The macho, competitive ethos of London’s old Fleet Street, on which newspaper executives celebrate beating each other’s circulation, has spilled over on to the web and is being fought across the Atlantic. Mail Online’s meteoric rise, which the company on Wednesday said gives it almost 100 million monthly uniques. is rightly admired.

But that dead-tree machismo is not necessarily the right lens through which to look and comparisons are not helpful. A&N Media’s fast-growing news and pictures vehicle is no more competing with The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) than Coca-Cola is with cod liver oil…

• Different content: One is laden with celebrity gossip, bikini photos and outrageous news and features written so expertly succinctly that readers just have to click. The other is a sobre, reflective and, some might say, banal examination of the machinations of American public life and culture. (While NYTimes.com’s U.S. page led with Court Strikes Down Ban on Gay Marriage in California this week, Mail Online’s was splashing with ‘My adoptive father poured hot sauce in my ears, glued my eyes shut and starved us’).
• Different businesses: If the two titles aren’t chasing the same audiences, they also aren’t fighting for the same advertisers. While NYTimes.com runs campaigns for $500 handbags, Manhattan apartments and Indian bridalwear, Mail Online advertises WeightWatchers, home telecom services and discount wine.

So, the Mail may now be operating in the same U.S. geography as the Times, but the pair aren’t necessarily competing head-on.

Although they each occupy the “online news” space together, observers of that sector who draw linear conclusions from Mail Online “overtaking” NYTimes.com’s traffic have got it wrong.

For one, the handover must be seen in two quite distinct but important contexts…

• NYTimes’ introduction of metered charging early in 2011 has, naturally, negatively impacted upon its web visits.
• Mail Online likely has not gained NYTimes.com readers but has acquired its new audience under its own steam from what was a flat start.

None of this is to denigrate Mail Online’s journey. Whilst some criticise the website’s sensationalist bent as much as the newspaper’s political tactics, it has shown how to build a big online news audience in a new country.

But Mail Online isn’t benefitting because it’s eating NYTimes.com’s dinner, and it doesn’t necessarily matter that one’s traffic has surpassed the other - in a still-growing market like the internet, all boats rise.

It is truer to say mass-market U.S. newspaper websites (National Enquirer? New York Post?) face a greater threat from Mail Online than NYTimes.com does. But it may be even truer to wonder if the U.S. as a whole has ever quite seen anything like Mail Online.

Whatever, one must at least compare apples with apples.

The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) (as measured by comScore (NSDQ: SCOR), currently the most fashionable collector of digital evidence extant) had 44.8m unique visitors in December, while our own dear Daily Mail (LSE: DMGT) had 45.3m. Manhattan’s “grey lady” doesn’t rule the global web world any longer.

A hundred years on, the heirs of Alfred Harmsworth are sticking it to the Yanks – boasting about “reinventing popular journalism for the digital era”.

As with almost any bold claim, there are nuances. Digital statistics are damnably variable according to the rules you count by (the Mail has an even more mind-boggling 84m uniques on the latest ABCe releases). The NYT thinks the Mail counts too many peripheral figures for comfort – and anyway “it is not in our competitive set”, according to a slightly sniffy spokesman. But, given its remarkable rise from zero to hero over a mere five years, there’s reason to concentrate hard one more time on what Mail Online is doing and what its frontier-busting salience portends.

We sometimes talk about print newspapers in Britain as though they were all the same, just parts of the “press”. But the Daily Star and FT, for example, are miles apart in aim, aspiration and resource. (The Star has just 57 journalists). In the online world, such differences are inevitably replicated.

The New York Times, partly concealed behind a paywall that curbs its reader traffic growth, runs a full-service print paper and an even fuller-service website. Its editorial staff is zealously integrated: theoretically, almost everyone does everything. Its internet presence is a natural extension of its newsprint history. Though it does not yet quite talk the talk of “digital first” – looking forward, like the Journal Register group in the US or the Guardian here in Britain, to the days when dead trees are left to lie and paperless news organisations bestride the net – it is, nevertheless, envisaging a certain sort of future: one where everything changes, everything is up for grabs.

