Research

Are you familiar with "Google on the Street"? This refers to a series of videos Google has put together in which it goes out and talks to people on the street about various online behaviors, to see how responses stack up against their own Insights for Search findings.

The videos are periodically posted on Google's UK Barometer Blog. Topics covered in the past include online shopping, consumer confidence, and travel. The most recent entry paints an interesting picture about how people use the Internet for auto-related services.

People take on the following topics in the video above (you'll have to click through to watch it on the blog, because it is not embeddable): 

- How do consumers use online to help build their consideration list?
- How do people search online?
- Do consumers buy cars online or do they need to visit a dealership too?
- Do people buy parts and book services online?
- What is their perception of branded websites?
- What do brands get wrong/right on their websites?
- What is the role of social media in the decision making process?
- Do people find online video useful and what do they want to see?
- Real time research: How do on and offline world’s fit together?

As long as you're on the blog, you might be interested in browsing through the past entries in the series by clicking on the " on the street " tag. It's interesting to see the responses of actual people on different matters, rather than just tables of data.

Related Articles:

> Google and Predicting Search Trends

> Google Shares Proposal for White Spaces Database

> Average Person Spends 13 Hours a Week Online

Compete puts together a monthly ranking of the top 250 Web sites in the US, based on unique visitors, and breaks up the data by relevant categories and behavioral segments. The firm is sharing the top 50.

"Despite continued concerns surrounding the economic recovery, holiday shoppers flocked to the Web in November," says Compete. "Of the 20 fastest growing Web categories last month, 13 were shopping related. November 2009 saw consumers shopping online for home and garden merchandise, searching for rebates and reading shopping blogs in record numbers."

Here are the top 50 Sites in terms of unique visitors:

Here are the top 20 gainers in terms of categories:

Here are the top 20 gainers in terms of traffic:

"If Web traffic is an accurate representation, Santa will be wrapping up a sleigh full of electronics this Christmas," says Compete. "In fact, 73.7 million consumers shopped for electronics in November, a 12 percent increase over 2008. Best Buy saw one of the month’s most dramatic Web site traffic increases – 74.6 percent month-over-month; the electronics retailer drew 29.5 million UVs to BestBuy.com. Gamestop.com (6.2 million UVs) and Newegg.com (5.9 million UVs) were also among the top gainers in November."

Unsurprisingly, bargain and coupon sites drew heavy traffic. It will be interesting to see how the lists shake out after the holiday season.

Related Articles:

> The Top 50 Websites in the US

> Online Shoppers Have Bigger Holiday Budgets Than Offline Shoppers

> Compete Builds "Twitter Down" Case

Harris Interactive has released the findings of its latest poll on Internet users. This doesn't come as much of a shock, but people are spending more time online these days.

According to the poll, adult Internet users are spending an average of 13 hours a week online." Of course, people's usage varies greatly; one in five (20%) of adult Internet users are online for only two hours or less a week while one in seven (14%) are spending 24 or more hours a week online," says Harris.

The firm presents the following as highlights from the poll:

- The age groups that spend the most time online are those aged 30-39 (18 hours) and those aged 25-29 (17 hours) and 40-49 (17 hours).

- Half (50%) of all those online bought something on the Internet in the last month.  This includes 62% of those aged 30-39 and 56% of those aged 40-49.

- The number of adults online, now 184 million (80%), has not changed significantly since 2008 and 2007.  This includes those online at work, at home, at school or any other locations.

- However, the number of adults who are online at home has increased to 76% this year, and 75% last year, compared to 70% in 2006, and 66% in 2005.

More findings from the poll can be found here, including more graphs, breaking them down by hours spent each week online by age, purchased online in last month by age, and PC/Internet use trends, as well as the estimated numbers of adults who are online - all by year.


Related Articles: 

> Americans Would Give Up Sex For Internet Access

> More Advertisers Turning To Internet

> Google Nabs Number Two Spot In Harris Reputation Study

Facebook users are a pretty important group of people; after all, in recent months, it's been established that there are more of them than there are individuals in the United States.  So to wrap up 2009, Facebook's provided a list that helps spell out what its users have been thinking about all year.

