If you aren’t one of the 24% of US and UK Internet users playing social games at least weekly, you may have seen the traces of those players and their FarmVille or Scrabble exploits in your Facebook newsfeed. PopCap Games, maker of several popular titles, explored the demographics of the group in its “2010 Social Gaming Research” report.

More than one-half of players are female, and the average US player is 48 years old. Relatively few US weekly gamers are under 30, while nearly one-half are over 50.

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Retailers that want to connect with their target audience online would do well to go where their customers already are. And according to the “2010 Social Media Report” from ForeSee Results, 69% of online shoppers regularly use social media sites.

The overwhelming winner in terms of shopper presence was Facebook, with more than one-half of respondents using it regularly. YouTube took the second spot, with former giant MySpace far behind its rival. Only about one in 10 online shoppers surveyed used Twitter.

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The Facebook and Twitter social networking sites both experienced triple-digit growth in 2009, according to the comScore Digital Year in Review.

Twitter Gets Younger in 2009 As Twitter’s audience grew in 2009, the site experienced interesting shifts in its demographic composition. All demographic segments achieved substantial gains in visitors, but certain segments grew more rapidly than others to gain in terms of their share of audience. The initial success of Twitter was largely driven by users in the 25-54 year old age segment, which made up 65% of all visitors to the site in December 2008, with 18-24 year olds accounting for just 9% of visitors. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

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Social media, which would have accounted for a very small increment of the “Other online marketing” slice just a few years ago, is now garnishing 11% of the average online marketing budget. Based on other trends indicated in this report, social media’s share will continue to increase in the year ahead.Read more at www.marketingsherpa.com

Google Sites accounted for 13.2 billion videos, or almost 40% of total online videos viewed in December 2009.

The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Tremor Media Video Network with 30.5% penetration of online video viewers, BrightRoll Video Network with 21.7%, and BBE with 21.2%. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

The preeminent video advertising format — pre-roll — still irritates some consumers, so much so, in fact, that nearly 16 percent of consumers click away from a pre-roll ad rather than sit through it to watch their desired video.

The trend is worse for news media; nearly 25 percent of consumers click away from pre-roll ads on newspaper and magazine websites, according to analytics firm TubeMogul.

What this means, of course, is that 16 percent of consumers would rather not watch a video simply because it contains an advertisement, which isn’t great news for video publishers. Read more at www.imediaconnection.com

ADOTAS – The future of ad networks remains murky, but those who believe they’re about to die in numbers should hold off on digging the mass grave and read Adify’s new survey showing that ad network adoption is up 24% in the last 18 months.

With 216 media planners, interactive marketing directors and agency executives responding to its queries, Adify reports that 69% of media planners and agencies are using ad networks as part of their digital buys, compared to 48% recorded in 2008. In addition, vertical ad networks are increasing in notoriety, with 72% of respondents now familiar with the niche services compared to 56% in 2008. Read more at www.adotas.com

Despite minor improvements, about 1-in-5 commercial, permissioned emails still fail to reach consumers’ inboxes, according to new research from email and reputation management firm Return Path. In the second half of 2009, 19.9% such emails never reached consumer inboxes in the United States and Canada — representing only a slight improvement over the first half of the year when 20.7% such emails missed their target. By contrast, European inbox placement rates fared markedly better with just 15% of requested, permissioned emails never reaching consumer inboxes. Read more at www.mediapost.com

According to a Retail Advertising and Marketing Association survey conducted by BIGresearch, women with children at home are more likely to use Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter than average adults. Additionally, 15.3% maintain their own blog.

Source

Use of Popular Social Media (% of Category)   Regularly or Occasionally Use Medium Adults 18+ Moms w/Children at Home Twitter 15.0% 16.5% MySpace 34.4 42.4 Facebook 50.2 60.3 Source: BIGresearch, 2009 Read more at www.mediapost.com

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The “2010 Digital Marketing Outlook” report found that 81% of the brand executives surveyed expected an increase in digital projects in 2010, and one-half will be moving dollars from traditional to digital budgets. Further, more than three-quarters think the current economy will push more allocations to digital.

Senior marketers reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, followed closely by digital infrastructure. While social media marketing looks set to stay top of mind, a majority of respondents considered a range of digital activities at least “important,” with only games failing to inspire widespread interest.

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SUMMARY: Marketers face lengthy time spans as they progress from lead generation to conversion, making it difficult to nurture prospects while moving them through the pipeline. This chart highlights the percentages of leads in each stage of the pipeline that are likely to advance to the next stage.

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