6 Million

Like we didn’t know this wouldn’t happen eh.

Morgan Stanley is calling it the reshaping of the PC market and in the process gives Apple a great big pat on the back by raising its target price to $332.00. Leading the charge at Morgan Stanley is Katy Huberty who raised her iPad sales estimates to 10 million units in 2010 (up from 6 million). At the same time she believes the company’s stock price could go as high as $440 by May 2011.

What’s turned her head? The blistering sales of the iPad and the diminishing growth of the netbooks’. Among her findings:

• The iPad is on track to become the fastest ramping mobile Internet device out of the gate and one of the most popular in history (see Exhibit 2).
• Early iPad usage patterns validate the tablet as a computing device. It’s already overtaken the Web browsing share of devices like the iPod touch.
• It’s at least partially responsible for a sharp drop in the growth of netbook sales, which decelerated to -13% year-over-year in the month of April, from +45% in the first quarter of 2010. Huberty thinks the netbook phenomenon may have peaked; she expects tablet sales to overtake netbooks by 2012.

Source: Fortune

Twitter COO Dick Cosotolo offered some updated stats at the Conversational Media Summit today in New York City. Twitter is now attracting 190 million visitors per month and generating 65 million Tweets a day. “We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train,” says Costolo. These numbers are up slightly from 180 million self-reported unique visitors per month back in April, and 50 million Tweets per day in February.

The number of visitors to Twitter.com is not the same as the number of registered users. (ComScore, in contrsat, estimated 83.6 million worldwide unique visitors to Twitter.com in April and 23.8 million U.S. visitors in May, see chart below). Most users, says Costolo, don’t Tweet at all, but rather use Twitter as a consumption media. How many of those 65 million Tweets are automated spam is not clear.

Once again, Costolo reiterated Twitter’s stance that “We will not allow third parties to inject ads into the stream.” When Twitter rolls out its Promoted Tweets, it will control them 100 percent. Some brands doing early beta testing with Promoted Tweets are seeing, on average, 2.5 percent “engagement rates,” whatever that means. He also mentioned that Twitter will be rolling out an analytics dashboard for commercial customers and brands. Advertisers will be able to target messages by interest and topics, but not by individual users.

More than 2.6 million people used Opera Mini on their iPhones, in the two weeks following April’s mid-month launch. This surge in new Opera Mini users reshaped both the top 10 countries and the top handsets for mobile Web usage, according to Opera’s State of the Mobile Web Report, issued today. The United States jumped two spots in the top 10 country ranking, displacing South Africa and Nigeria. Globally, the iPhone immediately became the third-most-popular device for Opera Mini users worldwide.

Mobile advertising network AdMob has released its mobile metrics report for April 2010, which takes a closer look at the geographic distribution of unique iPhone and Android devices. The report also looks at the ratio of iPhone OS and Android devices overall, and in specific geographical locations.

While Android is gaining lots of momentum, as posited by both the number of increased ad-requests and by sales estimates, the report highlights that Android is still largely concentrated in North America. The iPhone, in comparison, has a broader global reach.

Looking at the data broken down by geographic location, AdMob is seeing that 75% of unique Android devices are located in North America. Asia is next with 12%, and then Western Europe with 11%. The iPhone, conversely has 49% of its unique devices in North America, 28% in Western Europe and 14% in Asia.

This data gets more interesting when broken down by country. While the iPhone is growing tremendously in Asia and is a big hit in Japan, Android is already winning in China. According to AdMob, China had the second greatest number of unique Android devices (after the U.S.), and there are more Android devices than iPhones in China as of April 2010.

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The Importance of the iPod Touch and the iPad

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Android is quickly gaining on the iPhone in the U.S. — when just comparing phones, AdMob’s network measures 8.7 million unique Android devices to 10.7 million iPhone devices in the United States. However, when you add in non-phones running the iPhone OS, like the iPod touch or the iPad, that number becomes 18.3 million versus 8.7 million.

