WebProNews

Social Networks Blamed For $2.25B In Lost Productivity

Short stretches can really accumulate.  Did you know, for instance, that if someone comes back from lunch nine or ten minutes late every day, he (or she) will take the equivalent of free week of paid vacation per year?  And similarly, one IT services and technology company believes social networking is costing UK businesses $2.25 billion each year.

Hitwise: Facebook Receives One-Seventh Of UK Page Views

Google, eBay, and YouTube are all pretty big in the online world - monsters, really.  But in terms of page views - and in the UK - none of seem to them even approach Facebook's popularity, as new Hitwise stats indicate that the social network receives about one-seventh of all page views.

YouTube Strikes Deal With UK Broadcaster

New content - and quite a lot of it - will soon become available on YouTube.  The video-sharing site's struck a revenue-sharing deal with Channel 4 that'll give it access to full-length, recently broadcast shows along with about 3,000 hours of archive material. 

UK High Court Serves Injunction Via Twitter

The UK High Court has found a new use for Twitter: serving legal injunctions.  It seems that an anonymous Twitter user was satirizing/impersonating another man, and the High Court decided that the easiest way to contact him (or her) was through the site.

Online Advertising is Having a Big Year

Things are looking great for the online advertising industry. Several recent reports share data that is quite optimistic for the industry as a whole. eMarketer points to research from GroupM, which claims that digital spending will be at 17% of total US ad spending in 2010. This would be an increase from 15.4% this year and 13.9% in 2008. GroupM also predicts 4% growth in US online ad spending in 2009, to $22.77 billion.

Obvious: People Don't Want to Pay for Online News

Paid Content UK conducted a Poll with Harris Interactive, asking respondents how much they would pay for online news, and what they would do if they're favorite news sites started charging. The findings, perhaps not so shocking, indicate that users basically don't really want to pay.

UK News Sites Getting Big Traffic from US

British news sites are starting to see a lot more traffic from the US. UK Internet visits to News and Media websites grew by 8% last year according to Hitwise, and US Internet visits to UK News and Media sites have gone up by 54%.

Kanye, Swayze, Others Propel Google News to Record Week in UK

Google News had a record week in the UK last week. Hitwise attributes this largely to a big week for celebrity news.

YouTube UK To Bring Music Videos Back

Following a blackout period of about six months, music videos are set to make their return to YouTube UK.  YouTube's worked out an agreement with PRS for Music, a trade body that collects royalties and at one point asked to be paid about 0.36 cents each time a clip was played. 

Twitter Is Ahead Of MySpace In The UK

Twitter, media sweetheart and microblogging service extraordinaire, has another coup to add to its list: they’ve now beat out MySpace in terms of most visits in the UK.