Posts Tagged ‘Comscore’

While still way out ahead of the search engine pack, Google’s 64.4 percent April share of market, as reported by ComScore, is considerably below it’s over-70-percent high throughout 2009. In June 2009 Google was reported having slightly more than 74 percent of the search market. The April figure represents a slight drop from the search giant’s 65.1 percent of March 2010 as well. Its YouTube actually lost 7 percent of share from the prior month.

Yahoo sites rose 0.8 percentage points to 17.7 percent, and Microsoft sites gained 0.1 percentage points to reach 11.8 percent of the search market. Both these groups have introduced new site navigation experiences tying content and related search results together. Ask Network captured 3.7 percent of the search market, and AoL LLC 2.4 percent.

Noteworthy gains and losses:

* Mapquest, part of the AoL LLC figure, gained 10 percent market share from March 2010

* Fox Interactive Media in general, and MySpace in particular both lost 23 percent share of search market in one month.

* While Microsoft sites gained 19 percent month over month, Bing actually lost one percent

Here’s the complete ComScore April 2010 report.

ComScore, Inc. today released July 2009 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, showing that 158 million U.S. Internet users watched 21.4 billion videos during the month, both the largest audience and the greatest number of viewed videos ever recorded. 

In July, Google Sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video property with a record 8.9 billion videos viewed, making up 42 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Viacom Digital ranked second with 812 million (3.8 percent) followed by Microsoft Sites with 631 million videos viewed.

The top video ad networks, in order of rank, were ScanScout Network, Tremor Media, YuMe, Broadband Enterprises, BrightRoll, Advertising.com, SpotXChange, Break Media, and Nabbr.

In July, 81 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video, for an average of 500 minutes (8.3 hours).
 

Challenger, Gray & Christmas is reporting that last month planned job cuts by American employers increased 31 percent to 97,373. This was the first increase in monthly job cuts since January. The news is a bit of a shock: planned job cuts had fallen to a 15-month low during June, when job cuts decreased by 33 percent to 74,393. Still, the July total was 6 percent lower than this time last year.

The data of course is corroborated by the number of visitors to job sites, which according to June data from ComScore, showed a 10 percent growth in unique visitors to career sits over last year for a total of 65 million uniques. CareerBuilder stayed on top, followed by HotJobs and Monster.

Adding up the whole year, employers have announced 994,048 job cuts this year – that’s 72 percent more than the 579,260 job cuts announced during the first seven months of last year. The year-to-date total is now only 230,000 job cuts away from surpassing the 1,223,993 jobs cut during all of 2008.

Challenger CEO John A. Challenger said the July rebound after June’s surprisingly low job-cut total was not entirely unexpected. “We are still a long way from a full recovery. In fact, monthly job cuts are likely to return to levels in excess of 100,000 by the fourth quarter,” he said.

The increase in job cuts during July was mostly due to firms in the transportation industry, which announced plans to reduce 27,954 positions during July – an increase of 400 percent from the 5,587 jobs cut during June.

Layoffs in the telecommunication sector also grew in June – from just 802 in June to 17,601 during July (an increase of 209 percent). Challenger pointed to reductions at Verizon’s land line division which “reflect a shift in consumer demand from traditional telephone service toward wireless-communication options. The hope is that increased hiring in the wireless sector will help offset some of the losses in the more traditional divisions.”

ComScore’s report on top Web sites worldwide for June put social networking king Facebook in fourth place in terms of unique visitors per month, just after Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and ahead of AOL and EBay.

The reasons aren’t hard to discern. During June, Facebook gained 24 million unique visitors for a total of 340 million unique visitors throughout the world. That’s higher than the official number of 250 million active registered users: you don’t have to be registered to visit some of the site’s pages.

During the last year, Facebook grew by 157 percent, adding 208 million visitors.

During June, Facebook had 77 million unique users in the U.S. putting it in 6th place (AOL and Fox Interactive Media joined Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ahead of Facebook in the U.S.).

Here’s the complete list (worldwide numbers):

– Google Sites – 844 million
– Microsoft Sites – 691 million
– Yahoo Sites – 581 million
– Facebook – 340 million
– Wikimedia Foundation sites – 303 million
– AOL – 280 million
– EBay – 233 million
– CBS Interactive – 186 million
– Amazon – 183 million
– Ask Network – 174 million

Twitter unique visitors have reached 44.5 million worldwide in June according to new numbers from ComScore. That’s an increase of 7 million new visitors from May, a 19 percent increase. But compare it with June 2008 and you’ll findn increase of 1,460 percent. Yow!

20 million of Twitter’s visitors are coming from the U.S. ComScore now counts Twitter as the No. 52 largest site in the world (that’s bigger than ESPN but smaller than Craigslist).

Remember that these numbers only count visitors to the Twitter.com site and a substantial number of users – more than half by some counts – get to Twitter via third party apps. That could put unique visitors at potentially 90 million worldwide and 40 million in the U.S. Not up to Facebook numbers yet which hit 77 million in June, but who knows,  the way things are going in the social network world, Twitter could soon overtake MySpace’s 68 million (and dropping) unique visitors per month.

A new report from ComScore says that 65 million Americans visited the “career services and development category” in June – a 10 percent increase versus a year ago. Seven of the top ten sites in the category achieved double-digit gains during that period.

At the top of the bunch is CareerBuilder with 21.7 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo HotJobs with 17.9 million visitors (up 23 percent vs. year ago) and Monster.com with 14.5 million visitors (up 6 percent).