Worldwide, this trend continues. According to AdMob, there are 11.6 million unique Android OS devices and 27.4 million unique iPhone devices across the globe. However, add in iPhone OS devices like the iPod touch and iPad, and the iPhone OS number jumps to 40.8 million worldwide.

As we start to see more Android devices that aren’t primarily sold as phones — the Dell Streak, for example — this will be an interesting space to watch.

The importance of non-phone devices is twofold. First, non-phone devices run almost all of the same software that the phone counterparts run, thus adding to the overall marketshare for the respective platforms. Second, users who have one type of device and have already invested in applications for that device are more likely to want to move to a corresponding device for either a cellphone or for a tablet.

Conversely, an Android owner who has a Nexus One or Droid Incredible may be less likely to get an iPad and more interested in looking at Android-based solutions, including the Dell Streak, because of the cross-compatibility of applications.

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Geography Matters

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This report highlights one of the greatest areas of opportunity for Android (and Google) as a platform: Europe. Android is taking off in the U.S., but the U.S. is only part of the picture. iPhone adoption is growing faster in Europe and Asia than it is in North America; this is to be expected as the market becomes more saturated and more competitors enter the ring.

While Android may chip away at — and perhaps even surpass — iPhone sales in the U.S., the platform still needs to focus on other parts of the world. Apple, RIM and Nokia have had a multi-year headstart in getting more international traction and this is an area that Google needs to really zero in on.

Microsoft, which is on the verge of basically re-launching its mobile platform, also needs to make sure it focuses in the international market. The space is more crowded, but the userbase is also larger. There are plenty of opportunities for multiple players to have great success.

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For more mobile coverage, follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Android, Facebook, Google, Twitter

Tags: admob, android, ipad, iphone, stats

AT&T Could Lose 40% Of iPhone Subs To Verizon, Davenport Says — AT&T (T) could lose as many as 40% of current subscribers who use the Apple (AAPL) iPhone once Verizon (VZ) starts selling a version of the phone, according to Davenport &  Co. analyst F. Drake Johnstone. Johnstone thinks as many as 6 million of its current 15 million iPhone customers at [...]

Zappos-owned e-commerce site 6pm.com had a little pricing problem this weekend: A glitch in its system marked down every product in the store to $49.95. By the time the problem was fixed, the store had lost $1.6 million. So, did Zappos cancel the orders or charge the customers the "correct" price for their goods. Nope. The company ate the loss, saying it was "the right thing to do for our customers."

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (pictured) explained the situation on the company blog:

We have a pricing engine that runs and sets prices according to the rules it is given by business owners. Unfortunately, the way to input new rules into the current version of our pricing engine requires near-programmer skills to manipulate, and a few symbols were missed in the coding of a new rule, which resulted in items that were sold exclusively on 6pm.com to have a maximum price of $49.95. (Items that are sold on both 6pm.com and Zappos.com were not affected.)

We already had planned on improving our internal pricing engine so that it will have a much easier-to-use interface for our business owners. We are also planning on adding additional checks and balances to hopefully prevent this type of thing from happening again.

To those of you asking if anybody was fired, the answer is no, nobody was fired - this was a learning experience for all of us. Even though our terms and conditions state that we do not need to fulfill orders that are placed due to pricing mistakes, and even though this mistake cost us over $1.6 million, we felt that the right thing to do for our customers was to eat the loss and fulfill all the orders that had been placed before we discovered the problem.

Interestingly, Zappos' policies are not shared by its parent company, Amazon.com. In March, for example, an Amazon pricing glitch brought the prices of some books down from $125 to as little as $15. The company fixed the bug, canceled any orders that hadn't been fulfilled. Customers got $25 gift cards instead of their books; not a bad deal, but definitely a different perspective on the idea of "the right thing to do" for customers.

