Bits Blog: PopSugar, a Web Site for Women, Gets a Makeover

PopSugar, the blog that is eye candy for celebrity- and fashion-obsessed women, is getting a makeover.

The redesigned site is still photography-heavy, with big pictures and headlines like “Kate Middleton Shows Her Baby Bump” and “Reese Witherspoon’s Leg Workout.” But now, all topics — including fashion, parenting, cooking, gossip and fitness — are combined under PopSugar instead of at separate blogs, and posts offer ways to shop for everything from shoes to nursery decorations.

The message, said Brian Sugar, PopSugar’s co-founder and chief executive, is that it has grown up and matured beyond its previous existence as a blog network.

“We were a blog network, and what we’re trying to be is a real destination that women check on a daily basis,” Mr. Sugar said.

PopSugar is Exhibit A for several of the trends that are currently reshaping digital media.

One example is online video and video advertising. PopSugar originally described itself as a digital Condé Nast — a collection of lifestyle blogs, similar to Condé Nast’s various magazine titles. But it turns out that the magazine business is not the best model to emulate anymore.

That is largely because advertisers are willing to pay more for video ads. Each month, PopSugar produces 250 videos, ranging from live red-carpet interviews to 40-minute online workouts, and people watch them 50 million times.

To make video that was good enough that people would want to watch, PopSugar spent $10 million on video studios, and focuses on live video that viewers cannot find elsewhere online. It had its highest viewership during last year’s Oscars, when 1.2 million people tuned in to its online show.

“In the future, you’ve got to believe when you turn on a TV, whether you’re on a channel or a URL, does it really matter?” Mr. Sugar said. “So as a media company, we need to be prepared for that and invest in it because that’s the future for high-paying advertiser content.”

Like other Web companies, PopSugar was forced to shift from relying solely on advertising to finding another revenue stream: e-commerce. Now it makes half its revenue from e-commerce, including fees retailers pay when a shopper clicks on an item on PopSugar and a $35 monthly subscription box it sells to 12,000 readers.

“It’s a challenge to create a business today solely based on display advertising,” Mr. Sugar said. “A person that reads articles is worth less than a person who watches video who is worth less than a person who clicks to a retailer and then actually buys things from us.” PopSugar is also starting a new daily show, PopSugar Live, that will air every afternoon.

The site wants to become a new kind of search engine. A big search box dominates its shopping site, but unlike Google or Amazon.com, some of the results PopSugar shows are handpicked by editors.

As for other companies, mobile is a challenge for PopSugar. A quarter of its readers don’t visit on desktops, but it has not yet figured out how to make as much money on mobile readers as it does on desktop ones.

“The desktop is just over,” Mr. Sugar said. “But I think we’re all struggling with it. It’s difficult to make as much money on a smaller screen.”

Still, he said the six-year-old company, which changed its name to PopSugar from Sugar Inc. as part of the redesign, is profitable.

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The Lede: North Korean Video Shows Obama in Flames

North Korea has released a new propaganda video that shows President Obama and United States troops in flames and credits Washington with leading the impoverished country to become a proud nuclear power.

Songs, operas and novels that stoke hatred against the United States and belittle South Korea are daily fare for North Koreans living under a leadership that uses propaganda as a critical tool of governing. In the last several years, the country has taken its campaign to the Internet, posting thousands of videos onto YouTube that provide outsiders with rare glimpses into the world of North Korean propaganda.

More recently, the country’s propagandists have been busy trumpeting the successful launch of a satellite in December and a Feb. 12 nuclear test, telling North Koreans that their country was becoming a high-tech nuclear power under its young leader, Kim Jong-un.

“Thanks to the Americans,” the latest work by the propagandists, is a 90-second video that was uploaded on YouTube by the North’s official Uriminzokkiri Web site on Sunday.

“It is not incorrect to say that the United States’ gangster-like policy of hostility prompted us to become a most strong military power,” says the text that scrolls across the screen. “Thus it can be said that it was ‘thanks to’ the Americans that we conducted a nuclear test.”

In the video, flames are superimposed on footage of Mr. Obama in Congress, American troops and screen shots of a South Korean television station reporting the North’s nuclear test. It ends with an animated simulation of a nuclear device exploding in an underground test site.

The scorching of the United States in “nuclear flames” or a “nuclear holocaust” is a recurring theme in North Korean statements. A ubiquitous propaganda poster in North Korean towns calls for a “score-settling war” against the Americans.

