comScore: Facebook Attracted Over 100M Visitors In November
December 16, 2009
Well, it's official: Facebook is freaking huge. Today, comScore released some statistics regarding November, and during that month, the social network managed to hit (and pass) a very significant milestone.
We'll let Andrew Lipsman, Director of Industry Analysis at comScore, reveal his own data. On the comScore Voices blog, Lipsman wrote, "For the first time in its history, Facebook.com surpassed 100 million monthly U.S. visitors joining a very select list of web properties reaching such a threshold (the others are Google Sites, Yahoo! Sites and Microsoft Sites)."
Considering that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all own dozens or perhaps hundreds of properties, and that Facebook is just Facebook, this is fairly stunning. Here are some other interesting details to remember: the market caps of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are $188 billion, $22 billion, and $266 billion, respectively.
What's more, if you look at the graph above, you'll see that Facebook's showing no signs of slowing down.
We'll leave you with one last finding of Lipsman's. He reported, "Facebook also accounts for 5.5% of all time spent online in the U.S. (up from 2.5% a year ago) consuming a significant percentage of the average U.S. Internet user's attention online."
Have You Read This?
> Facebook Wants You To Post To Twitter
> Facebook URL Shortener Makes Appearance
> Survey Finds Facebook Most Popular Communication Tool
Portuguese Internet Users Reached Nearly 4 Million in September
November 27, 2009
comScore released findings this week from a study of the online habits of Portuguese Internet users. Interestingly, they found that the Portuguese Internet audience grew to nearly 4 Million users in September.
Over 3.8 million people age 15 and older accessed the Internet from a home or work location in Portugal in September, viewing an average 1,843 pages and spending an average 1.9 hours online per person during the month.
"Portugal represents a dynamic and growing Internet market in Europe with users continuing to be more active and engaged online," said Mike Read, comScore managing director for Europe and Ibero America. "The average Internet user in Portugal is spending more time online engaging in different behaviors such as reading news and articles, search, conducting personal financial transactions and social networking. As these behaviors continue to take hold in the Portuguese market there will be an increasing number of opportunities to leverage the Internet for marketing and advertising purposes."
Google sites are the most popular in Portugal, according to comScore's data. Here's a look at the top 15 online properties for Portugal:
Naturally, social media plays a big role in Internet use in Portugal, but it is not Facebook that dominates there, according to comScore's numbers. Here are the top ten social networking sites:
The figures for both charts exclude traffic from public computers, such as those from Internet cafes. They also exclude access from mobile phones and PDA's. I'm willing to bet that social networks and Google sites are pretty popular among mobile users in Portugal though.
Have You Read This?
> Study: Most People Go Online to Socialize
> Google, Bing Perform Well In Latest comScore Report
> "Time Spent Online" Report Puts Microsoft Way Ahead
MySpace Music Goes Down Under
October 2, 2009
Today MySpace announced the launch of MySpace Music in Australia and New Zealand. This release represents the first for MySpace Music outside of the United States.
The launch brings a new e-commerce partnership to MySpace Music with iTunes providing the music downloads locally, a MySpace spokesperson tells WebProNews. She also shares the following stats for the US version of MySpace Music:
Source: Nielsen Netview / August 2009
- MySpace Music unique users have grown 169% since launch in September 2008 and 1472%, year-over-year
- MySpace Music has nearly tripled its unique users since launch
- People ages 12 and 17 are 2.3 times more likely than the average active internet user to visit MySpace Music
- People ages 18-24 are 2.2 times more likely than the average internet user to visit MySpace Music
Source: comScore Media Metrix / August 2009
- MySpace Music is the #1 site in time spent for the 18-34 demographic
- MySpace Music is #2 in total unique users
- MySpace Music has 18.95 million monthly unique users
"MySpace Music brings to Australia and New Zealand all of the functionality currently available to U.S. based users including an ever-growing catalogue of fully licensed major and indie artist audio tracks, user-friendly e-commerce solutions, personal music players and user and artist playlisting, in addition to creating monetization opportunities for all artists," the spokesperson says.
"Both Australia and New Zealand have always been rabid music markets for MySpace Ever since Jet launched our Secret Shows program in August 2006 we’ve seen our fans share their favorite playlists, take advantage of advance listening sessions and help up-and-coming local artists build a following both locally and globally via MySpace," says Rebekah Horne, Managing Director and SVP of International at MySpace. "In Australia alone, we have had exclusive album premieres from Cut Copy, Silverchair, The Presets and Guns n Roses and hosted 40 free and intimate Secret Shows with some of the greatest acts in the world, including Air, The Cure, Hilltop Hoods and Duffy. New Zealand too has had its share of some great Secret Shows with the likes of Fall Out Boy and Evermore."
The site launches with Toyota and KFC as its flagship sponsors. Users can purchase and download single songs and full albums through iTunes.
Do We Really Watch That Many Online Videos?
September 30, 2009
This week comScore has released the latest numbers regarding video viewed online and I am still scratching my head. According to the findings (remember class, repeat after me – “It’s research and research ain’t perfect”) in August of 2009 there were just over 25 billion videos viewed by the approximately 161 million US Internet users. That works out to be an average of 157 videos viewed per user during that time period. Google sites alone accounted for over 10 billion of those videos with 99% of that number coming from YouTube. This number eclipses the previous month’s results and I am wondering if this economy is a main contributor to this amount of ‘free time’.
I am still shaking my head. Maybe it’s just me but that seems ridiculously high. I am a heavy Internet user. I spend considerable hours everyday on the computer researching etc, etc but I come nowhere near watching 5 video clips per day. I admit I probably have the TV on too much so maybe being online is a vacation of sorts with regard to watching video. I don’t know. Am I just a really low user of online video content?
Take a look at the comScore chart below to see how just how dominant Google (which is 99% YouTube in this case) is in this space as well.
So help me here. If you fall in line with these numbers, meaning you are a profile match to the just over 5 videos viewed per day type, what is it that you are watching? Of course, this is rated PG blog for the most part so anything deviant just keep to yourself and continue seeking help but please don’t share it here.
In fact, let’s take a look at a specific type of video viewing. Let’s keep it to marketing / advertising / product related videos. As marketers we need to be careful not to just look at this large number and automatically assume that everyone is watching videos about products or something that is related to our work. I have learned to never underestimate the power and allure of “stupid human tricks” video viewing which could simply be an escape mechanism for people at their desks who can’t wait to get out of the office.
What if the percentage of videos viewed that relate to marketing functions is just a small fraction of the total audience? That would be the number that we should be paying close attention to and not chase video’s version of a shiny object that will end up eating up valuable time and resources.
Thanks for stopping by and we look forward to hearing from you.
