According to online analytics company comScore, Americans watched 37 billion online videos on sites like YouTube, Yahoo and Facebook in April. In total, 181 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 1,307 minutes of online videos last month. Those numbers are virtually unchanged from last month, but one area that has seen pretty spectacular growth over the last few month is online video advertising. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users watched almost 9.5 billion video ads last month. That’s about 60 ads per viewer. What makes this number even more astonishing is that it was only in March of this year that the number of video ads topped 8 billion for the first time.

Overall, the number of overall video views and the number of minutes they watch online video has remained pretty stable. There are some small changes at the bottom of comScore’s top 10, with Amazon making a reappearance in seventh position with 30 million viewers and Turner Digital dropping out of the list. Google’s sites, of course, continue to dominate the charts with 158 billion viewers, followed by Yahoo (53 billion) and VEVO (49 billion).

Facebook, which is obviously having its day in the sun today, saw the number of video viewers on its site drop a bit from 45 million to 44 million, but in return, those viewers stuck around for 27 minutes now instead of just 21.3 minutes last month and also watched more videos per viewer than the month before (264 million).

As for video ads, Hulu leads the pack here with 1.6 billion ads streamed last month (though that’s down quite a bit from 1.75 billion the month before). Google is a close second with 1.3 billion ads delivered, followed by BrightRoll and video ad exchange Adap.tv.

With 48.6 ads per viewer, Hulu, also delivered a higher frequency of ads than any other service. YouTube, for example, only showed its average viewer 17.7 ads.

In total, video ads reached almost 52% of U.S. Internet users.

Online and mobile research company comScore just released its newly rebooted and retooled Mobile Metrix report this morning, which examines mobile media usage across both apps and mobile web browsing. According to the new data, Google sites led as the top property on iOS, Android and RIM devices, reaching 96.9% of the U.S. mobile audience, followed by Facebook, Yahoo sites and Amazon sites. But apps dominated in terms of usage, says comScore, with 4 out of every 5 mobile media minutes spent in apps.

As far as which apps led the way, not surprisingly, built-in system apps came out on top, as did Facebook. But Facebook isn’t #1 – depending on the platform, the App Store or the Android Market holds the top spot, followed by either Google Search or Maps.

On the iPhone, iTunes was the top app, with 99.9% reach (what, did someone figure out how to delete iTunes off of their iPhone?), and was followed by Google Maps, at 91.2% reach. Facebook, meanwhile, was in the #3 spot, with an 80% reach. On Android, the rankings were a bit different – the Android Market…excuse me, Google Play store…was #1 (93.2% reach), followed by the Google Search app (84.1%), Maps (74.5%), Gmail (71.4%), and then Facebook (68.9%). Clearly, the numbers show that Android users gravitate towards Google’s own branded apps.

ComScore also looked at social networking properties by audience size, a measurement determined by both app usage and mobile site visitors. In this case, Facebook was an easy winner, with the average Facebook mobile user engaging for over 7 hours via browser or app in March. Twitter saw 25.6 million mobile users, engaging for nearly 2 hours during the month, but this statistic didn’t include usage by third-party apps (of which there are many), so may not be as accurate. People visiting Twitter on their computers spent only 20.4 minutes on Twitter.com, which comScore says highlights the importance of mobile engagement for brands. However, again, Twitter.com metrics are not the only way to account for Twitter users who engage on a Mac or PC – there are dozens of client applications, available both as desktop applications and those which run in the browser, neither of which were counted here.

The newly hot image pinboarding site Pinterest reached 7.5 million smartphone visitors who engaged with the brand for nearly an hour. (And this despite a number of anecdotal and app store review complaints of app bugginess, some of which were only recently addressed by the company through a mobile app update – Imagine what Pinterest could do with a killer app!).

Foursquare trailed Pinterest, with 5.5 million mobile visitors engaging at an average of nearly 2.5 hours. And Tumblr reached an audience of nearly 4.5 million who engaged for 68 minutes during the same time.

As with anything, methodology is an important consideration here. With the new comScore Mobile Metrix 2.0 reports, the company is bringing its Unified Digital Measurement to smartphone devices, which combines both sever-side and panel data to provide a snapshot of mobile web and app usage on smartphone devices. This is combined with census data to determine that the above metrics apply only to U.S. adults, age 18 and up.