6pm.com Pricing Mistake [Zappos.com company blog]

Previously: Amazon Offers $25 Gift Card To Disappointed Comics Fans After Epic Price Glitch
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

For many years we've seen stories of companies making pricing mistakes at e-commerce stores. The news of those mistakes tends to spread very quickly, with lots of people piling on to order something for way less than it cost. Inevitably, the company realizes the mistake, and usually contacts everyone who ordered to let them know the order won't be fulfilled because it was a mistake. I actually have no problem with this, though some people think it's horribly evil. Either way, what seems to almost always happen is that the negative publicity that follows leads the company to change its mind and honor the original price. Sometimes, it actually takes a lawsuit to make that happen.

However, this weekend, it looks like Zappos had a pretty massive pricing glitch on its sister site 6pm.com. It lasted a few hours. But what's different this time is that once Zappos fixed things, it immediately decided that it would still honor the wrong prices, even though the mistakes would end up costing the company (now owned by Amazon) $1.6 million. Now, between Amazon and Zappos, the two companies have a ton of money, and continue making a lot of money every day. But, no matter what, a $1.6 million pricing error is still a big deal. Big enough that you would think that the company could potentially withstand any sort of PR hit to trying to not honor those prices (perhaps offering up some sort of gift certificate or benefit to those impacted, instead). However, for a company that bases its entire reputation on bending over backwards to make customers happy, it appears they quickly decided that it was best for their overall reputation to just eat the $1.6 million, and keep (or even boost) that customer service reputation.

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Zappos division 6pm.com screwed up and then manned up, making a mistake that capped all prices at $50 but honoring the sales and losing $1.6 million. The company blogged about it — apologizing, even — and then Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh tweeted about it. The king of customer service — whose book, Delivering Happiness, is coming out in only two weeks — set the bar high for screwing up publicly.

Store Loses $1.6 Million in Pricing Mixup —

Store Loses $1.6 Million in Pricing Mixup is a post from Chris Pirillo

On Friday night, a pricing mixup caused 6pm.com to lose nearly two million bucks. Around midnight, there was a mistake made in the pricing engine that capped everything on the site at $49.95. This only affected merchandise which appears only on 6pm, and not products that appear also at its sister site, Zappos.

On 6pm, you’ll find brand-name products at deep discounts. For instance, there was a $1400.00 GPS system available during the snafu for only $49.95 during the six hours of the pricing problem. The issue was discovered – and corrected – by 6am PST that morning. The company states that it will honor all purchases made during that time at the prices which were advertised. The cost of the messup for them is estimated at $1.6 million.

Sister site Zappos uses customer service as their key component of sales. It has paid off well, as it’s considered to be the biggest online shoe store on the Internet with over a billion dollars’ worth of sales in the past year. It was acquired by Amazon last year. They claim a large percentage of their sales come from repeat customers who are happy with the company and the way they are treated.

Several blogs are hinting that the price snafu could be some type of odd viral marketing campaign. I can’t believe that any company would willingly eat nearly two million dollars in lost sales for the sake of marketing. Sure… cut your prices. That’s a great way to make sales. But cost yourselves (and your investors) a chunk of change that large on purpose and you’ll likely find yourself out of business.

Did you manage to get some awesome buys over at 6pm on Friday morning? If so, share your steals and deals with us.

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Zappos Screws Up Pricing And Sells Products At $1.6 Million Below Cost...Then Honors The Sales! —

Shared by Jesse Stay
Wow - this makes me want to shop Zappos just to shop at Zappos and experience that support. That's great service!

More long-term thinking--and great customer service--from Zappos (which is presumably also smart enough to understand that this isn't a bad piece of marketing):

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Zappos CEO Hsieh: You Need To Build An Amazing Company Culture
• Zappos Sells 6%-30% More Merchandise When Accompanied By Video Demos
• Tech's Biggest Startup Success Stories Share Their Do's And Don'ts

As it continues its search to replace ex-digital head Chris Saridakis, Gannett (NYSE: GCI) is trying to make the most of its two successful digital units by bringing them more closely together. Under the new plan, rich media provider PointRoll, will be oversee social media marketing unit Ripple6. The integration will combine sales and operational efforts and tie together product offerings into a single digital marketing suite. Sang Kim, founder and CEO of Ripple6, will continue to oversee the division under PointRoll. Ripple6 headquarters will remain in New York.

