Clear Digital Digest: Wikipedia, LinkedIn and 60 years of TV ads

It’s been a week of landmarks in the digital and marketing world.  Wikipedia turned 15 and amongst the news celebrating this, I particularly liked this round-up of the most edited pages each year.  2012 is a year that really shows the variety of Wikipedia (which boasts 5m English articles now, up from 500,000 in 2005), with the most edited page being “Syrian Civil War” followed by “Gangnam Style” at number two.

LinkedIn announced that it has now reached 20m members in the UK, equating to 58% of the working population.  LinkedIn added 2m new UK members during 2015 from what was already obviously a fairly significant base.  It was interesting to reflect on this in a week when arguably the first social network to gain mainstream acceptance in the UK - Friends Reunited - finally shut for good.  This prompted many to question “I thought that shut years ago?”, while I enjoyed this look at other once popular social networks and what happened to them.

​One final landmark too: The Drum celebrated 60 years of UK TV advertising with an entertaining mash-up showing 60 great adverts in under 90 seconds, well worth a quick view.  And yes, Shake’n’Vac does make the cut.

The start of the week brought further confirmation of the move away from the high street and towards online retailing, with the BRC announcing that high street footfall over Christmas was 4% down on last year; albeit there was better news for retail parks where footfall grew by 2%.  In other ecommerce news, Aldi this week made its first foray into selling online with the launch of its wine store, the start of a £35m ecommerce investment with plans to sell electrical items, clothing and more later on this year.  Marks & Spencer also launched a new online store this week, with the launch of an Australian website, its first offering of this type outside Europe as M&S continues its international expansion plans.

Finally, Twitter went down for many users on Tuesday (apparently due to “an internal code change”), which of course brought many completely rational reactions from users, some of which are summarised in this blog.