The popular Swedish music service found that by the end of 2011, it had 32.8 million registered users. However, only 2.6 million were paying subscribers to one its two paid for offers. Consequently the remaining 30.2 million customers were using the free advertising-support service. This means that eight per cent of the user base brought in 83.5% of Spotify's total revenue. The majority of the rest came from advertising revenue.

A survey by Starcom MediaVest Group has now indicated that 90% of the UK's adult (over 18) population watched the Olympics through a combination of TV, PC, mobile, tablet and social media; heralding a shift in viewing behaviour. Some 21.9 million viewers watched at least some of the around 2,500 hours of live coverage provided by the BBC over 24 dedicated video feeds over various platforms, including the interactive TV Red Button.

Cathy Newman, a host for for Channel 4 News, tweeted late Wednesday morning: "Much hilarity in morning meeting about Prince Harry's exploits. We can't show the pix even though they're all over the web. Right or wrong?" And the Guardian in a brief news post said that royal aides were understood to have warned British media organizations not to publish the photos.

The German news publisher and ad company recently-formed Axel Springer Digital Classifieds joint venture is acquiring allesklar.com, the operator of 16-year-old meinestadt.de, a network of 337 local news and information sitelets underpinned by several categories of classified ads. t will gain a large local network through which to pipe meinestadt.de's existing ads as well as those from Springer's other sites.

Britain could get its first taste of 4G this autumn after regulators approved an application by the company that owns the T-Mobile andOrange networks to launch the next generation of mobile internet on 11 September. Telecoms watchdog Ofcom has granted Everything Everywhere, Britain's largest mobile company with 27 million customers, permission to launch 4G on its existing spectrum without having to wait for the auction of British airwaves scheduled to conclude early next year.

Canadian publisher Postmedia today launched paywalls for a number of its newspaper websites, including the Vancouver Sun, The Province and Ottawa Citizen. The metered paywalls introduced for digital content at these three titles will apply to all users. Postmedia has also introduced a paywall for international users on montrealgazette.com and nationalpost.com. The Gazette already had a paid-for content model which was introduced for its Canadian users in May last year.

Online entertainment retailer Play.com has looked into quantifying the advantages that Facebook marketing can offer, with many of the current estimates on the monetary value of fans being woolly or wildly varying. Now, the retailer has found that Facebook fans could be spending up to 24% more in direct sales than non-fans. For Play.com itself, this equated to around GBP2 million worth of extra sales in 2011 which can be solely attributed to Facebook fans.

From 10 September, the figures will be released, including website and print readership figures for all UK national newspapers and consumer magazines. Also included will be data from over 400, non-publisher websites and audience figures for print and online, as well as a comparison of in-depth print and online age and demographic profile data. The reach of websites will also be shown on both a weekly and daily basis, alongside page views and dwell time.

Google launched a broadside against a proposed law in Germany that would see search engines forced to pay license fees for linking people to news stories. Google's North Europe communications chief, Kay Oberbeck, sounded off this morning in a guest post for a German press agency. He also pointed out that Google sends readers to the publishers' sites, that anyone who doesn't want their content to be indexed by Google can throw a robots.txt file in there, and that publishers make money off Adsense.

The days of slumping passively in front of the goggle box whilst flickering rays of EastEnders wash over you seem to be at end, according to Deloitte's new television report. This charts the continued rise of so called 'second screening' whereby viewers surf the web or discuss what is blaring in the background via email, Facebook and Twitter on their laptops, smartphones and tablets.