPhone apps remain the most profitable place for publishers

Steve Jobs has suggested a multi-billion dollar revenue potential – the true figure could be a tenth of that, but the real value of iAd will be in defending and supporting the iPhone

The iPad is a beautiful device that offers new ways to consume and interact with content. It takes ideas that have been discussed for decades and turns them into a (fairly) practical consumer product

The iPad poses huge challenges for print publishers, since it
has the potential both to unlock the benefits of digital for them, but also to remove
the last remaining advantages of their physical products

However, the iPad costs at least $500 and is hard to see as essential
for anyone. While there is real money to be made here, it will take a long time
to match the scale that comes from 10m people buying a newspaper every day in the
UK

France’s altnet Iliad again delivered stronger than expected profit and cash flow growth in 2009 on the back of continued strong results at the Free brand and a positive contribution from the Alice brand

These results demonstrate the continued pull of Free for the triple play customer despite intensifying competition, including from cable, making the low cost, low churn business model sustainable

By 2012, we expect fixed line profitability to increase and deliver enough cash flow to finance the launch of the Free Mobile project

Despite the recession, in 2009 the French broadband market added 1.8 million connections to reach 19.6 million, but we expect the deceleration in growth to persist in 2010

Orange’s leading position weakened further in Q4 2009, despite retail price cuts, and we expect a further decline in market share in 2010, impacting FT’s top-line

SFR was the star performer of 2009, although its Ebitda margin has improved slightly. Iliad remains the ‘best in class’ in terms of profitability, but must address high churn at Alice. Bouygues’ fixed line début was an impressive splash – at a cost

Mobile content is moving to the centre of strategies for online
media. At MWC, the world’s biggest mobile conference, Google announced it now develops
all products ‘mobile first’ and Facebook reported a quarter of its 400m users access
the service through mobile

Three years after the iPhone 
launched, the handset industry is catching up, adding decent user interfaces
and mobile apps to colour touch screens and taking easy access to mobile content
beyond the iPhone

Beyond the self-selecting early adopter iPhone base, we found
real evidence of companies already successfully providing mobile content to much
wider segments of the population

Apple’s hardware-driven strategy for music recently passed two major milestones, with 10 billion paid track downloads and 250 million iPods sold

In 2009, Apple ‘returned’ to record labels and publishers roughly $1.9 billion, while generating gross profits in the region of $3.2 billion from the sale of iPods and music

Of wider significance to Apple is the music strategy’s contribution to building a mass market brand and expanding its customer base, helping to drive adoption of their computers and, more recently, the iPhone

Large parts of print media face existential problems from the structural decline of consumption and core advertising businesses, and the growth of an internet model of free content and large-scale disaggregation

Employment trends in US media underline the depth of the decline in sales of print media (no similar data is available for the UK), across newspapers, periodicals and books

Publishers are being forced to search for business models that align with new patterns of consumer behaviour –and which make money