10 interesting digital stats we’ve seen this week

Tablets and consumer spending

• 69% of tablet owners make a purchase on their device every month, according to stats from inMobi and Mobext.
• One in ten consumers were also happy to use their tablet for ‘big ticket’ purchases and over 20% claim to shop less in bricks and mortar stores since purchasing their device.  
• 50% of tablet owners spend at least an hour a day accessing media content on their tablets, and 72% use it while watching TV.

Newspapers and Google Plus

• According to stats from Searchmetrics, FT.com had by far the most followers of 13 US and UK newspapers on Google+, with 637,724 having the newspaper’s brand page in their Google+ ‘Circles’.
• Next up was the New York Times with 370,043, the Wall Street Journal with 173,993 and The Guardian with 130,629.
• The Daily Mail, normally at the top of any web charts, had just 53,110, behind the likes of The Independent (108,969).

Facebook ads CTR

• Click-through rates on Facebook ads have increased 50% over the past 12 months, according to data from Marin Software.
• It also found that the cost-per-click of social ads increased by 26%, while the CPC of marketplace ads decreased by 26%.

Facebook social readers

• Figures from AppData.com show that in the past month The Guardian has gone from 5.7m monthly active users of its Facebook social reader app to just over 3m.
• The Washington Post’s monthly user numbers peaked at more than 17m last month but since then has plummeted down to around 8m.

Social commerce: Facebook vs Pinterest

• Pinterest drives more sales and more new customers than Facebook, according to a study of social media traffic by accessories retailer Boticca.com.
• After integrating ‘pinning’ buttons on its website Pinterest has become its number one social referrer, assisting roughly 10% of sales, compared to 7% from Facebook.

• Boticca found that Pinterest users spend more than twice as much as Facebook users ($180 vs. $85), and the site drives higher numbers of new customers.

• 86% of visits from Pinterest are new to Boticca compared to 57% from Facebook.

The 1% participation rule

• 77% of us are now actively participating in digital media in some way which, according to the BBC, signals the death of the 1% rule.
• 23% remain passive and do not particpate at all. 

The EU cookie law

• 89% of UK consumers think that the EU cookie law is a positive step, though 75% had not heard of the e-Privacy Directive before they were surveyed. 
• 23% are happy for websites to use cookies to improve their browsing experience, though 33% of those surveyed by IMRG believed that cookies could be used for viruses and Trojans.

Alternative payments and e-commerce

• Alternative payment (AP) methods are used in 11% of online purchases in the UK, according to WorldPay stats. 
• APs account for €165bn of global e-commerce transactions across the world (22% of total transactional value). 
• PayPal owns more than half the AP market in the US and around 45% in the UK.

Consumer attitudes to online advertising

• According to an IAB/ValueClick study, 52% of consumers are happy to see online advertising because it allows them to view content or use services online at no cost. 
• 61% expect that a large portion of the web would disappear without the advertising revenue that is needed to support it. 
• 55% said they would rather see online advertising relevant to their interests and 59% would prefer a lower number of relevant ads than a higher volume of irrelevant ones. 

Mobile social networking

• Stats from comScore reveal that 82% of a smartphone user’s media time is spent engaged with apps. 
• Facebook is the top social brand on mobile, with the average FB mobile user in the US engaging for more than seven hours via browser or app in March.
• 25.6m Twitter mobile users (this stats doesn’t include third-party apps) had an average engagement of nearly two hours during the month. 
• By comparison, people using their PCs spent just 20.4 minutes on Twitter.com.