Here are a few of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured during the past week or so:

The New York Times – Yahoo’s Income Drops 5% in Struggle for Market Share
Investors hoping for any hint of what is next for Yahoo in Tuesday’s earnings announcement will have to wait a little longer. Instead, they got the same old story: more cost-controls and declining revenue. Read more.

Reuters – Twitter Is Much More Than Social: Co-Founder Dorsey
Twitter is much more than a social network and has no time to waste worrying about newcomers like Google+ as it becomes more important as an information service and builds its advertising business, co-founder Jack Dorsey said on Sunday. Read more.

USA Today – Consumers in the Middle of Google-Facebook Battle
For the past two years, each company has experimented with different ways to divine more and more about how people live their lives on the Internet, without sparking a revolt. Read more.

Forbes – Twitter Takes the World: Microblogs Explode Overseas, Attract Global Brands
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but sometime during the last six months the game changed dramatically for Twitter and its overseas imitators. Read more.

The Hollywood Reporter – Amazon.com Weighs Separate Video Streaming Service to Challenge Netflix
BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield recently predicted that Amazon.com could this year launch a stand-alone video streaming service to challenge Netflix, which will report its latest quarterly financials after Wednesday’s market close. Read more.

Bloomberg Businessweek – Yahoo’s Revenue Trails Estimates as Demand for Ads Shrinks
Yahoo! Inc., the largest U.S. Web portal, reported revenue and forecast sales that fell short of estimates as ebbing demand for display advertising underscored the challenge facing new Chief Executive Officer Scott Thompson. Read more.

Bloomberg Businessweek – Facebook Said to Weigh Expanding European Head Office in Dublin
Facebook Inc. is seeking to more than double the size of its European headquarters in Dublin as the most popular social-networking site prepares for a possible $10 billion initial public offering, three people with knowledge of the matter said. Read more.

Advertising Age – New Yahoo CEO: Great Things in the Works, but I Can’t Share Them Yet
In his first earnings call since Yahoo named him CEO three weeks ago, Scott Thompson mixed bold proclamations of Yahoo’s potential with requests for just a bit more time to articulate his vision for the stalled internet behemoth. Read more.

Advertising Age – Mobile-Ad Spending Projected to Reach $2.61B in 2012
Mobile-ad spending in the U.S. is rising at a much faster clip than previously forecast and is projected to grow 80% this year, to $2.61 billion. Read more.

Advertising Age – Twitter to Roll Out More Brand Pages for Advertisers Who’ve Committed $25K
Twitter will start rolling out more brand pages next week for some brands and partners who have already committed to spending at least $25,000 on its ad products, including promoted tweets and trends. Read more.

Bloomberg – Amazon Fire Tablet Leaves Google Apps Behind
Since Google Inc. (GOOG) introduced its Android operating system in 2007, the company’s strategy has been simple: Give it to developers for free and make money when consumers click ads on the Web or through apps. That model is hitting a snag. Read more.

Los Angeles Times – Advertising Spending Online Expected to Surpass Print This Year
U.S. online advertising spending is expected to grow 23.3% to $39.5 billion this year, pushing it ahead of total advertising spending in print newspapers and magazines, according to an eMarketer report. Read more.

paidContent – Yahoo In Context: It’s Declining While The Online Ad Market Keeps Growing
Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson earlier today gave frank—and, the hopeful might say, encouraging—run down of the task ahead to turn around Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), an internet portal that was once on top of its game but has lately seem some serious decline. Read more.

We all knew this day would come but it arrived sooner than some of us had expected. On July 19, Amazon announced it had sold more e-books than hardcover books over the past three months. Further, the growth rate in e-books accelerated during that time. In the month leading up to the announcement, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, compared with a ratio of 143-to-100 during the three-month span.

Amazon also said unit sales of its Kindle reader devices had accelerated every month during the second quarter, both on a year-over-year basis and on a sequential basis. The company further noted that growth in Kindle unit sales had tripled since Amazon cut the price of the device to $189 from $259 on June 21, 2010.

There’s a lot that these numbers don’t tell us, starting with the raw numbers of Kindle and e-book units or the revenue associated with those product lines. Growth rates can be dodgy without broader context, particularly if the trend curve starts at a low point.

What we can glean from Amazon’s update is that the e-book business is a vibrant and fast-growing segment of the digital content universe. Analyst Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company, predicted that, within a decade, fewer than 25% of books sold would be print versions.

