If you’re a frequent traveler, or just a social media addict, it’s likely that you’ve seen or complained about airline troubles somewhere on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. Have you ever wondered which airline has the worst social media reputation? According to Amplicate, which tracks social media sentiment, that would be American Airlines. Only 12 percent of social media opinions about the airline were positive. Yikes!
This week, Netflix took a huge hit when it reported that it had lost 805,000 paid subscribers following the company’s price hike. Its remaining 23.79 million U.S. subscribers continue to use the service loyally, however. According to a report by Sandvine Intelligent Broadband Networks, Netflix accounts for 32.7 percent of U.S. Internet bandwidth. Interestingly, viewers have been relying less on their PCs to access the movie database and are turning toward game consoles, set-top boxes, smart TVs and mobile devices for their film fix.
Speaking of videos, comScore Video Metrix just released data showing that 85.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience watched videos online during September. YouTube topped the list of video viewing sites with 161 million unique viewers last month, followed by VEVO, Microsift Sites, Viacom Digital, Facebook and Hulu.
When talking about videos online, most people want to know how to “make” their video go viral. But have you ever questioned how much money viral YouTube videos make? The father of Internet sensation “David After Dentist” earned approximately $100,000 from YouTube ads since he first uploaded the video to the Internet. Social Times has a more in depth look at the money behind viral videos.
Facebook has had a rough week in online news media. One Mashable article reported that the social networking site faced a $138,000 fine for holding data that had been deleted by users. All Facebook reported that the site’s valuation dropped for a third time this week, sinking to $80 billion from $82.25 billion in September. Finally, Tech Crunch wrote an article revealing that Facebook sees 600,000 compromised logins each day. While that’s only .06 percent of Facebook’s one billion logins, it is a lot of personal information that could fall into the wrong hands.
In the realm of not very surprising news, another comScore report showed that social networking via mobile devices is on the rise. The number of people who accessed Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter from their phones grew 50 percent, 69 percent and 75 percent respectively from August 2010 to August 2011.
And one more thing – a huge congratulations goes out to our CEO, Tripp Donnelly, for being named one of the Washington Business Journal’s top 40 businessmen under 40 in D.C. Take a minute and visit his profile on the WBJ site.