comScore

comScore has released their latest m:metrics report showing mobile search usage in the U.S. and several countries in Europe. Nearly 10% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. completed a mobile search and the total mobile search usage is up 68% in the U.S. In Europe where mobile usage is further along, usage is up 38%.

For all of the countries in the chart below, Google leads usage of mobile search. In the U.S., 63% of mobile searches use Google while 34% use Yahoo. In Germany, 85% use Google and in France 62% use Google. Spain and France were the only countries that had near 10% MSN search usage.

comScore has released new stats for European Internet usage based on their World Metrix audience measurement service today. The report shows that Russia is leading Europe in Internet audience growth followed by France, Spain and Ireland. Russia's Internet audience grew 27% from June 2007-June 2008.

As for Internet penetration in Europe, The Netherlands leads with 82% of the total population online. The Netherlands is followed by Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Based on what I am seeing, Switzerland appears to be pushing out the most new startups out of the top 5 European Internet penetration countries.

comScore is out with their June Ad Metrix analysis of the top online display advertising publishers and advertisers in the U.S. On the publisher side, Fox Interactive Media leads the pack with 52.3 billion ad views. MySpace accounted for 51 billion of the 52.3 billion hence my story title. Facebook came in sixth with 3 billion ads and Glam made the report in tenth with just over 2 billion ads.

On the advertiser side, Microsoft leads the pack with 5.5 billion ads purchased. In second place is the University of Phoenix with 4.7 billion ads - guess they have some open seats. Vonage and Netflix came in eighth and ninth respectively with just over 3 billion ads purchased. Experian Interactive is the company who pushes the dancing women/bear/monkey ads for Lower My Bills and the FreeCreditReport ads.

comScore will release their latest Widget Metrix report later this morning. From the report, "A total of 615 million people, representing 65% of the worldwide internet users, viewed or engaged with a widget in June 2008." While this number seems high, I would have expected it to be even higher. Nearly every page has a widget on it across the Internet these days.

I'd wonder exactly what comScore defines as a widget. Must a widget need to be viewable by the user to be counted? Would script code used in analytics tracking be considered a widget? I still believe that widgets will replace most traditional online display banner advertising by the end of 2009. The benefits of widgetizing an ad far outweight the cost to implement.

Gigya leads the pack serving over 150 million widgets during the period. In the U.S., Gigya served over 55 million widgets, giving them a 29.2% market share. It's interesting to look at the charts below and compare a widget distribution platform like Gigya with a widget provider like Slide. Gigya doesn't produce their own widgets, they help widget creators with distribution, monetization and analytics. Slide creates and distributes their own widgets. It's hard to do a direct comparison.

(comScore asked that we remove the top 10 charts)

Good to see SplashCast on the list - haven't heard much from them lately. Check out my thoughts on widget installation and ethics, 2008 widget predictions and all of our widget coverage.

Analytics provider comScore is out with a new report today regarding the Japanese Web social networking market. Facebook has the largest percentage growth (213%) over the period June 2007-June 2008. Mixi.jp leads the Japanese social networking category with over 12 million monthly uniques while Facebook has grown to just over 500k visitors a month. It's important to note that this comScore report does not include mobile social networking usage. This would be a very interesting bit of analysis since mobile usage is so high in Japan.

MySpace is second with 10% of the traffic Mixi.jp has but doubles Facebook in unique visitors. While we here in the states seem to believe Orkut is dead, it's beating Facebook in unique visitors by 20% for June 2008. comScore also notes that Orkut users have the heaviest engagement noting, "...in this study across several measures, including average usage days per visitor (11.5), average minutes per visitor (454), and average pages per visitor (1,557). Mixi.jp also generates fairly heavy engagement, while Facebook.com and MySpace.com show more modest engagement thus far."

comScore is out with their May online video report. No surprise here, Google still leads the pack with 35% market share. Google's YouTube property accounts for 98% of the Google video traffic. Fox Interactive, Yahoo, Microsoft and Viacom round out the top 5. The full list is below. Surprisingly Hulu has joined the top 10 with 88 million videos viewed.