But keep looking towards that future, because operating so ambitiously online is a cash drain, not a cash cow, for the moment. The New York Times, pushing its cover price up to $2.50 a copy, bidding a sudden farewell to its CEO and grinding through more redundancy toils, hasn’t exactly found sunlit uplands or revenue models as yet.

Britain’s new world champion, by contrast, sees things in another light. It rejects any form of print and online integration. It runs its online operation under an editor – Martin Clarke – who’s free to produce a digital version that, by the end of a working day, bears almost no similarity to what Paul Dacre ordains for print. “A good story’s a good story – particularly a good human story”, Clarke tells his growing American audience. But he doesn’t try to break the bank when he tells it.

The mothership Mail Online office in Kensington has only 25 seats and terminals. In New York, there are 20 staff people, nine in Los Angeles (most of them buying celebrity pictures). You’re not talking huge wage bills, or (in NYT mode) striving to slim 1,250 journalists down to 1,000. Mail numbers keep early losses under control and let profits flow more easily; the Huffington Post, remember, took off with 50 staff. Mail Online, even before its current American surge, made £15m profit last year.

Yet keep taking that old Daily Star/FT medicine: keep thinking differences, some of them profound. Dacre’s Daily Mail, with 4.5 million UK readers every weekday morning, isn’t anticipating giving up the print ghost any decade soon. On the contrary, like its closest rival, the Telegraph, which also claims to make profits online, it reckons on staying in print business for as far as a managerial eye can see. In one sense, it’s a leader of the digital pack. In another sense, it is hanging back, keeping options open.

That’s not where the New York Times stands. Nor is it yet quite “digital first”, which, in Journal Register terms, means print somewhere towards the disappearing rear.

But then those cavernous old differences keep opening again. Maybe this month’s world champion will be history in five years’ time as the net’s thirst for celebrity photos is slaked. Maybe – as pondered in a recent Communication Management group survey – the decline in print sales will plateau out for a while. Maybe the Mail model and the NYT model can both win through in the end. Maybe the Mail’s celebs can’t draw the ads. Maybe missionary zeal and cautious calculation can exist side by side.

Keep saying “maybe” time and again. And remember, amid all this “we are the greatest” stuff, to keep sucking your thumb while you do.

• That was the first year the growth rate increased since IFPI records began in 2004. Previously, growth rate of 10 percent in 2009 had sunk to five percent in 2010.
• Globally, digital is now 32 percent of labels’ income, up from 29 percent (that is 52 percent in the U.S. and 71 percent in China). Download volume grew 17 percent to 3.6 billion.
• Adoption of subscription services grew 65 percent to 13.4 million consumers. Remarkably, in Sweden, subscription contributes an impressive 85 percent of digital music revenue generally, thanks to its local hero Spotify.

All this gives the IFPI some cause to be bullish. “At a time when other creative industries - in particular film, newspapers and book publishing - are only now rapidly shifting to online and mobile channels, the music industry’s level of digital penetration still dwarfs that of all other comparable sectors, except games,” its report says.

The group also cites “important progress” on piracy including France’s Hadopi law and similar measures tabled in South Korea, New Zealand and the U.S.. But, as usual, it does not let the year pass by without warning: “Widespread piracy is the biggest factor undermining the growth of the digital music business.”

Nielsen research for the IFPI says 28 percent of consumers globally use unauthorised music services each month, with Spain and Brazil seeing especially high and disruptive levels.

“The result of this activity is effectively a rigged music market,” the IFPI says. “Legal services, whatever their model, incur the business costs of being authorised and paying rights owners, as well as investments to develop secure payment methods and good quality services.

“This model is unsustainable when facing competition from infringing services that have greatly reduced costs and circumvent the normal rules of commercial business.”

The IFPI’s report did not break out total music industry revenue figures.

According to comScore’s latest monthly report on online video usage, Google – driven primarily by the performance of YouTube – drew 157.2 million unique viewers to its video offerings in December. That marked a 9 percent rise from December 2010 and represented 86 percent of the total internet audience for the month, according to comScore.

