Citi analyst Mark Mahoney has produced a document taking the statistics generated by comScore in one of their many online studies, which indicates that across a range of markets, including the key industries: media, retail, travel, auto, finance and health, the biggest players within these verticals are deriving the larger proportion of their web traffic from Google’s search engine, influenced by their portfolio of PPC Management solutions.

Although it appears from the reports findings that Google’s dominance slipped ever so slightly, according to Mahoney: “Google has gone from delivering 17 percent of all the traffic to the top 30 Websites in 2010 and 2011 to 16 percent in 2012”.  Google has seen it’s ascendancy decrease fairly dramatically within the health sector, their traffic share dropping from 24% in January 2010, to 21% in the same month a year later, and down to 15% in January of this year, according to the data.

Google has long been the top “traffic referrer” and provider of PPC management solutions for some of the worlds biggest websites and across a range of vertical markets, however the report does highlight the significance of Google’s continued reign over other search engine providers, especially in what the report identifies as a “fluid” market; and one which Mahoney concedes is incredibly competitive; with Yahoo and Bing following in the shadow of Google’s dominance over global search and PPC management.

The report assesses the raw data provided by comScore and outlines some of the key trends within US search markets.  Out of 30 of the most traffic heavy sites in the US, Google ranks as the number one provider of traffic for 23 of these, and the report notes that: “by contrast, the #2 (Yahoo!) and #3 (Microsoft) influencers accounted for 11 percent and 6 percent of traffic to the top 30 Websites”.

Both Bing and Yahoo have seen little movement in these verticals from 2010 to 2012, although Yahoo can take some consolation from the fact that they have remained stationary in their position over the years, and given the general “market perception” that Yahoo! is a “deteriorating asset” the stasis in this particular research is perhaps heartening.  Although Mahoney does point out that for Microsoft the figures would prove “something of a negative surprise given signs of Bing Search market share gains”.

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In both 2011 and 2010 Facebook held four of the top ten search queries posted, with the search term ‘facebook’ recorded by Experian Hitwise as the number one most searched term for both years.  The total query volume for all the Facebook terms featured on the top ten list, grew by 33 percent in comparison to last year.

The social media sites preeminence comes as little surprise with the growing popularity of digital media marketing across industries; the world’s most popular social networking site now has over 800 million active users with over 50% logging in to Facebook on a daily basis, it’s not hard to see why marketers have jumped on the proverbial digital media marketing bandwagon.  According to the Hitwise blog post their statistics also revealed exponential growth in the number of people searching for the social networking site in 2011:

“Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010. When combined, common search terms for Facebook – e.g., facebook and facebook.com – accounted for 3.48 percent of all searches in the United States among the top 50 terms, which represents a 33 percent increase compared with 2010.”

While the latest statistics from Experian Hitwise demonstrate the increasing popularity of social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (Google’s broadcasting site found itself in second position on the Hitwise poll), which may have firmly established themselves in the consciousness of worldwide users and businesses alike, MySpace’s epic fall from grace was notable by the site’s absence from the top ten search queries of last year; dropping from number 5 in 2010, and the only website that had appeared in the 2010 but not the 2011 listings, apparently displaced by ‘yahoo.com’ making an entry and joining ‘Yahoo’ at number six.

The findings will no doubt add fuel to the Google and Facebook digital media marketing fire, with the search engine giant seeing an increase in the number of searches last year, however according to the Hitwise poll, Google is still lagging behind Zuckerberg’s social site and it’s dominant position:

“YouTube terms accounted for 1.36 percent, representing a 21 percent increase compared with 2010. Google terms (including YouTube) accounted for 1.59 percent – an increase of 27 percent compared with 2010.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Facebook does not appear on the “top lists” published by search engines Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL, due to the criteria used when collating their lists; when it comes to Google’s at least, their top 10 search queries are based on “rising” search terms, rather than those that prove the most popular overall.

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“184 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in October for an average of 21.1 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 42.6 billion videos, representing an all-time high.”

According to statistics published by the global leader in digital media analytics, You Tube/Google has an audience of just less than 161 million unique viewers; an impressive figure; and one that is three times that of Facebook, which comes in at second place with almost 60 million unique viewers.  Based on comScore’s findings, VEVO registered in third position with “57 million [viewers], Microsoft Sites with 49.1 million and Viacom Digital with 48.2 million”.

The number of videos viewed online in October broke all previous records, and indicates that the future of digital media marketing lies with the proliferating online video market.  The sheer volume of users, in the US alone, is testament to the increasing popularity of online video sites on a global scale:

“More than 42 billion videos were viewed during the month, with the average viewer watching a record 21.1 hours. Google Sites demonstrated the highest engagement with 7.1 hours per viewer.”

