Nielsen/NetRatings' August social media numbers: Not much change
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The metrics firm tracks growth of social networks, blogs and blogging sites, and video-sharing sites from August 2006 to August 2007.
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People who sign in to the newest social network won't be looking for dates or posting a list of their favorite movies. They will be searching for companies to invest in and listing their interests in areas like clean energy or enterprise software.
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Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for Jan. 24-30. Top 20 listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
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Paul Abrahams' comparison of blogs with the CB radio fad may or may not prove to be right, but too many of us are missing the wider influence of user-generated media.   It is not just bloggers who are influencing corporate reputations online.
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Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for July 9-15. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
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Shortly after the election, Atrios posted a short piece on how to build the popularity of a blog. In it, his number one recommendation was to update frequently &mdash; at least once per day. People do not bother reading sites that only update once every several days. This, in case there is still confusion amongst those who run this fair website, is why the diary section overtook the regular article sections in terms of hits.  In order to avoid stagnation, history tells us, we need a constant influx of new users. At present, however, the only good reason to register a new account is when your old one gets banned. There is simply not enough front page content to attract the interest of potential new users. Additionally, without the life line provided by freshmeat.net's syndication of kuro5hin (ended some time last year), we need substantially more provocative and note-worthy content if we are to bring in fresh blood.  There are two simple administrative actions that could quickly allieviate the current front page content situation.
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For the first time, a slim majority of US Net users are connecting via broadband. In July, 51 percent of America&#39;s home online population was using broadband connections, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings. Before July, the ...
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Nielsen//NetRatings (NASDAQ: NTRT) reports May 2007 data for the Top U.S. Search Providers.  Top search providers, ranked by total searches. Searches represent the total number of queries conducted at the provider.
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Doc: "A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver." I think so too because: 1. The idea is so compelling and 2. It's so easy to implement. Thanks so much to Doc Searls for writing a great evangelical piece about the power of rivers. The stream is turning into a current, and soon really will be a river.  It&#185;s so weird to see rivers show up in Facebook, and Twitter is just a big river of all the people you&#185;re following. The idea is actually a descendent of the teletype terminals that used to be in the movies (and for all I know in actual newsrooms). The news would be printed on scrolls of paper, and when a new story would come in it would push all the older stories onto the floor. You could catch up on the news by scrolling back through the news. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn did it. We&#185;ll all be doing it soon enough. And it really helps to get other people singing the song, esp from within the hallowed halls of Harvard. The more attention we get focused on it, the more other developers will tune in. And what may not be so clear from the narrative is that this project got its start from a meeting I had with some technical people at the Times last week in NY. Like most organizations, it's not of one mind, there are people who are scared of what comes next but there are others who know that the Times has to change. By opening up their internal data to me, all kinds of interesting stuff can happen. We've been here before. The Times are the unsung heroes of RSS, without them it never would have solidified, with the publishing industry falling in behind the Times. It was this consensus that created critical mass for RSS 2.0 in 2002 and 2003. I really hope some of this stuff feeds back into the Times support of RSS. And as you have seen, there are now lots of new opportunities in user interface for news. This is what I do, when I'm in my "flow" -- we're there now again, with a new toy to build and then play with, every day.  Betsy Devine: "Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I&#185;ve known him." Phil Windley: "With more sources, who are themselves continuously updating, the keyword river could be as dynamic as you&#185;d want it to be."
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Prime-Time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for May 21-27. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
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Prime-Time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen Media Research for Oct. 15-21. Listings include the week's ranking, with viewership for the week and season-to-date rankings in parentheses. An "X" in parentheses denotes a one-time-only presentation.
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The syndicated  newsmagazines got a ratings bump with their coverage of the  JonBenet Ramsey murder case arrest during the week ending  August 20, according to Nielsen Media ratings data issued  Thursday.
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Rankings for the top 15 programs on cable networks as compiled by Nielsen Media Research for the week of Aug. 20-26. Day and start time (EDT) are in parentheses.
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Rankings for the top 15 programs on cable networks as compiled by Nielsen Media Research for the week of Aug. 27-Sept. 2. Day and start time (EDT) are in parentheses.
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Bloggers offered mixed reviews of Nielsen/NetRatings decision to shift its key metric for measuring Web sites from page view numbers to the time spent by visitors.
