According to a recent study by Nielsen Online, Twitter’s audience-retention rate is currently about 40 percent. Which means that about 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users end up abandoning the service after a month. Why is Twitter struggling with low retention rates? Perhaps, because so many tweets are utter nonsense.
In August 2008, Facebook claimed 100 million monthly active users worldwide. By April 2009, it doubled that number. Today, the social networking outfit tells us it has reached 250 million monthly active users. Fifty million new users in under four months: Impressive.
Here’s an interesting metric: Apple’s Web site last month drew more than 55.7 million unique visitors, more than the site of any other computer hardware manufacturer, according to a report released this week by Nielsen Online. The number of visitors was more than double that of Hewlett-Packard, which drew 21.9 million people, and triple Dell’s, which drew 16.8 million.
If there was an over-arching theme for this last week on All Things D, it would have to be musical chairs.
Brand new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta started things off Monday with his first day on the job. He was joined by new COO and former AOL exec Mike Jones and new chief product officer and former Sling Media exec Jason Hirschhorn.
Hard to believe, but social networking has eclipsed email in popularity. The latest Nielsen survey found that 66.8 percent of the global online population spends time at “Member Communities”–a category that includes both blogs and social networks. That makes social networking about two percent more popular than email.
Consumers may not be buying as in years past, but they are browsing. Nielsen Online reports that traffic to online retail sites on Black Friday grew from 28.8 million unique visitors in 2007 to 31.7 million unique visitors in 2008. That’s 10 percent year-over-year growth. But what does it mean that Nielsen’s top-ranked Black Friday e-tailer was eBay, a site visited as often by people looking to sell things as buy them?
The economic crisis has been as much a boon for Yahoo as a bane. Earlier this week, we noted that Yahoo’s share of the search market had increased slightly, thanks to investors obsessively checking Yahoo Finance and its Stock Message Boards. It seems that morbid interest in the stock market’s decline is driving up Yahoo video streams as well.
In the past year, Microsoft has spent $1.2 billion to acquire enterprise search outfit Fast Search & Transfer. The company spent more than $100 million on Powerset and its natural language search. It spent untold millions on R&D. Microsoft has even taken the rather extraordinary step of paying people to use its MSN/ Windows Live search. None of this has done much to prop up its laggard search service, which continues to toddle along behind Google and Yahoo–a very distant third in the search market.
As the lines between television and the Internet grow increasingly blurry, online video services are seeing quite a bit of audience growth. Predictably, YouTube has been top among them. The company served up five billion video streams to some 77 million unique users in July, according to Nielsen Online, which ranked it as the top Web brand for that period.
Facebook shed some 400,000 members between December and January in the United Kingdom. This according to new figures from Nielsen Online, which charted a 5% decline in U.K. traffic month-to-month.
Which begs the question: Is Facebook nearing its saturation point? Is enthusiasm for the social-networking phenom finally wearing off? Have we all been spammed by the [...]
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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