Earlier this year Yahoo was surpassed by YouTube as the second largest search engine, and has the added benefit of attracting users for prolonged periods of time.  The reach of Google’s YouTube platform exemplifies the potential for online advertisements as a platform for marketers to reach potential target audiences, with digital media marketing video ads reaching a growing number of users globally, as more and more people utilise online video sites for extensive periods of time each month.  As comScore goes on to note, 53% of the population in the US accessed online videos 47 times during October on average:

“Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 3.2 billion minutes during the month, with Tremor Video delivering the highest duration of video ads at 614 million minutes. Video ads reached 53 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 47 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 46.5.”

The potential to use promoted video ads as a lucrative digital media marketing platform are vast, and with Google operating their promoted ads in much the same way as their existing search ads platform, it is relatively easy to navigate, and provides advertisers with methods for attracting attention to a video ad, as well as increasing viewers and subscribers to a channel, with the objective of impacting upon downstream conversions.

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“Nielsen estimates that the whole population spent a total of 53.5 billion minutes on the social network. That’s also about the equivalent of 100,000 years, or 36.8 million days.”

The figures provided by Nielsen are based on the user activity of one hundred and fifty million people logging on to Facebook in the U.S. which equates to each person spending 350 minutes a month, or roughly ten minutes per day, on the social networking site.

Facebook teamed with measurement company Nielsen BrandLift in 2009 in a move to, according to Sheryl Sandberg who made the announcement: “provide marketers with richer ad effectiveness data” allowing brands to more effectively monitor their advertisements.  The partnership was the precursor to the aggressive push towards social media marketing as the next big step for advertisers; and it seems to have worked.

Last month it was reported that Facebook reached a phenomenal one trillion hits per month; and according to web traffic reports for August, the social networking site attracted eight hundred and seventy million unique visits, providing Facebook with an impressive 46.9% reach among users surfing the web.  These are very appealing statistics for businesses using social media marketing as a platform to raise awareness of their company, product or brand online, and according to TIME’s report:

“Those 870 million visitors are around 120 million greater than Facebook’s reported total number of registered users. The discrepancy may be down to non-Facebook members visiting the site from other social media links or through search engine traffic.”

Comforting for social media marketers to know that Facebook’s reach extends beyond it’s registered followers, with over 10% of non Facebook users accounting for the website’s traffic.

Nielsen’s study also revealed that next in line after Facebook came Yahoo with over seventeen billion minutes spent on their site in May, and Google in third position with twelve and a half billion minutes.

Google can console themselves with the knowledge that after Facebook, You Tube came in with only a tenth of the social networking sites page views, but almost the same number of unique visitors, giving Google’s video sharing site a 42.6% reach amongst users online.

Facebook’s triumph comes just a week after Twitter announced via it’s blog that they had topped one hundred million users worldwide:

“Five years ago, Twitter came to life when @jack sent the first Tweet to his seven followers. Now, 100 million active users around the globe turn to Twitter to share their thoughts and find out what’s happening in the world right now [...] more than half of them log in to Twitter each day.”

The statistics recorded by Facebook and Twitter are testament to the impact that social media marketing is having on advertising strategies; and with the eagerly anticipated launch of Google+ the social revolution is set to continue.

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Reports on Twitter’s trend topics revealed that internationally, at 11:40am GMT during the address made by the Bishop, all of the top ten trends related to the Royal Wedding; it was also referred to sixty-seven times a second on Twitter posts.  Also dominating the high ranking topics was the ‘royalwedding’ hash tag, (used to add additional information and metadata to tweets), which proved to be a lucrative investment for a certain company who promoted the keyword tag.  While on Facebook, unsurprisingly, the wedding governed status updates, with 74 mentions per second.

The wedding of Prince William and Catherine also saw a flood of traffic hitting sites streaming footage of the ceremony; the BBC bearing the brunt of the increased amount of visitors, with people logging on and eager to watch live video of the event, the site was forced to post an update at 11:15am apologising for the slower speeds experienced by users.

Google reported that at 11:00am GMT, of the top twenty searches performed in the United States, half of them were in relation to the Royal Wedding; throughout April search topics relating to the marriage of Prince William and his bride Kate increased by ninety percent, and according to Yahoo’s data on search topics, ‘Kate Middleton’ is currently being searched more frequently on Yahoo! than Barack Obama.

