Hitwise runs the numbers and notes that for the first time ever last week Facebook passed Google (NSDQ: GOOG) to become the most visited website in the U.S. It’s not as though Google has stopped growing; it’s just that Facebook is growing at a much faster clip. The caveats: It’s…

With pre-orders for the iPad off to a fast start in preparation for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) product’s release next month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations has modified its guidelines for counting sales of a digital magazine in the U.S. and Canada. The old standards have always required that in…

Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) was selling pre-orders for the iPad at a rate of about 25,000 an hour this morning, according to a Forbes Fortune piece. The methodology is very unscientific; it’s based on differences between the order numbers assigned to early buyers. But if it is accurate, here’s how it…

Here’s why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is launching a “completely new smartphone OS.” The latest smartphone platform market share figures were released today by comScore and Microsoft posted the steepest drop. The new Windows Phone 7 Series—due later this year—can’t come to market soon enough.

Here’s why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is advertising Bing on UK TV: it’s barely making the tiniest dent in Google’s search leadership. Though Google (NSDQ: GOOG) piled on eight tenths of the 617 million additional searches Brits made since Bing launched in June, Bing took just four percent of them, according…

It’s half-way through the Vancouver Olympics and NBC Universal’s research head Alan Wurtzel already has some findings to share about the viewing results so far. Anticipating the ire of bloggers who have complained that NBCU has been holding back too much live coverage of the games from online, Wurtzel made…

It apparently can’t be an Olympics without dueling claims from both Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and NBC on whose Olympics website is tops. The headline of Yahoo’s release today: “Yahoo Sports Dominates Winter Olympics Traffic.” And here’s NBC’s: “NBCOlympics.com On MSN Leads All Competitors Through First Weekend Of Vancouver Games” (The…

Web analytics startup Effective Measure has raised $4 million in a first round of funding from Rho Ventures. The Australia-based company specializes in providing data about visitors to websites in emerging markets, specifically in the Middle East and North Africa, Oceania and South East Asia regions.

Analytics startup Mixpanel has raised $500,000 from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, according to Venturebeat. The startup provides a custom analytics tool, which it claims is more robust than those offered by rivals, like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Analytics. For instance, Mixpanel says it provides data in…

Magazines’ newsstand sales were a mix of good and bad during the latter half of ‘09, as Audit Bureau of Circulations’ Fas-Fax (sub. req.) for magazines report. In its survey of 472 mags, publishers said that newsstand sales dropped 11 percent in h209, flat compared to the 11.1 percent during…

Facebook, the news site? Hitwise runs the numbers and determines that the social network is now the fourth biggest source of visits to news and media sites, after Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) and MSN, accounting for 3.52 percent of all “upstream visits.” That’s up from under 1.5 percent…

Game publishers’ financials had already told us the video games industry is in something of a slump - now complete sales figures from the world’s three biggest markets show us how much... Game sales in the U.S., UK and Japan fell eight percent in 2009 to 379.3 million, according to…

Global digital music revenue has grown 20,900 percent since the music business started keeping count in 2003 - but it still needs government protection to grow further, says the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the industry’s main trade umbrella. 2009 digital sales hit $4.2 billion, or 27 percent…

Good news for the big search companies with earnings season just ahead. Search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier has upped its estimates for search ad spending this year. The company now expects spending to increase between 15 and 20 percent, up from its earlier estimates of 10 to 15 percent…

UK media M&A deals should bounce back this year after hitting their lowest level since the post-dot.com crash of early 2002, PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons. Number of deals fell 36 percent last year to just 29, their worth down from €4.1 billion to €2.7 billion, according to PwC’s Media M&A Insights 2010…

It’s a given that 2009 was a particularly bad year for media ad spending, and the latest figures from the Publisher’s Information Bureau shows just how bad it was for consumer magazines. In total, mags’ ad pages dropped 25.6 percent last year. Among the better known titles, U.S News &…

Some pageviews are worth more than others, but when it comes to a benchmark to impress advertisers, Gawker Media head Nick Denton (pictured, left) believes that unique users are the better bet. That appears to be a stark change of heart from what Denton has valued previously. In a staff…

eMarketer is out with what should be its last online ad spend forecast for the year—and the final stats for 2009 are even gloomier than they were when it updated projections in October. The company estimates that total online ad spending in the U.S. for 2009 will end up at…

Even the record-breaking sales of Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 weren’t enough to bring the video game industry out of its sales slump. Overall sales (hardware, software and accessories) for November came in at $2.69 billion, down 7 percent year-over-year. Total sales for the year thus far were…