And with YouTube focusing on longer form, professionally produced video in its dedicated “TV” channels—not to mention other offerings like full-length movies—usage per unique viewer shot up 72 percent year-to-year to an average of 471.9 minutes per viewer.

The top 10 dedicated video channels all have homes on YouTube, with music channel VEVO ranking first, Warner Music second and game channel Machinima third. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), which has also been aggressively building content channels, had a 6 percent year-to-year rise in unique video viewers to 53.3 million, while Hulu saw its unique viewers spike 18 percent to 31.2 million for December, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR).

Facebook saw only minimal growth, 2 percent to 42,024 unique viewers, over Dec. 2010.

Some other highlights from the comScore report:

—Hulu once again delivered the most video ad impressions with nearly 1.5 million ads rendered in December, up 22 percent from the same month in 2010.

—Across the entire internet, video ad deliveries increased 20 percent to 7.1 million.

—181.7 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in December – up 6 percent over 2010—for an average of 23.2 hours per viewer (up 59 percent). The U.S. Internet audience watched nearly 43.5 billion videos last month.

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It will certainly be when all of them start branding their connected TVs “Smart TVs” from the get-go. If that and sales of those TVs were the only way we measured the success of Smart TVs, then, yes, 2012 is going to be the year of the Smart TV.

But will they actually be Smart TVs? That is to be seen. As far as I am concerned, offering over-the-top (OTT) services and perhaps an app store does not suddenly make the TV “smart”.

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Personally at this point, I would query if anything the TV manufacturers bring out this year will be as good as the Xbox’s latest dashboard with Kinect, which I think is currently setting the bar. It is not only because the UI looks nice and lets you quite easily move from one type of service to another. It also offers a social network. Perhaps most important is Kinect.

The iPhone brought about the smartphone not just because it changed the software UI but also the hardware UI with the use of a full touch screen. These two things together are important.

Smart TVs are arguably being held back by reliance on the old TV remote. Although at CES this year manufacturers finally seem to be taking alternatives seriously, LG (SEO: 066570), with its wand remote, had the most mature offering - but Samsung is now promoting limited voice and motion control embedded in their top end TVs. 

Connection rates are low for connected TVs right now. The Xbox 360 only has connection rates of between 50-60 percent and this is a device that is used by a tech savvy user base who get real benefits from connection, like downloadable content, online multiplayer, new games, as well as OTT video and music. The PS3 – a similar audience – has about 80 percent, entirely due to the fact it integrated Wi-Fi from the get-go.

There are a number of factors behind this:

1. Manufacturers aren’t making it easy enough. The majority of connected TVs sold in 2011 can only be connected with Ethernet. Wi-Fi remains a premium, additional feature. Yes, some manufacturers offer Wi-Fi dongles, but these are in the region of £70, which can be quite a significant amount of a TV buyers budget.

2. Are consumers buying TVs because they are connected/smart? Some are, no doubt. But most are quite likely just buying a TV that happens to be connected.

3. The failure of retail. We recently undertook a mystery shopper project to see if retail was pushing Smart TVs this Christmas. In the high street, the answer was categorically “no”. It is well known that there is no internet connection in the majority of shops, reducing the chances of showing off all the functionality that connectivity brings. But, on an even more mundane level, shop assistants do not have access to remote controls to let users actually interact with the Smart TV, see the enhanced UI and the services that are actually available. Instead, TVs are being sold in the old fashioned way -  ‘this TV has a large screen with a nice picture’.

Finally, there are a lot of pay-TV subscribers in the UK for whom the set top box is the box that needs to be connected. Sky customers get Anytime+, Virgin customers get all of the catch-up services it provides. These services are pushing connectivity from the get-go and the services that they bring.

Andrew Ladbrook is senior analyst for connected home at Informa Telecoms & Media. He is currently at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

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Quarterly figures from Marin Software indicate that mobiles and tablets accounted for 10 percent of all search ad clicks in the U.S. in Q4 2011. That is double the amount of clicks seen on those devices in Q3 2011.

