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Twitter's Runaway Popularity Halts in US

Ryan Whitwam — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:06:29 -0600

It’s been nearly a year since Twitter exploded into the mainstream. Instead of seeing the year go out with a bang, Twitter may be headed for disappointment. The number of unique domestic users visiting Twitter’s homepage declined for the first time in October, down 8%.

The new numbers from comScore put Twitter’s users at 19.2 million in October, which is, admittedly, nothing to sneeze at. Growth began to taper off over the summer, but people are taking notice of this decline. Twitter CEO Evan Williams has acknowledged the drop off, but hopes new features, including lists and retweets, will reverse the trend. While the numbers don’t include access via Twitter’s API, it is still a troubling situation for the microblogging site.

Rival Facebook’s growth seems to be continuing unabated. If this is the beginning of a trend for Twitter, things could be bleak. Without their massive growth, are they even a viable company?

ComScore Internet Usage Survey Shows Microsoft “On Top”

Justin Kerr — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:29:09 -0600

A recent ComScore survey on Internet usage is reporting that Microsoft might not be leading the way in search, but in terms of total hours spend online, it has a commanding lead over its competition. The survey, which measured a whopping 27 billion hours of Internet usage by Web users aged 15 or older is an increase of nearly 24% over the year prior, and of those studied, over 3.9 billion hours were spent using Microsoft services. Google came in a not so close second place with around 2.5 billion hours.

The big winner in the Microsoft portfolio might surprise you however, with about 70 percent of the usage being attributed to Windows Live Messenger. Of course, this number measures time spent “online” and not just those “actively engaged” with the service, but it certainly shows the popularity of Microsoft’s instant messenger. Google’s numbers are pretty typical explain analysts, since they make it their business using search to try and get you “in and out” as quickly as possible. The most successful Google property continues to be YouTube with nearly 1.2 billion hours logged watching video.

Yahoo placed third with 1.7 billion hours, and Facebook commanded a respectable fourth place with 1.4 billion hours. The individual rankings may have been a bit of a shock, but the trend showing “Internet usage on the rise” certainly isn’t. Did any of these results surprise you? Let us know what you think.

Study: Display Ad Click-throughs on the Decline

Pulkit Chandna — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:15:24 -0500

Online display ads account for around a third of the $40 billion online ad market. Advertisers mainly commission display ads to apprise internet users of their presence and not necessarily in the hope of immediate results. But click-through rates for display advertising have slumped to such abject levels that it is just too optimistic to expect immediate results with banner ads.

According to market research firm comScore, American internet users are increasingly becoming immune to display advertising. A recent comScore study found that the number of American internet users that click on a display ad at least once every month fell by 50% over a 20-month period. But according to Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore, it is not always correct to measure the success of online ads with number of clicks as the yardstick.

Image Credit: Donttreadonme.tv

Twitter Suckers in 19 Million Users, Narcissists, and Spammers

Andy Salisbury — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:37:10 -0500

Earlier this month the traffic monitoring service comScore released their global numbers for March of 2009. And, with those results came some astonishing numbers for everyone’s favorite compulsive microblogging service, Twitter.

Twitter.com’s worldwide visitors increased a whopping 95 percent in March from 9.8 million to 19.1 million, according to the report. It’s expected that Ashton Kutcher’s race with CNN to one million followers and Oprah’s introduction were both large parts of the traffic increase.

It should be noted though, that this is only traffic on Twitter’s site, not an actual tally of active users. And it doesn’t track users that use the service by means of desktop or mobile client. All things considered, these are still some pretty impressive numbers.

Image Credit: comScore

Hulu Most Riveting Video Website

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 08:45:18 -0600

It seems inevitable that ISPs currently training their guns at p2p traffic will soon start fretting over video sharing websites, which are gaining in popularity and gradually conquering more internet bandwidth. November 2008 proved to be another prolific month for online video websites. According to data released by comScore Video Metrix service, there was a 34% year-over-year increase in online viewership in the US in November. A staggering 12.7 billion online videos kept online viewers riveted to their computer screens.

Google websites accounted for 40% of the total views in that month. Google obviously has its Youtube juggernaut to thank for being in the ascendancy. Youtube contributed 98% of Google’s market share. Google websites also triumphed as far as total number of viewers goes with 98 million viewers in November.

One website that has come up by leaps and bounds is Hulu, which retained the 6th spot in the high-stakes online video market in November 2008. Hulu scored a major victory over its competitors by emerging as the website with most riveting videos as the average duration of each video viewed at Hulu was 11.9 minutes – way higher than the industry average of 3.1 minutes.

New Year in Spyware

Erin Simon — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 22:13:07 -0600

Here it is 2008 already, but one fact of life hasn't changed: corporations can get away with things that would land teenage hackers in jail. Two years ago it was Sony installing a rootkit on users' computers. This year Sears steps up to the plate with its “My SHC Community” on Sears.com. When you join the community, Sears installs spyware on your computer which tracks your internet usage, even parsing the headers of your email. The software transmits copies of every page you view to marketing research company comScore. Even secure sites get intercepted, which means your banking website or online shopping credit card transactions are exposed. Moreover, the software sits on your system invisibly, with no evidence that it's monitoring your browsing.

Ben Edelman has a good rundown of the installation sequence, and how it runs afoul of the FTC's rules requiring “express consent” from users before installing tracking software on their computers. Such consent is only valid if users have been presented with clear and prominent information about the nature and purpose of the program and its effects. Information buried in a EULA (those lengthy bits of legalese none of us read) is not enough.

We can hope that the FTC imposes legal consequences on Sears, and maybe that will deter the next big player from sneaking invasive software onto customers' computers. But there's a lesson here for you, too: don't blindly click 'agree.' Know what you're signing up for – and even well known brands can bite you when they don't expect to get caught. Google around, do your homework. And happy New Year!