This Google Trends chart says it all. Yahoo!, Google, Twitter – nobody comes close to Facebook.

By the team at XA.net‘s count, from Facebook’s own figures, about 495,362,600 users. Still a lot, perhaps the other 4.6mm or so are from other countries than the 186 listed, or people who live on the moon or whatever. Here’s the data in an excel sheet, along with country populations from Wikipedia for all to use as they wish (but please keep attribution intact).

Here’s the top 25 – Southeast Asia has made a big push:

Here is the full data file in Excel. Enjoy!

I’ve been seeing voicefive.com loading everywhere so wanted to see who this is — according to domaintools.com their nameservers are all .comscore.com – so it looks like this is another “unbranded” comscore domain. According to the voicefive.com website:

VoiceFive Networks is a leading global market research company that studies and reports on Internet trends and behavior. VoiceFive Networks is routinely commissioned to conduct research on numerous topics of concern to industry leaders in diverse fields, including travel, pharmaceuticals, and publishing.

The usual giveaways are their privacy policy address, and of course the nameservers. Then of course, the repetition of wording – if you do a google search you’ll see “a leading global market research company that studies and reports on Internet trends and behavior” also includes “Full Circle Studies” (http://www.fullcirclestudies.com) and their “ScorecardResearch … domain used by Full Circle Studies, Inc. to help with the collection of Internet web browsing data on specific websites that have enrolled in a broad market research effort to create reports on Internet behavior and trends.” We’ve seen b.scorecardresearch.com before which is the beaconing URL that comscore is using for reconciling its panel numbers with the higher site-measured figures.

Lots of discussion around the comScore $10k fee for measurement, most notably initiated by Jason Calacanis. I happened to stumble across some interesting data along these lines. It appears that the URL used by the beaconing program is b.scorecardresearch.com (the domain is owned by TMRG, Inc., “an organization dedicated to managing a leading market research community comprised of millions of Internet and mobile consumers from around the globe. The data generated from this community is used to help companies understand trends and patterns online and on the mobile Internet.” TMRG is a service of comScore, so they say.

A few things about this all seemed strange for comScore to say for example that they needed people to subsidize creating this data/storing it; that you needed to pay more for better data and so on. Also that you needed to pay to help them “audit the data” to make sure tags were not incorrectly placed on multiple sites. That’s BS too — any system will be smart enough to make sure it’s only counting pages with the correct URL basis/referrer. But anyway, I digress. The data is worth looking at.

This appears to be the format similar to this <img src=”http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6662697&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c15=&cj=1″ />. Anyway, I just aggregated some of the data around various IDs we saw randomly while looking at other data. Here they are for you to do with as you will, in a scribd format.

Scorecard Research – comscore

No surprise to those who know me, the area I spend most of my time thinking about during the workday is the online advertising business. In running a company that participates in this space and has some different takes on the existing ways of doing things (albeit many of these staid practices are all of 2, 5 or 10 years old), it often behooves me to have handy some analogies to help laypeople navigate our space and understand what it is that I am doing day after day and hour after hour.

Analogies and comparisons for online advertising are most often made with financial markets, and don’t always hold up. I did, however, stumble on some recent interesting information looking at the historical context in financial markets and talking about the difference between a financial market and a financial exchange. The text below is from a review of The London Stock Exchange: A History by Ranald C. Michie (1999) .

Michie begins his story, “From Market to Exchange, 1693-1801,” with an overview of the rise of an informal, unorganized, secondary market in government debt. This begins, in his view, in 1693 with the establishment of permanent debt that could be transferred. As the amount of debt increased with each successive war, so did the number of investors, encouraged by the government’s ability to continue servicing at least the regular interest payments promised on the debt issues. Gradually, specialists arose, both brokers and jobbers, both very important to the operation of an efficient secondary market for any set of products. Brokers made their money from commissions they charged to their principals, who desired to buy or sell an amount of a particular security within a specified price range. Jobbers provided the brokers the counterparties to their principals, offering to sell to their buyer or to buy from their seller the particular security. They made their money on the difference between the prices they bid or asked, and saved the broker the time and expense of finding a specific counter party to his original client. Both made more money, the greater the volume of transactions. Brokers made a commission charged to their principals; jobbers made a “turn” on the bid-ask spread always intending to buy low and sell high. By the end of the eighteenth century, the number of investors was large and a number of specialized brokers and jobbers seemed to be making a living from their respective trading activities. Nevertheless, asserts Michie, this was just a market, not an organized exchange that could affect by its own rules and enforcement decisions the way the security market would develop in the future. In 1801, however, the informal London stock market ceased to be shaped strictly by outside forces and henceforth could determine in part its own destiny through the decisions taken by its governing bodies.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Larry Neal, Department of Economics, University of Illinois.