On tablets, search ads—the ad units that typically appear alongside a search made through engines such as Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) or Bing—also accounted for the highest of all click-through rates.

Tablets’ CTR (the ratio of clicks/the number of times the ad appears) for the quarter, according to Marin, was 1.31 percent, compared to 0.95 percent on desktop computers. Smartphones had nearly as high of a CTR, at 1.25 percent. Marin does not break out which devices are proving “more” interactive, although recent figures from Jumptap indicate that at least on its network Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) devices continue to dominate in interactivity.

Search advertising is currently the most-popular form of interactive advertising, above display, and video and other rich media. It’s the case as well in mobile, where search is projected to have accounted for $349 million of the estimated $1 billion spent on mobile ads. But overall, PCs are still a vastly more popular platform for searches, and subsequent search ads. Marin notes that in the last quarter, mobile devices accounted for just seven percent of impressions on search ads, with PCs taking 93 percent:

On PCs search ads were estimated to have accounted for 25.6 percent of $73.8 billion spent on online advertising, or $18.9 billion, according to Publicis’ ZenithOptimedia.

Marin, which offers an online advertising management platform to brands and agencies, says that it based its conclusions on its own Marin Global Search Index. This includes more than 1,000 advertisers and agencies that invest over $2.7 billion annually in paid-search, which each brand or agency typically spending over $1 million annually on paid-search, social and display.

There are a couple of reasons why the numbers could be higher for tablets and mobile phones, which are worth pointing out here. As mobile ad skeptics have pointed out in the past, it can be much easier to “click” accidentally on ads on a touchscreen compared to a PC. That is partly due to the touch element, but also because of the smaller screen sizes. At some point advertisers might start demanding better metrics to try to account for accidental clicks on touchscreen and other mobile devices.

The other issue that could account for the rise in clicks in Q4 in particular is the fact that it covered the holiday season. As we’ve seen from other studies, mobile devices had a double-whammy for increased use over that time period, as people received or bought new devices for themselves as presents; and others used them to look for goods other information related to the holiday shopping season. We’ll have to keep an eye out how numbers look in Q1 of this year to see whether the increased clicks are a trend, or a seasonal blip.

Other changes that Marin noted in its quarterly report:

—Click volume is up by 56 percent across Google, Yahoo and Bing, while paid search spend increased 35 percent (note: Marin does not give hard figures for how much its customers actually invested in the quarter).

—Google’s clicks grew by 48 percent, and so did its CTR.

—Impressions are growing on Yahoo and Bing, which were up by 43 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago, and clicks were up by 44 percent. Marin attributes some of this to the companies’ new search alliance. However, the sites are still not getting more effective in their search ads: CTRs only increased by one percent.

—It’s still early days at Facebook. Marin also broke out how search ads are performing on Facebook and the numbers are still pretty low, with only a 0.1 percent CTR and $0.23 cost per click (CPC). That doesn’t look too good compared to Google and Yahoo/Bing who respectively had CTRs of 2.36 percent and 1.61 percent in Q4 2011. CPCs at for the portals were respectively $1.02 and $0.85. To be fair, Facebook is putting more effort, and seeing more success in display ads, although you can be sure that as Facebook grows even bigger it will look to improve its position in search against the likes of Google, too.

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The Digital Entertainment Group, a research consortium backed by Hollywood’s major studios, released data Tuesday showing that overall home entertainment revenue declined only 2 percent in 2011. As shrinkage goes, it was the smallest since 2008 for the challenged entertainment sector, which tallied $18.4 billion in total rentals and sales for the year, according to DEG. That $18.4 billion includes the revenue for everything from DVD and Blu-ray, to cable and satellite VOD, to downloads and streaming, of movie and TV content. Interestingly, in the second half of 2011, the DEG reported that revenue from rentals and sales of “home filmed entertainment,” physical and digital alike, actually rose 1 percent.

