Last week, we took a look at Facebook’s financials and wondered if the social networking giant is headed for financial ruin, despite—or even because of—118% worldwide growth, 32% US growth (monthly unique visitors). Many commentators argued that any company would be overjoyed with even 32% growth. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is the exact thinking that has brought Facebook to this point—and now Facebook’s ad rates have fallen 50%.
The Difference in Holiday Growth: Online and Off
As the holidays approach, are people going to do their shopping online or off? Well, both of course, but Hitwise shares some data that sees online shopping growth at 4.19% over the past four weeks, and that is up from 1.94% growth from the same period last year.
Online Retailers Expect 15% Growth In Holiday Sales
The holiday season will be challenging for retailers but more than half (56.1%) of online retailers expect to increase sales at least fifteen percent over last year according to a study conducted by Shopzilla for Shop.org."Online retailers are resilient, but not immune, to the challenges of this holiday season," said Scott Silverman, Executive Director of Shop.org.
Women Driving Online Video Growth
The growth in the online video audience is no longer being driven by early adopters but has spread to other demographic segments that use it to access media.Over the past six months, the popularity of online video has grown significantly with women and older consumers, helping to close the age and gender gap within the growing online video audience in the U.S. according to data from Ipsos Media CT’s Motion study.
Google Aims for Big International Growth for Sites
Early this year, Google released "Google Sites," a platform that lets users create their own sites based on templates provided by Google. The company said that users could utilize Google Sites to create :
Search Engines’ News Sites Seeing Growth Spurts
The economy’s problems have, in some corners, elicited comparisons between now and 1929. Other experts don’t even use the word "recession." However, it looks like the people in charge of the news sites run by Google and Yahoo are in a good position to visit the completely opposite side of the spectrum and focus on some silver linings.
Mobile Search Growth Up 68 Percent
Mobile search is increasing in both popularity and frequency in the U.S. and Western Europe.In June 2008, 20.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers and 4.5 million European mobile subscribers used mobile search during the month, an increase of 68 and 38 percent from June 2007, respectively, according to comScore M: Metrics.The U.K. had the highest penetration of mobile subscribers using search at 9.5 percent, trailed closely by the U.S. at 9.2 percent.
Health Information Sites See Rapid Growth
Online health information sites have grown 21 percent as a category in the past year, more than four times the growth rate of the entire U.S. Internet population according to a new study from comScore.WebMD Health continues to be in the top position of the category with 17.3 million visitors in July, up three percent over a year ago. Three other health networks increased the overall growth of the category, each pulling in more than ten million visitors.
Facebook Sees Significant Growth In Japan
The Japanese language version of Facebook had more than triple the amount of visitors to its site in the past year according to comScore World Metrix.The leading social network in Japan was Mixi.jp with 12.7 million visitors in June. Facebook, which recently launched a Japanese language version of the site, has seen significant growth in the past year, gaining 213 percent to 538,000 visitors. MySpace captured 1.2 million visitors, up 10 percent over a year ago; Orkut attracted 638,000 visitors and Gree brought in 455,000 visitors.
Google Predicts Impressive Online Ad Growth In Russia
Thanks to matters of both proximity and size, discussions concerning overseas search tend to focus on the UK and China. Russia may soon enter more conversations, though, as at least one expert feels its online ad market is ready to explode.