comScore, Inc. released its latest data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 180 million US Internet users watched online video content in August for an average of 18 hours per viewer. The total US Internet audience also engaged a record 6.9 billion viewing sessions.

Google sites, boosted primarily by YouTube, ranked as the top online video content property in August with 162 million unique viewers. VEVO came in second but quite far at 62.3 million. Facebook remained at third position with 51.7 million viewers. Viacom Digital (49.9 million) and Microsoft sites followed (46.4 million).

Total viewing sessions at 6.9 billion was an all-time high last August. Google sites contributed the most with 3.5 billion viewing sessions.

Let’s stress what we just said: What else is new?

YouTube Tops August 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings (What Else Is New?) is a post from: The Inquisitr

ComScore today updated their Facebook and Yahoo measurements, revealing that Facebook has overtaken Yahoo to become the most trafficked site worldwide.

Facebook managed to bring in 648 million unique visitors to the site, while Yahoo fell 18 million short at 630 million users visited.

It should be noted that ComScore lumps together “groups” sites and does not count individual URLs, which means Microsoft with their sites takes the overall number two spot.

Facebook Now Beating Yahoo In Worldwide Traffic [ComScore] is a post from: The Inquisitr

comScore has a new report out that shows Twitter doubling its global audience over the last year but saw a fourfold audience growth in Latin America during that time.

Their study found that Twitter saw an increase of 109 percent from the previous year as nearly 93 million people visited the service in June as part of Twitter’s strong gains across all global regions.

“Twitter.com has experienced an explosion in global traffic over the past year, establishing itself as one of the most-visited social networking sites across each of the five worldwide regions,” said Graham Mudd, comScore vice president, search & media. “Today nearly 3 out of 4 global Internet users access social networking sites each month, making it one of the most ubiquitous activities across the web. As more users around the world have become acquainted with connecting and expressing themselves through social media, it has created an environment where new media like Twitter can emerge globally in a relatively short period of time.”

Twitter get a big boost from Brazil, Venezuela and Indonesia is a post from: The Inquisitr

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Videos Viewed

Google Sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video property in August as it surpassed the 10 billion videos viewed threshold, representing 40 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube.com accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed at the Google Sites property. Microsoft Sites ranked second with 547 million (2.2 percent) followed by Viacom Digital with 539 million videos viewed (2.1 percent) and Hulu with 488 million (1.9 percent).

*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Viewers

More than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer during the month of August. Google Sites attracted 121.4 million unique viewers during the month (82.8 videos per viewer), followed by Microsoft Sites with 54.9 million viewers (10 videos per viewer) and Yahoo! Sites with 51.6 million viewers (6.9 videos per viewer).

*Rankings based on video content sites; excludes video server networks. Online video includes both streaming and progressive download video.

Top Video Ad Networks by Potential Reach

In August, Tremor Media ranked as the #1 video ad network with a potential reach of 68 million viewers, or 42.2 percent of the total viewing audience. YuMe Video Network ranked second with a potential reach of 59.1 million viewers (36.7 percent penetration) followed by ScanScout Network with 57.6 million viewers (35.7 percent).

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Other notable findings from August 2009 include:

The top video ad networks in terms of their actual delivered reach were: Tremor Media Video Network (19.5 percent penetration of all online video viewers), BrightRoll Video Network (16.2 percent penetration), and BroadbandEnterprises.com (14.8 percent penetration).
81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours.
120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com (82.6 videos per viewer).
44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).
The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos, totaling 1 hour and 17 minutes of videos per viewer.
The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

Google Sites Surpasses 10 Billion Video Views in August is a post from: The Inquisitr

Figures out from comScore show Online Black Friday sales rising 1% this year compared to last year.

Naturally, some are welcoming the news as a positive in a sea of negative economic news and to be fair, not seeing a decline in sales is a positive of sorts when many predicted less spending.

But take a look at the broader news, including a appalling Walmart Stampede Death. Shoppers always like a bargain and stampedes and injuries aren’t completely new (although a death would be a rarity); what it would though seem to demonstrate is that shoppers this year are MORE desperate for bargains given the broader economic crisis.

Black Friday sales are up because consumers have less money to spend, and are trying to save money by buying at sales.