Sammy is now the big kahuna of cell phones. Today’s Juniper Research and comScore reports indicated that Samsung kicked Apple from the top spot in regards to smartphones. IDC also released a report today indicating the same thing while noting that Samsung kicked Nokia from the top of total phone shipments. This comes just days after another analyst firm questioned Nokia’s current title as reigning king. Samsung happened to be at the right place at the right time — but only because the company positioned itself properly.

Five years ago, Nokia was the world’s dominant cell phone maker. It held a commanding slice of the pie. Profits were soaring on the wings of cheap devices. RIM was nearly as dominant in its smartphone arena. It was hip to have a crackberry addiction. Then things began to change. Now, five years later, both companies are in nearly equally precarious positions, priming the companies for utter failure or rise-from-the-ashes success.

While Nokia and RIM fell from grace, Samsung and Apple rose to the top. Apple had the benefit of being new to the space. Samsung had the tougher task of retooling its existing line to keep pace with new devices from Apple and HTC. But now, after just a few quarters of neck-to-neck racing, Samsung overtook Apple to become the largest smartphone vendor and overtook Nokia to be the largest vendor overall.

Samsung had a blockbuster first part of the year. It shipped a whopping 42 million smartphones, and per IDC’s research is the only Android vendor on an upswing. The rest of the players are seeing a steady decline in shipments. Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones are Android’s only bright spot right now.

RIM is also on the decline. The once-king of smartphones dropped more market share during the first part of 2012 and only accounted for 6.8% of the smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2012. However, while I still believe RIM can turn things around, the Canadian-based company is in a very tough spot after failing to innovate fast enough to compete with iOS and Android. BlackBerry 10 is a great start.

Nokia and RIM’s decline was caused by sheer arrogance. The two companies rested on their respective successes. Failure to innovate and sell existing supporters on changes is a recipe for disaster. Instead of following the market toward high-end devices, both companies dove headfirst toward the low-end, leading the race downmarket.

Samsung went the other way. The Korean company followed Apple upmarket. In fact, they may have followed a bit too closely. Remember the never-ending patent battle over the striking similarities between Galaxy smartphones and Apple’s iPhone?

The first line of Galaxy S smartphones were haphazard at best, but they set the stage for the fantastic Galaxy S II line. Now, as Samsung is the new king of mobile, the third generation is set to launch within the coming weeks. Samsung is succeeding because it kept moving.

The mobile phone wars are far from over. Apple and Samsung will continue to fight it out. The Samsung Galaxy S III will launch this month but the iPhone 5 (or whatever it’s to be called) is coming soon as well. These reports also indicate that other smartphone vendors, being Android supporters or not, are seeing steady declines in shipments. It might soon be a two dog race.

ComScore today released its analysis of this month’s top properties on ye olde Webernets in the U.S. There are a number of points of interest, but among them, it seems that lotto sites were the top beneficiary of U.S. Internet traffic. This was largely a result of the unprecedented Mega Millions jackpot, which became the largest jackpot in U.S. and world history, reaching $656 million in March. Lotto sites drew nearly 29 million visitors (with MegaMillions.com grabbing the top spot), up 25 percent from February, making it the biggest mover in March.

Travel info sites were the next biggest beneficiary of traffic, according to comScore, as Americans looked to book last-minute spring break trips and summer travel. This made travel one of the top-gainers, up 10 percent to 69.7 million visitors in March. Of the web’s growing number of travel properties, TripAdvisor saw the biggest boost, up 5 percent from the prior month, to a total of 18.1 million visitors. TripAdvisor was followed by Travora (which today acquired NileGuide) at 15.5 million visitors (also up 5 percent), and Yahoo! Travel was up 9 percent with 11.1 million visitors in March.

As is expected in the travel vertical, a rising tide lifts all planes — that is to say that airline sites benefited from travel’s boost in March traffic, growing 8 percent to 29.8 million visitors, with Southwest nabbing the most traffic, up 17 percent to 10.9 million visitors. Following Southwest was Delta at 6.1 million, United Airlines at 5.4 million, American at 4.8 million, JetBlue at 3.3 million, and U.S. Airways at 2.6 million.

