It’s kind of a slow day, so I’ve been digging around for nuggets. Here are what I’m calling the stats of the day. Let’s start with social media. Nielsen research says in the past year, time spent on Twitter soared 3712%. Only one problem — revenue is a bit smaller number. Zero.
Time spent on Facebook grew 699% since April of last year. MySpace saw a drop of 31%. LinkedIn’s minutes grew 69%.
Facebook is only expected to bring in about $500 million this year, which prompts 24/7 Wall Street to conclude… “social networks may end up being very large, commercially impaired businesses.”
How about this number? GM’s US sales fell by a smaller percentage than Toyota’s last month. We’re back to the old getting worse more slowly thing. GM sales dropped 30%, year over year. Toyota fell 41%. Ford had the “best” number – only a 24% drop. Chrysler’s was the worst at 47%.
Between April and May, car sales did tick up a bit, though.
OPEC, meanwhile, is confident that the price of oil will be $80-90 a barrel by early next year.
OPEC officials have been nudging up their price aspirations since Saudi Arabia’s oil minister said last week an oil price of around $75 could be achieved later this year and would not undermine a tentative global economic recovery…
“I don’t think the price will go down… By the end of the year we’ll see $75. $80-$85 is possible — not with the demand we see at this time, but if demand picks up month after month, then maybe we’ll see this price.”
On things going the other way, newspaper ad sales had their worst quarter. Ever. By a lot. Nationally, ad sales were down 26%.
And finally, the Dow ended the day 19 points higher at 8,740 (+.22%). The S and P 500 added 1.8 points to 944 (+.2%). The NASDAQ gained 8 to 1836 (+.44%).
Maybe it’s a good day for our new music:
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