The change follows a largely positive series of earnings reports for Gannett as Pointroll and Ripple6 have demonstrated growth. The exception on the digital side has been online recruiter Careerbuilder, which has suffered along with the high unemployment rate.

Saridakis departed last month and to become CEO of GSI’s commerce marketing unit.

Saridakis was brought in to serve as Gannett’s chief digital officer two years ago after serving as CEO of Pointroll.  Gannett acquired a 92 percent stake in Pointroll for $100 million in 2005 and three years later, purchased the remaining shares for $4.6 million. Saridakis had been an investor in Ripple6 before Gannett bought that company in Nov. 2008. Release

Related

• Gannett's Number One Shareholder: A 'Passive' JP Morgan
• Gannett Beats Analysts' Estimates; Weakness In Publishing, Digital Abates

Data is the lifeblood of the Web, but when it comes to advertising some of the most valuable data ends up all over the place. New York City startup Demdex captures behavioral data on behalf of Websites and advertisers and stores it in a “behavioral data bank.” The 14-employee company just raised $6 million in a series A financing, led by Shasta Ventures. Seed round investors First Round Capital and Genacast Ventures also participated, bringing the total capital raised by the startup so far to $7.5 million.

Here’s how I described what the company does when it came out of stealth last December:

They put all of this user profile data into a “behavioral data bank” and then score each user across more than 40 behavioral and demographic variables to come up with a “traitweight.” This number is supposed to be able to help websites segment their audiences better and advertisers target their messages more exactly.

. . . All of this behavioral data is currently locked away in black boxes inaccessible to the advertisers themselves or the Websites. If a big advertiser decides to switch technologies or ad networks, all that historical behavioral targeting data typically gets left behind. DemDex makes the data portable and puts it in the control of the Websites and advertisers themselves. They can plug it into whichever ad server or service they are currently using.

Demdex wants to cash in on giving control of that behavioral data back to the advertisers and publishers on whose behalf it was originally collected.

Dice Holdings, which provides specialized career websites for professional communities, has acquired the online and career events-related businesses of WorldwideWorker, a Dubai-based company active in recruitment for the energy industry.

The purchase price consists of initial consideration of $6 million in cash. Upon achievement of certain operating and financial goals within the next two years, the purchase price can mount up to a maximum of $9 million in cash.

WorldwideWorker boasts an extensive international resume database and is behind recruitment events held at conferences around the globe. According to the official statement, more than 400,000 energy professionals have registered with WorldwideWorker, two-thirds of which are based in Asia, Africa or the Middle East.

In June 2009, Dice Holdings moved to purchase another niche recruitment player, AllHealthcareJobs.com, in a mix of $2.8 million in cash and stock, with earn-out.

(Via press release)

iPad Isn't "Killing" Netbook Sales, According to Paul Thurrott — mantis2009 writes "Paul Thurrott, the prolific technology analyst and Windows expert, reacts strongly to an article highlighted on Slashdot. Thurrott takes numbers from IDC and the Wall Street Journal, indicating that netbook sales have not in any meaningful way been affected by sales of Apple's tablet computer, the iPad. Money quote: '[N]etbooks and sub-12-inch machines will sell 45.6 million units in 2011 and 60.3 million in 2013. If I remember the numbers from 2009, they were 10 percent of all PCs, or about 30 million units. Explain again how the iPad will beat that. Please. Even the craziest iPad sales predictions are a small percentage of that.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ben Kaufman is known as the guy behind Mophie, the Burlington, Vermont-based iPhone accessory maker that claimed $1 million in revenue in 2006.