Consider the economic trends of any recession or even during the Great Depression. What we see is a reduced spending capacity in the market as a whole, but likewise consumption never dies. It may decline, but it declines relative to spending capacity. Shoppers become more frugal, so what they buy must fit their ability to spend, and what better time to get value for money than at the Black Friday sales, particularly for those smart enough to plan ahead and buy early Christmas presents. The 1% figure is actually worse than it should have been; Black Friday sales should have been higher given a mild economic crisis, indicating that the economy is in worse shape again because a sure sign of a deep recession or even depression is when people stop spending on non-necessities and save.

Was the Online Black Friday rise really that good? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Web metrics are an interesting game. Like TV ratings, web metric firms take a sample of viewers and extrapolate those figures to represent the entire internet audience. Statistical measurement may be a scientific study, but ultimately the figures are only ever as good as the sample, and the smaller the sample, the higher the chance that the results are inaccurate. Web analytics services have the same issue: they can’t possibly know the true traffic of every site, they can only create a calculated guess based on the sample size.

What follows is a brief overview of each player, how they gather their stats, and what I think of them. The conclusions will no doubt be disagreed with by some, but in noting that, it can only be expected when the stats each service provides are subject to debate themselves. Ultimately though, the better we understand the methods used, the better understanding we may have of the results.

Alexa

Alexa has long been the web’s favorite whipping boy in web analytics. The Amazon owned service was founded in 1996 primarily as a recommendation service, with traffic stats being pulled from each installation of the Alexa toolbar. For most of its history, the toolbar was Alexa’s only source of statistics, and was only available for Internet Explorer.

Things changed earlier this year when Alexa started fresh, announcing that they would be resetting their stats and using external data as well as their toolbar data to report web traffic.

The methodology has always been flawed, and although it may be marginally better now, it is far from perfect, and yet people keep on using Alexa. The simply reason why: Alexa has become the defacto standard in web analytics because they have always been the most open in reporting their stats. Alexa also allows for easy comparison between sites, creating demand for the tool as a way to measure sites against competitors, even when the statistics themselves may have been flawed, after all, they are flawed for everyone, including the competition.

comScore

NASDAQ listed comScore has a $610 billion market cap, so although you may not be able to freely access their statistics, they are a true success story in the space. I’ve had access to a comScore account in the past, and the depth and variety of statics they offer is brilliant. They also have huge sample audiences, said to be in the millions in the United States alone, but the methodology is rather interesting.

comScore gathers data through monitoring software distributed under brands including PermissionResearch and OpinionSquare. One such offering is the Marketscore Internet Accelerator, a Windows tool that offers users (as the name suggests) quicker internet access. comScore’s particularly corporate friendly Wikipedia entry suggests that comScore is no longer using such services, so I can only go on that, but in previous years comScore used what has been called by leading publications spyware and malware to build its sample audience. There was also a confirmed case (per the Wikipedia entry) of this software being installed without permission, and even stories at one stage of comScore tracking tools being bundled with Kazaa.

comScore will no doubt claim they are clean today, but they still rely on installed tracking software that is often bundled as part of other packages as an incentive to install. The real question is whether this data collection method delivers the best and most accurate statistics in the market.

Hitwise

Like comScore, we don’t see a lot of Hitwise data in the wild as they sell the data and don’t offer it freely on demand. We do see Hitwise stats though on a regular basis through controlled releases, and the company has a solid outreach program with blogs and the media.

Hitwise gathers its data by buying the information directly from internet service providers. In Australia they buy surfing data from Telstra, the country’s biggest ISP, and in other places have similar deals in place.

Hitwise data isn’t absolute, and like the others they take the sample data and extrapolate that across all internet users, but the data isn’t sullied by toolbars or internet accelerators, so it is somewhere closer to being representative. Of all the web metrics firms, I’d put my most faith in Hitwise data, with the proviso that like any set of stats, it can never be perfect when it doesn’t capture all data.

Quantcast

Relative new comer Quantcast is growing in popularity with a service that offers free comparable statistics to Alexa.

Quantcast gathers its data two ways: from a panel, and directly. The methods behind the panel data isn’t explained by Quantcast, but it would be fair to presume that it would be somewhat similar to comScore, given that Quantcast doesn’t offer a toolbar or install of its own, at least from the Quantcast site. Quantcast allows web site owners to embed code on their site so Quantcast can track traffic directly, delivering actual statistics for participating sites as opposed to panel only estimates.

Quantcast claims that their combination of panel and direct data gathering delivers a holistic model of internet audiences. In my experience, their embed under reports stats, but not so outrageously as to make it unusable. Quantcast is the natural successor to Alexa: it may not be perfect, but they at least give aggrieved site owners the opportunity to correct the stats by feeding real data into the system, and that is always going to be a positive.