You can view the list of top status trends below.  It was made possible thanks to something termed "Facebook Memology," and as you can see, has been a bit simplified (condensing Farmville, Farm Town, and Social Living into "Facebook Applications," for example).

We'll respect your intelligence by just hitting some of the items that might not be completely obvious.  Here's a quick one: at number two, "FML" stands for "f*ck my life."  Which makes sense given the economy's nosedive.

Then, at number eleven, "years" is nothing more than a reference to dates like 2008, 2009, and 2010.  Apparently a lot of folks thought about life on something other than a day-to-day basis.

Finally, "yard" is simply a reference to the green things that surround houses.  To explain this word's presence, data scientist Lars Backstrom theorized on the Facebook Blog, "[H]ipsters' moms and dads are also on Facebook, and these folks have yards that require some tending."  Or it might have something to do with the housing stimulus and a fair number of young people getting yards for the first time.

Related Articles:

> Facebook Releases User Diversity Data

> Facebook Directs Companies, Celebs To Preferred Developers

> Facebook Gives Translators Awards For Their Services

According to data from StatCounter, Mozilla's web browser Firefox 3.5 is now the world's most popular browser. It has just surpassed Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, which has beend steadily declining.

For December 20, StatCounter has IE 7 at 21.2% market share, and Firefox 3.5 at 21.93%. Microsoft's IE 8 is closing in though. Its share has been steadily increasing, presumably making up for most of the lost IE 7 share, and has approached 20.33%.

The top browsers are as follows:

1. Firefox 3.5
2. IE 7
3. IE 8
4. IE 6
5. Firefox 3.0
6. Other
7. Safari 4.0
8. Firefox 2.0
9. Opera 9.6

Last month Mozilla celebrated the fifth birthday of the Firefox browser. They said that in the first four days of launch, over a million people downloaded Firefox 1.0. Firefox is available in over 70 languages and offers over 7,000 add-ons.

Firefox 3.5 also had over a million downloads in its first day of launch, and Mozilla surpassed a billion downloads in late July. Firefox has come a long way in five years and has really given Microsoft a run for its money in the web browser space.
 

Related Articles:

> Mozilla Celebrates The Fifth Birthday Of Firefox

> 8 Firefox Add-Ons to Boost Productivity

> Firefox Nears 1 Billion Downloads

Citibank has released the results of a survey about small business social media use. According to Citibank, few small business owners and managers are increasingly using social networking sites.

Over 500 small business executives across the United States were surveyed, and 76% of them haven't found sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to be helpful in generating business leads or expanding their business during the last year. 86% said they hadn't used social networks to get business advice or information either.

"Our survey suggests that small business owners are still feeling their way into social media, particularly when it comes to using these tools to grow their businesses," said Maria Veltre, Executive Vice President of Citi's Small Business Segment. "While social media can provide additional channels to network and help grow a business, many small businesses may not have the manpower or the time required take advantage of them."

According to the survey, small businesses are relying much more on search engines than they are social media, or even small business-focused sites and WSJ.com.

42% of small business owners and managers say they've made greater use of their company's website to generate business leads and sales in the last year. Among companies with 20-99 employees, 57% say they've made greater use of their sites. 28% are using email marketing and 25% are using online advertising for generating leads and sales.

Google has been pushing Google Apps use big time this year. They took out billboard space, and they recently sponsored a survey about IT departments and cloud computing.

The poll covered 1,125 IT decision-makers. Google has prepared an entire report based on the findings, which is available for perusal here (pdf).

The report covers measurement of IT success, IT's role in communications security and compliance, mapping cloud computing benefits to IT performance metrics, barriers to cloud computing adoption, etc.

"The findings provide some insights on what types of organizations are moving to the cloud, what value they find there, and what the key drivers for and barriers to adoption are," says Adam Swidler of the Google Postini Services team.

On the Google Enterprise Blog, the company shares some key findings from the survey:

- More than 60% of respondents indicated that the IT department holds the majority of the responsibility for communications security and compliance, but fewer than 20% feel they are well equipped to handle it.

