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. 

Unfortunately Alexa didn’t make it. After stopping to count again yet again, Dr. Stern did all he could to bring the service back. Rest in peace Alexa, rest in peace.

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Web analytics provider Clicky has announced the launch of customizable email reports today. Each report can be sent to multiple email addresses which is good when you need to get daily reports sent to clients. The reports can be customized to include the data points you are most interested in.

If you have multiple sites using Clicky, you can setup the reports as templates as assign them to multiple sites. The email reports option is currently available only for Pro account holders but founder Sean Hammons says they may provide a basic email report to all customers in the near future.

Currently you can only select daily, weekly or monthly. I’d love to see an open selection where I can pick the times and frequencies that work best for me. I am still hooked on the Clicky Spy. To be able to watch visitors in real time is just like heaven.

Here’s a sample report - note that this report has only a couple of options checked.

Check out our interview with Clicky founder Sean Hammons and why we included Clicky in our top acquisition targets for 2008.

Editor’s note: We are setup as a Clicky affiliate however no links in this post carry the affiliate code.

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Alexa, oh Alexa, how you kill thee. I’ve written and spoken about Alexa since they began operations nearly a decade ago. I’ve watched agencies pitch advertising based on Alexa charts. There are still ad networks that use Alexa rankings as a baseline for pricing Web site advertising.

Considering how wrong Alexa is, I’ve wondered for a long time who would be the first one to sue Alexa for an incorrect ranking. For sites that drive revenue from advertising, an incorrect ranking can impact their direct ability to generate revenue.

Alexa changed their ranking model back in April and since then everything has gone downhill for most sites I track. Currently CN has a 1-week average rank of 194,000 while my other site HTMLCenter has a rank of 78,000. There’s only one issue, CN has 6-10x more traffic on average than HTMLCenter does.

Here are some additional thoughts in my Alexa video:

Daniel Scocco compared 15 Web sites using Alexa, Compete and Google Trends. It’s interesting to see just how off Alexa is overall. Andy Beard believes that Alexa is no longer counting social media traffic and that’s why we have seen even more ranking drops for sites that rely on social media traffic. I would tend to agree with Andy but CN has very little social media traffic - we had one digg frontpage in the last 60 days.

If Alexa is removing social media traffic (they haven’t said anything yet about this latest change), that’s an excellent step forward. I’ve said before that just because a site has more raw pageviews than another, doesn’t mean it’s worth anything more - especially if they are gaming the social media sites. But I am not convinced Alexa has made this change.

I’ve tried sending emails to Alexa, but I have never received a reply. Which is so unlike Amazon considering how responsive and fast they are to customer service emails. It’s almost like Bezos ignores Alexa for some unknown reason.

Perhaps it’s finally time to turn off Alexa.

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Pagealizer is a new startup that aims to help create more effective Web pages by providing details on how site visitors are currently utilizing specific pages. The service reminds me of CrazyEgg for the click heatmaps and ClickTale for the time and scroll analysis.

Pagealizer tracks time spent on a given page, where users clicked on the page, and how far down on the page users scrolled. Pagealizer points out that Nielsen is now using "time spent" as a metric and by optimizing pages to increase the time users spend on them, you can increase your reportable metrics.

I found Pagealizer easy-to-setup and the charts (shown above) easy to read. I like the comparison of time to click with page visit length. Page scroll distance can give content creators an excellent view into whether users are reading the full content. For ecommerce sites, the page scroll can tell you whether vital information needs to be shifted on the page.

Pagealizer offers a freemium pricing model and while normally I think startups give too much free, Pagealizer has a good mix of free and paid. The free model allows you to track 200 visits a month. Pricing ranges from $9-49/month depending on usage and SSL options. One interesting note, no matter which plan you select, Pagealizer will always show you the most current users for the selected plan. Most other services give you the first x users until you hit your limit.

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Web analytics trend service Compete is out with their latest report today comparing the change in gas prices with the change in Web traffic to sites related to public transportation. To build the report, Compete took the top 50 sites in the "Bus and Train" category and the average gas price for the week and compared the change over time. This report is only based on U.S. Web traffic and gas prices.

It’s pretty interesting to watch how directly correlated the two are. Yet as author Connor Caldwell notes, it seems like Americans are getting more comfortable with higher gas prices.

Are people (worldwide) more productive on public transportation than in their cars? The simple answer is yes but what this additional productivity means is that when a person arrives home, they perhaps have more time to spend with family and friends and not working because the normal after-dinner work was completed on the subway, train or bus. With more mobile devices offering real connectivity to the Internet, it could be that people may actually stick to transit if gas prices drop. Ok, I am dreaming I know.

