New figures released by comScore show that AOL’s Platform A advertising network is the top advertising network in the United States by reach (unique visitors).

According to the figures, Platform A reaches 90.7% of all American internet users, ahead of Yahoo on 85.3% and Google on 80.9%. AOL’s figures include ads served from Advertising.com.

Erick covered rumors of an AOL advertising lead IPO in September 2007 and more recently AOL was said to be in merger talks with Yahoo. Ultimately these figures don’t equate to revenue, but market leader by reach is certainly a strong selling point for AOL in any merger talks or for an IPO.

comScore also released figures for “niche” advertising networks and the Snap Shots Advertising network, launched in November 2007, came out on top. Another notable entry is Widget Bucks, which launched in October 2007.

Every day, Snap collects 15 million links from bloggers and others across the Web that use Snap Shots on their sites. We use Snap Shots on TechCrunch. Hover your mouse over any link, and a preview of that Website will appear in a small new window without leaving the site you are on. If the link is to a video, photo, MP3, map, stock chart, Amazon product, Wikipedia entry, movie profile, Social networking profile, or RSS feed, a customized shot will appear that lets Web surfers watch the video, stream the MP3, or see the map in question. Two million blogs and Websites use Snap Shots, and now Snap is revealing the most popular shots by different category at Snap HotShots.

If Google Zeitgeist is an attempt to tap into our cultural mindset by exposing popular search terms, Snap HotShots is an attempt to show what’s popular based on what bloggers and other people on the Web are linking to. “It’s a distributed Zeitgeist view of what is in the consciousness of the blogs that use Snap Shots,” says Snap CEO Tom McGovern. For each different type of Snap Shot (video, photo, map, music, Web page, rss feed, etc.) the HotShot page shows the three fastest-rising links, the three fastest-dropping, and the three steadiest. These are based on the top 50 Shots in each group. For instance, for the week ended March 22, some of the hottest links were to Barack Obama’s speech on race, Arthur C. Clarke’s Wikipedia profile, and Eliot Spitzer call-girl Ashley Alexandra Duprey’s MySpace page (which seems to no longer be available).

I like the idea behind HotShots. What he have here is the germ of the Web’s linkgeist—what bloggers and others are linking to right now. Techmeme tries to do this for technology blogs, but this is a broader cut that could turn up more surprising trends. But there is also alot more noise to sift through.

HotShots still needs a lot of work. For one thing, it is already April. Showing us what was hot the week of March 22 is kind of pointless. For instance, the Rick Roll video on YouTube is shown to be declining, which is almost certainly no longer the case. The HotShots page should be updated daily, if not hourly for it to become truly useful. Secondly, it would be great to see more of the underlying data. Right now you can only see the nine links per category, not the top 50 on which the data is based. Thirdly, the category which should be the most useful (the PreviewShot that shows straight web page links) is the oddest of the lot. The hottest PreviewShots that week were links to +SOL, a new Russian social networking marketing agency, and Vogate, the “AdSense” of China. These may be interesting, but completely out of context for most American readers. I may or may not care what bloggers are linking to in Russia. Sorting links by geography—maybe U.S. and worldwide at the very least—would be more helpful.

This morning brings another cautionary tale for anyone trying to build a Website or a business using data from another site. Visual search engine ManagedQ is broken right now because it took images of Websites from another visual search engine, Snap, without permission. (See screenshot above). Sound familiar? Alexaholic (now Statsaholic) ran into similar trouble with Amazon a year ago for taking graphs from Alexa before they were officially available through its API (read more about that dispute here).

It is unfortunate that Snap effectively disabled ManagedQ, which is run by a few programmers out of a basement in Palo Alto. But it goes to show that just because data is becoming more freely available on the Web, you still have to be careful about building a business on another company’s data. It appears that ManagedQ based its visual previews entirely on Snap’s images. As I wrote in a review last month:

Every time you do a search on ManagedQ, a grid appears on the right of the first six results so you can visually see what is on the other side of what is normally a blue link. If you click on one of the images, it opens up a larger, browsable window still within ManagedQ. The idea is that you can surf the Web without leaving the search application.

The way ManagedQ was using the images violated Snap’s terms of service (TOS), according to Snap CEO Tom McGovern. Snap does distribute these images through its Snap Shots widgets. (We use them on TechCrunch. If you mouse over any external link in this post, an image of the Web page on the other end will pop up). After coming across the site, his engineers figured out that ManagedQ was taking the images from Snap without any attribution or link, and cloaking the fact that it had done so. After contacting ManagedQ and not getting a response, McGovern ordered his engineers to block the site’s access to Snap’s images. Warns McGovern:

Folks really need to use services per the TOS. Otherwise they will go the way of ManagedQ or Alexaholic.