Here are the other notes from comScore for May 2008:

• 74 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• The average online video viewer watched 228 minutes of video.
• 82.2 million viewers watched 4.1 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
• 54.8 million viewers watched 703 million videos on MySpace.com (12.8 videos per viewer).
• 6.8 million viewers watched 88 million videos on Hulu.com (13.0 videos per viewer).
• The duration of the average online video was 2.7 minutes.

YouTube will always come in with a higher video/user count because most of their videos are short, user-generated and are typically unplanned while sites like Hulu are longer shows and are typically planned.

Ashkan says more videos were watched than searches were performed.

comScore is out with their German search engine rankings for May 2008. Google picked up another 1.5% share from the previous month, moving them to just over 80% of the German search engine market. That's a staggering number. eBay is the second most popular search engine in Germany, however they lost .5% share for the month, coming in at 6% overall.

German networks Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck and ProSiebenSat1 Sites own 4.6% share combined.

It's interesting to compare the numbers to the Russian search engine comScore report. In Russia, local search provider Yandex owns nearly 50% of the search market.

comScore is ouit today with a new report regarding U.S. online advertising within the quick-serve restaurants category for March 2008. The report leads with McDonalds online advertising numbers which lead the pack at 295 million online display ads for the month. Quiznos came in second (huh?) followed by KFC, PapaJohns and Subway. In fact, McDonalds nearly tripled the online ad impressions that Quiznos ran.

With the stupid Subway campaigns for $5 footlongs, I would have imagined Subway ranking higher in impressions than Quiznos.

While 295 million impressions might seem like a lot, comScore ranks McDonalds at #113 on their list of total ad impressions for March 2008.

This news comes after TNS Media Intelligence reported that online advertising spend was up 8.5% for the 1st quarter 2008.

Web analytics service comScore is announcing their acquisition of mobile analytics provider M:Metrics. The transaction involves a cash payment of $44.3 million and the issuance of approximately 50,000 options to purchase shares of comScore common stock to certain M:Metrics unvested option holders. As mobile grows here in the U.S., the ability to measure will become more critical - especially for sites that monetize their mobile traffic.

M:Metrics describes their core mobile analytics services as:

MobiLensTM, a syndicated monthly online survey that captures overall mobile phone usage, including device information, data usage, media consumption and demographic characteristics of a representative sample of more than 40,000 mobile device users. MobiLens is available in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Spain, and Italy.

MeterDirectTM, the industry’s first on-device meter that passively measures the mobile Internet behavior and media consumption of more than 4,000 existing Smartphone panelists. The M:Metrics metering technology is compatible with more than 280 device models. MeterDirect is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.

M:AdTM, the first competitive tracking service for mobile advertising that continuously monitors clickable display advertising from a broad representative set of mobile Web destinations to reveal leading advertisers across a variety of market segments. M:Ad is currently available in the U.S. and U.K.

More details on the acquisition on Silicon Alley Insider and Techcrunch.

comScore is out with their latest online video report for March 2008 covering U.S. Internet users. YouTube continues to lead the pack and represents 98% of all videos in the Google Sites category. Tell me again why they keep Google Video around? It's seems Google abandoned it when they acquired YouTube.

Google moved up another 2.6 share points to 38% of all videos watched. The real telling statistic is that YouTube visitors watched an average of 50 videos each over the month. No one else comes close to this in the lead pack as Microsoft Sites comes in second with nearly 10 videos per user. More videos per user mean more ability and options to monetize over the session. In total videos watched, Fox Interactive came in second followed by Yahoo Sites, Viacom Digital and Microsoft Sites.

Another juicy bit in the report is that the average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video. Wow. And with live video slowly taking off, this number will only continue to increase.