Yahoo has conducted some rather self-serving research in conjunction with ComScore and Media Contacts that concludes the obvious: most consumers care intensely about only a small number of websites, and it’s these websites that make for the best places to advertise.

After analyzing over 12 million “passively observed site-user paired data points” from ComScore and surveying 800 users, the report came up with the following statistics:

• People visit on average 85 sites over the course of a month; they are “deeply engaged” with only about 1.5 of them (7%)
• People visit these 1.5 sites almost every day they go online
• People have been visiting these 1.5 sites for approximately 4.5 years
• People spend more than 1/3 of their time online at these 1.5 sites
• People are 13% more willing to pay attention to ads, and 200% as likely to find trustworthy information, at these 1.5 sites

The report calls these 1.5 sites “starting points” and asserts that they can be “portals or homepages or search engines”. So let’s see here…portals, homepages, search engines…at least 4.5 years…what the goodness could they could be referring to? Oh yea, Yahoo.

Best Buy has announced plans to acquire Napster today for $121 million in cash. From the release, the proposed acquisition includes Napster’s approximately 700,000 digital entertainment subscribers, its Web-based customer service platform, and innovative mobile capabilities. In conjunction with the definitive merger agreement, Napster CEO Chris Gorog and key members of senior management of Napster have entered into employment agreements, effective at closing, pursuant to which they have agreed to continue as the Napster leadership post-acquisition.

Napster, which recently launched one of the world’s largest MP3 stores, had fiscal 2008 revenue of $127.5 million, an increase of 15 percent over the prior fiscal year; a loss of $16.5 million, an improvement compared with a loss of $36.8 million the prior fiscal year; and positive cash flow for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2008.

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comScore has released their latest m:metrics report showing mobile search usage in the U.S. and several countries in Europe. Nearly 10% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. completed a mobile search and the total mobile search usage is up 68% in the U.S. In Europe where mobile usage is further along, usage is up 38%.

For all of the countries in the chart below, Google leads usage of mobile search. In the U.S., 63% of mobile searches use Google while 34% use Yahoo. In Germany, 85% use Google and in France 62% use Google. Spain and France were the only countries that had near 10% MSN search usage. 

Multimedia search provider blinkx has announced a distribution partnership with Getty Images today. The partnership brings blinkx search technology to the Getty Images database. Apparently it’s easier to search for images on Getty using the blinkx search rather than the search on the Getty Images site.

blinkx will use their ad platform, AdHoc, to serve ads next to the images from the Getty Images library. Revenue will be shared between both companies.

Last month blinkx made an offer to acquire Miva and this year they have formed a variety of partnerships with Revision3 and the BBC.

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comScore has released new stats for European Internet usage based on their World Metrix audience measurement service today. The report shows that Russia is leading Europe in Internet audience growth followed by France, Spain and Ireland. Russia’s Internet audience grew 27% from June 2007-June 2008.

As for Internet penetration in Europe, The Netherlands leads with 82% of the total population online. The Netherlands is followed by Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Based on what I am seeing, Switzerland appears to be pushing out the most new startups out of the top 5 European Internet penetration countries.

comScore is out with their June Ad Metrix analysis of the top online display advertising publishers and advertisers in the U.S. On the publisher side, Fox Interactive Media leads the pack with 52.3 billion ad views. MySpace accounted for 51 billion of the 52.3 billion hence my story title. Facebook came in sixth with 3 billion ads and Glam made the report in tenth with just over 2 billion ads.

On the advertiser side, Microsoft leads the pack with 5.5 billion ads purchased. In second place is the University of Phoenix with 4.7 billion ads - guess they have some open seats. Vonage and Netflix came in eighth and ninth respectively with just over 3 billion ads purchased. Experian Interactive is the company who pushes the dancing women/bear/monkey ads for Lower My Bills and the FreeCreditReport ads.

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comScore will release their latest Widget Metrix report later this morning. From the report, "A total of 615 million people, representing 65% of the worldwide internet users, viewed or engaged with a widget in June 2008." While this number seems high, I would have expected it to be even higher. Nearly every page has a widget on it across the Internet these days.

