JetLib News

One in every ten tablet users views video content almost daily on their device, according to a new report by comScore. The study also found that tablet users are nearly three times more likely to watch video on their device compared to smartphone users.

Nearly one in four smartphone owners now owns a tablet, according to comScore. That’s an increase of 13.9 percentage points since a year ago.

comScore’s statistics are reflective of the rapid growth in the tablet market, since the iPad was launched two years ago. In her presentation on Internet trends this month, Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker showed that growth in iPad sales per quarter has been three times that of iPhones. While that’s partly due to Apple’s dominance in the tablet market, it’s also an indication that tablets have been adopted by consumers much faster than smartphones. The iPhone was released in 2007, but it took mobile apps and mobile websites at least a few years to mature. Tablet apps on the other hand, and in particular iPad apps, have matured much faster.

Another telling statistic from Meeker’s presentation is the growth of tablet and eReader ownership. 29% of US adults now own one of those devices, up from 2% just three years ago.

The lesson in all of this? Video apps are an area of tremendous potential. It explains why there is such interest from Facebook in social video apps like Viddy and Socialcam. Facebook knows video is going to be crucial in the coming years, which is why it is sniffing around Viddy – a potential Instagram for video.

The biggest video site on the planet, YouTube, is already adapting to the fast-emerging tablet market for content. Over the coming months on ReadWriteWeb, we’ll be profiling other growth stories in tablet video. Stay tuned!

In ComScore’s report on The State of Online and Mobile Banking, it cites social networks as a space where banks are creating a presence, and improving their capabilities. But do any of the banks’ customers even know about this? Apparently not.

Even though financial institutes have increased social networking activity, ComScore says that only 18% of customers knew that their financial institutions had a presence on social networks. A total 59% had no idea, and 24% were unsure of what their financial institutions were doing on social media sites.

The data shows that customer visits to banks’ Facebook pages have increased by nearly 25%, whereas on Twitter and LinkedIn that number has enjoyed less much less growth.

For institutions that are creating a presence on social media sites, take heed: customers are not interested in solving customer service issues on those sites. If Facebook did update its brand pages to include private messaging options, this might change. For now, however, customers who do follow their financial institutions on social networking sites are mostly interested in retail, credit card and online shopping offers.

As social commerce continues to try and find its place on Facebook thanks to new social apps, and payment services like PayPal build a presence on Facebook, will banking be the next move? Or are social networking sites just a place for banks to build their brand? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Image via Shutterstock.

Facebook has finally surpassed Google’s Orkut in Brazil. Launched in 2004, Orkut quickly caught on in Brazil and remained the number one network until the end of 2011. Facebook was Brazil’s number three most popular social network in 2010. A recent ComScore report showed Facebook’s steady increase throughout 2011. It only took the lead in December 2011, edging out Orkut with 36.1 million visitors.

In August 2010, the average Orkut user spent 275.8 minutes on the site, and only 29.3 minutes on Facebook. By December 2010, the average Brazilian user’s time on Facebook creeped up to 37 minutes. One year later, that number had shot up to an average 4.8 hours on Facebook.

“Brazil has always been a particularly social market and currently owns the fifth largest social networking population in the world,” said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil. “But despite the cultural affinity for social media, Facebook adoption had traditionally lagged in the market.”

It’s true: Brazillians are very community-oriented people. Orkut also is easy to pronounce in Portuguese because of the “ch” T sound. According to SearchEngineWatch, the lack of advertising on Orkut also appealed to Brazilians.

The ComScore report reveals a few more interesting data points about demographics of Brazilian Facebook users. They are 50.9% female and 49.1% male. The majority of users are under age 35, with 30.6% aged 25-34 and 28.2% aged 15-24 years-old. A few other interesting statistics stick out: 34.2% of those users live in São Paulo, and 12.9% reside in Rio de Janeiro.

SearchEngineJournal brings together a few different ideas about Orkut’s heyday and, not-so-surprisingly, the reasons it prevailed for so long may have to do with bragging rights, nationalism and the Portuguese language. And in 2008, Google moved its Orkut headquarters to Brazil.

Right after the ComScore numbers came out, Google launched an Orkut app for the iPhone. It looks like they’re just too late.

