Internet Statistics

I’m really trying to get it, but Twitter has raised $100 million for no apparent reason.
Twitter is now valued at over $1 billion!
Currently, the 60-person company has no plans to do anything significant with the money it has raised, but it’s nice to have it…just in case.  Surprisingly, there are no plans to start monetizing [...]

Thanks to a $100 million advertising campaign, BING, Microsoft’s search engine, is gaining ground on Google.
It’s not like it’s an even fight at this point, but BING is closing the gap, albeit a very wide gap.  BING increased its market share of search from 8.0% to 9.3% in the latest study from Comscore.
Google still has [...]

Americans are increasingly turning online for news.
A national study of news habits of US adults, conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, shows that an increasing amount of Americans are getting their news online.  The study measured the percentage of news and information that Americans receive from various media sources each month.
The traditional media of television, newspapers, [...]

Many companies believe they have maxed out pay per click search as a primary lead generation tool.  Moreover, in the past few years, as companies have fought for market share, some pay per click categories have become overpriced.  So, it’s not surprising that pay per click spending in the United States was down 21% in [...]

Here are the top internet advertisers for 2008, as reported by B to B magazine from data accumulated by TNS Media Intelligence.

Monster
Hewlett-Packard
UPS
Experian
Capital One
Verizon
Career Builder
Bank of America
ING
Pythian Group

Internet search engine use increased by 41% worldwide in 2009, according to a study by comScore.
The leading search engines nationwide were:
 

Google - 67.5%
Yahoo - 7.8%
Baidu - 7.0% (Chinese search engine)
Bing - 3.0%

Worldwide, there were 113 billion searches made in July.

As if plunging circulation wasn’t enough, the newspaper industry was the worst hit medium from the horrible economy in the USA and worldwide.  
Newspaper advertising revenues dropped 29% in the second quarter of 2009, according to the Newspaper Association of America.  Nationwide, the drop converts to $2.8 billion less dollars flowing to what was once the [...]

It’s no surprise in a bad economy that the first thing to get cut by companies is advertising.
 
 
Overall, advertising expenditures in the USA dropped by 15% in the first half of 2009 compared to that of 2008.  That translates to $10 billion less in the overall advertising market for the first half of the year.
Even [...]

Visitors to web sites that came from direct access stay longer, view more pages, and have higher conversion rates than other traffic.
That shouldn’t be surprising.  After all, if you know where you are going, you are more likely to stay.  Direct access site visitors stayed on average 308 seconds which was 41% longer than organic [...]

Facebook now has over 250 million members.  50 million members joined in the last four months!
The average user spent 4 hours and 39 minutes on Facebook in June, 2009.  Now, that’s a lot of face time.
Bob Bentz Facebook account.

Microsoft continues to gain ground on Google, as evidenced by a study from StatCounter.  It shows
Microsoft’s share of search rising from 7.2% in April to 8.2% in June.
Google is so far ahead with 78%, but it looks like it finally has a competitor other than the dwindling share of Yahoo search. 
Mark Mahaney, an analyst at [...]

The average American who is online visited 88 domains during 51 internet sessions in June 2009, according to Nielsen Online.  They also surfed 2,569 pages and spent an average of 57 seconds per page.
Not surprisingly, almost all web surfing starts with Google.  Google remains the top company for American surfers with over 155 million visitors [...]

If you read our last post about the research in interactive marketing based on Forrester Research, you’ve seen that there will continue to be a significant increase in spending on interactive marketing for the next five years.  In fact, by 2014, interactive marketing will represent 21% of all marketing investment.
So, then, why does pay per [...]

Interactive marketing in the United States will reach $55 billion by 2014, according to a study by Forrester Research.
Search marketing will lead the growth, totaling $31.5 billion by 2014, followed by display advertising at $16.9 billion.  Social media projects to $3.1 billion and email marketing to $2.1 billion.
The news is not good news for traditional [...]

As of July 4 , more than 5.8 million Facebook users were 55 and older, according to a recent study by iStrategyLabs. The survey also found that students use of Facebook fell 16.5 percent for high school students and 22 percent for college students.
“There have been rumors that these younger user groups are being alienated by their parents joining [...]

The Facebook boom continues!
I have seen it personally as high school friends and even my old teachers from the 70’s have become my Facebook friends and users over the past six months.
Facebooks’s traffic is up more than 250% this year with 113 million users in May 2009.  That’s only 20 million less than giant Yahoo.  Yahoo [...]

Most Twitter accounts are set up and then never used, according to a study by HubSpot.
Here are some interesting facts about Twitter use, or non-use:
56% follow nobody
55% have never Tweeted
80% don’t provide a homepage URL which is an easy link for SEO purposes
76% have no biography
69% don’t specify a location

Active Twitter Users
The average user Tweets [...]

According to a March 2009 study by Internet Wireless World, the number of worldwide internet users is:
 
1,596,270,108