As to the top 50 web properties, comScore found a usual suspect at the top of its rankings, with Google Sites bringing in 189.7 million visitors in March. Microsoft Sites came in second at 178.9 million, followed by Yahoo! Sites at 175.4 million, and Facebook.com at 158.9 million. In terms of March movers, Ask Network rose into the seventh spot, while ESPN vaulted six positions to 26th place.

Google also grabbed the top spot in comScore’s “Top 50 Ad Focus” ranking, with its ad network reaching 91.7 percent of U.S. consumers online, followed by AOL Advertising at 83.1 percent, Yahoo Network at 81.4 percent, and AT&T AdWords at 81.1 percent reach in March.

As for the top properties seeing the biggest change in unique visitor counts from February to March, interestingly PerformerSoft.com — the makers of software like PC optimizer, driver automatic updater, data recovery, etc — saw a 152 percent hike in traffic, up to 9.2 million visitors. Rounding out the list, in order, were Sun Microsystems, Babylon.com, College Humor, TheStreet, MLB.com, DailyMotion, SB Nation, Instagram, and ESPN.

More from comScore here. Charts below:

ComScore has released its search data for February 2012, and Google continues to lead, gaining 0.2 percentage points over the previous month, up to 66.4% in February from 66.2% in January. Microsoft sites, which includes its Bing search engine, also continued to hold second place, up just 0.1 percentage points to reach a 15.3% share. Yahoo, meanwhile, dropped 0.3 points to 13.8%, down from 14.1% in January.

None of the numbers are all that remarkable, which, when you think about the changes Google recently introduced to its core product involving the fusion of social and search, is actually somewhat remarkable.

Trailing the three search leaders were Ask Network at 3.0% and AOL, Inc. (disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL) with 1.5% of the market.

In terms of explicit search queries, the rankings remained the same, with Google at 11.7 billion queries, followed by Microsoft at 2.7 billion and Yahoo sites with 2.4 billion. However, all three were down by 1% in terms of queries from January. Ask Network, with 535 million queries was up by 2% in the same time frame and AOL with 266 million queries was down 4%.

In “Powered by” searches in February, Google gained, going from 68.4% in January to 68.6% last month. Microsoft’s “powered by Bing” search, which includes Yahoo, dropped slightly, from 26.5% in January to 26.2% in February.

One thing these results do show is that Google users have not yet been so turned off by Google’s search engine changes, including its introduction of social search known as “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW), to have actually migrated over to another competing search portal. Introduced in early January, SPYW adds search results from Google’s social network, Google+, above other organic search results surfaced by Google’s engine. There has been a lot of grumbling about the changes, but nothing that has impacted Google’s use as a search engine. (Google’s public image may be another matter, though).

In addition, it’s also too early to see the results of Google’s decision to merge all its user privacy policies under one umbrella, a change that went live on March 1st. That move had raised the ire of some privacy advocates, but it’s unlikely that this will result in bottom line impacts to Google searches, either.

Smartphone users are, country by country, starting to gradually outnumber those who are using feature phones, and at the same time, consumers have passed a different kind of penetration: a majority are now using mobile devices to do a lot more than just make phone calls.

A lengthy annual report out from comScore today, surveying mobile usage across Canada, France, Germany Italy, Japan, Spain, the U.S. and U.K., found that mobile media usage has passed the 50 percent mark, meaning that more than half of us are accessing the web, apps and content downloads on our smartphones. But it’s not always the case that more smartphones always equals more media usage. In fact, the highest usage of mobile media comes from the country with the lowest smartphone penetration.

It’s Japan, where comScore says 76.2 percent of the population is using mobile media services, but where, surprisingly, less than 17 percent have smartphones. This is in contrast to the U.K. and U.S., where the correlation is a little more direct: smartphones now respectively account for 51.3 and 41.8 percent of all devices, and 56.6 percent and 55.2 percent of mobile users are accessing mobile media.

