Posted 01/25/10 at 08:45:54 AM by Paul Lilly

According to market research firm comScore, Facebook now has more than twice as many U.S. users (111.9 million) than it did in 2008 (54.5 million). To put that into perspective, no other Web company since Google has been as successful as Facebook, which now earns about $2 billion in profit every quarter.

"Ever since it opened registration to the general public back in the fall of 2006, Facebook has seen considerable growth, so it's not like this story is new by any stretch of the imagination," comScore noted. "And yet, even in its native market, Facebook continues to add to its audience at an incredible rate... It now accounts for 7 percent of all time spent online in the U.S."

And it's not just the number of users that so impressed comScore, either. The research firm noted that Facebook manged to "grow substantially across nearly every performance metric," including total pages viewed, average visits per visitor, average minutes per visitor, and several more.

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Posted 01/19/10 at 02:46:47 PM by Bart Salisbury

It doesn’t get any more savage, or any more personal, than a knock-down, drag-out fight among market research firms. Gartner, this morning, released its report for mobile apps. It claims apps generated $4.9 billion in 2009, and that 99.4% of those revenues were collected by Apple’s App Store. For the math deficient, that means all other mobile apps accounted for only $25.2 million in 2009.

Yeah, right, responded comScore. In the language of the smackdown, Alistair Hill, a comScore analyst, said, “I think somebody's missed something out on the math there...I find that hard to believe. We know iPhone users buy a lot more apps than anybody else, but that [Gartner’s finding] still doesn't work.”

Is Gartner right? Maybe. Maybe not. Gartner doesn’t survey the entire app universe, so there’s a chance some data is missing. But, Apple reported 2.5 billion app downloads in 2009. Averaging revenues on downloads, Apple would only need to generate $1.67 per app download, so Apple’s revenue could be legitimate. (Gartner, responding to a follow up from Ars Technica, defends its figures as accurate.)

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Posted 01/07/10 at 08:13:02 AM by Paul Lilly

According to data released this week by comScore, a large number of you chose to do your shopping in cyber space rather than battle the crowds in November and December. The research firm noted a 4 percent spike to $29.1 billion in online spending, with Black Friday and the week leading up to Christmas being especially busy.

This was enough to beat out comScore's expectations, which the firm partially attributed to guaranteed shipping, discounting, and poor weather conditions. Electronics sold particularly well, jumping 15 percent, largely the result of heavily discounted TVs.

comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni was encouraged by the results, but added that high unemployment and consumer debt levels could end up closing some wallets in 2010.

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Posted 12/30/09 at 03:00:55 PM by Bart Salisbury

ComScore yesterday blessed us with a data dump on holiday shopping, and the bottom line: e-commerce racked up $27 billion in sales, a five percent jump over last year. (That, by-the-by, averages out to $88 for every man, woman, and child in the United States.)

ComScore’s total encompasses the period November 1 to December 24. Narrowing it down a bit, Black Friday to Christmas Eve, sales grew about 3.5 percent--after adjusting for the additional shopping days this year. The biggest sellers, naturally, were electronic items, which showed a 20 percent growth over last year.

Big winners were large retailers, who were able to out muscle smaller vendors by offering free shipping, and who did a fair bit of hustling on social-networking sites. (Let’s hope this isn’t a sign of things to come for social-networking.)

ComScore says that the increase in sales was driven by more people shopping online this year than last, perhaps pushed into it by the snowstorm that slammed the East coast December 19-20. ComScore also suggests that the current financial situation was reflected in the totals, with the average spent per shopper down from last year.

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Posted 12/28/09 at 08:54:48 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The Android platform is growing in popularity now that a multitude of phones running Google’s open-source software are available. Recent comScore and Complete surveys aimed to determine how much Android users had in common with users of the massively successful iPhone. As it turns out, users of the two platforms behave in much the same way.

As far as mobile media use, the number of people that used the browser, apps, social networking, and IM were within a few percentage points of each other. Only in the area of email use did the iPhone come out ahead, 87% of users to only 63%. This is surprising considering Android’s tight integration with Gmail. Notably, this data was gathered before the release of the Motorola Droid.

Even in the area of app usage, where the iPhone can claim the award for most massive app catalog, the differences are minor. The slight majority of iPhone users and about 44% of Android users spend at least half their time using applications other than the browser. On other smartphone platforms, that number of more like 20%. Applications have been key to the iPhone’s success. Even with the smaller user base and application market, usage patterns are similar on Android.

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Posted 12/16/09 at 03:12:19 PM by Bart Salisbury

The Business Insider is proclaiming that “Bing Crushes Yahoo Again in November”, based on numbers released by comScore for November search-engine performance. But do the numbers reported support this bold statement of success and failure?

According to comScore, search-engine market share broke down like this: Google, 65.6%; Yahoo, 17.5%; Bing, 10.3%; Ask Network, 3.8%; and AOL, 2.8%. (AOL still exists?) This seems to indicate that Yahoo and Bing still occupy the same ordinal ranks they did in October. A little closer, perhaps, but that’s about it. And, if anything, both were crushed by Google.

Maybe it’s the change from October to November that’s the cause for the hyperbole? Google was up 0.2 percentage points, Yahoo down 0.5 percentage points, and Bing up 0.4 percentage points. Yeah, Yahoo lost ground in November, and Bing gained, but the shifts don’t seem all that dramatic. And when you consider year-to-year (Y/Y) differences, Yahoo seems about the same place it was a year ago, with its "core search volume" up 1.1%. Bing is new to the market, so it showed a more dramatic 46% Y/Y increase (even though Bing isn’t yet a year old).

Still, trends for Yahoo seem pointed down, having fallen from a 20.1% market share in May to 17.5% in November, while Bing rose from 8.0% to 10.3%. Percentage-wise those differences may be meaningful. Maybe that justifies the hand-wringing over Yahoo and back-slapping for Bing.

Before getting too excited about the impending demise of Yahoo, it would be nice to see revenue figures for it and Bing. After all, it’s not the number of people using the service that really matters, it’s how much you make off those people that counts.

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Posted 11/13/09 at 07:06:29 PM by Ryan Whitwam

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?

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Posted 11/08/09 at 02:29:09 PM by Justin Kerr

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.

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