While North Korea has faced chronic food shortages and growing trade sanctions, its propaganda strives to inspire nationalistic pride among its people, portraying their country as a small nation prospering despite the constant bullying of the “imperialist” Americans.

Part of another video, posted on YouTube by the country’s Korean Central Television on Feb. 12, showed a boy wearing a red scarf singing a song against the backdrop of rockets flying into space and satellites circling the Earth.

“We will fill the space with satellites,” the boy sang. “We will grow to be conquerors of the space.”

Another video posted early this month showed a North Korean man dreaming about circling Earth on a homemade spacecraft and looking down to see the Korean Peninsula unified and Manhattan being attacked by missiles and going up in smoke.

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Wall St. Shares Inch Ahead

Shares on Wall Street inched higher in early trading on Tuesday, putting the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index on track to extend its seven-week winning streak.

Shortly after the opening bell, the S.&P. 500 was up 0.3 percent, while the Dow Jones industrial average was up 0.1 percent. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.2 percent.

The strong start to the year has been helped by legislators in Washington, who temporarily averted a series of automatic spending cuts and tax increases, as well as by better-than-expected earnings and economic data. The Federal Reserve’s stimulus policy has also been a major factor.

But further gains for the benchmark S.&P. index have been a struggle as investors look for new catalysts to lift the index, which hovers near five-year highs.

The compromise by lawmakers on across-the-board spending cuts, known as sequestration, only postponed until March 1 a resolution to the Congressional budget fight.

The faster pace in merger-and-acquisition activity, a sign of optimism about the outlook on Wall Street, has resulted in more than $158 billion in deals announced so far in 2013.

“The firm market tone continues," said Andre Bakhos, director of market analytics at Lek Securities in New York, "fueled by a lack of negative surprises as well as an increase in M.&A. activity, adding confidence to market valuations.”

“The market has been able to shrug off minor negatives as it looks ahead to a potential bigger hurdle in the sequestration,” he said. “Until then, the situation looks stable.”

The No. 2 office supply retailer in the United States, Office Depot, surged 24 percent. The company is said to be in merger talks with a smaller rival, OfficeMax. OfficeMax shares jumped 30 percent.

The computer maker Dell reports fourth-quarter results on Tuesday, and it is expected to show earnings per share fall to 39 cents from 51 cents a year earlier. Analysts will have their first chance to question management on a buyout deal struck earlier this month by its chief executive, Michael Dell, private equity firm Silver Lake and Microsoft.

According to the Thomson Reuters data through Friday, of the 388 companies in the S.&P. 500 that have reported results, 69.8 percent have exceeded analysts’ expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the last four quarters.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S.&P. 500 companies are estimated to have risen 5.6 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

European shares rose on Tuesday, lifted by gains at food group Danone and fresh signs of a German economic recovery, although broader market sentiment remained cautious ahead of Italian elections this weekend.

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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National Briefing | South: Abortion Curbs Clear Senate in Arkansas

The State Senate voted 25 to 7 on Monday to ban most abortions 20 weeks into a pregnancy. The measure goes back to the House to consider an amendment that added exceptions for rape and incest. The legislation is based on the belief that fetuses can feel pain 20 weeks into a pregnancy, and is similar to bans in several other states. Opponents say it would require mothers to deliver babies with fatal conditions. Gov. Mike Beebe has said he has constitutional concerns about the proposal but has not said whether he will veto it.

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Bits Blog: Tech Predictions for 2013: It's All About Mobile

If there is one theme that will be the topic of digital business this year, it is mobile.

ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, published a report about what happened in 2012, and what to expect in 2013.

It shows that the effects of a movement toward mobile are everywhere, from shopping to media to search. According to the report, “2013 could spell a very rocky economic transition,” and businesses will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the 48-page report.

The mobile transition is happening astonishingly quickly. Last year, smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time, led by Android phones. People spend 63 percent of their time online on desktop computers and 37 percent on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, according to comScore.

Just as they compete on computers, Facebook and Google are dominant and at each other’s throats on phones.

Google’s map app for the iPhone, which had been the most used mobile app, lost its No. 1 spot to Facebook after Apple kicked Google’s maps off the iPhone in October. Now, Facebook reaches 76 percent of the smartphone market and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent using apps each month. The next five most used apps are Google’s, which account for 10 percent of time on apps.

As mobile continues to take share from desktop, some industries have been particularly affected, and they are seeing significant declines in desktop use of their products as a result. They are newspapers, search engines, maps, weather, comparison shopping, directories and instant messenger services.

