comscore

Google snatches search share in August

It's a familiar pattern: another month, another increase in Google's search market share.

Internet users performed 11.7 billion searches in the U.S. in August, choosing Google 63 percent of the time, according to ComScore's monthly analysis released Thursday. That's an increase of 1.1 percentage points from 61.9 percent in July, the analyst firm said.

Yahoo slipped from 20.5 percent to 19.6 percent, and Microsoft slipped from 8.9 percent to 8.3 percent.

MySpace in July: Best month ever?

Recently, statistics firms haven't been too kind to MySpace, the News Corp.-owned social network that was at the center of Silicon Valley press love not so long ago. In June, ComScore reported that once-smaller Facebook had surpassed it in worldwide traffic for the first time.

But the news isn't all bad for MySpace, the company said in an e-mail Monday evening. ComScore statistics might be showing that Facebook is still growing rapidly, but the firm's numbers for July said that MySpace has surpassed 122 million unique visitors worldwide for the first time. Granted, it's been … Read more

Are online advertisers disappointed in NBC's Olympic performance?

NBC President Jeff Zucker has been explaining to the U.S. public just how right the network was to not screen the Olympic opening ceremony live.

"There's no question we did the right thing in holding the opening ceremony to air in prime time on NBC that night," he said on CNBC's Squawk Box. "The excitement that built out of word of mouth that the opening ceremony was the most spectacular thing that people had seen, that China had wanted to make a statement and they made a statement and people wanted to see that.&… Read more

Google takes top Web spot in July

It should come as no surprise, but Google sites officially continued to dominate the Web landscape in July, drawing more than 141 million unique visitors and placing Yahoo and Microsoft at second and third place, according to analyst group ComScore Media Metrix.

AOL took fourth behind the top sites, all of which were enveloped in discussions about acquisitions or partnerships this summer.

Fox Interactive Media, parent company of MySpace, was the fifth most visited group of sites, with a registered 88 million unique visitors. Facebook, on the other hand, landed at No. 16 with 39 million visitors. However, ComScore reported … Read more

ComScore: Social sites are going global

We sort of knew it already: while Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, and Friendster were all founded in the U.S., social networking is a worldwide phenomenon. New statistics from ComScore show that sites like Facebook are growing rapidly across the globe, even as that growth slows down in their home country.

Earlier on Tuesday, performance firm Pingdom released numbers pulled from Google Insights for Search, showing that different social networks have very different levels of "interest" across the world. ComScore's numbers, also released Tuesday, underscore the fact that social sites are increasingly global in nature--and sometimes … Read more

New comScore figures suggest fewer people believing comScore

comScore has done a wonderful job. Of marketing comScore results.

If the Internet abacus company sees its readings suggest a significant conclusion, it releases the information in an interesting and digestible form.

However, I understand that both comScore and its frats-in-stats at Nielsen Online are having their audits audited by the Interactive Advertising Bureau after mlb.com declared that Nielsen Online's score for its site of 6 million was a "conScore." The real figure, according to mlb.com, was actually 19 million. (the results of the audit's audit are due at the end of this year.)… Read more

ComScore: Facebook is beating MySpace worldwide

New numbers from metrics firm ComScore show that in May, the battle of the social-networking sites may have gained a new front-runner: Facebook appears to have surpassed longtime rival MySpace in worldwide unique visitors for the first time. ComScore representatives said that this began in April when Facebook passed MySpace by a hair, and widened in May.

Facebook, according to ComScore, pulled in 123.9 million unique visitors in the month of May, beating MySpace's 114.6, and 50.6 billion page views compared to MySpace's 45.4 billion. It's been a slow but steady upward climb … Read more

McDonalds in bid to take over the web

This week sees the Cannes Advertising Festival. Where a lot of advertising people and clients drink themselves silly and whisper sweet everythings into each others' ears.

I love it myself. But, being on the creative side of the business, only when you have something in competition that has a chance of winning an award.

McDonalds has already achieved a victory this week, according to the eyeball counters at comScore.

Not in Cannes (yet), but on the web.

comScore announced this week that McDonalds enjoyed the unprecedented attention of almost 600 million eyeballs in March with their display ads. (that's … Read more

Google posts strong April paid click figures

Google's U.S. paid click-through rate posted a strong performance in the month of April, while Yahoo and Microsoft gave up ground, according to figures released late Wednesday by ComScore.

Google's paid click-through rate climbed 20 percent in April, compared with year ago figures, marking its best performance since November, according to a research note by Ben Schachter, a UBS analyst.

Yahoo, meanwhile, saw a year-over-year decline of 4 percent and Microsoft's MSN saw a drop of 9 percent.

And on the click-through rate, which takes the total number of searches divided by the sponsored clicks, Google'… Read more

ComScore scores M:Metrics for $44.3 million

Online number-crunching firm ComScore announced Wednesday that it has acquired M:Metrics, a mobile usage statistics company, for $44.3 million in cash and a handful of common stock options.

The reason for the purchase is pretty obvious: as mobile phones make up a bigger and bigger chunk of digital consumption, ComScore wants to be able to provide the relevant statistics to businesses and advertisers. M:Metrics operates mobile phone usage survey MobiLens, mobile ad statistic tabulator M:Ad, and mobile Web monitoring product MeterDirect. ComScore currently has about 950 clients, the company said, and M:Metrics has more than … Read more