Part 1
The numbers (from Comscore) in the article "Modeling The Real Market Value Of Social Networks" suggest some opportunities.
A comment on the article pointed out Sites such as Xing.com are excluded as they might have dead accounts. This makes sense. I have over 20 social network accounts, but I only use four of them frequently. Unless a user report how many accounts he/she created across the various social networks (80 big ones), there is no way to count unique persons behind the various account. For the moment consider these numbers are accurate.
What are some important questions regarding Ad Spending?
Some follow:
1. What markets has the most potential growth? i.e. the number of Internet users in the US
are nearer to saturation than Mexico or Brazil
2. Where Ad money makes the most impact, i.e. attracting traffic and improve conversions, and which publishers produce the most traffic/conversions.
3. What are Ad Spend Correlations?
FIRST CORRELATION: Ad spend per capita correlates with the total market Ad Spend.
The chart below shows a near perfect correlation. It suggests that the larger the market (in dollars), the more it costs per capita - it takes more money to grab your attention. This is also observed between Google ads and Facebook ads. The emerging Facebook ads are much less than equivalent ones in Google. There are some big anomaly, for example, in the UK Ad Spend per capita is much higher than the US (60% higher). These outliers are the opportunities.
Here are some tabulations from the data - Note that the US is still by far the number one
market with over 25 billion in ad spend in 2008 for nearly 191 million Internet users.
Top 10 markets by Ad Spend (millions)
|
|
Top 10 markets by number of Internet users (thousands)
|
|
Data source: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pSnKg7M-DPfdEvcCrNoiETA