But as he learned more and more from firsthand visits to outsourced manufacturers in China, Kaufman realized that he didn’t have to design the products himself. Instead, he told Inc magazine in 2007, he planned to “turn Mophie into a community-based product-development company” that let anyone submit a design. Winning designs would be built by Kaufman’s outsourced network.

Instead, Kaufman sold Mophie and founded Quirky. A few days ago, Quirky closed a $6 million A round of funding led by RRE Ventures. Village Ventures, Lowercase Capital and Contour Venture Partners also pitched in. That brings total funding to around $7.5 million.

Quirky, founded a year ago and headquartered in New York City, does what it calls social product development. Aspiring product designers pay $99 per idea to submit their product designs for group evaluation. Quirky maintains a community of people who are paid to influence product designs. Those who do get a cut of eventual sales. The $99 fee guarantees that “it’s either going to get your product developed, or you’ll get a 45-page stack from us explaining what type of people like your product.”

Once a week, Quirky chooses an unbuilt product to design and to offer for presale. They figure out how to get it built, and how much to sell it for. If enough people pre-order on Quirky’s website to turn a profit, the thing gets built and goes on sale.

If Quirky decides to build, say, your modular kitchen spatula, you must assign your intellectual property to the company. In exchange, you get a cut of revenue.

Eventually, if everything works out, your product goes on sale with Quirky as both a retailer and a distributor. Fixed portions of sales revenue are split among inventors, Quirky, and its community of influencers. One prolific influencer has earned $1,500 already.

The company has built and sold gadgets ranging from rain water collector, to a portable nightlight for children, to a luggage tag that weighs the suitcase to see if it fits carry-on restrictions. Because of the Mophie connection, Kaufman gets lots of submissions for Apple accessories. “The iPad case we launched last week is killing it,” he told me in a phone interview.

Some inventors might balk at paying to submit an idea, or at handing over their intellectual property to Quirky. “Mainly the reason behind the $99 is it’s a psychological barrier,” Kaufman told me. “You have to ask if you’re serious about building a time machine.”

Currently, he said, “one in about thirty-five ideas right now gets designed. of the one in 35, about 25-30 percent of them meet the presale threshold.”

The new funding will go toward hiring more staff, setting up model shops for new products, and getting international distribution for the finished products put into place.

Kaufman’s strength seems to be his willingness to let others be the star designers and inventors. “When you drill down to what this business is,” he said, “it’s an operational powerhouse.”

Companies: Quirky

People: Ben Kaufman

Media analyst Ken Doctor takes a close look at Nielsen Online's Huffington Post stats and finds several incredible stats about the five year old site's traffic.

• Huffington Post recently landed in the top 10 news sites.
• 13 million unique visitors to the site in March. That's a "whopping 94% year-over–year."
• 13% growth in uniques from February to March.
• 7% growth in page views from February to March.
• HuffPost generates 18 page views per unique, beating NYTimes.com's 16 and Yahoo! News' 15.
• Keeps visitors on the site for 12 minutes a month, couple minutes less than NYTimes.com and Yahoo! News.
• Ken figures if Huffington Post makes $20 million this year (a generous estimate), 13 million monthly uniques could mean $1.6 million a month or about 12 cents a unique visitor per month.

CEO Eric Hippeau and sales boss Greg Coleman have a lot of work to do.

Read more at Ken Doctor's site, Newsonomics >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Meet 25 Media Stars Who Leaped From Old Media To New Media
• Huffington Post Blasts Past 40 Million Monthly Unique Visitors
• Huffington Post Wants To Sell Ads In Twitter Streams, Comments

As I wrote about back in February, ManageTwitter is easily one of the most useful third-party Twitter services out there. While there are plenty of services that help you find new people to follow, there simply aren’t enough that help you prune those that you already follow. For those of us who have been using the service for years now, and have accumulated a lot of people we follow over that time, this is a problem. ManageTwitter solves it brilliantly. And now Twitter is going to kill them.