U.S. advertisers spend nearly $40 billion a year to be seen online, but 31% of their ads are never seen. That means $12.4 billion will be wasted on U.S. online ads this year. That’s the average across all sites; on some sites, only 7% of the ads were “in-view,” meaning 93% of them went unseen.

That sounds ominous for the health of Web content. But ad spending is up by over 20% this year. Online ad spending will exceed print magazine and newspaper ads for the first time this year. So, put another way, online ads in the U.S. are still worth enough to brands to waste $12 billion a year on them. But is all this waste necessary?

Dr. Magid Abraham, CEO of comScore, says that today’s display ad market is “characterized by an overabundance of inventory, often residing on parts of a web page that are never viewed by the user.” Online ads may be working overall, but the problem with out-of-view ads “dilutes the impact of campaigns” and puts a “drag on prices” for publishers.

31% of ads in the study were delivered successfully, but they were never seen by a consumer. The user either scrolled past the ad before it loaded or never scrolled it into view. On average, 4% of ads were delivered to viewers outside the desired geography, with some campaigns running as high as 15%. That means some ads were shown to customers in places where the product is not sold.

Even among ads that were seen, 72% of the campaigns in the study ran alongside site content that was “not brand safe.” If you’re advertising cheeseburgers, and your ad runs next to a news article about the obesity epidemic, you’re not likely to get much value out of it.

Online ad growth is projected to slow down over the next five years, but the trend is still positive. It’s a good sign for the Web that the ad market is healthy, but it could be much more effective with smarter technology.

Lead image via Creative Commons. Second image via Wikimedia Commons.

Well, that didn’t take long. Bing, Microsoft’s three-year-old search engine, has officially edged out ahead of Yahoo, according to the latest data from ComScore. In December, Yahoo dropped 0.6 percentage points over the previous months, giving Microsoft a slight lead, despite the fact that Bing didn’t grow that much during the same time period.

Bing now commands 15.1% of the search market, while Yahoo has dropped to 14.5%. It’s not even a full percentage point, but this is the first time Yahoo has been ousted by Microsoft for that #2 slot behind Google.

Speaking of Google, the search giant still leads the pack by a huge margin, commanding nearly 66% of the search market. It hasn’t grown that dramatically in the last few years, but Google did add half a percentage point in December.

Bing has a long way to go before being considered a serious competitor to Google, but its growth is still noteworthy. It may be hard to believe, but Bing was only launched in mid-2009. The product was essentially a rebranding of Microsoft’s existing search engine, which trailed well behind Yahoo at that point.

Not content to remain at below 10% of the search market, Microsoft launched Bing in a bid to more aggressively compete with Google, whose search engine had risen to dominate 65% of the search market by 2009. In addition to sporting a simplified user interface and improved performance, Bing was also found to be closely emulating Google’s own search results.

Almost as rapid as Bing’s growth has been Yahoo’s decline. The company has been struggling for a few years to figure out what kind of business it is in a world dominated by Google. When Microsoft launched its new search engine in 2009, Yahoo commanded 20% of the search market. It has fallen five percentage points since then while Microsoft has increased its own market share by 7%.

What’s an Android user to do about this not-so-shocking fact? Rejoice?

A new report from ComScore tries to make it look like 10% of iPhone users is a huge marketshare when, really, it’s not. For the three month period ending October 2011, reports showed that 234 million Americans ages 13-and-older used mobile devices. Apple has bumped its way up to number four, trailing behind Samsung, LG and Motorola. It did pass up RIM.

What might actually be more significant than the amount of mobile subscribers achieved by Apple is that of the five brands listed in this report, Apple is the only one that has actually gained more subscribers over the past three months alone. And just to be clear, this data was collected before the launch of the iPhone4S.

To be precise, Apple owns only 10.8% of mobile subscribers, while Samsung has 25.5%, LG has 20.6%. Motorola clocks in above Appel at 13.6%, while RIM lags behind just a bit with only 6.6% of mobile subscribers.

As of October 2011, 90 million people in the United States owned smartphones. Google tops that list, too, with a total of 46.3% of mobile subscribers. Apple comes in second with 28.1% of mobile subscribers.

It’s a good thing both ComScore and I both included iPhone in the headline. After all, who cares about Google’s mobile market share, really…