Compete

Compete freely offers basic data on US traffic, but unlike others ignores non-US traffic, a sort of stunted statistical tool. Data gathering includes a combination of ISP’s, opt-in panels, application providers, and users of the Compete toolbar.

Compete has become popular is some circles, but I not sure why. The stats seem reasonable, but in a global economy, US only traffic might have some use for advertisers, but it will never show the complete picture. Compete stats should only ever be used when considering a US audience. They should NEVER be used as being indicative of true traffic for any site.

Google Trends for Websites

Google launched Google Trends for Websites earlier this year, and it looked like Mountain View might have been on a winner. The service pulls data from various external services, Google search and Google Analytics, although as Google has told me previously, not directly, and only anonymously…which I think means that the Google Trends stats don’t actually reflect reality even if Google has the data at hand. The service has possibilities, and expect Google to offer more data in the future.

Conclusion

No provider of web metrics offered today is perfect, but some services are better than others. For corporate metrics Hitwise offers the best bet, gathering its data from ISPs so the incoming data spread is wider than relying on panel statistics from installed tracking software. For free stats, Quantcast offers a similar depth to Alexa but with the added bonus that over 10 million sites are contributing real data.

(image credit: McHumor)

Which web metrics service is best? is a post from: The Inquisitr

The Times discovered a mistakenly posted page at the Advertising Research Foundation — a group hosting a conference on audience measurement in New York Tuesday — that listed plans for Google to reveal the service at a 5 p.m. session. The page has since been taken down at Google’s request, but in a funny twist, can still be found via Google’s cache feature.

An inside source told the Times the new tool will use a variety of audience measurement data, search engine data, and third-party information to break down the demographics of various web sites and then help plan out the best strategies for ad agencies. It sounds like it’ll be geared more for big agencies than for individual sites or companies.

AdPlanner is expected to launch as a free service.

Coming Soon: Google AdPlanner is a post from: The Inquisitr

Media measuring company HitWise released its May data this morning. The researcher found Google took a full 68 percent of all U.S. searches in the month, followed by Yahoo at just under 20 percent, MSN at about six, and ask.com at four. Other smaller engines made up the remaining searches.

In the UK, Google’s lead is even stronger. HitWise measured Google getting more than 87 percent of all searches in May, leaving Yahoo and Microsoft-based searches with only about four each, and ask.com with just over three percent.

It’s an increasingly common trend for the search giants. Both ComScore and HitWise showed Google with a sizeable lead in April as well, though significantly less extreme than the May results show. That data also marked the first time Google had overtaken Yahoo in terms of overall traffic, not specific only to searches.

Google Gains Another Winning Month is a post from: The Inquisitr

comScore announced the deal this afternoon. It’ll continue M:Metrics’ major services — MobiLens, a monthly online survey of cell phone patterns; MeterDirect, an actual on-device meter that measures usage in participating customers; and M:Ad, a tracking service for mobile monitoring. comScore plans to expand the number of cell phone users participating in the MeterDirect program.

“With the substantial growth of 3G devices and Internet friendly handsets, we believe we are now at an inflection point in internet usage on mobile devices,” comScore President and CEO Dr. Magid Abraham said in a prepared statement.

“Our acquisition of M:Metrics makes comScore an immediate market leader in this space and positions comScore to deliver significant shareholder value as wireless carriers, telecom equipment providers, media companies, advertising agencies, online publishers, and marketers extend their reach into the mobile Internet world.”

M:Metrics co-founders Will Hodgman and Seamus McAteer will move over to comScore as managers.

The deal is worth just over $44 million.

Media Measuring Companies Join Forces is a post from: The Inquisitr

Google Sites hit a total audience of more than 141 million visitors in April, to Yahoo sites ranked second with 140.6 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites with 121.2 million visitors.

comScore chalked the Google win down to growth in YouTube viewer numbers.

Other growth categories for the month included tax sites, job search and television sites.

One thing Yahoo has been able to use in its defense during the failed Microsoft takeover offer is that it has remained the largest destination on the web by traffic; today that no longer holds true. The figures are still very close, but once Google takes the lead in any space in usually widens the gap in following months. We’ll follow this up for May when the figures become available to see how they play out.

Google Finally Overtakes Yahoo By Traffic is a post from: The Inquisitr