Web measurement company comScore, has acquired Certifica, a similar web measurement company based in Latin America. ComScore says the acquisition will help buid its presence in Latin America. ComScore did not disclose the terms of the acquisition.
Based in Santiago, Chile, Certifica was founded in 2000 and publishes analytics and statistics on Internet usage in Latin America. The sites measured by Certifica will be available for inclusion (on an opt-in basis) in comScore’s Media Metrix 360 measurement product, which combines panel-based audience measurement data and Web site analytics data to provide a more comprehensive view of activity.
Another month, another report that Bing is chiming slightly louder. Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest figures on search market share, and once again Microsoft’s search engine has managed to grow while its competitors have seen modest losses.
Bing launched to the public on May 31, when Microsoft held 8.0% search marketshare. Over the course of June and July, the site has gained nearly a full percentage point — it’s up to 8.9%, and growth was actually higher for July than for June, when the site was getting all of its launch attention. Of course, Bing’s marketshare still pales in comparison to Google’s dominant 64.7%, but at least Microsoft is heading in the right direction.
Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest statistics for video streaming sites in the United States for the month of June, and at first glance the results are quite surprising: the top video sites have seen a major shakeup, with many of the top sites abruptly falling in the rankings.
The cause, of course, is the Michael Jackson effect — media organizations around the world dedicated huge amounts of coverage to the pop star’s tragic death on June 25, and many people turned to the web to learn more. Other breaking news that month, including the Iranian election controversy, also likely contributed to the growth seen by news properties.
Hulu, which has ranked as the third most popular video site in the United States for the past few months, has dropped down to seventh. Likewise, Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, has dropped from second to fifth.
comScore has aggregated some data based on its World Metrix audience measurement service and put together a study on social networking worldwide. Surprisingly, it appears that the Russians are more engaged with social networking than the rest of the planet (or the biggest slackers at the office, depends on how you look at it). The study found visitors in Russia to spend 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month on average, at the same time – once again – confirming Vkontakte.ru’s leadership in terms of popularity with 14+ million monthly visitors.
To put that level of ‘engagement’ in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month.
After experiencing torrid growth during the first months of the year, Twitter took a breather in May. According to new comScore data released today, Twitter had 17.6 million U.S. visitors in May, which is only 3.5 percent increase from the 17 million U.S. visitors comScore registered in April. One month does not make a trend, but this is a screeching slowdown from the 82 percent month-over-month growth Twitter had in April and 131 percent growth in March. Recent Compete data also points to a similar slowdown in growth.
These are just U.S. numbers. (ComScore measured 32 million unique visitors worldwide in April). But up until now Twitter’s global growth rate has closely followed it’s U.S. growth rate. Remember, these numbers only reflect visitors to Twitter.com, not the actual number of registered or active users, which is much less. By one count, Twitter had about 11.5 million registered accounts in May. And probably about half of all consumption of Twitter messages occurs in mobile and desktop clients such as Tweetie and Tweetdeck, which comScore doesn’t capture.
Despite the avalanche of mobile apps that let people access local information, the mobile browser is still the king when it comes to finding out what’s going on in your city or neighborhood. People across the board are using their mobile phones to look up local info. ComScore reported today that the number of people in the U.S. who sought local content on mobile devices grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009. The report also shows that the mobile browser is the most popular way consumers find local information, with 20.7 million browser users in March 2009, up 34 percent versus a year ago. Only about half as many people (11.3 million) use downloaded apps to find local data.
There are now 231.5 million Websites according to Netcraft. But last year the number of new sites added to the Web slowed down to 29.9 million, from 48.7 million in 2007. Royal Pingdom went through Netcraft’s server surveys to come up with the chart above, which shows the increase or decrease in the number of Websites for every year going back to 1996.
The growth of the Web so far can be broken down into two five-year cycles, where every year the growth rate gets bigger until there is an economic downturn, when the growth rate takes a breather. In 2001 and 2002 the growth slowed and even went into negative territory, and again in 2008 there was another slowdown in the number of sites added to the Web. It stands to reason that the number of new sites will ebb and flow with the global economy, but it is not clear that there is any direct correlation. For instance, so far in 2009 we’ve added a whopping 46 million sites, many of them Chinese blogs. The total for the year will almost surely be much greater than the 2007 increase, and is already larger than all the sites added in 2008.
