Spotify: growth and scale don't necessarily produce profit
Spotify is one of the most popular streaming music services in the world, and since its July debut in the U.S. and the recent launch of a deep Facebook integration , it has gained 250,000 U.S. subscribers, bringing the company's worldwide paid subscriber total to "well north" of 2m.
But it's not all good news for the Swedish-based company: while revenue grew from just over £11m in 2009 to just over £63m in 2010, during the same period Spotify's after-tax loss jumped grew by nearly £10m to £26m.
Developing digital economies: should we be looking to the East?
I’ve previously written about the enormous 95% growth the Chinese e-commerce market has had in the last eighteen months, but online shopping aside, I feel that this will extend further into advertising and marketing, as well as the associated technologies.
Are social networks tapped out?
Social networking may be the most notable phenomenon in internet history. Few trends have grown as fast and gone as a far, and it has in many ways fundamentally altered the way hundreds of millions of people use the internet.
But have popular social networks like Facebook tapped out most of their growth potential? According to a new eMarketer report, the answer may be yes.
Currently, just under 64% of the internet users in the United States use social networks. By 2013, that number will increase to 67%. That's growth, but it's not the double-digit growth we've become accustomed to seeing.
Facebook grows...older
If you haven't already had to grapple with whether or not you should friend your Mom, you may well be facing that conundrum soon.
Women over 55 are the fastest-growing demographic on the social network, their ranks swelling a jaw-dropping 175.3 percent since late September, according to InsideFacebook.
Overall, users over 26 comprise the fastest-growing segment on the social network -- originally geared at college students, remember? Forty-five percent of Facebook's 45.3 million active US users are 26 years old or older.
Teens, meanwhile, comprise less than 12 percent of registered users.
While registration rates continue to rise in all demographics, there are almost double the number of 55+ women on Facebook than their male counterparts.