As the service posted on its Posterous blog yesterday, Twitter has sent the service an email letting them know that they’re breaking one of their rules. Specifically, this is what Twitter wrote:

We’re writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the “Select All” option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance.

The problem is that ManageTwitter’s service isn’t automated at all. It simply offers up suggestions for who you should unfollow. As ManageTwitter writes:

Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.

They go on to note that they understand Twitter’s rule, but again, do not believe they are breaking it. It’s possible that the portion Twitter doesn’t like is that the checkboxes next to usernames are automatically selected for deletion (I don’t particularly like this either because most users — even many of the ones they suggest — I don’t want to unfollow) — and if so, that’s an easy fix. I have an email into Twitter asking them if that would be good enough and will update when I hear back.

I can certainly see Twitter not approving of the name for trademark reasons — but they’re apparently not disputing that at the moment, just the bulk unfollow bit.

Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the social graph in such a way. But again, this service is very useful to many users, and I believe makes Twitter better — even if it is slightly less connected.

ManageTwitter is asking that you retweet this tweet in support of them.

[Thanks Courtenay]

Yesterday was a big day for social-oversharing site Blippy, which lets members automatically post their purchases to the Internet. The company announced $11.6 million in funding and was profiled in The New York Times.

Overnight, at least one Internet power user figured out a way to search for Blippy members’ credit card numbers on Google. A fairly obvious search for “from card” this morning returned dozens of results that included full credit card numbers.

VentureBeat reporters deduced that all are Citibank-issued MasterCard numbers. We’re reluctant to publish further details yet. We’ve contacted Citibank, Blippy CEO Ashvin Kumar and cofounder Philip Kaplan, and some of the people whose card numbers turned up.

Companies: Blippy, Citibank

People: Ashvin Kumar, Philip Kaplan

As we first reported last month, Blippy has raised another round of funding. Following the initial $1.6 million angel round in January, the controversial service has just raised another $11.2 million.

As we expected, the latest round was led by August Capital and partner David Hornik will join Blippy’s board. Humorously, Hornik shared his investment on Blippy itself, so we know he put in about $8 million 8 days ago (it was hidden until just now). “I think this is my biggest purchase on Blippy,” Hornik quipped. The rest of the money is from Charles River Ventures, which had led the angel round.

Blippy’s valuation is now $46.2 million post-money, we’re told.

So what’s the plan for the new money? “Expanding our services, doing marketing, and closing some large business development deals,” co-founder Philip Kaplan tells us. Currently, Blippy has 10 employees.

Since the service launched in December, it has been a lightning rod for controversy. In a world where some people are hesitant to check-in at places using location services, the idea of posting credit card transactions truly terrifies some. But others seem to love the service, and clearly investors do too.

After significantly scaling down costs, The New York Times Company this morning announced upbeat Q1 2010 results, reporting a profit and growing digital advertising sales.

NYT’s operating profit grew more than fivefold in the first quarter of 2010, to $83.3 million compared with $16.4 million in the first quarter of 2009. Total revenues were down 3.2% in Q1, to $587.9 million from $607.1 million in the same period last year.

That’s not bad news, considering that the media company reported a decline of 11.5 percent in last quarter before that (Q4 2009). Could this be signs of a turn-around?

Interestingly, The New York Times Company reported solid growth in digital advertising revenues (up 18 percent), offsetting an expected but rather significant decrease in print advertising across the board as revenue dropped 12 percent.

Total revenues for the quarter declined ‘only’ 6 percent in the first quarter of 2010 compared to the same period the year before, in large part thanks to the rise in digital sales revenue.

Noteworthy: online advertising revenues now make up more than a quarter of the company’s total advertising revenues: it rose to 26 percent in the first quarter, up from 20 percent in the year before and 23.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009.

The company’s Internet businesses include NYTimes.com, About.com, Boston.com and other Web sites. In the first quarter, total Internet revenues increased 15.5 percent to $90.4 million from $78.2 million, and online advertising revenues increased 18.3 percent to $80.0 million from $67.6 million.