Further evidence of the role played by social media in relaying the events of the 29th of April is the British Monarchy’s official channel on YouTube; transmitting images, news and a full three hours and thirty seven minutes of the ceremony and proceedings throughout day.  The investment by the Royal family in a channel broadcasting on YouTube, and the sponsorship of popular hash tags on Twitter, demonstrates the influence of social media platforms when it comes to global events; with people interacting online, across the world, through mediums such as Facebook and Twitter, with the global population posting comments, feedback and general opinion, at an unprecedented level.

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Currently ISP’s treat information passed over the net equally; regardless of the source of the content, or where it is destined, but almost 90% of UK fixed line broadband and mobile carriers, including the likes of BSkyB, BT, Everything Everywhere (formerly Orange and T-Mobile), TalkTalk, 3, Virgin Media and Vodafone are proposing an alternative approach to the provision of internet services, advancing the idea of “two tier” connection speeds.

Founder of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee claims that the proposals advanced by ISP’s go against the principals of the Internet; which was intended to provide information to everyone without discrimination.  The idea being that no restrictions are posed by ISP’s or government bodies on subject matter and modes of communication; essentially you pay a fee for fixed line broadband, and you access whatever content you wish, whenever you want it.

According to the Guardian, at a ‘round-table’ event hosted in Westminster earlier this month, attended by Ed Vaizey (the Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries), Berners-Lee advanced his concerns about the threats posed to existing guidelines for net neutrality:

“Every customer should be able to access every service, and every service should be able to access every customer … The web has grown so fast precisely because we have had two independent markets, one for connectivity, and the other for content and applications”.

In conjunction with Berners-Lee, content providers such as the BBC, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype are not happy with the direction the debate is going, and feel that threats posed by ISP’s for the implementation of two-tier connection speeds is gaining momentum, with a lack of opposition, and an unwillingness of groups other than content providers, to attempt to ban the proposal.

At the event in Westminster, representatives of Skype voiced their concerns that with the exception of the 3 network, other providers restrict Skype’s services, due to the threat they pose to their call revenues.  If this is the case, carriers are already breaching the principles of net neutrality.  Here lies the crux of the issue: net neutrality is upheld by the ethics of those who implemented the internet and the web; the provision of services has drastically changed since it’s inception with commercial funding in the 1980’s; and while there is no central governance in it’s access or usage policies, no one seems keen to break the deadlock between the ISP’s and content providers and decisively resolve this debate.

ISP’s have long tried to implement a system allowing them to charge content providers such as the BBC, or their customers, for the data they transfer using services such as iPlayer.  ISP’s have to pay to carry the data, and it is for this reason that they have put forward their proposals to prioritise traffic, with the caveat that they would be transparent about the changes to their services and how it would affect the customer.

Content providers such as You Tube and the BBC continue to resist these proposals, claiming that they bring customers to the door of the ISP with the information they provide.  Without them, the ISP has nothing to offer their customers.  The Consumers Association argues that because users are often tied into long term contracts, if a change was made to an ISP’s traffic management policies, they may have little opportunity to change provider and move to an alternative.

If the ISP’s proposals are accepted, it could change the way content is delivered via the internet, across the UK.

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Recently, Yahoo has lost some of its popularity, having been knocked from second to third place in terms of search engine popularity, by Microsoft’s Bing service. In addition, the company are losing page views, and recent attempts to gain customers through the launch of new products have all fallen flat.

Chief Products Officer Blake Irving hopes that his intervention will change the way in which Yahoo is currently being perceived, making it more popular and much more widely used by customers, globally. He shared a three-year strategy at a recent event this week, stating: “You are going to see things that happen fast, that are innovative and that make customers and advertisers delighted. Yahoo in three years is a global series of web experiences across a variety of different devices that gives people what they want; the content, the folks that they care about. There is a bunch of bringing cool back to Yahoo saying a lot of the things that you want to do on the web are here.”

New products include a faster mail service, enhanced user interface, spam blocker, integration with Facebook and Twitter, entertainment search support, improved advertising and connecting to video-on-demand and gaming services.

Irving commented: “I think in the next 15 years more than half of users will be accessing services through mobile devices. I see it with my own kids who are just as comfortable typing on glass as they are on a keyboard. It’s going to be a different world and a huge percentage of what Yahoo will do will not be on PCs.”

“Yahoo is a technology company and an innovative technology company. It is in the digital media business and operates the largest digital media content on the planet. People should use this presentation as a pivot to say this is a technology capable company that has at its core technology as a key lever.”

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The shut down will come into effect as of April 30th 2010 giving users of YPN only 1 months notice. Yahoo Publisher Network is the self service contextual ad network that Yahoo setup to compete with the mighty Google Adsense Network, offering a similar, if not inferior, service.