- Email security, web security, and messaging are the cloud applications most widely adopted, and organizations using these applications in the cloud report higher satisfaction than users of traditional platforms.

- Ease of use is cited as the key motivator for transitioning to cloud-based applications.

- Although price is mentioned as a key deterrent for respondents who are not yet using cloud-based apps, value is cited as a key benefit by respondents who already work in the cloud.

"In these findings – and in our conversations with businesses of all types and sizes – we are seeing that more and more businesses are finding enhanced productivity and IT efficiency when they move their applications to the cloud with services such as Postini or Google Apps," says Swidler. That the cloud movement is more than just a trend is validated by our research findings, which indicate that 50% of the respondents who were aware of but not currently using cloud-based apps are planning to deploy a cloud solution within the next 12 months."

Google has had a fair amount of issues with Gmail, Google Docs, and other products included in Google Apps in recent memory. Service has been interrupted multiple times. These reliability issues could be holding back adoption of Google Apps (and cloud computing in general) to some extent.

In August, online video reached a record high, with over 25 billion videos watched during the month, according to data from comScore. A pretty good chunk of these were watched via Google sites (hardly surprising, considering the enormous popularity of YouTube). Google sites accounted for over 10 billion videos watched in August.

Let's not pretend that Google sites other than YouTube played a significant role in Google's dominance in this category. YouTube accounted for 99% of Google's video market share. Microsoft sites ranked 2nd with 547 million (2.2%) followed by Viacom Digital with 539 million videos viewed (2.1%) and Hulu with 488 million (1.9%). Here's the top ten (note: rankings are based on video content sites, and don't include video server networks. They include both streaming and downloaded videos):

That was by videos viewed. Here's a look at the top ten by unique viewers:

Over 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 videos per viewer during the month. Google Sites attracted 121.4 million unique viewers during the month (82.8 videos per viewer), followed by Microsoft Sites with 54.9 million viewers (10 videos per viewer) and Yahoo Sites with 51.6 million viewers (6.9 videos per viewer).

To put the whole picture into perspective, 81.6% of the total US Internet audience viewed online video in August. The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours. 120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube. 44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace. The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos, totaling 1 hour and 17 minutes of videos per viewer, and the duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

Nielsen set out to prove that social media use put a significant dent into email use, assuming that the more time people spent on social networks, the less time they were likely to spend using email. It didn't quite work out that way in the firm's experiment however.

Nielsen explains its methodology:

We decided to churn some quick data to test our hypothesis that “Consumption of social media decreases email use.” First, we broke the online population into four groups. The first three are terciles of social media consumption in minutes. The fourth is a group that doesn’t use social media at all. We then looked at each segment’s time of web based email consumption over the course of a year. Finally, we subtracted the email consumption of those that do not use social media from those that do, basically to show a lift over possible external forces. Clearly, there are more robust approaches that could be taken (controlling for factors other than consumption for example) but for the sake of this simple experiment, we tried to keep it straightforward.

As you can see from the above graph, Nielen's results pretty much show the opposite of what the firm expected. It would appear that the more people use social media, the more they are also using email. The "low social media consumers" spent the least amount of minutes consuming email, compared with the "high social media consumers" consuming the most email.

Think about it though. We often get our social media updates through our email anyway, via notifications. I know I do (some networks allow you to adjust this in the settings). I know I have a direct message on Twitter or a comment on a Facebook post when I get my email notification. Every time someone that runs a YouTube channel that I subscribe to uploads a new video, I get an email notification letting me know. The list goes on.

There is also the possibility that when people are using social media more, they are actually on their computer more, and more apt to go through and send email. They may get on to check Facebook, and decide to go through their inbox while they're there. They may do just the opposite and check their email, and decide to post a status update. It makes perfect sense that the increase in one channel correlates with the other.

That is all the more reason to integrate social media and email marketing campaigns. Read more about such integrations in this article based on an interesting session from last week's Shop.org Summit.