mThink

2012-Q1:

Apple’s profits $11.6 Billion
Google’s revenues $10.7 Billion

And if the iPhone was a business on its own, it would probably be the most profitable company in the world.

Much more here.

Ad Age’s Digital Conference has been running this week and one presentation in particular caught my eye. Lau Seng Lee from Tencent offered up seven key statistics on China’s online revolution:

- Every day, 164,000 new Chinese come online for the first time;
- There are more Apple iOS and Android users in China than there are in the USA;
- China has over half a Billion online users currently.

In the last quarter Google’s CPC rates decreased by 12% compared to the year before, at the same time that Facebook’s rates increased by 28%. The shift of power towards Facebook is probably the result of Google’s frantic search for new display ad revenue: the drop in CPC prices coincides with their purchase of AdMeld.

What would you say if I told you that fully half of all the display ads you buy are never even seen by a website-user?

It’s true. In case you’re wondering, I don’t mean that the user doesn’t look at an ad that is in front of them. No. I mean that the ad is not even shown to them in the first place.

The good news is that there’s something you can do about it but you need a new metric. The missing metric is visibility.

Eight mobile ad networks are collaborating to come up with a new way to track iPhone and iPad users. The initiative, called ODIN, comes as a result of the pressure that Apple is applying upon networks to protect user privacy by stopping the use of unique device ID numbers (UDID) for tracking purposes. The working group claims that over 60% of mobile ad revenues derive from performance-based marketing campaigns and could be threatened unless a standard is agreed.