the buzz

Hello, my name is Jean, and I love statistics.

ComScore just issued their “2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report. I pulled out some tidbits and insights I found interesting. (Note any comparative numbers are for 2009 vs. 2008.)

Web searching ain’t going anywhere.
More people are searching more: the number of unique searchers is up 6% and searches per searcher up 10% (yeah, you may need to read that more than once).
Google remains at the top: Bing showed some gains but Google still owns about 66% of search market share.

Neither is social networking, and everybody’s doing it.
It now accounts for 11% of total time spent online.
Facebook and Twitter had growth spurts (visits up 105% and 900%!, respectively).
Facebook is getting more habitual with members going more often (about 27x per month, up 64%) but for a little bit less time (9 min. per average visit, down from 10).
Facebook reaches all ages: the 25-34 age group grew the most at 22%, at the expense of the 24 & younger crowd, but 35-49 is still the largest group.
Former leader MySpace is still kicking at #2, but getting younger and more music-focused.

Display advertising growth is keeping pace.
Ad impressions are up 21%.
Yahoo sites serve up the most ads.
AT&T and Verizon are the #1 and #2 online advertisers (maybe because opportunities exist in the fact that smart phones are still only 17% of the market).

We like things that move.
More people are watching video: In December, 86% of the online audience viewed videos.
And more of them: average watcher viewed 187 videos in December, up 96%.
For longer: the average video length grew from 3.2 to 4.1 minutes.
But from more sources: half of these videos were on sites that rank outside of the top 25, which means opportunity for smaller sites.

So what does all this mean for marketers? This is not new news, but the web is becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. It’s what we do every day. It’s where we get our news, our advice, our entertainment, our friends, our new shoes. Opportunities for marketers lie in connecting with your audience, reaching them where they live, and integrating with offline activity (much like consumers do). It’s a moving target and to keep up, it’s important to devote time and resources (appropriate to your business and industry) to staying with or ahead of the crowd.

If you’re like me and want more info, you can download the whitepaper here.

p.s.  I’ll leave you with another one of my favorite things – quizzes. What single day in 2009 do you think had the highest e-commerce sales? (Free smith&jones t-shirt to anyone who puts the right answer in the comments section by this Friday, 2/19. Honor system, now – no cheating!)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 2:52 pm and is filed under interactive, marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.