Comscore has finally caved to a decade of complaints from web publishers that its traffic estimates woefully undercount site traffic, thus producing a vast disparity between Comscore numbers and the numbers the sites have in their logs.
Brad Stone blogged the bad news: "During the first 23 days of November, according to a report to be released later on Tuesday by the research firm comScore, consumers spent $8.19 billion online, a 4 percent drop from the same period last year. That marks the first annual decline since e-commerce took off." You can…
The accompanying chart from TechFlash says it all: Online sales just aren't growing anymore. October's 1 percent growth over October 2007 is the worst performance measured by ComScore since they began tracking stats in 2001. TechFlash quotes Gian Fulgoni, chairman of the research firm: "We can only hope that the…
The Jesusphone is no longer just for privileged white folks. "The strongest growth in users is coming from those earning less than the median household income, particularly since the launch of the iPhone 3G." So says a report from ComScore, which concludes that "lower-income mobile subscribers are increasingly turning…
That's what the addition by subtraction equals when you compare comScore's 10.8 billion unique video streams counted in June to Nielsen's 7.5 billion — because of the two Web usage statistic compilers, Nielsen refuses to count "pornography" and "advertising" in the company's total. At first I though, "There's a…
Web metrics firm ComScore says it going to begin tracking ad networks' "potential reach" and "actual reach" for online-ad buyers and sellers. A translation: Ad networks, in theory, can place ads on all of a Web publisher's pages, and those are the numbers they trot out when luring ad dollars. Operations like Glam…
Reversing a long trend, one research firm says Yahoo and Microsoft have posted gains in search market share — at the expense of industry leader Google. ComScore reports that 61.5 percent of all U.S. searches went through Google in June 2008, 0.3 percent less than in May 2008. Yahoo saw 20.9 percent of the searches…
ComScore's stock dropped 23% on Tuesday when news broke about Google's Ad Planner — because now you can get demographic info from the same shop you can buy Web ads from. However, that's exactly the reason ad agencies and marketers might be wary to take Google's information at face value. [Silicon Alley Insider]
Why is Microsoft so desperate to acquire Yahoo's search business? According to ComScore, Google's video-sharing site YouTube and Google's other subsidiaries alone attracted more search queries than all of Microsoft's properties combined in April. Comparing total searches for each company is similarly lopsided;…
Revolution Health, the company founded by former AOL Time Warner chairman Steve Case, has laid off its entire business-to-business unit, according to a tipster. In the rest of Revolution Health, there's little sign of its original mission — helping consumers lower healthcare costs. Instead, it's operating a series…
In February, ComScore reported underwhelming growth in clicks on Google ads in the U.S. Google shares sank below a 52-week low for the first time in the company's history. Then, yesterday, Google reported 42 percent year-over-year revenue growth, surpassing expectations. Burned, Wall Street traders reacted harshly…
BrewPR's snacky flack Brooke Hammerling penned a guest column for Silicon Alley Insider, arguing that the Web video industry needs to come up with a strict viewership metric. Though she doesn't mention it in the piece, New York-based online-video startup NextNewNetworks is a Brew client. (It's disclosed, in tiny…
ComScore reports MySpace hit 109.3 million worldwide unique visitors in January. Facebook had 100.7 million, only 8 percent less. Last year, MySpace's lead was four times as large. [SAI]
Bear Stearns analyst Bob Peck laid waste to stock portfolios everywhere on Tuesday with ComScore metrics that said Google users clicked on only as many paid links in January 2008 as they clicked on in January 2007. On the news, Google's share price dropped 8 percent. ComScore's Magid Abraham and James Lamberti are…
SearchIgnite, which spends about $200 million each year on search advertising, says that clicks on Google ads aren't down or even flat as ComScore recently claimed. They're up 40.1 percent year-over-year. On all major search engines, paid clicks are up 45.7 percent year-over-year — up 65 percent for retailers and…
Creative Capital got ahold of the December 2007 ComScore numbers for the top social networks in the U.S. — and they are, on the whole, not good. Engagement — average minutes spent on the site per visitor — is down for MySpace and Microsoft's Live Spaces, but up for almost all the other sites. Unique visitor growth…
Sears, the department-store operator, is inviting visitors to its website to join an online "community." In the process, visitors may be unwittingly installing spyware from ComScore which monitors all of their online behavior "including ... filling a shopping basket, completing an application form, or checking your…
Sound the alarm bells: CPM Advisors has uncovered a drastic disparity between the demographics Facebook offers advertisers and the metrics ComScore independently reports. ComScore reports that 13.6 million U.S. people ages 35 or older use Facebook. Facebook, however, puts that number at only 1.26 million. What gives?
Just when ComScore had you worried that the subprime mortgage crisis would slow down e-commerce, they come back today with good news. According to the she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not online-metrics firm, this holiday season's first 18 days saw more than $7 billion in spending, a 17-percent gain versus the…
ComScore, the online traffic tracker, told us that 62 percent of the 1.2 million fans who downloaded Radiohead's latest album "In Rainbows" weren't willing to pay for it. Now the band's management wants to kibosh those reports.
