Our ‘Digital Marketplace Overview Report 2008′ of Ireland reveals some interesting insights about the state of the nation.

Topline Market Size and Nature
From an analysis of data from Comreg, comScore and the CSO we have identified the following key market trends:

- 75% of the adult population have access to the Internet (2.5m adults 15+)
- 60% of the online population are active online in any month
- Broadband growth is the third fastest in Europe

Broadband penetration is now at 18% (based on broadband connections as a percentage of the total population). How does this compare with the rest of Europe? OECD data shows that the leading countries have penetration rates of 30% to 35% (Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland) and in the UK the figure is close to 25%. Needless to say we still have some way to go.

The Online Maketplace
Average daily visits to the top 100 properties increased by 6% over the last 12 months. The average time spent per online visit has increased marginally to 31.5 minutes. The duration time for individual sites ranges from as low as 3 minutes on search engines and portals to over 30 minutes for social networking sites.

Google and MSN remain the top 2 sites in the market with search, email and Instant Messenger being the key content drivers. Bebo has overtaken Yahoo and is now in third position overall, delivering coverage of 46% – rising to over 70% for specific age groups. Bebo and the other social network sites continue to drive high onsite duration times.

The Mobile Marketplace
Wireless access is growing strongly with a total of 2,603 access points – representing quarterly growth of 11%. Sales of laptops have surged over the last 12 months and this, combined with the greater availability of broadband and wireless access points, means that the Internet is now more mobile than ever.

Mobile handset ownership is at 114%. With a continuous uptake of new subscriptions, the new mobile subscriber volume for Q3 07 was 108,000. This brings the overall mobile subscription base to 4.9m.

Mobile broadband access levels (using the Internet on your handset) are equally impressive with a total of 88,400 broadband subscribers – representing 11% of the total broadband market. Of course the big statistic is that while mobile grows, fixed line volumes are declining at 5% per quarter.

To read the full report (which also includes further information on the online marketplace, the state of industry research and digital TV), please click here to download.

RTE Podcast volume is now close to 800,000 downloads every month. Data just released by RTE shows that Morning Ireland is their most popular podcast – generating 45% of their top 10.

RTE content is also available on their mobile platform, with the latest data showing monthly page views of around 800,000. It’s certainly shaping up to be an very interesting year in mobile, with significant growth projected following the introduction of flat rate Internet fees from all operators.

RTE will shortly unveil their new mobile site which they promise will be more user friendly and will have a series of standard ad placements. More details to follow of course when they come to hand.

Dynamic in-game advertising refers to ads that are switched in and out of games post-development (from interactive placements to signage to sponsorships). Currently the market is already worth an estimated $400 million but this figure is set to sky rocket with Sony poised to open up its in-game advertising platform.

There are currently three key players who sell these ads: Double Fusion, IGA and Google-owned AdScape. According to Sony, their new platform will not favour any particular agent. This means all three companies can broker deals directly with the game publishers creating PS3 games. The major publishers waiting in anticipation for the forthcoming windfall include the likes of Electronic Arts, Activision and Ubisoft.

According to James Belcher, a longtime video-game writer and senior writer at eMarketer, “opening up only makes things better for marketers because they aren’t at the mercy of a given network”. He went on to say that the market is already hypercompetitive, as “everyone’s playing around with the best model including how to charge and what gamers will put up with”.

Last summer, Sony signed a deal with Nielsen to measure in-game advertising. In October, it hired Darlene Kindler, a veteran of the video-game business who was most recently at AdScape, to oversee its in-game advertising efforts.

The $400 million market is expected to grow during the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 23%.

Many people will be familiar with the concept of placing small 5 / 10 second ads before streaming video content. It makes sense. If someone has made the decision to hit play, they’re likely to put up with the ‘pre-show’ ads.

Google, however, have gone a step further. In a private test program currently running, selected AdWords advertisers are allowed to associate video clips with their ads. Just below these ads, there’s a small plus symbol with an invitation to watch a video. Click the symbol and the video appears and begins to play. Video opens the doors to almost endless possibility beyond 70 characters. Perhaps this is the beginning of PPC following SEO’s shift towards universal search. We would not be surprised to see maps, podcasts and other rich content integrated into AdWords over the coming months.