The most visited Web sites are not so surprising: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon. Facebook continues to take up most of our time online.

But there were a few surprises from younger, smaller Web companies. Tumblr was No. 8 on the list of sites, ordered by time spent on them. And several Web sites were breakout hits last year, as measured by growth and visitor numbers: Spotify (music), Dropbox (online storage), Etsy (shopping), BuzzFeed (news), JustFab (shopping), SoundCloud (music) and BusinessInsider (news).

Search, one of the biggest and most reliable Web industries, is at a crossroads, comScore said. Even though the search market continues to be extraordinarily profitable, there is a desire for it to evolve and offer new services to users.

Here is some evidence: Searches on traditional search engines, dominated by Google, declined 3 percent last year, and the number of searches per searcher declined 7 percent. Yet searches on specialty sites, known as vertical search engines, like Amazon.com or Whitepages.com, climbed 8 percent.

Social search, based on what users’ friends like, has put Facebook and Google on a “collision course,” comScore said, particularly in searches for local businesses like restaurants.

In social networking, the visual Web, as comScore calls it, has transformed the landscape. Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram, all of which emphasize images, each gained more than 10 million visitors last year.

Last year was also pivotal for online video, comScore said, as viewers increasingly seek the ability to watch video when and where they want. Watching TV shows online helped last year break viewing records, especially during the Olympics.

In the United States, 75 million people a day watch online video and stream 40 billion videos a month, and viewing is driven by YouTube.

There has also been a turning point for video ads. They cost more than typical ads, and have always lagged behind viewership. But in 2012, 23 percent of videos were accompanied by an ad, up from 14 percent the year before. More TV ad dollars are coming to online video, comScore concluded.

Though e-commerce spending grew 13 percent last year, it was a disappointing holiday season online, largely because of economic pressures. Purchasing on mobile phones is beginning to make a dent in e-commerce, comScore said, with mobile shopping accounting for 11 percent of e-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 3 percent in the period two years earlier.

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IHT Rendezvous: As Europe Moves to Cap Bonuses, Britain Hesitates

LONDON — It is hard to imagine any European politician losing votes these days by promising to curb bankers’ pay, which may explain why members of the European Parliament are enthusiastically pushing for the toughest restrictions on bank bonuses since the 2008 financial crisis.

Representatives of the Parliament and of the 27 European Union governments were meeting on Tuesday to finalize a deal on banking law that would include pegging bankers’ bonuses at no more than their annual salaries.

The Parliament’s demands for a bonus cap reflect public outrage at continued revelations of huge payouts to bankers. But a side effect has been to hold up enactment of global banking regulations designed to strengthen the capacity of banks to withstand a future crisis.

A majority of member states have come around to supporting the bonus cap. Germany, a late convert to the idea, is prepared to compromise on the issue in order to ensure the wider banking changes are adopted by the elected European Parliament.

The debate has left the British government out on a limb, as it fights a possibly doomed rearguard action to protect the interests of the City of London, Europe’s biggest financial center.

The Conservative-led government believes the bonus cap could have the perverse effect of increasing bankers’ fixed pay, while allowing less opportunity to claw back variable bonuses in the event of poor performance.

Boris Johnson, the outspoken Conservative mayor of London, was quoted on Tuesday as saying, “we don’t need Europe butting in on bonuses,” as he attacked the European proposals as a threat to the City’s international competitiveness.

In the light of popular anti-banker sentiment, however, the British government has been relying on quiet diplomacy to argue its case with European partners in order to avoid the perception that it pushing the agenda of “fat cat” bankers.

It has been left largely to the business media to press the case against a bonus cap. Allister Heath, writing at the City A.M. Web site on Tuesday, suggested that a cap would be a “disaster for London.”

In an editorial this week, which said adoption of the bonus cap would be a defeat for common sense, the Financial Times wrote: “The parliamentarians’ pet idea is a result of populism mixed with ignorance of how banking works.”

“A cap on the ratio of variable to fixed pay will do little to lower total compensation (which is what outrages voters sick of bailing out failed banks),” according to the Financial Times. “It will just encourage higher fixed salaries to compensate for the lack of bonuses that tend to be far larger.”

Mr. Heath, in his City A.M. column, suggested that George Osborne, the British finance minister, was “seemingly too frightened by anti-City sentiment” to block the Brussels proposals.