Ironically, it seems that Japan’s early move into mobile content – the i-mode service from DoCoMo, launched in the 1990′s, being one of the very first plays at offering more than just voice and text to users – is partly to blame.

comScore notes that the prevalence of those services and handsets presented a “barrier to entry” for smartphone makers, who perhaps didn’t have as hungry a market to serve. Smartphones are making more headway Japan now, comScore says, with Android and iOS platforms accounting for 94.1 percent of devices sold and more devices coming online at lower price points. (One of those, a Disney Mobile phone with NTT Docomo running a forked version of Android, is pictured here.)

Mobile still a niche player. Japan is not the only surprise in this report. Another is that even with a majority of the people using mobile devices to access media, web usage is still minor compared to PCs. comScore notes that in the U.S. in December, handsets contributed 5.2 percent, tablets 2.5 percent and “other” devices 0.5 percent of Internet access. Together that still only makes 8.2 percent, with computers accounting for the rest. Other countries surveyed had similarly low numbers:

One other interesting disconnect in the research is that although Android is the more popular platform overall, it turns out that Apple accounted for the top three devices sold in the U.S. in 2011, and the top two in the European countries surveyed by comScore. So while Android is the platform winner, Apple wins the day on devices.

comScore just released its monthly U.S. online video data, and while viewership dipped slightly in January 2012 (from December), long-form video content views are on the rise. According to comScore, 181 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 40 billion videos of online video content in January, compared to 182 million users who viewed 43.5 billion videos in December. And 84.4 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in January. The duration of the average online content video was 6.1 minutes (up from 5.8 minutes in December), while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.

Once again, YouTube ranked as the top online video content property in January with 152 million unique viewers, followed by VEVO with 51.5 million, Yahoo Sites with 49.2 million, Viacom Digital with 48.1 million and Facebook.com with 45.1 million. Google Sites (YouTube) generated the highest number of views at 18.6 billion, followed by Hulu with 877 million and VEVO with 717 million. The average viewer watched 22.6 hours of online video content, with YouTube (7.5 hours) and Hulu (3.2 hours) seeing the highest average engagement.

Specifically on YouTube, video music channels VEVO (50.6 million viewers) and Warner Music (29.7 million viewers) were the most popular amongst viewers. Gaming channel Machinima ranked third with 23.8 million viewers, followed by Maker Studios with 12.5 million, FullScreen with 11.6 million and Big Frame with 8.2 million. Among the top 10 YouTube partners, VEVO demonstrated the highest engagement (62 minutes per viewer) and highest number of videos viewed (696 million), while Machinima exhibited the second highest engagement (60 minutes per viewer) and number of videos viewed (347 million).

Americans viewed 5.6 billion video ads in January, with Hulu delivering the highest number of video ad impressions at 1.4 billion. Adap.tv ranked second overall (and highest among video ad exchanges/networks) with 652 million ad views, followed by BrightRoll Video Network with 598 million, Tremor Video with 580 million and Specific Media with 398 million.

Time spent watching video ads totaled more than 2.3 billion minutes during the month, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 540 million minutes. Video ads reached 47 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 38 times during the month. Hulu delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 43, while ESPN delivered an average of 20 ads per viewer. Video ads accounted for 12.2 percent of all videos viewed and 0.9 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

Digital audience measurement company comScore this morning reported its earnings for Q4 and full year 2011. Last quarter, comScore says it achieved record revenue of $62.6 million, a 22 percent increase compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

However, comScore posted a net loss of $3.3 million, or a loss of $0.10 per share, for the quarter. The reason for the – unexpected – loss isn’t hard to find: the company says it includes $7.8 million in costs related to litigation with Nielsen and the related settlement.

For your background: Nielsen originally filed suit against its rival in March 2011, accusing comScore of infringing five patents it owns that relate to measuring and displaying online content.

Looking at full-year results, the impact of the patent-related litigation is even more apparent: comScore says the GAAP losses for 2011 ($15.8 million, or $0.49 per share) include costs of $16.5 million related to its litigation and subsequent settlement with Nielsen.

Costly feud indeed, though we should note Nielsen also acquired approximately $19 million in comScore restricted common stock as part of the settlement agreement.