In fourth place, Indeed grew 59 percent to 8 million visitors, Job.com sites were up 46 percent to 7.4 million visitors, and SnagAJob increased 48 percent to 4.7 million visitors.

The next four on the list were Simply Hired, JobsOnline.net, OPM and Brassring.com.

ComScore also asked which were the top searched for occupations in the careers category. “Customer service” came out on top with 273,000 people searching on that term in the category in June, followed by “warehouse” (257,000 searchers) and “sales” (217,000 searchers).

Today comScore revealed its June 2009 study of the career services and development category of recruitment sites. Based on data from comScore Media Metrix and comScore Marketer, more than 65 million Americans visited the career and devleopment category in June. With a 10 percent year over year increase, the category is one of the top-growing areas of job board activity. Careerbuilder, HotJobs, Monster, Indeed, Job.com, SnagAJob, and SimplyHired all experienced double-digit category growth.

“Job and career-related resources continue to be one of the fastest-growing categories online…,” said Jeff Hackett, comScore SVP, in the report. “Careerbuilder, HotJobs and Monster have maintained their leadership positions for several years now, but there are also a few upstarts in the industry making some noise. Certainly with millions of Americans reevaluating their careers right now there is opportunity for continued growth and innovation in this segment of the online marketplace.”

According to the comScore report, the most searched occupation in the category was customer service, with 273,000 searches in June. Warehouse jobs had 257,000 searchers, and sales 217,000.

The latest Comscore rankings for real estate websites in the U.S. are in. Not surprisingly, Move.com is once again on top. Here’s the full list:

1. Move.com
2. RealEstate.yahoo.com
3. RealEstate.aol.com
4. Rent.com
5. Zillow.com
6. Trulia.com
7. RealEstate.msn.com
8. Homes.com
9. Apartments.com
10. NCI Interactive

As always, Comscore and fellow research firm Hitwise don’t always agree. For example, Trulia was only at number 9 on the Hitwise list. Rent.com was in sixth place on Hitwise, and Zillow was in third place, rather than fifth as on Comscore.

Online brokerage Redfin is expanding into New York. Westchester, Long Island, and Queens are all available, although Manhattan and Brooklyn still remain beyond its reach. In California, the site now covers Sacramento and the Central Valley. Other existing markets include Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, the San Francisco Bay Area, and of course Redfin’s home base of Seattle.

At the same time, the company announced it is adding up to 200 additional data fields for Realtors to use. Depending on the area, Redfin will now list property details such as price history, the sellers’ mortgage history, cumulative days on the market, lot square footage, and will display addresses on a map.

Redfin says that traffic grew 300 percent last year to 1.6 million unique visitors. ComScore is more cautious, estimating only 324,000 U.S. visitors in March, 2009.

We all know that Twitter is growing rapidly. But the latest ComScore numbers surprised even us.

Traffic to the micro-blogging company’s site jumped 133 percent from February to March, putting it at 9.3 million visitors in the U.S. By comparison, the January to February increase was 55 percent, and from December to January, it was “only” 33 percent.

In February, ComScore estimated that Twitter.com had worldwide 9.8 million visitors worldwide and 4 million U.S. visitors. If you apply the same 40/60 U.S. to worldwide ratio, Twitter could have as many as 20 million unique visitors worldwide.

ComScore releases international figures later in the month.

The gap between Facebook and MySpace in the U.S. is narrowing…quickly. According to ComScore, at the end of last year MySpace’s unique visitors in the U.S. were 20 million more than Facebook. As of March, MySpace’s lead has dwindled to just 9.1 million.

ComScore says that Facebook had 61.2 million visitors in March compared with 70.2 million for MySpace. But Facebook is on a growth curve – March saw 3.8 million more visitors, an increase of 6.7 percent over the previous month – while MySpace actually lost 160,000 uniques in March, and an astounding 5.8 million down from January.

At this growth rate, Facebook could overtake MySpace as early as this summer.

ComScore reports that Facebook is the top social network in Europe, leading in 11 of 17 European countries surveyed.

Facebook recently logged its 200 millionth registered user.

In February, Facebook saw 275 million visitors worldwide, according to comScore, of which nearly 100 million were from Europe — up 314 percent from a year ago. “Facebook has very quickly taken a leading position across most of the European social networking market despite having a strong foothold in just a few European countries one year ago,” said Mike Read, comScore’s managing director for Europe.

Its largest audience is in the U.K., followed by France, comScore reported.

Think video is hot? It’s not just about what you watch. It’s what you search for too. ComScore is reporting that searching for video on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S.

ComScore’s monthly qSearch report breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. And, to drive another nail into Yahoo’s downfall, more searches are done through YouTube than through the former search engine high flyer.

The numbers (from Christa Quarles of Thomas Weisel Partners):

– YouTube generates 2.7 billion searches in the U.S., up 8.5 percent from last month.
– The number is up a whopping 114 percent from 1.3 billion in Nov. 2007.
– YouTube represents 25.4 percent of all U.S. Google site searches (vs. 17.4 percent last year).

Oh, and in case you were wondering, ComScore also addresses non-YouTube searches on Google. The company’s search market share (not including YouTube) stood at 63.5 percent vs. Yahoo’s which dropped slightly to 20.4 percent. Microsoft pulled up the rear at 8.3 percent.