Even though the DEG is backed by the studios, its revenue numbers are often cited as official benchmarks of industry performance. According to the DEG, the home entertainment market has declined every year since 2004, when it peaked at $21.8 billion, mainly because of the decline of DVD sales.

One caveat to the latest numbers from the DEG: They were helped by a change in the group’s equation. For the first time, the DEG included revenue from subscription streaming services, which resulted in nearly $994.6 million in additional revenue for 2011.

Overall digital spending for home entertainment – which includes VOD through various carrier services like DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) and Comcast, and electronic sell-through via vendors like Apple’s iTunes – was up 50 percent, according to the trade group, to $3.4 billion.

SEE ALSO: Interview Part 2: Netflix’s Hastings Hurt By Criticism But Over Transition

The kiosk business continued to grow, too, with rentals through outlets like Redbox increasing 31 percent to $1.66 billion. And rentals of Blu-ray and DVD through subscription services like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) kept on growing, as well, increasing 4.1 percent to $2.36 billion.

As the studio-backed trade group is prone to do, it touted the performance of high-margin physical media, noting that Blu-ray sales and rentals had increased 20 percent in 2011, reaching $2 billion for the first time.

Still, the market’s legacy revenue streams remain in steep decline. Rental through brick-and-mortar outlets continued to circle the drain, declining 29 percent to just $1.64 billion. And overall sales of “packaged goods” – DVD and Blu-ray – declined 13 percent to $8.9 billion, brought down by the continued cratering of the older format.

Jumptap, in its latest MobileStat report, notes that Android had once again widened the lead between it and the next-closes smartphone platform in terms of popularity. In November it accounted for 52.7 percent share of the 95 million unique monthly visitors to which Jumptap served ads in the month. That is up from 44.7 percent in October, and well ahead of Apple’s 22.1 percent. For all the woe piled on RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), BlackBerry’s share of the market was nearly level with iOS, with 20.9 percent. Symbian, at 3.2 percent, is still bigger than Windows Phone 7, which was level with WebOS at 0.5 percent.

Given the platform’s ubiquity, Android’s domination also shined through in terms of data consumption on its devices. Android led in app usage at 56 percent (again, growing from 49 percent the month before), and was the biggest smartphone platform in terms of mobile web access, at 25 percent—but feature phones like the one pictured above, which largely do not use apps (although that is changing) still outshone it in the latter category, with a 45 percent of all traffic.

That’s all fine and well, but Apple’s iOS is still leading when it comes to interactivity on ads that run on its devices, a sign of perhaps more engagement on the platform, and perhaps a more tactile experience in the content itself. Many developers do, after all, still put iOS first on their list of platforms when presenting their best and most enhanced work. iOS had click-through rates of 0.72 percent, well above the average of 0.65 percent. Also notable is how well Symbian performed compared to the others:

http://paidcontent.org/images/editorial/_original/jumptap-nov-2011-ctrs-o.png

In terms of how different verticals fared in mobile advertising, Jumptap says that entertainment and retail had the highest CTRs, and also saw the biggest spend from brands in November 2011. Not surprising, considering that both sectors would have been gearing up for the holiday spending rush and getting consumers aware of films, TV and other entertainment to consume over the holiday break.

And in the ongoing absence of hard data from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) about exactly how many Kindle Fire tablets it has sold since launching the product late last year, Jumptap has waded in with its own number-crunching. Using data from its ad network, which is able to detect what kind of device is pulling down ads from Jumptap’s ad network, it came up with Kindle Fire penetration rates in different U.S. cities.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Seattle, home of Amazon, accounted for the most Kindle Fire traffic of all, with one device for every 124 people. Not clear if that’s a sign of Amazon employees clicking away, or some consumer support for the home team. San Francisco—one device for every 249 people—had the second-highest penetration for the Kindle Fire—again, not too much of a surprise given that it is in the heart of the tech capital of the world. (Full map appears at the bottom of the post.)

Jumptap notes that while numbers appear to be growing fast—Kindle Fire traffic on its network grew by 270 percent in November—“it’s still nowhere near the iPad in traffic.” Time (NYSE: TWX) will tell whether it will catch up.