Ouch. At least his engineers didn’t replace the Website snap shots with goatse images. But the reaction does seem a bit harsh, especially for a tiny site like ManagedQ. Was McGovern justified in his response? Here’s what ManagedQ looked like before:

Update: ManagedQ founder David Stat has provided the following comment on their shutdown at the hands of Snap:

As we’ve been developing ManagedQ, we looked at several different
thumbnail services and decided on Snap due to their speed and high image
quality. ManagedQ is an experiment with visual Search, not a high volume
Search site. As such, we believed that Snap would not mind our use of
their service and may even encourage its novel and interesting
application. Before using Snap for our site, however, we performed a
traffic analysis and found that ManagedQ would consist of only about
0.01% of Snap’s traffic at most – hardly a share that would affect them
in any meaningful way.

It is most unfortunate that Snap has decided to block us, but I
understand that they are perfectly within their rights to do so. We did
not, however, receive a notice beforehand. We would certainly be
interested in pursuing an agreement with Snap that is outside the bounds
of their normal TOS, but we haven’t yet done so because we thought
ourselves too small for them to consider such a partnership.

Our focus is on continuing to create a new Search Experience with broad
appeal. We believe data should be open by default. We are at a loss
as to why a relatively big startup like Snap would feel threatened by a
small Search experiment like ManagedQ.

Update 2: Snap CEO Tom McGovern has also added these remarks to the situation:

We want sites to use the service in an unadulterated manner where the
actual Snap Shot is shown. There are lots reasons (server load,
business model, end user confusion) that this is important to us. For
developers that are working on a project or offering a commercial
service there are many other companies that offer a developer API
(Girafa, thumbshots, Alexa).

Snap.com will launch the Snap Shots Ad Network Monday at Ad:Tech, a new program that allows advertisers and ad networks to deliver context-based ads to Snap Shots users.

Snap Shots, for those not familiar with the service, are the little site preview windows that pop up on websites with the service enabled, mouse over the image at the end of this link to Snap.com for a demo.

Under the new program, each time a Snap Shot is triggered, the Snap Shot window reveals both the information the user specifically requests and a context-based ad centered directly where the viewer’s eyes are focused. The focus of the ads is said to be better as the are contextually served against a specific link, ignoring other information on the same page that may otherwise result is lower quality contextual results.

Snap.com has over 2,000,000 Web site operators, bloggers and individual Web surfers currently using Snap Shots served via a webpage or browser. The Snap Shots service is used approximately 15 million times daily and is available in 43 different languages.

The Snap Shots Ad Network will initially offer three ad formats that include simple banners and text to expandable rich media, with ad serving provided by DoubleClick.

Search engine Snap launched an image search feature today. The results are no better than that offered by the big guys, but Snap’s unique two column interface is something that some users find to be really cool. The problem with the lack of available photo meta data to assist with queries continues to plague all search engines, of course, leading to less than great results. It will be interesting to see if some of the new services launching, such as Polar Rose, can help by partnering with them and leveraging user generated descriptive data. More on Snap here.

One thing people really like about the Snap search engine is that it gives a large preview screen of every search result. The idea is that users can save time by seeing the site before they click to it. That can be an advantage when wading through increasingly sophisticated SEO and spoof sites that aren’t relevant to your search. Snap has 300 million stored site images, updated regularly, and adds new ones as unique searches are performed. The search engine is now serving up to 50,000 searches per day.

Last week they launched Snap Preview Anywhere, a free service that lets any site owner add previewing technology to their sites. When installed, every link on the site (internal links are optional) will show a preview of the linked site when a viewer hovers over the link. To see how it works, hover over the “Try Snap Preview Anywhere here” link near the top of this page. Snap Product Evangelist Jason Fields and Business Development executive Joseph Sarmiento gave me a demo of Snap Preview Anywhere at the Web 2.0 Summit last week.

The preview optionally includes a Snap search box, and large partners are eligible to negotiate a revenue share with Snap based on usage. For others, having the preview functionality will be incentive enough.

Someone has already created a wordpress plugin for the functionality as well, which makes installation easier.

Since launching a few days ago, Snap reports that 500 sites have integrated the functionality and 70,000 page previews have been created. Note related services Browster and Cooliris, which users can integrate into their browser to view page previews for certain links on any site.