Of course, the downside is that video ads will open the door for the payment structure to change. For a long time, Google (and us) were quite happy with a CPM-based system. In 2002, however, AdWords Select was introduced, along with a move to a CPC based system and CPM eventually disappeared.

So it looks like we’re left with some questions:

Will video ads signal the return of CPM?
Will impressions and views matter more then clicks?
Will the effectiveness of PPC diminish with the clutter of video driving people away?

Either way, as bandwidth increases and broadband penetration deepens, video / rich media is certainly going to stick and evolve.

There were heated scenes at the Dublin Castle Tribunal on Friday as two men staged a protest against the Internet. The Internet?!

We were at a great session today on brand and reputation management. According to Data Monitoring, 33% of those who lose trust in a company in the United States, actively campaign on the web against them. What an amazing statistic! We urge all PR agencies to take notice and embrace online PR and social media immediately.

UK and Irish consumers are following our American counterparts and will become the makers and breakers of brands over the coming years. There are now plenty of social outlets to vent anger and these voices are becoming louder and clearer!

Cybercom’s approach to our search business in the UK and Ireland has always placed PR top of mind so it’s good to see the industry shifting towards the convergence of social, PR and search.

It will be interesting to see how fast the Irish market in general moves in 2008. Traditionally, Irish agencies have been slow to adapt but it seems the bar has been raised over the last few months.

Here’s to 2008…

Sky have just launched a ‘Storage and Sharing’ portal where members can upload files, photos and other stuff they want to share with their family and friends. With email and chatting functions, users have the option of getting 1GB for free or paying for extra storage.

Heavy hitters, such as Google, have tried to tap into the social network arena by offering branded portals, most of which have failed. Sky are hoping to crack this by taking a different approach by offering a ‘storage and sharing’ service.

Photo sharing sites like FlickR.com and Pix.ie were first to see the demand for storage capabilities in the Web 2.0 world, and as the speed of Social Network development gets faster and faster, we now have portals hosting all our data. Another Irish company, Putplace.com, offers a similar service (although still in beta). Could it indeed be Sky’s offering to put Putplace out of business before they even start?

There are two questions that need to be asked. Firstly, does the Irish Market have the broadband capacity to support this level of mass market uploading? Secondly, what are Sky’s motivations for storing their customer’s personal data and will they be responsible for it (and indeed what laws will they be bounbd by – Irish or UK)?

There’s a theme emerging at this year’s conference that is best summarised as “Think Local, Think Social in 2008″! Today has been good – some very useful searcher insights, lots on universal search and solid shared experiences on delivering high end PPC strategies.

We simply have to start with some brilliant research results announced today from comScore and some of the other metric companies:

General figures that stood out to us:

1. 67% of all searchers are driven from ATL advertising
2. 39% of these ATL prospects went on to purchase
3. Others complete their research online and go back offline to purchase
4. 36% of searchers believe the top result is the top brand or product
5. 16% lift in brand recall when you have an organic and paid presence

This is ample proof that search is becoming central to marketing communications and both organic and paid must be integrated at every opportunity. Otherwise the competition will simply take the traffic and prospects generated by your ATL media spend.

We’d also like to share some impressive stats specific to the online travel industry:

1. 56% of first time searches are non-branded
2. 64% of last searches (when purchase is made) were branded
3. 3+ searches represent 71% of all online travel transactions
4. 45% of transactions happen 4 weeks after the initial search

This confirms what we’ve been experiencing with clients in this sector – there is a travel purchasing cycle conducted via search which starts on generic, then goes to product / service specific and finishes with a brand search (resulting in the sale). Having said this, we were surprised with the 4 week lead time!