But the company, recently acquired by Japanese e-tail giant Rakuten, did not state actual sales figures for either its e-readers or its e-books.

Kobo says “hundreds of thousands” of new Kobos were activated each day since Christmas Eve. That compares with the over four million Kindles Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) says it sold through December.

For Kobo, Christmas sales prompted registered Kobo users to almost double from the previous six-week period. And, for the Christmas weekend, e-book purchases on the new gadgets were 5x up on Kobo’s previous record week, which fell earlier in December.

Purchases of e-books for Kobo-owning loved ones as “e-gifts” was 200 percent up from the same period in 2010, and 500 percent up between this November and December.

The new usage saw readers earn 100,000 “awards” (badges) on Christmas Day through Kobo’s Reading Life social platform. Christmas Day sign-ups to Reading Life were 50x up from 2010.

UK Kobo e-book sales over the holiday were 7x up from the previous December daily average. Ahead of Christmas, Kobo struck retail agreements with WH Smith, Walmart’s Asda and the John Lewis department store. In branches of WH Smith, Kobo has gained promotional displays, while staff are wearing Kobo t-shirts.

This Christmas, one in every 40 UK adults (1.33 million) received an e-reader for Christmas, YouGov says. But the likes of Kobo are back runners to Kindle, which YouGov says accounted for 92 percent of the gifts.

• It says 1.33 million e-readers were given as gifts in the UK this Christmas.
• 92 percent (1.22 million) of them were Kindles.
• That beat the 640,000 tablets YouGov says were given as gifts - 72 percent of them were iPads.
• All in all, YouGov says one in 40 UK people received an e-reader this Christmas.

But YouGov’s figures are not concrete. They are based on a survey of 2,012 adults, modelled up to try representing the entire UK population; and the survey was online so naturally skews techy.

Amazon itself says it sold “well over” one million Kindles each week of December (ie. over four million through December).

The Kindle Fire is not yet available in the UK, but the country has relatively fewer e-reader options than the States, where the likes of Nook are strong. Kobo gained high street retail distribution pre-Christmas through WH Smith stores. Bookseller Waterstone’s is currently contemplating its own Nook-style device.

Both Kindle and iPad proved more popular with women, whilst alternative brands were received more by men, YouGov says.

Digital singles continue to boom, more than making up for lost physical sales. They are now 99.3 percent of all single sales. At this rate, CD singles sales, which clocked up 1.1 million units in 2011 (0.6 percent), may be entirely eliminated in 2012.

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Digital albums continue their more modest growth, which is not making up for physical decline. But LP album sales boomed by 43.7 percent and CDs are three quarters of the total.

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Singles have surpassed album sales thanks to digital downloads.

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In the last week of 2011, 5.7 million singles and one million albums were downloaded as gift recipients redeemed download vouchers online, the BPI said.

In total, music sales by volume increased by over three percent through 2011.

But growing volume does not equate to growing revenue. Last time revenue figures were released (by IFPI), the UK saw an 11 percent revenue dip in 2010 to £896 ($1387.76) million. Globally, the industry lost 8.4 percent of its revenue.

According to figures from ZenithOptimedia, global advertising revenues will reach $486 billion in 2012, a rise of 4.7 percent compared to 2011. With wider economic pressures bearing down on the overall ad market, digital ad spend is still seeing healthy growth: it will account for slightly more than one-fifth of all ad spend, but more than half of all growth, as advertisers become more confident in digital media metrics, and the ad industry gets more sophisticated in what it offers to brands and publishers in the name of digital advertising—which will remain a key way of funding digital content, as media companies continue to tinker with other charging models. Here are some specific areas to watch in this space:

Social media and advertising. Social networks already make money from marketing and advertising services—according to an estimate from eMarketer in September, Facebook apparently will have made some $3.8 billion in advertising revenue in 2011—so 2012 will be the year that we see more social networks, not just Facebook, look at leveraging their audiences to grow this even more.