I’d wonder exactly what comScore defines as a widget. Must a widget need to be viewable by the user to be counted? Would script code used in analytics tracking be considered a widget? I still believe that widgets will replace most traditional online display banner advertising by the end of 2009. The benefits of widgetizing an ad far outweight the cost to implement.

Gigya leads the pack serving over 150 million widgets during the period. In the U.S., Gigya served over 55 million widgets, giving them a 29.2% market share. It’s interesting to look at the charts below and compare a widget distribution platform like Gigya with a widget provider like Slide. Gigya doesn’t produce their own widgets, they help widget creators with distribution, monetization and analytics. Slide creates and distributes their own widgets. It’s hard to do a direct comparison.

Here’s the worldwide Top 10 Widget Metrix chart:

Here’s the U.S. Widget Metrix Top 10 chart:

Good to see SplashCast on the list - haven’t heard much from them lately. Check out my thoughts on widget installation and ethics, 2008 widget predictions and all of our widget coverage.

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Below are some of the latest jobs posted on the CenterNetworks Job Board. Subscribe to the CN Jobs feed and get all of the latest Web industry jobs delivered directly to you.

Featured Jobs:

• Community Liaison - Magnify.net
• Account Executive Web 2.0 Startup - Magnify.net

More Fresh Jobs:

• Manager, Content Distribution - Showtime Networks
• Analyst, Stategic Development - Disney
• Web Data Architect - UpCompany
• Business Development Coordinator - Lifetime Networks

Employers - Join other top companies on the CN Job Board. Post your jobs now - $79 for 60 days

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Analytics provider comScore is out with a new report today regarding the Japanese Web social networking market. Facebook has the largest percentage growth (213%) over the period June 2007-June 2008. Mixi.jp leads the Japanese social networking category with over 12 million monthly uniques while Facebook has grown to just over 500k visitors a month. It’s important to note that this comScore report does not include mobile social networking usage. This would be a very interesting bit of analysis since mobile usage is so high in Japan.

MySpace is second with 10% of the traffic Mixi.jp has but doubles Facebook in unique visitors. While we here in the states seem to believe Orkut is dead, it’s beating Facebook in unique visitors by 20% for June 2008. comScore also notes that Orkut users have the heaviest engagement noting, "…in this study across several measures, including average usage days per visitor (11.5), average minutes per visitor (454), and average pages per visitor (1,557). Mixi.jp also generates fairly heavy engagement, while Facebook.com and MySpace.com show more modest engagement thus far."

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Smynx

20 word description: Find new ideas for having fun, and arrange to try them with friends and people near you.

CEO’s Pitch: Smynx is a website for people who need more variety in their lives. Get inspiration for active, worthwhile, or just unusual new ideas to try and things to do. You can also arrange to try them, either privately between friends, or publicly with new people, making friends in the process. And if you have a good idea, add your own!

In keeping with the idea of having more fun in your life, you can rate ideas by interestingness, comment and tag them, and even add your own little sketches!

Mashable’s Take: If you have friends in driving distance and the lot of you can’t think of anything to do, Smynx may be just the thing for you. This site lets you post and search for activity ideas you can do with your friends. Some of them you can even do by yourself, such as watch all the episodes of a season (or 3) of your favorite television series in one night, but the purpose of Smynx is to help you find activities on a local level.

Any ideas that are public and are in your neck of the woods will appear as recommendations for things you may want to do yourself. Any ideas that you’d like to try out through the site involve some basic event-planning tools that let you pick a time and date, and post the event on Smynx’s site.

This event-planning process could be greatly expanded to include import and export options so you can post the event on your Facebook events profile, import friends from email or various social networks, or sync up local events with your iCal. This would also be a prime area for any additional event-planning resources or further details surrounding a particular idea, which could be used for marketing or advertising purposes or for recommendations for products that are related to the idea being tried out. For instance, in planning my dog party, I could receive recommendations on pet treats and party favors for the willing pet owners.