Fourth quarter revenue was also negatively impacted by approximately $600,000 due to the effects of foreign exchange fluctuations, comScore adds.

comScore has released its ‘explicit’ U.S. search data for January of this year and while Google and Microsoft Bring’s search share continues to grow, Yahoo’s share dropped both year over year and month over month. This comes after Bing overtook Yahoo in terms of search queries for the first time in December. While Bing grew slightly from December 2011 to January, Google reached its highest share since December 2010 this past month.

Google search queries increased 6% year over year in January, to 66.2%, compared with 65.9% in December 2011 and 65.6% in January 2011. Bing queries increased 21% year over year in January to 15.2%, compared with 15.1% in December 2011 and 13.1% in January 2011. Yahoo queries are on a downward spiral, decreasing 8% year over year in January to 14.1%, compared with 14.5% in December 2011, 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.1% in January 2011. Yikes.

On a combined basis, Bing and Yahoo’s share of searches was 29.3%, compared with 29.6% in December 2011 and 29.2% in January 2011. Clearly, despite the fact that Bing’s technology is now powering Yahoo’s search, the rollup is still not powerful enough to overtake Google search share.

AOL queries declined 6% year over year January to 1.6%, compared with 1.6% in December 2011 and 1.7% in January 2011. And Ask.com queries declined 8% year over year in January to 3%, compared with 2.9% in December 2011 and 3.4% in January 2011.

It’s important to note that this data does not include search queries from mobile devices, which could boost Google’s share further. And these refer to “explicit” US search market share, which includes searches when someone actually types a query into a search box.

comScore also reports that the general search market continued to grow at double-digit rates in 2011, posting an 11-percent increase in 2011. Apparently, this momentum was driven by a 3 percent gain in unique searchers and a 7 percent gain in the number of searches per searcher.

Google’s search query volume grew 10 percent, driven mostly by gains in searches per searcher (up
7 percent). Bing had the highest growth in search query volume in 2011 at 40 percent, propelled by sizeable gains in both unique searchers (up 6 percent) and searches per searcher (up 31 percent).

comScore just released its monthly mobile numbers, which charts smartphone usage from U.S. consumers for the three month period ending in December 2011. For the period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices, which is in line with the previous period’s usage. With respect to smartphone usage, 97.9 million (up from 91.4 million people in the previous period) people in the U.S. used smartphones during the three months ending in December, representing 40 percent of all mobile subscribers.

Google Android continued to be the most popular smartphone platform with 47.3 percent market share, up 2.5 percentage points from September. Apple took the second position, growing 2.2 percentage points to grab 29.6 percent of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 16 percent share, followed by Microsoft (4.7 percent) and Symbian (1.4 percent).

Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 25.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (no change from September), followed by LG with 20 percent share and Motorola with 13.3 percent share. Apple has 12.4 percent share of total mobile subscribers (up 2.2 percentage points), while RIM following with 6.7 percent share.

As mobile phone usage increases and smartphone adoption grows, more and more consumers are actually using their mobile for functions other than phone calls. In December, 74.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device; ownloaded applications were used by 47.6 percent of subscribers (up 5.1 percentage points), while browsers were used by 47.5 percent (up 4.6 percentage points). Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 3.8 percentage points to 35.3 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 31.4 percent of the mobile audience (up 2.6 percentage points), while 23.8 percent listened to music on their phones (up 2.9 percentage points).

Google just revealed in its fourth quarter earnings, Android has been activated on over 250 million devices, up 50 million since November of last year. But iOS is growing as well. Nielsen reported recently new smartphone buyers are more interested in the iPhone (particularly the 4S) vs. Android phones.

Audience measurement firm comScore has just released its U.S. online video rankings for December 2011. There are few surprises: Google’s YouTube is still king of the hill, while VEVO remains firmly in second place with roughly a third of Google Sites’ audience.

In total, comScore says 182 million U.S. users watched online video content in December 2011 for an average of 23.2 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience viewed 43.5 billion videos.

What caught my eye, however, was that Facebook dropped from third place in November 2011 to fifth place, trailing Yahoo and Viacom properties again, in a single month.

According to comScore’s data, almost 50.8 million unique viewers watched online videos on Facebook.com in November 2011. The month after that, only a little over 42 million people did.