These advertising services will be a crucial piece to put into place for Facebook in particular as it gears up for a widely-expected IPO. Keeping in mind recent IPOs for Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) and Zynga, in which people questioned the longer-term business models for these social media properties, Facebook will be looking for big and consistent sources of revenue to demonstrate to the investor community that it has a solid foundation for the long haul.

As my colleague Jeff pointed out, they may also be the source of more debates about online privacy. Facebook has already started laying the groundwork for how it might draw on the content and nature of a users’ activity on the site as a route to promoting products and services to others within users’ timelines. Similarly, Twitter is moving to new ways to advertise brands to users, for example, with promoted tweets populating people’s timelines. There are very likely more innovations along these lines in the pipeline.

New ad formats on social networking sites may, to some, feel like a violation of an individual’s space, and we may see more challenges and questions coming from regulators and users as a result. On the other hand, some argue that if these services free to use, this is the price to pay. What might equally be interesting is to see whether ad-driven sites like these at any point consider paid, ad-free versions of their services.

Ads get a bit more personal. I don’t think that it will be only social networking sites that make use of our personal information in new ways in advertising. Companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) are also looking at ways of leveraging its databases to make its advertising units more valuable. One example is a new search ad format that automatically inserts your gmail address to sign you up for marketing lists if you click on a link in the ad. The other area that is worth watching here is mobile advertising, where an advertiser uses potentially a combination of an opted-in user’s location, browsing activity and purchasing habits to deliver relevant ads and offers to consumers.

Consolidation: small, medium and large? Last year saw some significant acquisitions that pointed to ongoing consolidation as digital advertising continues to mature: Google’s $400-million AdMeld purchase (which officially closed earlier this month); ValueClick’s $75-million acquisition of mobile ad firm Greystripe; and Adobe’s purchase of Efficient Frontier, all of which further pad out the bigger companies’ ad services business.

There will very likely be at least a few more deals like these, but the question is whether consolidation could also extend to bigger players like Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and AOL (NYSE: AOL). They are still some of the strongest companies in online advertising (with 13.1 percent and 4.2 percent of the overall display market, according to eMarketer) but they are being hit hard by companies like Google and Facebook, once known respectively for search and social ads but already now bigger than AOL and Yahoo in display revenues.

If you believe the reports, Yahoo is already in play: Alibaba, the China-based internet giant that is a parter of Yahoo’s in that country, currently wants to buy Yahoo out of China, but Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, apparently also has an option to buy Yahoo outright, too. He has already enlisted the help of lobbyists in Washington, which could prove useful if Ma decides to bite.

As for AOL, it recently had to weather an embarrassing leaked letter from one of its biggest investors, Starboard Value, ripping apart the company’s business strategy and accusing it of focussing too much on “money-losing” areas like its content business. AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong’s response has been: be patient. But if things don’t start looking brighter for AOL in 2012, investors like Starboard could take things up another notch and call for something a little stronger.

Read the rest of the posts in our Coming in 2012 archives.

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• Looking Back At 2011

Revenue from the sector grew 48 percent in the last quarter alone, to 1.48 billion RMB ($234 million), and is up 139 percent over the year, according to Enfodesk, Analysys International.

The main players are Nasdaq-listed Youku (25.3 percent of revenue) and Tudou (14.5 percent), which have each threatened to sue each other over alleged re-use of TV shows for which they own rights, followed by Sohu (NSDQ: SOHU) Video (13.3 percent).

FutureSource Consulting recently said annual paid video revenue in the U.S., UK, France and Germany would finish 2011 having tripled from a year earlier (to $3 billion).

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That is according to Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) Systems’ Visual Networking Index data, republished in UK communications regulator Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report 2011.

UK users are the most data-hungry. In 2010, average monthly data consumption per customer jumped by 108 percent.

But that still only reached 268Mb per month. By 2015, Cisco forecasts that will grow 21-fold to hit 4Gb per month - almost double the U.S. data rate.

Most of the consumption comes form dongles connected to laptops, however.

By the time Cisco’s forecast becomes a reality, many networks, which have already been investing in bolstering their 3G networks, are expected to have 4G networks.

