The two leading online measurement companies are in court fighting over patent infringements, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“ComScore filed a counter suit against Nielsen Holdings and its Netratings division in a United States District Court alleging infringement of patent rights, comScore revealed in a regulatory filing on Tuesday. Nielsen is claiming that comScore violated its patent rights and filed a lawsuit on March 16 in a U.S. District Court..”
Both companies provide the numbers for online traffic that many use to determine success and growth numbers. The search engine market share, the time people spend at given websites and market share of online traffic for numerous industries are some of the important numbers both provide.
With SES London 2011 just around the corner, comScore today announced that 34.7 million Internet users in the U.K. watched 6 billion videos in November 2010. That’s an average of 173 videos a month per British viewer.*
During November 2010, nearly 964 million viewing sessions took place in the U.K., resulting in an average of 6 videos viewed per session. This is important because that Brits — like Yanks — snack on half a dozen clips a session.
comScore’s September U.S. search market share numbers are out. Google, which has dropped share or remained steady pretty much for the last year, made some slight gains. Meanwhile, Yahoo took a hit and Bing held steady.
- Google search market share grew to 66.1 percent in September (up from 65.4 percent in August).
- Yahoo fell to 16.7 percent (down from 17.4 percent).
- Bing grew slightly to 11.2 percent (up from 11.1 percent).
- Ask fell slightly to 3.7 percent (down from 3.8 percent).
- AOL held steady at 2.3 percent.
Fully embracing HTML 5, the IE9 beta was launched yesterday, and the Bing team says their goal is to provide a “very rich” and “visually appealing search experience.”
Some of the new search features:
- Query to Results: Smoother transitions from search page to results. There is no more flickering.
- Images, Videos, Text: Previews are bigger, bolder and easier to trigger.
- Quick Tabs/Visual Search: A more “application-like” experience.
- Scrolling: Related searches, search history, and search box are locked in place as you scroll.
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.