Mobile Web usage is still a nascent activity, but comScore put out some data on the information-consumption habits of consumers in the U.S. The number of people who access news and information daily on their mobile phones doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009.
The second most popular mobile activity was social networking, with 9.3 million daily mobile users (although for some reason this number also includes blog access). While social networking is only half as popular as reading news, it is growing four times as fast, up from 1.8 million users a year ago.
An estimated 63 million people accessed news and information on their mobile phones at least once during the month. Of those, about a third did so via a downloaded application rather than a mobile browser, with the most popular downloaded app being maps. SMS-based search proved even more popular (with 14.1 million monthly users versus 8.2 million for downloaded maps.
The number of people on the Internet surpassed one billion in December, according to comScore. The actual number is probably higher than that (Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 billion Web surfers worldwide as of June 30, 2008). In any case, only between 15 and 22 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet. We have a long way to go.
Using the comScore numbers, here is the breakdown by country and region:
After a tepid start, online holiday sales seem to be picking up a bit. Online sales on Cyber Monday as measured by comScore were a healthy $846 million, up 15 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday. Online sales since Thanksgiving are up 12 percent to $2.4 billion. But overall online sales in November of $12 billion are still down 2 percent.
Can sales make up the difference over the next five weeks? As the chart above shows, holiday sales so far in 2008 (the red bars) are struggling to keep up with the levels we saw in 2007 (the dark blue bars). Maybe consumers have just been postponing purchases longer than usual, but now that the U.S. is officially in a recession that knowledge will likely have a psychological impact on people’s willingness to splurge. (I love how the recession news didn’t come out until after the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend).
Hitwise also offers some insight into what happened on Cyber Monday in terms of Website traffic to retail sites.
Yahoo has conducted some rather self-serving research in conjunction with ComScore and Media Contacts that concludes the obvious: most consumers care intensely about only a small number of websites, and it’s these websites that make for the best places to advertise.
After analyzing over 12 million “passively observed site-user paired data points” from ComScore and surveying 800 users, the report came up with the following statistics:
- People visit on average 85 sites over the course of a month; they are “deeply engaged” with only about 1.5 of them
- People visit these 1.5 sites almost every day they go online
- People have been visiting these 1.5 sites for approximately 4.5 years
- People spend more than 1/3 of their time online at these 1.5 sites
- People are 13% more willing to pay attention to ads, and 200% as likely to find trustworthy information, at these 1.5 sites
The report calls these 1.5 sites “starting points” and asserts that they can be “portals or homepages or search engines”. So let’s see here…portals, homepages, search engines…at least 4.5 years…what the goodness could they could be referring to? Oh yea, Yahoo.
Click image above for a larger view. Comscore has released its May search market share numbers (prior data through April is here).
Key points: Google and Yahoo edged higher in search share to 61.8% and 20.4%, respectively. That’s the first up month for Yahoo this year.
Microsoft dropped from 9.1% to 8.5% for the month. It’s important to note that Microsoft’s new Cash Back search program didn’t go live until May 22, so it will be interesting to see how they do next month.
Search volume is increasing rapidly – about 18% per year. Notes from a report by J.P. Morgan’s Imran Khan:
- According to the data, total US core search volume increased 16% Y/Y in May vs. 18% Y/Y growth in April. Thus far in 2Q, comScore shows17% Y/Y growth in total US core searches vs. 18% Y/Y growth in 1Q.
- Google domestic core search market share increased to 61.8% in May from 61.6% in April. Thus far in 2Q, Google domestic core search volume was up 29% Y/Y vs. a 31% increase in 1Q.
- Yahoo domestic core search market share increased to 20.6% in May from 20.4% in April. Thus far in 2Q, Yahoo! domestic core search volume was down 2% Y/Y, consistent with 1Q performance.
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MSN domestic core search market share declined to 8.5% in May from 9.1% in April. Thus far in 2Q, MSN domestic core search volume was up 7% Y/Y, slightly below 1Q’s 9% Y/Y growth.