The Amazon figures also suggest that predictions of a head-to-head battle between the Kindle and the Apple iPad may have been overstated. When the iPad launched earlier this year, The New York Times said Apple was on “on a direct collision course with the Kindle.”

However, in the second quarter, Apple sold 3.27 million iPad units, according to the company’s latest earnings report. While there’s no data on how many consumers own both devices, I’d be willing to bet that the overlap is significant.

Jefferies & Company managing director Youssef Squali suggested as much when he said Amazon’s announcement was “clearly an indication that the iPad is complementary to the Kindle, not a replacement.”

Mike Egan of ComputerWorld elaborated on this point by summing up 13 reasons why iPad owners still need Kindles. The main takeaway from Mr. Egan’s commentary is that the iPad does exactly what the Kindle doesn’t, and vice-versa. As long as this remains the case, there should be room for both items in consumer’s gadget wish lists.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will launch its long-awaited Google Editions electronic bookstore sometime this summer. This move, which had been rumored for months, will almost certainly reshape the e-publishing landscape.

To give you an idea of how analysts perceive Google’s impending market entry, a February 2010 Credit Suisse report stated: “We expect Google to be a major competitive factor in the eBook market.” Further, it predicted “a scenario where Apple, Amazon, and Google eventually split the market.” Amazon, according to Credit Suisse, had a 90% share of e-book sales in 2009.

In order to fully gauge the potential impact of a Google e-book store—and even a device, which the company is also rumored to be developing—we need much more information than the company divulged in a May 4 session at Random House’s New York headquarters.

At this point, we know nothing about the pricing, content mix or types of deals Google is making with publishers. Will Google use the “agency” pricing model that Apple is pushing for the iPad, whereby the publisher gets a 70% cut of each sale, with retail prices ranging from $13 to $15 per title? Or will Google follow the earlier Amazon “wholesale” model, where the publisher gets a 35% cut of a baseline price of $10 per title?

Rumor has it that Google prefers the agency model, which is also favored by most publishers, but we don’t know for sure.

Here’s what we do know:

• Google’s offering is browser-based. It’s not tethered to a specific device, which means any title purchased through Google should be readable on an Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, or any other e-book reader, laptop, desktop, tablet or mobile device.
• Google Editions will be closely tied to Google book searches.
• Google will allow book retailers to sell Google Editions on their own sites and keep the bulk of the revenue.

Commenting in the Journal, Evan Schnittman, vice president of global business development for Oxford University Press, said: “This levels the retail playing field. [A]s a publisher, what I like is that I won’t have to think about audiences based on devices. This is an electronic product that consumers can get anywhere as long as they have a Google account.”

Schnittman added that Google Editions represents “the ultimate test” of whether the ability to search, find and purchase electronic books will generate substantial revenues for Google as well as participating publishers.

As always, the deciding vote in whether the test succeeds or fails will be cast by the almighty consumer. If Google’s offering is compelling and priced fairly, there’s no reason to think the company couldn’t become a prime mover in the e-book business. On the other hand, this is already a hyper-competitive market thanks to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony and others. Google will have to thread the needle very carefully to find a place in this crowded field.

Whatever happens, I can’t wait for the next chapter on this one.

It’s a familiar question. Whether the iPad or any other tablet will really be the “savior” of the publishing industry, as some have said, is unclear. What is clear, however, is that consumers aren’t likely to be friendly to publishers who don’t provide content optimized for their preferred digital media devices–be it tablet, e-reader, mobile phone, or even desktop computer.

Some publishers already appear to be taking the tablet route. Wired Magazine is currently developing a gorgeous app for the iPad, and other publishers appear to be moving in similar directions. We recently put senior analyst Paul Verna in the hot seat to ask some questions about his new report, “Paid E-Publishing Content: Books, Newspapers and Magazines” to really find out what’s moving and shaking in the print-gone-digital space. (Read more…)

Wired Magazine just released a video promoting their upcoming app for the iPad, and it looks gorgeous. We’ve all heard about how large-format e-readers such as the iPad and Amazon Kindle DX can deliver a truly immersive experience, but this video gets that point across visually. I was especially struck by interactive features embedded in the ads – something we haven’t heard much about because we’ve been understandably focused on editorial content. Delivering this type of rich media advertising experience will be crucial for publishers threatened by a sluggish economy, competition from other forms of entertainment, changes in consumer behavior, and the inexorable march of technology. (Read more…)