Web Trends

Morgan Stanley has just revealed last month’s Internet Trends Report which has some very intriguing statistics regarding Social Networking sites.

Here are some of the highlights from the 72 page document:

• 6 out of the TOP 10 Most visited sites on the Internet ARE Social Networking sites. YouTube, Facebook, Hi5, Live.com, MySpace and Wikipedia all made the list.
• 5 out of the 6 didn’t even make the list in 2005. Within 3 years our internet experience has been drastically changed by the introduction of social media, networking and sharing sites.
• in 2008 YouTube has surpassed Google and Yahoo in number of Page Views
• Facebook has grown by 305% - largely in part to it’s ’stickiness’, open application platform, and recent open invitation strategy.
• Top 5 Facebook Applications are: Superwall, Top Friends, FunWall, SuperPoke and Movies.
• Top 5 Searches according to Google Zeitegist: iPhone, Badoo, Facebook, Daily Motion & Webkinz.
• Amazon.com is still the Largest Online Retailer
• Internet Advertising spend is up 26% making it the biggest advertising mover.
• 80% of Internet Users deem the internet as an important source of information, where as radio and newspaper only received 63% importance.

View the full Morgan Stanley Internet Trend Report:

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Already unique in the way it aggregates news stories from multiple sources and offers them in customizable RSS and Atom feeds, Google News took another bold step in the way it presents the news with the announcement that story participants will be able to comment on stories about them in the near future.

As the Natural Search Blog points out, the most interesting people to hear from in stories — publicly-owned, major companies — will likely not take up the opportunity to use this new feature. Caution is the better part of PR for most major companies, and the hurdles to drafting an accepted public statement may well make the story well over and done with before any comment is ever posted.

While as of today (almost a week after the announcement) a visit to the Google News homepage doesn’t show any stories tagged with the new feature, I think the move is very forward-thinking on Google’s part and should disintegrate the producer/consumer, story/subject lines that as a whole are under attack by Web 2.0. Now it’s just a matter of seeing exactly who’ll comment using the new system.

Things have been hot for online advertising companies. Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, followed by Yahoo’s $650 million purchase of Right Media. Now Microsoft jumps to prove they’re not out of the online advertising game with a whopping $6 billion purchase of aQuantive in a move to expand their breadth of paid opportunities on web sites, Internet television, video on demand, and other places online.

While Google, Yahoo and MSN all run their own competing search engines with paid opportunities on these engines, the acquisition of these networks shows their vision of a future dominated by new forms of advertising. While paid search is now paid on a per-click basis, the ability to leverage banner ads and ads within rich media offers advertisers the ability to say a whole lot more to their desired audience. To be seen is how much search engines use data about user searches to correspond ads to likely targets — the ability to hone in on target markets is extremely alluring to advertisers, and feared by privacy advocates (Google, at least, says they do not intend to use their search data to improve ad targeting).

Whether the aQuantive purchase will solidify a rather rocky position for Microsoft’s online advertising portals waits to be seen, but the commitment of the Redmond giant to not be outpaced in the industry is clear. And with billions of advertising dollars on the tables, the stakes have never been higher.

Well, it’s no news that Yahoo, among others, is fighting for its life against the megalithic efforts of Google. The ink just dried on Google’s $3 billion buy of the Doubleclick ad network and they’ve officially announced a Powerpoint-clone program to join their already beefy hosted office software suite. They’re being innovative and aggressive enough that Microsoft has accused Google of becoming a monopoly. Which is not necessarily incorrect, just funny.

In a desperate fight for life, Yahoo has taken several aggressive initiatives of their own — notably, the so-far-successful new Panama ad-platform — and most recently, a push to extend their ad network into a variety of newspapers’ web sites and now a partnership with PayPal to add branded buttons to their sponsored search listings.

The water’s definitely starting to get hot, due in no small part to projections that spending on paid search is projected to increase by 17% this year. With more traditional advertisers catching on to the power (and impressive ROI) of paid search, the market is growing at an incredible rate and everyone wants part of Google’s enormous pie. Whether or not Google is becoming a monopoly, they are very steering the way of the web and have the technology, innovative people, and singular vision to do it. And for the moment, it’s forcing everyone else to try some interesting tricks to catch up.