BoomTown » Nielsen

The Outage Aftermath: Louie Swisher Hearts Facebook, but Twitter Not So Much

Kara Swisher — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:37:44 +0000

Like grandmother, like grandson.

Yesterday, I told my No. 1 son, Louie, that Twitter was down, after a denial-of-service attack.

He was–shall we say–not very sympathetic, as you can see in the video below.

Interestingly, Louie’s response was similar to my mother’s, Lucretia Carney, who mocked the San Francisco-based microblogging service at a gas station on the way to my interview with its founders at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference (see her video below too, as I continue to use my poor family as props in interviews).

It’s just anecdotal, of course, but it turns out their opinions actually track on several recent reports, the latest coming from Nielsen.

It showed that the 25-and-under crowd is definitely not the group adding to the site’s tremendous growth.

Using a panel of 250,000 U.S. Internet users, the data (which you can see above–click on the image to make it larger) said that there are fewer young people on Twitter than on the Web itself–16 percent versus 25 percent.

Older people, like my mother, are also a smaller group, at 20 percent of Twitter. The biggest and fastest-growing group on Twitter is 25 to 54, just like me, an obvious fan of the service.

An earlier anecdotal report from Morgan Stanley (MS) posited similar findings.

Facebook, of course, is hugely popular with young people. And, with Louie, who–even at the tender age of seven years old–wants me to set up an account now on the Silicon Valley-based social networking site, to be able to upload video, photos and more.

Check out his and my mother’s thoughts on the subject:

[ See post to watch video ]

The Little Engine That Could? Yahoo Paid Search Adds Video and Pictures, Trying for More Clicks.

Kara Swisher — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:44:30 +0000

Yesterday, Yahoo celebrated the fifth anniversary of the launch of its own search engine with some good news about its market share and by jazzing up its paid listings today with a plan to include pictures and video.

Will the “rich” ad search product work better, a digital little engine that could?

We’ll see, although it seems the troubled Internet company is already doing better without all the bells and whistles.

After years of declines, according to a new report from comScore, Yahoo’s share in the U.S. continued to scratch its way back slowly, from a low of 19.6 percent last June to 21 percent in January.

Better still, according to comScore (although not in other recent surveys like Nielsen), Google (GOOG) lost some juice, declining to 63 percent from 63.5 percent in December of 2008.

Microsoft (MSFT) search rose a tiny bit to 8.5 percent. But that’s still essentially pathetic for a company that is spending so much and trying all sorts of new iterations of its search product–from giving cash back to creating more niche search–to boost share.

For its part, Yahoo (YHOO) has decided to integrate images and video with its search ads, which have long been text-based. Yahoo has been working on various versions of this and other improvements to search for a year.

Both Google and Microsoft have tested similar versions, but have not launched them widely, for a variety of reasons.

Thus, it is Yahoo that will be first in a major rollout of what one company insider jokingly described to BoomTown as “a mutant marriage of search ads and display.”

Paid search, a business where advertisers pay for relevant links on a larger search page, has been largely dominated by Google, with Yahoo’s share one-seventh the size, even as it dominates in selling online graphical advertising called display.

But the display business has been hard hit in the weak economy as advertisers have pulled back drastically on banner advertisements and the like, and as evidenced by a decrease in that business that Yahoo announced in its most recent quarter.

Thus, the idea is now to apparently make paid search richer, giving it the cool-looking attributes of display and the more measurable qualities of paid listings.

But whether this yields better click-through rates on Yahoo–and, more to the point, fends off calls by investors to take a giant sum of money from Microsoft to hand over its search business–is still unclear.

Still, it’s nice to see Yahoo search–which also recently added a “search pad” for users to conduct online research more easily–trying to compete with a little more panache after, badly, copying Google for so long and with so little result.

In other words, after five years of losing, it’s about time for some new moves.

Video, Which Already Killed the Radio Star, Is the Killer App Online for 2009

Kara Swisher — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:00:57 +0000

BoomTown likes charts, so here are two recent ones from comScore and Nielsen about online video usage for November of 2008.

The pair have different results. But, overall, it’s up big time, year over year (40 percent!), as viewers have really started to up their time spent watching videos on the Web and also the number of videos they watch.

Google (GOOG) property YouTube ruled, no surprise, at 40.3 percent share of videos, according to comScore, with little competition.

The next largest is a dwarf in comparison–News Corp. (NWS) unit Fox Interactive Media at 3.5 percent. (News Corp is the owner of this Web site.)

You can yammer all you like about cloud computing, but online video and its monetization is going to be the big story for 2009, because it is exactly where the audience is going.

Here are the charts (click on the images to make them larger).

And below the charts is the music video of the classic Buggles hit, “Video Killed the Radio Star”:

November 2008 comScore

November 2008 Nielsen

Buggles