- AOL May domestic core search market share declined to 4.5% from 4.6% in April. Thus far in 2Q, AOL domestic core search volume was down 2% Y/Y vs. 1% growth in 1Q.
- Ask Network domestic core search market share increased slightly to 4.5% in May from 4.3% in April. Thus far in 2Q, Ask Network domestic core search volume was up 9% Y/Y vs. an 11% Y/Y increase in
1Q.
Web measurement firm comScore is going mobile. The company is buying M:Metrics for $44.3 million plus 50,000 options of comScore stock. M:Metrics measures mobile Web usage, and will give comScore the ability to track mobile visitors, pageviews, and ads clicked. Its three major products are (from the press release):
MobiLensTM, a syndicated monthly online survey that captures overall mobile phone usage, including device information, data usage, media consumption and demographic characteristics of a representative sample of more than 40,000 mobile device users. MobiLens is available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.
MeterDirectTM, the industry’s first on-device meter that passively measures the mobile Internet behavior and media consumption of more than 4,000 existing Smartphone panelists. The M:Metrics metering technology is compatible with more than 280 device models. MeterDirect is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.
M:AdTM, the first competitive tracking service for mobile advertising that continuously monitors clickable display advertising from a broad representative set of mobile Web destinations to reveal leading advertisers across a variety of market segments. M:Ad is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.
ComScore is a publicly traded company with $87 million in revenues last year. It expects the M:Metrics business to be profitable by the end of 2008 on an EBITDA basis. M:Metrics reveneus are forecasted to reach $11 to $12 million this year, and are expected to contribute $6.5 million to $7 million towards comScore’s revenues for the full year. Founders Will Hodgman and Seamus McAtee will join comScore.
M:Metrics, which is based in Seattle, was founded in 2004. It has raised $18 million from Prism Venture Partners, i-Hatch Ventures, and WPP.
New figures released by comScore show that Google’s (mostly YouTube) share of online video has continued to grow, rising to 31.3% of all online video’s viewed in the United States, up from 28.3% in September.
Google maintained its dominance over its nearest competitor, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) who remained a distant second on 4.4%, up from 4.2% in September.
Notably the top ten companies per videos viewed continue to make up less than 50% (48.9%), indicating that the long tail for video viewing remains long, particularly considering that tenth placed Break came in a 0.5%.
YouTube’s traffic looked better again when considering video destinations (as opposed to videos viewed) with Google sites growing to 138 million unique visitors or 41.8% of the market, up from 39.4% in September. FIM sites also showed healthy growth, hitting 25.4% up from 22.6% in September.
Cyber Monday is finally here, the day when everyone can continue this weekend’s shopping spree online. Not that you had to wait until today. Online sales on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving, were up 22 percent over last year to $531 million, says comScore. Today’s e-commerce take is expected to be $700 million, bringing the total spent since November 1st to $10 billion. That’s about the same as all physical U.S. retail stores made on Friday alone ComScore expects online sales for this holiday season to total $30 billion, or 7.5 percent of consumer retail spending, when all is said and done.
And according to a survey conducted by Shop.org, 72 million Americans are expected to shop online today. It is not clear from the survey if those people will actually be making purchases, or just browsing.
CrunchGear lists some of today’s CyberDeals here. Even Google Checkout is getting in on the deal action, offering discounts at online retailers who use Checkout. BowlingBall.com or Cufflinks Depot, anyone? I didn’t think so.
Update: Seems like some e-tailers can’t handle the online stampede. Yahoo’s checkout system is suffering outages, and Sears’ site is down altogether. (Anyone noticing any other outages or slowdowns today, please report in comments).
Update 2: ComScore reports that online sales for Cyber Monday came in at $733 million, based on its panel.
Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore. I asked comScore to do a ranking of social sites in the U.S. and then I reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is:
Here are my takeaways. MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).
In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360 (’nuff said).
Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include Wordpress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.).
Web analytics firm Comscore filed to go public today, with Credit Suisse acting as the lead underwriter. The registration statement can be viewed here.
Comscore had revenues of $66.3 million in 2006, and about $5.6 million in income from operations.