The current state of the online display advertising market I think is quite similar to the above, with “brokers” and “jobbers” earning revenue by providing market access for varying amounts of commissions/fees that I am sure historically were quite volatile and in the absence of regulation might correlate with the particular client’s level of sophistication. The online ad space is a series of private markets loosely connected and as such, the connective glue that companies like ad networks provide definitely makes it stick together and these types of firms who already have been involved in these markets will play a role if shifts to one or more true exchanges take place. Again quoting the book review below, the LSE success was built on allowing access under controlled conditions, utilizing the skill and knowledge of the jobbers to help make markets and provide liquidity, and then the cycle of specialization with tight alignment of interests (specialization can only work well if motives of partners are in sync and measured/monitored by market and/or regulatory mechanisms… the relationships between entities becoming more important than the internal capabilities of one -> a market ecosystem develops…):

What accounts for this earlier success? Internally, one factor was that dual control by Proprietors and Members continued to be effective in offsetting tendencies towards restricting access to the exchange; another was the continued importance numerically of jobbers within the membership of the exchange. Externally, the most important factor was the central role played by the Stock Exchange in the money market of London. The ever-expanding joint stock banks in London found that their loanable funds could be employed profitably for short periods of time by lending to so-called money brokers who were members of the Stock Exchange. They, in turn, could lend on security of shares and stocks held by jobbers to allow them to settle differences at the fortnightly settlements or to continue their positions to the next account. Specialization in function within the Stock Exchange thus occurred that allowed further specialization in function among the financial intermediaries of Lombard Street. These nested specializations increased efficiency in the use of funds by all concerned. They also allowed, however, increased efficiency within the growing number of provincial stock exchanges, who could tap into the London money market easily through the branches of the joint-stock banks.

The development of stock exchanges is rich (sometimes eery) fodder for analogies for the development of new, electronic markets and exchanges. In the end, people and the incentives that connect them to one another and their institutions are the key underpinnings, but more about that later.

Yahoo! just launched a page where you can manage how they classify your interests based on your search and other activity on the Yahoo! Network.

http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/opt_out/targeting/

Mine was blank, and then I did two searches, one for “powerball” and one for “cars”. These are the categories I am now flagged as being interested in:

Interest Categories:

Automotive

Entertainment

Entertainment > Movies > Animation

Entertainment > Movies > Childrens

So I can see how that the lottery/entertainment categorization could go along with it being a move title etc. But what was odd was then the next list which was “Categories you search:”

At which point I have to say, “huh?” – this is really what I’m searching for with those two keywords? Categorization is dangerous – but it is really difficult to create an ad product that takes keywords as an input because you need tens or hundreds of thousands unless you’re only focusing on the “head” keywords and as we know people don’t only search that way. Fascinating though, now you can do some searches, clear your cookies and start again and see how Yahoo! classifies you. Or opt-out of it all of course.

I’m amazed that a senior executive at a major ad company like The Rubicon Project would write something like this (in their Q3 update):

“Many of these platforms ultimately value all inventory equally, from the New York Times or Sports Illustrated, to a niche WordPress sports blog,” [JT] Batson [,Rubicon’s EVP of Revenue and Global Development] said. “And for certain ads, that is OK. But publishers correctly argue that a reader seeing an ad against the trusted brand of a well-known site is more valuable than a reader seeing the ad on a site they don’t fully trust.”

Referencing the “agency-backed buying platforms” which presumably encompasses all demand-side aggregators. Any company on the demand side of the display ad business (agency-backed or not) that does value all inventory equally is surely going to fail. Having a set of well-known branded sites in a campaign is certainly going to create more confidence for brand-sensitive advertisers, but that is of course one of many determinants of the value of inventory. Audience, position on page, user frequency, number of other ads on the page — these are all certainly factors in valuing ad inventory.

As I mentioned on CPMa’s blog recently, some very well-known publisher brands appear to be giving themselves liberally to anyone with an ad to show. Those in our business who have real technology and a real understanding of media know that the way we make this business work is to get past the irrational, emotional responses that “nobody cares about my brand” and bring data to the table to support our suppositions.