It would appear, from this evidence that Yahoo’s attempt at competing with Google has lost to a service that has always been far superior in almost every way, it was always only a matter of time before Yahoo were forced to throw in the towel and admit defeat.

In a statement Yahoo outlined what this announcement meant for its current users:

They confirmed that the decision does not affect large, direct publishers and partners, nor advertisers using Content Match. There will be no change for large partners/affiliate networks and there will be changes made to Content Match ads.

This will surely be a harsh blow to Yahoo, admitting defeat to one of their biggest rivals, but it will be a case of back to the drawing board for the internet search

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If you’re in this camp then allow me to have one last crack at persuading you otherwise with one good reason why you need to think of each as a new campaign and tailor your approach to match… Demographics.

The splits in terms of search engine use in the UK are pretty well known. Google have around 85 – 90% of the market, Yahoo come in around 5% and Bing fluctuate erratically below that. However, the mistake comes in believing that the pie is split along the same lines in terms of demographics. It isn’t.

A couple of examples of what I’m talking about…

Youth – For some reason, the average age of yahoo’s users has historically tended to be a bit younger than Gopogle’s. So if, for example, you sell products and have a certain selection that you think is going to appeal to younger consumers then it might be an idea to push those products more enthusiastically on Yahoo. By the same token, you may find that the results you get from saga holidays isn’t quite as good.

Experience – Many Internet Explorer users have Bing as their default search engine to begin with. Whereas experienced internet users will more often than not change the default settings to Yahoo, or (more likely) to Google the less experienced won’t. Ergo the users of Bing may contain be the less experienced users – perhaps not the venue for your ‘integrated IT business solution.’

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Well, the answer to question one is basically a resounding yes, Google’s domination of the search marketing world is so complete now that they really do have full control of the industry, far eclipsing both Yahoo and MSN. The question is whether Google have played by the rules or not in getting to that position. If it’s deemed that they have, then there’s really nothing anyone can do and Google really are that rarest of things – a natural monopoly. If not however, they could be opening themselves up to the kind of antitrust trouble that Microsoft got themselves into at the end of 90s.

Personally I think the first option is the more likely. Google haven’t really abused their position of power to unfairly hamper their competitors, also, they tend to keep their software open and compatible with other formats, something that Microsoft decidedly don’t do and continue to get punished for. The most important point in the debate is that, as Google are so fond of saying, ‘competition is just a click away.’ Internet users can use Live Search or Yahoo any time they like.

It’s simply not Google’s fault that their competitors have failed to come up with a product capable of competing with theirs and almost every step of the way they’ve been a lot fairer to their competition than they could have been. To punish them for just being better would be grossly unfair.

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Unsurprisingly, the announcement has caused very few waves within the community. Only this blog and a handful of others are even talking about it. The trouble is that just keeping up with Google is not going to cut it for Yahoo since it gives advertisers absolutely no reason to abandon the huge number of searchers on Google and schlep all the way over to Yahoo.

The struggling search engine really needs to do something to change the game, to give users some reason to move over from Google, or at least to use them as well. What that would be however, is anybody’s guess.

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Yahoo is divided up into three divisions, for Europe, Asia and emerging markets, it is thought that one executive will take control of all of them though who that is remains a mystery.

Things don’t look as bleak as they have at Yahoo, with various avenues such as internet TV looking like coming good, however, there is a feeling within the industry that this is going to need to yield some results if Yahoo is to survive long-term.

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This is exactly the kind of bold move that Yahoo need to try to rest back some search business from Google. Over the last few years they have become very much the poor cousin of Google in terms of search advertising with many PPC companies not even offering advertising over Yahoo. It’s not hard to see why – Google offers a many times the number of exposures than Yahoo and their client support and management software is much better.

Having said that, this initiative will probably attract a decent number of curious new advertisers, but they’ll only stick around if it actually works.

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In an email to its users Yahoo explained themselves thus,

“The decision to close Content Match underlines our commitment to focus on our Sponsored Search and Display business and to simplify our solutions to deliver a high ROI for our advertisers.”

This is clearly evidence of how bad things are at Yahoo, but we’ve known that for months. More urgent for the consumer is the fact that this move will drastically weaken the Yahoo Publisher Network, the closest thing to an Adsense competitor there is. What’s more, if this is the first step of a move to roll out this initiative across the company, then Yahoo are about to basically hand Google ownership of online contextual advertising.

It doesn’t take a degree in economics to know that monopolies are bad for customers, since a lack of competition removes the incentive to provide good customer service and low prices. Come on Yahoo, pull yourself together!

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