In posting or viewing others’ ideas, you can rate them, or even add a sketch (think the graffiti app), which is fun and helpful for search and filtering purposes, but uploading your own image or even performing a Web search for importing a Flickr image may have a broader appeal to users as opposed to the sketch option. While ideas are currently broken down into categories like “social” and “active” I think Smynx has the potential to dig deeper into various niche groups, such as dating ideas, children’s parties ideas, or even housewarmings or weddings.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

Companies from all over the globe are making their way to the Web to try their hand at online advertising.  And according to the latest comScore report, American Apparel leads the pack, delivering 483 million display ad views in April, reaching 49 million Internet users an average of 9.9 times during the month.

And while it easily outpaced the second place firm, UnderArmour, I can’t help but wonder if American Apparel should run for the hills and hope against hope that things can turn around.

For all the money it spent on advertising online, the company’s profit slumped to just over $1 million in the last quarter, $11 million less than the previous quarter.  Granted, those quarters didn’t include the advertising the company spent during April, but American Apparel has consistently had an online presence in advertising and seemingly, to no avail.

Some will say that the economy may be causing the downturn in American Apparel’s revenue, but I think it may go far beyond that.  Let’s face it – if you’re spending that much money online in an attempt to bring more people to your site and buy clothing, wouldn’t you hope that it actually bears some real progress?

But the story doesn’t quite end there.  According to comScore, most of these ads were displayed on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others.  Does this say something about advertising on social networks?

Social networking users are notoriously fickle and usually interact with the services for as long as their “cool” or until they’ve grown out of them.  And although there is little evidence to prove the point, I’m wondering if social networking users also couldn’t care less about advertising and vendors would do better to spend money on more traditional sites where viability of advertising is easier to measure.

At this point, this is all conjecture and American Apparel’s poor performance may be the result of other factors that have nothing to do with social networks.  But it begs an important question: Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults?

I’m starting to think they shouldn’t.

Should companies be advertising on social networks to target young adults? ( surveys)

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:American Airlines Sues Google for Selling AdWordsStagr - Killer Custom T-Shirt ServiceReminder: Design a T-Shirt and Win an iPhoneAmerican Greetings Nabs PhotoWorks for $26.5MCBS and Dogster.com Partner for Summer TV SeriesTakkle Launches America’s Best Branded GroupGlam Media Steals Executive Talent from MySpace

Plentyoffish is still on top, now in both the US and in the UK, according to a recent comScore report. The dating site founded in 2003 by Markus Frind in Vancouver has provided us with a rather entertaining tale of minimal resources and resounding success. The spartan dating website draws in over $10 million per year from advertising, equaling out to around $1 million per year for every daily hour Frind puts into the maintenance of Plentyoffish.

In the US the numbers provided by comScore show that Plentyoffish receives over 36,000 daily visits, with Singles.net coming in at number two with just under 30,000 daily visits. On the other hand, the UK provides only about 8,000 daily visits to Plentyoffish, which is enough to put it at the number one slot. Plentyoffish’s daily traffic in the UK is nearly double that of Meetic, which comes in at number two with just over 4,000 daily visitors.

While the site isn’t anything pretty to look at, users couldn’t care less since it doesn’t cost them anything to use Plentyoffish. In my personal (testing) experience, I also found this free use of the site as an opening of the floodgate for scummy people that are less likely to be seeking their one true love, but you can’t argue with $10 million.

Whatever Frind is doing to promote Plentyoffish and its users is converting into high traffic and a fat wallet. Plentyoffish seems to be another case of quantity over quality, as we’ve seen with other industries like online video where a lot to sift through can often be more popular than an improved system for doing things more efficiently. What’s it worth to you?

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Dating on Plentyoffish - Trading Fees for Scumbags?Hookups Get More Random, with Jangl on Plenty of FishFacebook is Fastest Growing Social Network in EuropeGodTube Named August’s Fastest Growing SiteIs Facebook’s Usage Declining?ComScore Files for $86 Million IPOcomScore Report Shows Global Growth of Social Networks