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Amid months of speculation, FIVE has been sold to Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell for £103.5m. Previous owner RTL says the deal with the Express owner is based on a fair evaluation of the channel's worth excluding advertising revenue.

At the Marketing Week Live! event on 30th June, David Howlett spoke about the need for and value of new research methods that go beyond measuring consumers' 'liking' of brands.  As David pointed out, respondents who say they like a brand or even that they are likely to buy it, do not necessarily go on to do so.  We like lots of brands we don't buy and buy lots of brands we don't necessarily like.

Well, almost half, 49% had searched for more information on a brand post their pre-roll experience - 15% took a direct action, 8% visited the brand site, 3% purchased something - all in accordance to Factory Media's recent survey (1k participants).

I attended Marketing Week Live! earlier this week - a two day marketing event at Olympia that show-cased a variety of speakers and case studies across the broad areas of Insight, Data Marketing, Online Marketing and Instore.

There were plenty of really good, interesting speakers, a couple in particular spoke of the importance of getting maximum value out of any client, customer, competitor or industry data available to you, and not just stopping at face value insights and results.

We continue to hear that people no longer watch television in its traditional format. This continues to be the view of several commentators. This tends to be opinion, rather than fact.

Like Shakira's hips - the numbers don't lie.

Last month Depaul U.K launched an App called IHOBO with Publicis London which has now become one of the most popular Itunes downloads.

Google have finally released a new web indexing system, Google Caffeine. It may seem a bit odd for the world’s number one search engine to change something that wasn’t broken before but with the continuous evolution of the web, Caffeine promises to return searchers with more up to date, relevant content then before from not only text based content but from video, images, news and real-time updates.

In May this year Google unveiled their latest product, Google Secure Search. Secure Search or SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is Google’s very on secure search engine, or in Google’s words:

“SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol that helps provide secure Internet communications for services like web browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, and other data transfers. When you search over SSL, your search queries and search traffic are encrypted so they can't be read by any intermediary party such as employers and internet service providers (ISPs).”

Last month, Google Local Business became Google Places and a Local Business Listing became a Place Page. Google also released some astonishing facts on Google Places. There are 4 million Place Pages worldwide, 2 million in the U.S., estimates put this as 10-15% of all U.S. businesses have a Place Page. 20% of searches on Google are related to location, that’s 1.28 billion per month.

On Monday 7th June, SPAR will become the first advertiser to run a truly local advertising campaign on Spotify, using a postcode-specific targeting strategy conceived by MEC Manchester.

Once you have set up your campaigns, adgroups, adtexts and keywords in Adwords you still need to be able to track their performance. Google conversion tracking is a free, simple way to do this. Once our conversion tracking tag has been placed on the ‘thank you’ page of the website we can then see exactly which keywords have driven conversions. These 'conversions' are attributed to the last click; in other words the last keyword they searched and clicked through on before converting.

Digital Radio UK are set to try and convince more radio listeners to move to digital listening after they announced this week that they would be launching a month long scrappage scheme on 22nd May, designed to get listeners to trade in their old FM/AM radios for a shiny new digital radio.

Following on from Google announcing page load speed to be a ranking factor, they have had a patent granted that was filed in 2004 for a new ranking signal, semantic closeness. This is when Google uses the HTML structure of a webpage to view how close words are together and determine a visual structure of the webpage that is semantically meaningful.

Google have recently announced a new element to ranking factors for websites – page load speed.

Currently page load speed is only a ranking factor on searches made through google.com although it will be rolled out across all counties and languages soon.

We’ve got a wealth of information at our fingertips. Alongside subscribing to the latest consumer data, market reports and profiling systems we’ve uncovered a plethora of free information on the net available to all. Government affiliated organisations conduct hundreds of surveys every year and the resulting data sets and reports are made available to the public.

I’ve compiled a list of both useful and useless facts from free of charge sources below. Some are invaluable, some random and some rude!