Google sites remained the most visited in the U.S. during the month of June but Yahoo is closing in on its rival, comScore’s numbers show.
Most Popular
Among the top five most popular web properties in the U.S., Google sites remained #1 with almost 179 million visitors in June. Yahoo edged ever closer with a mere 9 million lag, or 170 million visitors to its sites. Microsoft sites ranked third at 161 million visitors during the period. Facebook came in fourth at 141 million visitors, ahead of AOL sites at 107 million visitors. The most notable gains were those of Adobe properties, which went up 10 positions and ESPN, who won 12 spots as it benefited from traffic generated by the World Cup, comScore said.
According to comScore, social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally, with 75.8 percent of all women online visiting a social networking site in May 2010 versus 69.7 percent of men. This is just one of the highlights of a global report released today by comScore on women’s online usage entitled, Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.
Linda Boland Abraham, comScore chief marketing officer and executive vice president for global development in a press release, “We have seen that women across the globe share some similar usage patterns online, such as strong engagement with social networking sites, but it’s also important to understand gender differences on a regional, country and local level, where cultural differences are continually shaping online usage and content consumption.”
This afternoon, comScore announced the introduction of Video Metrix 2.0, the next generation of comScore’s online video measurement service. The new service offers several enhancements – including reporting of online video ad impressions – designed to better align with the today’s evolving online video landscape.
Enhancements to the service include:
- The ability to filter video viewing activity between ads and content.
- TV show-level reporting for major broadcast sites.
- Additional reporting metrics, including average daily unique viewers, viewing sessions, percentage of ads by videos viewed, percentage of ads by time spent viewing video, ads per content video, content minutes per ad minute.
Okay, so this seems more like a continuing trend than breaking news. But the comScore Video Metrix service today reported that 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during May 2010. But the new news is that YouTube.com achieved record levels of viewing activity during the month with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time.
There are other news nuggets buried at the bottom of the announcement:
- 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
comScore today released a report of the top U.S. online newspaper groups based on the comScore Media Metrix service. The newspaper category represents the first site category for which each of the top ten ranked entities has transitioned to the comScore Media Metrix 360 (Unified Digital Measurement) methodology.
The report showed that more than 123 million Americans visited newspaper sites in May, representing 57 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience. It also showed The New York Times brand led the category with more than 32 million visitors and 719 million pages viewed during the month.
While social networking gained the most penetration in U.S. mobile market use in April, searches also recorded hefty increases, both via apps and browsers, according to freshly released comScore data.
Strong Growth Segments
Searches registered a 90% boost, both via app and browser access in April.
Just like last month, social networking led the pack, soaring 240% from a year ago via app access and 90% via browser access.
News access via apps grew 124% and edged 45% higher via browser.
Mobile banking gained 113% via app access and 69% via browser.
Market research firm comScore has unveiled its new generation ad ROI metrics weapon, calling it Smart Control. Here’s why.
How it works
Smart Control is based on marketing mix modelling techniques and enables to avoid using the test-and-control methodology to measure advertising impact. In comScore’s own words, “The methodology looks at the change in consumer response (either attitudinal or behavioral) by varying frequency of advertising exposure using a Bayesian regression model, from which the “control” response (i.e. frequency = 0) is derived”.
Online advertising revenues hit a record $5.9 billion in the U.S. in the first quarter, reflecting an uptick in the country’s economy as well as the increasing role of online advertising in marketers’ campaigns, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said in a report.
The figure represents a 7.5% gain from the same period a year ago. Commenting on the increase, Randall Rothenberg, IAB President and CEO, said innovation and technology giving access to real-time information and 24/7 entertainment drove the industry which, in turn, “lends major fuel to the U.S. economy.”
Last week, .Fox Networks (pronounced “dot-fox”) and comScore unveiled the findings of a ground-breaking U.K. study at the Advertising Research Foundation’s 2010 conference in New York. The study found that video and display advertising are effective at driving significant uplift in site visits and advertiser search queries.
Image via Wikipedia
The ground-breaking study evaluated results from four campaigns across the Travel, Finance, Government and Utilities sectors. These campaigns utilized various combinations of video and display formats and delivered a total of 300 million impressions to U.K. Internet users.
Here are the key findings:
February is always a weird month for search data.
It’s a short month. Query volume is always down. And this year was particularly odd with all the snowstorms. Were people on the Internet more or less as a result?
An interesting note in comScore’s rankings for last month is that Facebook search query was actually UP. So, there’s one thing people like to do when it snows. (I think we all knew that already by the sheer number of snow pictures uploaded by people in our network.)