“The cap will lead to further boosts to base pay, increasing fixed costs and risk,” Mr. Heath wrote. “When business volumes drop, the only answer will be to sack people, rather than cutting bonuses.”

“The fact is U.K. regulators have already created a bonus framework that is tough but fair,” according to Nick Goodway, writing in the London Evening Standard. “Europe is trying to bring in one that could have dire consequences for London’s status as one of the world’s top three financial centers.”

Does this all amount to special pleading on behalf of overpaid bankers? Or do the opponents of the bonus cap have a point? Is the European Parliament guilty of populism, or simply displaying good sense with its proposals to outlaw excessive bonuses?

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Tech Industry Sets Its Sights on Gambling

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Cesar Miranda, left, and his brother, Edgar, working on their claw crane game in San Jose, Calif.

SAN FRANCISCO — Look out Las Vegas, here comes FarmVille.

Silicon Valley is betting that online gambling is its next billion-dollar business, with developers across the industry turning casual games into occasions for adults to wager.

At the moment these games are aimed overseas, where attitudes toward gambling are more relaxed and online betting is generally legal, and extremely lucrative. But game companies, from small teams to Facebook and Zynga, have their eye on the ultimate prize: the rich American market, where most types of real-money online wagers have been cleared by the Justice Department.

Two states, Nevada and Delaware, are already laying the groundwork for virtual gambling. Within months they will most likely be joined by New Jersey.

Bills have also been introduced in Mississippi, Iowa, California and other states, driven by the realization that online gambling could bring in streams of tax revenue. In Iowa alone, online gambling proponents estimated that 150,000 residents were playing poker illegally.

Legislative progress, though, is slow. Opponents include an influential casino industry wary of competition and the traditional antigambling factions, who oppose it on moral grounds.

Silicon Valley is hardly discouraged. Companies here believe that online gambling will soon become as simple as buying an e-book or streaming a movie, and that the convenience of being able to bet from your couch, surrounded by virtual friends, will offset the lack of glittering ambience found in a real-world casino. Think you can get a field of corn in FarmVille, the popular Facebook game, to grow faster than your brother-in-law’s? Five bucks says you cannot.

“Gambling in the U.S. is controlled by a few land-based casinos and some powerful Indian casinos,” said Chris Griffin, chief executive of Betable, a London gambling start-up that handles the gaming licenses and betting mechanics of the business for developers. “What potentially becomes an interesting counterweight is all of a sudden thousands of developers in Silicon Valley making money overseas and wanting to turn their efforts inward and make money in the U.S.”

Betable has set up shop in San Francisco, where 15 studios are now using its back-end platform. “This is the next evolution in games, and kind of ground zero for the developer community,” Mr. Griffin said.

Overseas, online betting is generating an estimated $32 billion in annual revenue — nearly the size of the United States casino market. Juniper Research estimates that betting on mobile devices alone will be a $100 billion worldwide industry by 2017.

“Everyone is really anticipating this becoming a huge business,” said Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder of the pioneering social site Myspace, who is throwing his energies into a gaming studio with a gambling component backed by, among others, the personal investment funds of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, and Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman.

As companies eagerly wait for the American market to open up, they are introducing betting games in Britain, where Apple has tweaked the iPhone software to accommodate them. Facebook began allowing online gambling for British users last summer with Jackpotjoy, a bingo site; deals with other developers followed in December and this month.

Zynga, the company that developed FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Words With Friends and many other popular casual games, is advertising the imminent release of its first betting games in Britain. “All your favorite Zynga game characters will be there, except this time they’ll have real money prizes to offer you,” an ad says. “Play online casino games for pennies and live the dream!”

Mr. DeWolfe’s studio, SGN, is also on the verge of starting its first real-money games in Britain. “Those companies that have a critical mass of users that are interested in playing real-money games are going to be incredibly valuable,” he said.

Mark Pincus, the chief executive of Zynga, said the company was just following the market. “There is no question there is great interest from all kinds of people in games of chance, whether it is for real money or virtual rewards,” he said. Zynga, which has missed revenue expectations in the last year, is making gambling a centerpiece of its new strategy. It has just applied to Nevada for a gambling license.

Casual gaming first blossomed on Facebook’s Web site, where players could readily corral friends into their games. It is now being rethought for mobile devices, so people can play in brief snippets as they wait for a bus or a sandwich.

Some games mimic the slots and poker found in casinos; others emphasize considerably more creativity. The vast majority of casual game players play at no charge. A small number buy virtual objects in the game to speed their play or increase their status.

