Call it “the wisdom of the crowds” or “herd mentality.” A new study from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management in Canada claims that the reason group buying sites are so hot is that “users draw conclusions on quality from the number of people that have signed up.”

That may not sound so radical, but consider why today’s group buying sites are succeeding where older services like Mercata and MobShop failed: the latter deterred potential buyers by leaving them “waiting for days before confirming whether or not they had got the offer they had signed up for.” Continue reading →

Take a guess which country is the world leader in online engagement? Chances are Canada wouldn’t have been at the tip of your tongue, but according to new data from Comscore in its 2012 Canada Digital Future in Focus report, Canadian web users spend an average of 45 hours online per month, more than in any other country.

The study also had some other interesting findings:

• Facebook is “nearing” its saturation point in Canada while there is “still room” for other social networks to grow (Comscore points specifically to Twitter and LinkedIn as the services with the most potential).
• Online video views in Canada are up 58 percent with YouTube accounting for half of all online video viewing in Canada.
• Smartphone penetration has reached 45 percent in Canada; daily usage is growing by 50 percent.

In the report, Comscore is understandably upbeat about the direction the digital media industry is moving in Canada. “It’s evolving in extraordinary ways,” Bryan Segal, Comscore’s Canada VP said in a release on the new report. “2012 is poised to be a defining year for digital as consumers grow their engagement with social, video, mobile and other emerging media.”

When Bill McDonald, the publisher of Metro, a free publication owned by the Canadian publishing giant Torstar, was asked during a panel discussion in Toronto last month to name the date when his paper would cease publishing in print, he quipped “Never in our lifetime.” Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank agreed, saying that, “I feel very optimistic about the long term for our news organizations … the best of times are ahead for the best of brands.”

We’re not so sure. Continue reading →