Here is comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) Media Metrix’s chart of the most-read newspaper sites in Europe (June 2011), as features in Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report 2011...

While Axel Springer’s Bild is the highest-circulating newspaper in the western world, it only manages third place online behind the UK’s Mail Online and Guardian.co.uk.

Turkey’s fast-growing internet audience puts two Turkish newspapers in the top 10.

Note, industry-audited figures through bodies like ABC (NYSE: DIS) may differ from comScore’s figures.

The latest figures from Netherlands-based app analytics firm Distimo notes that Apple’s App Store for iPhone generated four times as much revenue as the Android Market when it came to the top-200 apps.

Although app stores are very much an exercise in long-tail content, this does still point to the Apple storefront as a better guarantee for returns for those developers looking for a big hit.

It also explains why so many app publishers still look first to iOS when developing an app, even as Android pulls ever further away from the competition as the most-popular smartphone platform in terms of devices sold worldwide.

Distimo’s annual app report also points to a rise in “freemium” apps—those that are free to download but then make their money on offerings within the apps themselves, either in-app purchases to unlock levels in games, or other kinds of extra content.

Distimo notes that in the App Store, half of all revenues for the top-200 apps came from those apps with freemium models built into them. In Android, that figure was 65 percent—which could also point to the fact that longer term Android may well end up as the bigger revenue generator, even if today it is not.

Some other implications from Distimo’s numbers for all platforms. If the trend towards freemium continues, it could mean that apps that cost something to download/install may possibly turn out to be a less popular route for developers. It also raises the question of whether advertising will be as strong of a revenue generator for apps compared to direct purchases for content within the apps themselves.

What’s also worth noting is that as in-app purchases rise within the apps that also benefits companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Apple, which get a cut on those revenues.

China. Unsurprisingly, the market for apps in China is still booming, and it’s not just about Android figures—although these seem to be the ones we hear about most because of the proliferation of Android app stores in the country not operated by Google itself.

Distimo notes that for the Apple App Store for iPhone, China represents 30 percent of all downloads when you combine the total number for China and the U.S. On the iPad, China accounts for nearly half (44 percent) of all downloads across the two countries.

In effect that points to China slowly becoming one of the most important markets, if not the most important, when it comes to apps for those devices. No surprise then that Apple recently finally made it possible for people to actually pay for apps and in-app payments via the local currency.

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At least, that’s what they told UK communications regulator Ofcom, which published the findings in its International Communications Market Report 2011.

The proportion of those who say they regularly pay for content is as low as equivalent surveys suggest - eight percent in the UK, seven percent in the US.

But Italians’ 14 percent is impressive - and a surprise.

Where did this statistic come from, and what content are Italians paying for? That’s not made clear in Ofcom’s research.

Are Italians just boasting? Twelve percent said they don’t even know whether they pay for content.

And the total population across nine surveyed countries was up only 2.4 percent (12 million), to 500 million.

I remember, from 1995, when .net magazine used to print the population of the internet on its spine each month; tiny numbers but fast growth.

Researchers did not explain the figures.

All countries have experienced good growth in mobile ad spend, and the UK is chief amongst them. But Japan is leaps and bounds ahead, with mobile ad spending double that of America and a whopping £6.52 per head mobile ad spend.

That is according to Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report 2011, citing PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2011-2015 data.

“Those nations with a high proportion of internet advertising spend also have a high mobile internet advertising spend per head,” Ofcom says.

UK mobile internet advertising revenue grew 118 percent through 2010 to £83 million.

YouGov’s BrandIndex, which measures consumers’ positive and negative sentiments towards brands, shows Samsung rose and iPhone fell after the ads were released on November 22 and December 1.

But YouGov says the movements are “driven mostly by adults 50+”. That may suggest older adults generally have a more negative perception of young, iPhone-toting hipster baristas - but it does not mean the attractive younger target market is about to desert iPhone.

Kindle has also overtaken iPad for brand perception, according to YouGov BrandIndex.