Internet advertising revenues at the News Media Group increased 11.2 percent to $46.9 million from $42.2 million due to strong growth in national display advertising, while classified advertising is still hurting.

The paper intends to start charging for some of its content next year.

This could cause mayhem.

At today’s Twitter developer conference Chirp, Twitter execs were asked whether they were considering including media sharing as a twitter feature. Their answer: “we can’t guarantee we won’t”.

This essentially means apps like Twitpic, Twitvid, yfrog, Tweetphoto (who just raised $2.6 million in funding) and other media sharing tool could be making a quick exit – for the majority, the bad kind.

The decision is by no means final but rests on how easy Twitter decides it can make media sharing for its users. As things stand today Twitter co-founder Evan Williams thinks the current media sharing apps out there do a great job, but sharing could be much easier, particularly in regard to photos.

Twitter has a renewed focus on ensuring the twitter experience is as simple to understand as possible. With that in mind Williams believes, and I agree, that photo sharing is an integral part of the twitter experience. If twitter can make the process easier for its users, the chances are it will – even if that means eradicating some of twitter’s most popular apps (twitpic is number one), something it has proven it is willing to do.

Original title and link for this post: Twitter considering integrating media sharing as a feature.

Are you a cord-cutter, or do you want to be? Have you had enough of paying your cable company through the nose for 800 channels, when all you really watch is maybe 20 or 30? With an increasing selection of high-quality TV fare coming online, more people are experimenting with ditching their TVs (or more accurately, their cable and satellite TV subscriptions) for online options such as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes. The numbers are still small, but last year an estimated 800,000 U.S. households cut the cable cord altogether, according to a new report by the Convergence Consulting Group. By the end of next year, that number is forecast to double to 1.6 million.

Cord cutters don’t yet represent a serious threat to the $84 billion cable/satellite/telco TV access industry, which counts an estimated 101 million subscribers. But they are a leading indicator of the shift to TV viewing on the Web. The cord-cutters make up less than 3 percent of all full-episode viewing on the Web. The rest comes from people who are only beginning to watch occasionally online. An estimated 17 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watch at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online. Last year, that percentage was 12 percent, and next year it is forecast to grow to 21 percent.

As more and more viewing options become available online, more people will add Web viewing as part of their mix. For instance, in my home we don’t have a TV in the kitchen, but we keep a laptop there. Last night, my wife watched a full episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolutionon Hulu while she was cooking. When any screen can be a TV, people will watch the one that is closest. And the easier it becomes to connect your computer to your flat screen TV, the more the online video sites and services will become just another set of channels.

The free, advertising supported model is still the most popular. Although Apple is making noises about making Apple TV more than just a hobby and doubled the number of TV shows available for download last year, Convergence estimates only 100 million episodes were downloaded last year, up from 90 million in 2008. The associated download revenue was only $200 million.

Meanwhile, Convergence estimates that U.S. online TV advertising by the likes of CBS, Disney/ABC, NBC Universal, News Corp., Time Warner, and Viacom made up 2.5 percent of their estimated $62 billion of traditional TV advertising revenues last year—or an additional $1.56 billion (which is above other estimates putting all online video advertising last year at $1 billion). But you get a sense of the huge revenue gap here, and this is not even counting the extra $34 billion in programming fees the broadcasters and TV networks got from the cable companies last year. No wonder they are in no rush to move their shows to the Web.

What is helping them stave off the cord-cutters is the growth of DVRs, video-on-demand, and HD channels. Convergence estimates that 35 percent of U.S. households have a DVR, and 36 percent have HD. By 2012, it forecasts that 50 percent will have DVRs and 58 percent will have HD. And more video-on-demand is bringing a la carte options directly through the set-top box.

But the Web will always be cheaper. It is a question of convenience versus cost. So what are you, a cord-cutter or a coach potato?

Photo credit: Flickr/Schmilblick