comscore

Omniture and ComScore, two Web-tracking powerhouses, are combining forces to launch a new system for measuring online audiences, the companies said Monday.

Teasing out online traffic figures has been a constant challenge for both advertisers and publishers. The two companies' goal is better analyze online audiences by teaming Omniture's reliance on Web site analytics with ComScore's approach of following patterns of Internet users.

Web sites tend to rely on either analytics or audience measurement to determine traffic patterns, which can often lead to conflicting results. By merging the two methods, Omniture and ComScore hope to give customers a … Read more

Internet search continues to skyrocket around the world with Google's dominance unchecked.

ComScore came out with worldwide search market share numbers Monday, which revealed that Internet searches increased by 41 percent to 113 billion in just the month of July. Slightly more than two-thirds of all those searches were done with Google, which also saw the number of searches done with through engine increase 58 percent compared with last year.

Yahoo is a distant second with 8.9 billion searches in July, while China's Baidu ranked third with 8 billion searches. Both of those sites posted slow growth … Read more

Google's Gmail is the fastest-growing e-mail service on the planet, but it has a way to go to catch Yahoo's still-growing market share.

ComScore's latest figures for the e-mail market show Yahoo added almost 20 million users last year, growing its share of the market by 22 percent from 87.2 million users to 106.2 million users in June. Only Gmail grew faster--a 46-percent clip--but just 36.9 million people are currently using Gmail. Microsoft's Hotmail is the second-most widely used e-mail with 47.1 million users, up 3 percent from last year.

Some outlets, … Read more

Updated 10:57 a.m. PDT with comment from MLB.com.

When is 2 million people too small a group to get a good feel for the latest trends?

When you're trying to perform the deceptively difficult calculation of just how many people visited a Web site.

ComScore, by some accounts the leading analysis firm that supplies publishers and advertisers with figures about how many people visit various Web sites, announced Tuesday a switch to a new method geared to provide more accurate Web traffic numbers. Previously the company had judged traffic on the behavior of a panel of … Read more

Facebook has become the top social network in a majority of European countries for the first time, according to analytics firm ComScore's newly released figures for February.

That's most dramatically reflected in Spain, where Facebook's reach has grown tenfold over the course of only a year and is now in the No. 1 spot

In fact, ComScore said Wednesday, the only countries where Facebook isn't the No. 1 or No. 2 social network are Germany, where it ranks fourth; Russia, where it's seventh; and Portugal, where it's third. Facebook's biggest stronghold in Europe … Read more

McDonald's restaurants and global Internet usage share something in common: more than 1 billion served within a month.

Global Internet usage reached more than 1 billion unique visitors in December, with 41.3 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a report released Friday by ComScore.

The study looked at Internet users over the age of 15 who accessed the Net from their home or work computers. Europe grabbed the next largest slice of the global Internet audience, with 28 percent, followed by the United States, with an 18.4 percent slice.

But Latin America, while comprising just 7.… Read more

The blogosphere's love affair with Facebook-MySpace traffic wars just won't stop.

On Thursday, TechCrunch posted new statistics from ComScore that show Facebook now pulling in nearly twice as many unique visitors worldwide as its News Corp.-owned competitor.

About 222 million people visited Facebook worldwide in December (keep in mind that the social network pegs its active user count somewhere just north of 150 million these days) versus 125 million people for MySpace.

This comes less than two weeks after other ComScore statistics indicated that not only was MySpace still bigger in the U.S., it was way … Read more

It's that time again: Measuring the traffic of the two biggest social-networking sites, Facebook and MySpace. Traffic firm ComScore has released year-end numbers that show the News Corp.-owned MySpace is still noticeably ahead in the U.S., but that Facebook's traffic is getting up there--however slowly.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has done some, uh, crunching: he estimates that at current growth rates, Facebook's U.S. audience will overtake MySpace's early in 2010.

The key point here is that the U.S. growth for both social networks has cooled down. Facebook's average monthly growth rate … Read more

Here's a little statistical cheer for online retailers bracing themselves for what many have been predicting will be a dismal holiday sales season.

The latest online retail spending report released Tuesday by ComScore shows that consumers last weekend spent almost double what they spent on the corresponding weekend before Christmas last year. U.S. consumers online spent $677 million last weekend, December 20 and 21, compared to $341 million the weekend before Christmas in 2007, which was December 22 and 23.

It should be noted, however, that there are five fewer days this year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, making … Read more