Ok, ok… there was more to today that boring old stats and figures. We enjoyed the session on Video and Podcast SEO. Lots of new products, designed to make it easier to find video or podcast content on the web, were showcased this afternoon. Don’t freak out here – simply apply the SEO basics and your content will be found! There’s a green field opportunity in the Irish market for good video to scale fast with clever SEO. Get on it and good luck!

We sat in on some interesting conversatons around the Yahoo / Microsoft debacle. The general consensus from the experts of the day is that the two companies have massive data synergy to gain by joining up but the cultural clash of these two digital giants does pose difficulty. The focus of the debate is primarily who Yahoo! should partner with, not whether they should. Yahoo is far more than search – it is a media server with massive subscriber numbers. Whether it merits $44bn is another question..

With all the talk about local search, we are naturally looking to implement granular, targeted advertising through PPC. Over and above the big three search ad centres, it’s time to look to verticals. Yell.com comes to mind. The PPC ad strategists are agreed on one thing: the ad centres are unifying their approach to search which will allow for cross management of PPC accounts. Search managers can then concentrate on niche identification and detailed reporting. Ultimately the advertiser will benefit.

We’ll finish on, yep – you guessed it, more social media. Humans certainly are hot again when it comes to search! But this time, it’s not the old school method of using human editors to categorise the web. Instead, search engines are tapping into human knowledge more widley through tagging, universal search, search history etc. There is indeed a search revolution underway so make sure consumers have the opportunity to take your content with them into their social spaces. And make sure it’s always tagged with your keyphrases.

Same place, same time tomorrow for our report on the last day.

We’re in London at the moment at Search Engine Strategies. Today has been good if a little quieter that we expected. Mind you, it’s a three day event so will probably heat up tomorrow.

There were some interesting sessions this morning on local search – both desktop / laptop based and mobile based. Local has been slow in Ireland but hopefully the revamped GoldenPages.ie and Independent Newspaper’s YourLocal.ie will do something about this over the coming months. They could have done with being over here this morning.

It was very insightful to hear how other markets (European and American) are adopting to consumers who are increasingly turning online to find localised services such as plumbers, pizza delivery etc. Particularly interesting was the convergence of local search and web 2.0 resulting in localised social networks / review sites like QYPE which already has a strong presence in the UK and Germany.

Mobile local search is exciting but the technology seems to be 18 months away from a “tipping point”. We will do a seperate post on this over the coming weeks.

There was also an intresting analytics session this afternoon which certainly added fuel to the debate on whether Google, the media owner, should also be Google, the evaluation owner? All the same, it’s generally accepted in the industry that Google Analytics can do 70% – 80% of what the paid analytical tools can do. In fact, it can do 100% of what most of us need analytics to do. It will be interesting to see where this goes over the coming months.

Fredrick Marckini was the conference’s keynote speaker. He’s the guy who founded iProspect in the States. The agency went on to become the largest search agency in the world and was purchased by Isobar a couple of years ago. It was encouraging to hear him talk about the increased blending of the various rich channels (video, maps etc) into the search results page. Cybercom’s approach to search (viewing it as the convergence of SEO, social media and PR) is very similar so it’s good to confirm that, strategically, we’re at the leading edge globally.

Tune in for more tomorrow folks..

Reports show that 50% of all people using BitTorrent at any given point in time do so to download TV series and, in total, over a billion TV`shows are downloaded every year (a figure which continues to rise).

In the US, it has come to the stage where BitTorrent is slowly replacing Tivo. Some episodes of popular TV-shows such as “Lost”, “Prison Break” and “Heroes” get up to 10 million downloads per episode. This number is now so large that it’s actually close to the average number of viewers on US TV. The major difference being of course that the BitTorrent “viewers” come from all over the world.

The graph below shows the percentage of .torrent files per category downloaded over the last 2 years – over 40 percent are TV shows.

According to EZTV, the leading TV-torrent distribuition group, “A factor that plays a role in the rise of unauthorized downloading of TV shows is that most people simply don’t see it as stealing. It is a signal that customers want something that is not available through other channels and it’s more about availability than the fact that it’s free. It’s not a threat, but more an opportunity.”

We sourced this information at EZTV and Torrentfreak.com