According to Nielsen NetRatings and the Online Publishers Association, the proportion of time users are spending on search-related activities increased noticeably at the end of 2007, at the expense of communication activities like email and IM.
So I’m finding myself putting together a lot of PowerPoint presentations lately, and that has necessitated a search for interesting data and charts. Of course, the data that are publicly available (i.e., free) are always almost exactly what I need, but never exactly what I’m looking for. If I’m looking for info on B2C search spending, for example, inevitably I find awesome data on B2B search spending. Or, if I’m looking for top search destination categories, I’ll find data on categories experiencing the most search growth year over year, but no totals.
But I figure all those hours spent looking at search engine usage factoids should at least result in a blog post.
Need data on online user behavior, search engine market share stats, e-commerce or Internet industry research? Start here:
I’ve created a search on Rollyo for web stats, so if you’re looking for a specific piece of data, try limiting your search just to these sources.
True or False: Members of Gen Y are less likely to use libraries to find answers to problems than previous generations.
According to Pew, millenials are actually the leading users of libraries for help solving problems, as well as more general patronage.
Another insight from the December 2007 study is that more people turn to the Internet than consult experts or family members to provide information and resources for answers to common problems (with the exception of some specific topics such as health, thank Heavens).
ComScore’s Year in Review press release seems to underscore the principle that the rich keep getting richer: Google, of course, saw more gains, as did Wikipedia (which some conspiracy theorists seem to think is in cahoots with Google somehow) and Craigslist.
Facebook traffic jumped 81% year over year to 34.7 million visitors, now that registration is open to non-students (including quite a few pets, if Stewie’s ever growing circle of Facebook friends is any indication).
The release goes on to say that “the top-gaining site categories in 2007 reflected trends in both the online and offline worlds. The politics category grabbed the top position, gaining 35%, as the 2008 presidential election and primary season kicked into high gear.” Not to be outdone by current events of any gravity, sites devoted to celebrity entertainment news, “from Britney Spears’ meltdowns to Anna Nicole Smiths death,” kept up with an equally impressive 32% increase in visitors.
In total — including all searches for Britney, Anna Nicole and even “poop porn” — more than 113 billion core searches were conducted in the U.S. last year, with Google representing a 56% share of the market.
Nielsen//NetRatings today reported its market share data for the top 10 search engines. Google, no surprise, continues to lead with Nielsen NetRatings reporting 4.03 billion searches having been conducted on Google last month. That translates to nearly 45% year over year growth and 56.3% of total U.S. market share.
Yahoo Search is in second place with a little over 1.5 billion searches and 21.5% of the total. MSN trails a distant third with only 8.4% of all U.S. searches conducted on the Windows Live search engine. Rounding out the top 5 search engines are AOL Search and Ask.com, with 5.3% and 2.5% of search market share, respectively.
At the bottom of the list is the search aggregator Dogpile, which saw fewer net searches than the previous year, with year over year growth a -10.6%.
HitWise, a competing market research firm, also released its May search data today. According to HitWise, in May Google captured a whopping 65.1% of all U.S. searches, up from 59.3% last year. The number of searches attributed by HitWise to Yahoo are in line with Nielsen’s data: 20.9%, a figure that’s down slightly from May 2006. And MSN/Live Search garnered 8.4% of searches, down from 12.1% of marketshare 12 months prior.
Ask.com fared a little better based on HitWise data, with 3.9% of the market compared to 2.5% that Nielsen reported. Either way, IAC’s Ask.com continues to lose market share to the bigger players.
A study released last month determined that only 30% of Internet users access the mobile Internet on their devices. The study is based on a series of focus groups and a survey of 1,001 mobile users. Of those who do surf the mobile Web, a whopping 75% use mobile search. No stats on how many people actually do any shopping from their cell phone. My guess is close to zero. (Surfing an e-commerce site and entering your credit card info on a PDA would be the suck.)
The porn industry has always been at the forefront of technology adoption (VCRs, the Internet, …) so it should be no surprise that pornography is the most popular type of content on the Internet. But possibly not much longer.
According to recent HitWise data, visits to pornographic sites are dropping while visits to online communities are rising. The latter category includes sites like MySpace and Facebook… But come to think of it, the former probably does too!
The market research firm says that 13% of all website visits in the U.S. last year were to pornography sites, compared to only 7% to search engines. However — and this is very interesting — HitWise’s clickstream data shows that, in Britain, porn traffic was already passed by search engine traffic last year.
Check out this article, even if only because it contains my favorite sentence of any Economist article ever: “[Second Life] Users must first buy genitalia for their avatars, who otherwise resemble Barbie and Ken dolls when unclothed.”
Online advertising will grow by 21%, reaching $81 billion by 2011, according to a research report by Piper Jaffray & Co. Internet Media and Marketing:
“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, in a press release.
The report says that consumers are taking control of their consumption of online content and brands.
hitwise data