Business and Marketing

Tablets are poised to score big with videos.

Mobile devices currently claim a mere 16% of the video ad spend, but their share will balloon to 40% in five years due to the rapid adoption of video viewing on devices—especially tablets. According to an eMarketer forecast released this week, Americans already watch more video on mobile devices than on PCs.

Still, desktop spending will continue to dominate video media in 2014, claiming $4.45 billion to mobile's $1.44 billion, says eMarketer. By 2018, however, mobile spending is figured to hit $5.44 billion, compared to $6.83 billion for desktop.

A big reason for this, says the researcher, is the tablet's replacement of the desktop and laptop computer in many American homes. More than three quarters of the 113 million tablet users in the U.S. watch videos on the device at least once a month, and eMarketer sees penetration rising to 87% in five years.

As for video viewing time, mobile is already dominant, claiming 33 minutes a day to desktop's 22 minutes. Emarketer predicts that video viewing on tablets will increase by 54% this year to 20 minutes a day, while smartphones will rise 44% to 13 minutes.

Business Breaking News: 5 Big Data Solutions for Small Businesses

Big Data isn't just for big businesses with even bigger budgets. Today, small business, too, can reap the benefits of the massive amounts of online and offline information to make wise, data-driven decisions to grow their businesses. Although most Big Data discussions concern enterprises that have all the resources to hire data scientists and research firms, if you know where to look, there are several ways that your small business can gather, analyze and make sense of data you already have. Here are five Big Data solutions for small businesses.

You don't need fancy, expensive software to begin gathering data. It can start from an asset you already have — your website. Google Analytics, Google's free Web-traffic-monitoring tool, provides all types of data about website visitors, using a multitude of metrics and traffic sources.

With Google Analytics, you can extract long-term data to reveal trends and other valuable information, so you can make wise, data-driven decisions. For instance, by tracking and analyzing visitor behavior — such as where traffic is coming from, how audiences engage and how long visitors stay on a website (known as bounce rates) — you can make better decisions when striving to meet your website's or online store's goals. Another example is analyzing social media traffic, which will allow you to make changes to your social media marketing campaigns based on what is and isn't working. Studying mobile visitors can also help you extract information about customers browsing your site using their mobile devices, so you can provide a better mobile experience. [How to Sign Up for Google Analytics]

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