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While Microsoft and Yahoo talk, Google takes more search market
Why is Microsoft so desperate to acquire Yahoo's search business? According to ComScore, Google's video-sharing site YouTube and Google's other subsidiaries alone attracted more search queries than all of Microsoft's properties combined in April. Comparing total searches for each company is similarly lopsided; Google controls 61 percent of the search market to Microsoft's 9.1 percent, which is a decline from 9.4 percent in March. Problem is, buying Yahoo might not help. Yahoo lost search market share last month, too, dropping from 21.3 percent to 20.4 in just one month.
rumormonger
Revolution Health lays off an entire business unit
Revolution Health, the company founded by former AOL Time Warner chairman Steve Case, has laid off its entire business-to-business unit, according to a tipster. In the rest of Revolution Health, there's little sign of its original mission — helping consumers lower healthcare costs. Instead, it's operating a series of vaguely health-related websites, and selling banner ads against them, a push for traffic for traffic's sake which began last year. But most recently, another source tells us, Revolution's pageview games have started to look desperate: More »
stats
ComScore plays Google whipping boy, but Web statistics firm actually saved search giant's bacon
In February, ComScore reported underwhelming growth in clicks on Google ads in the U.S. Google shares sank below a 52-week low for the first time in the company's history. Then, yesterday, Google reported 42 percent year-over-year revenue growth, surpassing expectations. Burned, Wall Street traders reacted harshly toward ComScore, dropping the company's shares by 8.4 percent after hours. Today, ComScore wants to remind the world that it never said Google's revenues would sink and that it only measures clicks on Google ads in the U.S., not internationally But really, Google investors owe ComScore a large debt. More »
great moments in pr
Brooke Hammerling, online-video PR rep, weighs in on online-video audience debate
BrewPR's snacky flack Brooke Hammerling penned a guest column for Silicon Alley Insider, arguing that the Web video industry needs to come up with a strict viewership metric. Though she doesn't mention it in the piece, New York-based online-video startup NextNewNetworks is a Brew client. (It's disclosed, in tiny type, at the end.) We could ask why Henry Blodget is giving a self-interested company rep a soapbox, or why they couldn't fix the red eye in Hammerling's photo. But the real question is why Hammerling suddenly cares about online video analytics. More »
ComScore reports MySpace hit 109.3 million worldwide unique visitors in January. Facebook had 100.7 million, only 8 percent less. Last year, MySpace's lead was four times as large. [SAI]
stats
ComScore backtracks on numbers that tanked Google's shares
Bear Stearns analyst Bob Peck laid waste to stock portfolios everywhere on Tuesday with ComScore metrics that said Google users clicked on only as many paid links in January 2008 as they clicked on in January 2007. On the news, Google's share price dropped 8 percent. ComScore's Magid Abraham and James Lamberti are sorry. To say so, they wrote a 1,152-word post. Here's a Friday-friendly version: More »
online advertising
Buyer of $200 million a year in search ads says clicks are up
SearchIgnite, which spends about $200 million each year on search advertising, says that clicks on Google ads aren't down or even flat as ComScore recently claimed. They're up 40.1 percent year-over-year. On all major search engines, paid clicks are up 45.7 percent year-over-year — up 65 percent for retailers and non-mortage-related financial services. So WTF, ComScore? The most likely answer: ComScore has surveys; SearchIgnite has invoices. (Photo by bitzcelt)
stats
ComScore says social networks' growth is slowing
Creative Capital got ahold of the December 2007 ComScore numbers for the top social networks in the U.S. — and they are, on the whole, not good. Engagement — average minutes spent on the site per visitor — is down for MySpace and Microsoft's Live Spaces, but up for almost all the other sites. Unique visitor growth is ominously low for MySpace and, in the last three months, LinkedIn. Hit the jump to see the numbers for yourself. More »
your privacy is an illusion
Sears covertly spying for ComScore?