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Companies like Google and Yahoo that control major online advertising networks have not met their pledge to aggressively ferret-out click fraud among their affiliate partners, driving growth of the problem across the entire Web industry, according to new research estimates.Click Forensics -- an independent click fraud monitoring and reporting service that markets itself as an online version of the TV industry's Nielsen ratings system -- released its latest statistics tracking Internet advertising trends on Friday, and the group reported that the issue of fraudulent ad traffic continues thrive on the Web.According to the company, roughly 16.2 percent of all online ad clicks were derived via click fraud during the third quarter of 2007 compared to a rate of 13.8 percent for the same period during 2006 and up from 15.8 percent of all traffic during the second quarter of this year.Even more concerning, Click Forensics leaders said, is the report's finding that the average rate of click fraud -- most often carried out by software programs designed to mimic legitimate traffic -- continues to rise on major search engine networks, including Google's AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network.Fraudulent traffic accounted for 28.1 percent of all ad hits on such networks during the third quarter of 2007 compared to 25.6 percent for the second quarter of this year and 21.9 percent for the first three months of the calendar, Click Forensics contends.The research company also reported that more than 60 percent of all ad traffic coming from so-called parked domains -- typically used solely to funnel traffic to advertisers -- was observed as being fraudulent during the third quarter of 2007.Tom Cuthbert, chief executive of Click Forensics, said that as a result of the negative impact that click fraud is having on Web advertising as a whole -- in that it undermines the legitimacy of all Internet ad traffic -- both publishers and advertisers are feeling a pinch.Ad publishers are seeing a diminishing of their network traffic quality, said Cuthbert, while advertisers are seeing their conversion rates "drop significantly" on content networks and are pulling back some of their spending as a result, he said."The issue of click fraud on these major networks is becoming a real problem for advertisers, and increasingly, they are choosing to stay away and look into other alternatives," Cuthbert said. "The big guys are not doing a better job of policing themselves; both Google and Yahoo have tools for advertisers to opt-out of suspected click fraud sites, but the vast majority of advertisers are not doing so, and the tools are too hard to use."Cuthbert said that the major network providers have promised to cooperate with efforts to drive down automated ad clicks and other forms of fraud but have not followed through on their promises."We've asked the search engines to work with us to improve the situation, and they've said yes, but here we are 18 months later, and we've seen no movement in that area, which is frustrating for us and for advertisers as a whole," said Cuthbert. "So far, we've had a great process of discussion, but we're really hoping to see them act on those ideas."Ideally, Click Forensics -- which claims to derive its figures from statistics provided by 4,000 advertisers and agencies participating in its Click Fraud Network consortium -- would like to serve as an objective third party that is used as a clearinghouse for identifying online ad fraud, much as Nielsen provides rating figures for the TV industry.Without such an entity, the ad networks continue to hold most of the cards, leaving advertisers at a disadvantage, he said."There needs to be better communication and sharing of data. We have information about traffic that these guys don't have, such as conversion data and other things from the actual advertisers, that they're very skeptical to give to Google or Yahoo," said Cuthbert. "Ultimately, we believe that the first provider to embrace this third-party model we're proposing will have a significant advantage over its rivals."Google disputes Click Forensics' figures Yahoo representatives didn't immediately return calls seeking comment on the Click Forensics report, but Google officials countered that Click Forensics' estimates don't accurately represent the company's own click fraud statistics.While Click Forensics has its 4,000 partners, the search giant claims to view a far broader and detailed swath of ad traffic, giving it a more comprehensive perspective. Google has consistently questioned the legitimacy of Click Forensics' figures since the company began issuing its reports in 2006."These estimates have never reflected the invalid click rates we see at Google; Click Forensics has consistently been one of the highest estimates our there with numerous serious methodology problems, and, as such, we rarely get asked about them these day," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for the Trust &amp; Safety group at Google.Ghosemajumder said that Google offers "significantly more transparency" into its click fraud efforts and provides more traffic quality tools for advertisers than any of its rivals."We plan to do even more in the future," he said.Among the measures that Google has employed to help advertisers thwart click fraud were the launch of new IP exclusion and Placement Performance Reports in June, tools that Ghosemajumder labeled as unique features in the industry.The IP exclusion tool is meant to allow advertisers to specify IP addresses they want to avoid with their ads and builds on the site exclusion feature the company introduced in 2005, which allows advertisers to prohibit specific URLs from showing their content.The Placement Performance Reports are designed to give advertisers the ability to view which sites are performing the best among those displaying their content, which specifically arms the companies with the opportunity to use the site exclusion and site targeting tools drive out any apparent fraud, Google said.In August, the search giant also launched an Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center, which is meant to offer a single place where advertisers can access all of Google's click fraud resources.Some smaller search providers believe that they can begin winning advertisers' business away from their larger rivals by providing stronger methods of fighting click fraud.Daniel Yomtobian, chief executive of ABCSearch, said that his company has begun luring large, well-known advertisers like VeriSign away from other venues with a tool dubbed ClickShield, which promises to profile advertising affiliate behavior to give its customers better insight into just how their content is being distributed.Yomtobian points out that Click Defense, an online marketing firm that offers independent click fraud detection services, recently charted his company's traffic as having less than 5 percent fraudulent ad hits."As an industry we can't burden the advertisers and can't burden the users, as ad networks we all need to do a better job and police affiliates to drive down fraud," he said. "A lot of our competitors talk about their technologies to fight this problem, but a lot of that work is merely basic click fraud-blocking; by going above and beyond, we feel that we can grow our business based on delivery of a lower rate of unwanted traffic."
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I love Twitter, but there have been a lot of problems, and this is too much. They're taking it down tonight, for two hours, and we're hot on a big story, and it's developing -- on Twitter. This seems like a bad night for Twitter to go to sleep. (But there probably never is a good night.) I don't think the Twitter guys really understand how much we're doing with their service.  It's been going down a lot lately. And while other people have been complaining about it losing posts, I had never seen it lose one, until yesterday, and now it's losing them regularly, for me too. Read the first three words of this post again.  They raised $5 million, it seems now it's time for them to get the bugs out, hire some people who really understand scaling, if necessary re-implement the system from the ground up. Do whatever is needed to make it as reliable as the other tools we depend on. We need Twitter to work. It's not a fun experiment for us, we're using it.  Jack, Ev, Biz, Fred -- please take note. Postscript: The announcement changed, now they're saying it'll be down on Sunday night. Much better. Thanks!