Do you find that you get more done on the train or bus than in the car? For me, even on a short subway ride, I find that I am able to think about ideas rather than worrying about who just cut me off or how that idiot didn’t put their blinker on.

Don’t forget to check out our public transportation sister site, InsideTransit, which takes a fun and interesting look at trains, buses, and other means of transportation.

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Web site tracking service Compete has announced the launch of their "Pro" plan today. They are dropping their previous payment system which basically required you to buy credits and then each report you selected was some amount of credits. Going forward the plans will all be monthly - this should be easier for their current customers but also easier to market to new customers.

They have also added more reports which include: page views, visits per person and daily reach. They are keeping more data as well and you can now go back up to 25 months for report purposes.

The new plans start at $199 a month which includes 50 reports. Compete might lose some customers over this - sometimes you only need one report a month, other times 100, now you are stuck with a minimum of $200 a month. It seems like if you have any credits they are giving you a free month of the basic Pro package. Perfect for the large enterprise customers, not so for small customers, consultants or media outlets. My hope is that they will add a ppv report option as well for say $5-10/report.

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If you’ve been reading CN for a while, you know we like ClickTale. We said that Omniture should acquire the service and we’ve also interviewed the ClickTale CEO, Tal Schwartz. ClickTale is basically a worldwide virtual usability lab for your Web site, application, ecommerce site or blog.

Today the company is launching a new product — Form Analytics. Over my career I’ve seen several products do something similar but not to the scale that ClickTale is. From the ClickTale blog, "Form Analytics reveals how visitors interact with online forms and provides recommendations that can increase shopping cart conversion, form completion rates and reduce visitor abandonment."

Form Analytics is currently in beta and includes three reports: Time, Blanks, and Refills. Tal tells me that additional reports will be coming out soon. The Time report shows you how long people are spending on your forms. It gets even crazier with the Advanced Time report which shows you how much time was spent with each individual field. Blanks provides you with details on which fields users are leaving blank when submitting a form. And lastly, the Refills report provides details on how often a user is forced to redo some part of their entered data.

Based on their initial testing, they’ve seen two common errors that developers and content creators are making. One is around ZIP codes and not taking into account non-U.S. postal codes. The other is password fields which don’t provide any specifics on the type of password required which forces the user to refill the form.

My hope is that they provide regular blog posts with more form analytics data - optimizing your forms can return huge value and they could offer excellent guidance with the aggregated data.

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comScore is ouit today with a new report regarding U.S. online advertising within the quick-serve restaurants category for March 2008. The report leads with McDonalds online advertising numbers which lead the pack at 295 million online display ads for the month. Quiznos came in second (huh?) followed by KFC, PapaJohns and Subway. In fact, McDonalds nearly tripled the online ad impressions that Quiznos ran.

With the stupid Subway campaigns for $5 footlongs, I would have imagined Subway ranking higher in impressions than Quiznos.

While 295 million impressions might seem like a lot, comScore ranks McDonalds at #113 on their list of total ad impressions for March 2008.

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One of my colleagues in the office told me about a website statistics service named Woopra (he knows I love quantitative data). I had not heard about it prior, so I went a did a little research around the Internet about it. Apparently, it launched on/around May 30 2008, as it’s relatively new, but had a nice little writeup on TechCrunch. I did some Tweet tracking and saw that a healthy early adapter audience was using it.

What is Woopra you ask? Very simply: MyBlogLog meets Google Analytics and has a baby, and then morphs into a Bloomberg Terminal of the next century. Very, very interesting, at least to me it is. I’ve taken some screenshots of my Woopra Terminal and put them below for you to see:

What I like about Woopra is that it gives me information in near real-time and tells me where my audience is going and where they have been on my website. Generally, all of the data exists on server logs, but I like the advanced graphical representation of my data. In the screenshots above, you can see the ticker on the bottom of the page that scrolls with data from the server.

Woopra is going to run into some issues when large publishers start signing up. They are in beta right now which is very smart and limiting their service to publishers who are less than 10,000 page views. I’m speculating that the reason for this is because the amount of resources it takes to crunch all of the data is fairly intensive and that they want to work out all of the kinks before they start charing. I’m interested to learn how their infrastructure is built - are they using Amazon’s EC2?

What I’d like to see is Woopra share network data information.  Meaning, if I track a view on my site and rename them, I’d like to see that “renamed” person across the entire Woopra network.  There is a lot of information in the larger “network” - lets see if Woopra pools that data.

I also give them credit for the slick interface.

Darren Herman is a digital media enthusiast and serial entrepreneur. Herman writes about technology, entrepreneurship and digital media at his blog, http://www.darrenherman.com.