Tech executives expect an equally small number to play for real money but believe they will bet heavily, making them much more valuable to the gaming companies. By Betable’s estimate, the lifetime value of a casual player is $2 versus $1,800 for a real-money player.

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Well: Certain Television Fare Can Help Ease Aggression in Young Children, Study Finds

Experts have long known that children imitate many of the deeds — good and bad — that they see on television. But it has rarely been shown that changing a young child’s viewing habits at home can lead to improved behavior.

In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers reported the results of a program designed to limit the exposure of preschool children to violence-laden videos and television shows and increase their time with educational programming that encourages empathy. They found that the experiment reduced the children’s aggression toward others, compared with a group of children who were allowed to watch whatever they wanted.

“Here we have an experiment that proposes a potential solution,” said Dr. Thomas N. Robinson, a professor of pediatrics at Stanford, who was not involved in the study. “Giving this intervention — exposing kids to less adult television, less aggression on television and more prosocial television — will have an effect on behavior.”

While the research showed “a small to moderate effect” on the preschoolers’ behavior, he added, the broader public health impact could be “very meaningful.”

The new study was a randomized trial, rare in research on the effects of media on children. The researchers, at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington, divided 565 parents of children ages 3 to 5 into two groups. Both were told to track their children’s media consumption in a diary that the researchers assessed for violent, didactic and prosocial content, which they defined as showing empathy, helping others and resolving disputes without violence.

The control group was given advice only on better dietary habits for children. The second group of parents were sent program guides highlighting positive shows for young children. They also received newsletters encouraging parents to watch television with their children and ask questions during the shows about the best ways to deal with conflict. The parents also received monthly phone calls from the researchers, who helped them set television-watching goals for their preschoolers.

The researchers surveyed the parents at six months and again after a year about their children’s social behavior. After six months, parents in the group receiving advice about television-watching said their children were somewhat less aggressive with others, compared with those in the control group. The children who watched less violent shows also scored higher on measures of social competence, a difference that persisted after one year.

Low-income boys showed the most improvement, though the researchers could not say why. Total viewing time did not differ between the two groups.

“The take-home message for parents is it’s not just about turning off the TV; it’s about changing the channel,” said Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis, the lead author of the study and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington.

“We want our children to behave better,” Dr. Christakis said, “and changing their media diet is a good way to do that.”

Until she began participating in Dr. Christakis’s trial, Nancy Jensen, a writer in Seattle, had never heard of shows like Nickelodeon’s “Wonder Pets!,” featuring cooperative team players, and NBC’s “My Friend Rabbit,” with its themes of loyalty and friendship.

At the time, her daughter Elizabeth, then 3, liked“King of the Hill,”a cartoon comedy geared toward adults that features beer and gossip. In hindsight, she said, the show was “hilariously funny, but completely inappropriate for a 3-year-old.”

These days, she consults Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group in San Francisco, to make sure that the shows her daughter watches have some prosocial benefit. Elizabeth, now 6, was “not necessarily an aggressive kid,” Ms. Jensen said. Still, the girl’s teacher recently commended her as very considerate, and Ms. Jensen believes a better television diet is an important reason.

The new study has limitations, experts noted. Data on both the children’s television habits and their behavior was reported by their parents, who may not be objective. And the study focused only on media content in the home, although some preschool-aged children are exposed to programming elsewhere.

Children watch a mix of “prosocial but also antisocial media,” said Marie-Louise Mares, an associate professor of communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Merely being exposed to prosocial media doesn’t mean that kids take it that way.”

Even educational programming with messages of empathy can be misunderstood by preschoolers, with negative consequences. A study published online in November in The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology found that preschoolers shown educational media were more likely to engage in certain forms of interpersonal aggression over time.

Preschoolers observe relationship conflict early in a television episode but do not always connect it to the moral lesson or resolution at the end, said Jamie M. Ostrov, the lead author of the November study and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Buffalo.

Preschoolers watch an estimated 4.1 hours of television and other screen time daily, according to a 2011 study. Dr. Ostrov advised parents to watch television with their young children and to speak up during the relationship conflicts that are depicted. Citing one example, Dr. Ostrov counseled parents to ask children, “What could we do differently here?” to make it clear that yelling at a sibling is not acceptable.

He also urged parents to stick with age-appropriate programming. A 3-year-old might misunderstand the sibling strife in the PBS show“Arthur,” he said, or stop paying attention before it is resolved.

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Well: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “…toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in the United States. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

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