Sears, the department-store operator, is inviting visitors to its website to join an online "community." In the process, visitors may be unwittingly installing spyware from ComScore which monitors all of their online behavior "including ... filling a shopping basket, completing an application form, or checking your ... personal financial or health information." Sears defends this installation process as clearly and appropriately disclosed. Computer Associates, a Harvard Business School professor, and possibly the government disagree. More »
stats
Why Facebook, ComScore disagree on users' ages
Sound the alarm bells: CPM Advisors has uncovered a drastic disparity between the demographics Facebook offers advertisers and the metrics ComScore independently reports. ComScore reports that 13.6 million U.S. people ages 35 or older use Facebook. Facebook, however, puts that number at only 1.26 million. What gives?More »
e-commerce
Holiday retail just fine after all
Just when ComScore had you worried that the subprime mortgage crisis would slow down e-commerce, they come back today with good news. According to the she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not online-metrics firm, this holiday season's first 18 days saw more than $7 billion in spending, a 17-percent gain versus the corresponding days last year. Here's the chart. More »
Radiohead on ComScore numbers: Bollocks!
ComScore, the online traffic tracker, told us that 62 percent of the 1.2 million fans who downloaded Radiohead's latest album "In Rainbows" weren't willing to pay for it. Now the band's management wants to kibosh those reports.
ComScore, the online traffic tracker, told us that 62 percent of the 1.2 million fans who downloaded Radiohead's latest album "In Rainbows" weren't willing to pay for it. Now the band's management wants to kibosh those reports.
ComScore says Facebook traffic dropped in September. We didn't think that was accurate. It turns out that traffic was only "down" because ComScore's measurement panel (along with Nielsen and others) only measures traffic from home. As students return to school, they are removed from the panel and traffic "drops." Facebook says that active monthly users is still rising at 3 percent a week, as it has since January 2007. [GigaOm]
followup
Compete data confirms Facebook traffic drop
Earlier, we scoffed at the idea that Facebook's traffic could have dropped in September. Compete.com — the poor man's ComScore, which makes its traffic data publicly available — just released September data that shows a similar drop. Maybe Facebook has peaked. More likely: since the kids returned to college, the free time they had to screw around on Facebook this summer has disappeared in favor of schoolwork and frat parties. MySpace, Orkut and Bebo were all down in September too. Amid the hysteria about Facebook's traffic dropping, everyone seems to have forgotten that Facebook traffic was down last September as well.
stats
Either Facebook or ComScore jumps the shark
Facebook traffic dropped nearly 10 percent in September, according to a sneak peak at ComScore's latest stats given to GigaOm. That's a significant drop to a chart that's been climbing steadily all year, and especially odd during the start of a new school year when traffic traditionally soars for student sites. My Valleywag coworkers say that can't be right — it's a huge failure of ComScore's measurement methods that the company will have trouble explaining. Then again, I'm reminded of the anecdotal tale of the scientists who decided there must be a bug in their software because it showed — ha ha! — a gaping hole in the ozone layer.
British Internet users spend 11 minutes a day on social networks. Want something more interesting than that? Nielsen/NetRatings thinks Facebook is the top social net in the U.K. ComScore says they're No. 3 behind MySpace and Bebo. Either way, we're glad they didn't poll the Valley — based on an informal survey of our peers, we probably waste three hours a day on Facebook. [Times Online]
online advertising
The great blog rollup
At times, there's nothing more amusing than watching a blogger in the middle of a meltdown. Barry Ritholz, the CEO of stock-research firm Fusion IQ, has apparently been seized by panic over an interesting, but unthreatening, development: Big media companies getting into the business of selling ads for blogs. They've already built up an expensive ad sales force, and often find it difficult to grow traffic on their websites faster than their salespeople can sell it. A natural solution: Approach blogs covering similar topics and offer to sell ads on their sites, sharing the revenue. The Washington Post was one of the first to do so, and now, apparently, Reuters is getting into the game. The part that has Ritholz alarmed, though, is a requirement that the blogs "assign" their traffic to the larger company for purposes of getting counted by Nielsen/NetRatings and ComScore Media Metrix, the two largest Web-traffic research firms. Why does Ritholz find this so alarming — and why is he utterly wrong? More »
10:49 AM on Mon Oct 8 2007
By Owen Thomas
503 views,
1 comment
Latest by ritholtz: I understand that many people look at this as just a standard measuring approach - but I don't buy that. It is too easy to actually measure precisely how many ads are served or clicked on. Why, then, the aggregation/assignment approach, more »