The number of videos watched by these people also dropped significantly: from roughly 270 million in November 2011 to close to 240 million in December 2011.

Looking at the data from October 2011, the drop becomes even more noteworthy: that month Facebook had bumped VEVO off #2 with almost 60 million viewers watching 346 million videos.

That’s a loss of 18 million unique viewers in two months for online video content posted on Facebook.com. I’m struggling to find an explanation for this, and comScore did not offer one either.

Care to venture a guess?

comScore has released its search data for December 2011, and Google continues to dominate in terms of share, with 65.9%, compared with 65.4% in November 2011 and 66.6% in December 2010. Year-over-year, queries increased 9.7% in December.

Yahoo queries came in with 14.5% share, compared with 15.1% in November 2011 and 16.0% in December 2010. Microsoft’s Bing’s share of searches in December was 15.1%, compared with 15% in November 2011 and 12.0% in December 2010. Since Bing powers Yahoo search, combined the two search engine’s share of searches was 29.6%, compared with 30.1% in November 2011. AOL queries declined 8% in December with 1.6% share.

In terms of search queries, this was the first month Bing overtook Yahoo in terms of search queries, says Citi analyst Mark Mahaney. Both search portals are powered by the same technologies but clearly Yahoo search traffic is declining, which is just another problem added to new CEO’s Scott Thompson’s list of problems for the company.

As Mahaney writes in his report citing the new data, “Scott Thompson has his work cut out for him.”

comScore also reports that more than 18.2 billion ‘explicit’ core searches were conducted in December (up 2 percent) (Explicit searches exclude contextually driven searches that do not
reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results). Google Sites ranked first with 12 billion searches (up 3 percent), followed by Microsoft with 2.7 billion (up 2 percent) and Yahoo Sites with 2.6 billion. Ask Network delivered 531 million searches (up 3 percent), while AOL came in with 287 million searches in the month.

Americans conducted 20.5 billion total core search queries in December (up 3 percent). Google had 13.6 billion searches (up 4 percent), followed by Yahoo with 3.3 billion (up 2 percent) and Microsoft with 2.8 billion (up 2 percent).

comScore has just released its latest numbers regarding the mobile landscape here in the U.S., finding that Samsung is still the top OEM with a 25.6 percent marketshare, up just .3 percentage points from the three month period ending in August. Meanwhile, Apple’s price drop on the iPhone 4 along with the introduction of the iPhone 4S has taken its share of the market from 9.8 percent to 11.2 percent.

Mind you, this report doesn’t include holiday sales numbers (Galaxy Nexus, included), and as we know thanks to Flurry data, 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas day. It’s unclear how exactly those activations were split among the two platforms, so there’s no telling if it actually made a difference in market share, but it’s worth considering. These numbers also include feature phones as well as smartphones.

LG (number 2) and Motorola (number 3) both slipped a bit during this time frame, along with last place RIM (which is to be expected, seeing that RIM is doing silly things like getting $1.7 million in PlayBooks stolen at a truck stop).

As far as the mobile OS is concerned, Google still reigns supreme with a 47 percent market share, up from 43.8 percent last period. Apple comes in second, taking its share from 27.3 percent to 28.7 percent, while RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia all slipped this period. Most notably, RIM lost 3.1 percentage points in platform market share, dropping from 19.7 percent in August to 16.6 percent.

Online audience measurement and Web analytics companies Nielsen and comScore have settled their patent disputes, according to a joint statement released this morning.

Nielsen filed suit against its rival in March 2011, accusing comScore of infringing five patents it owns that relate to measuring and displaying online content. Sure enough, comScore countersued Nielsen just a few days later.

Now, the companies have seemingly buried the hatchet and come to this elaborate agreement:

“As part of this settlement both companies will enter into a cross-licensing agreement. Subject to retained rights by Nielsen, comScore will acquire ownership of the four Nielsen families of patents asserted in litigation, a portfolio with many U.S. and international patents.

comScore also grants Nielsen worldwide licenses for the families of the four patents comScore asserted in litigation. Both parties agree not to bring any patent action against the other for the next three years.

In addition, Nielsen has acquired approximately $19 million in comScore restricted common stock with neutral voting requirements, which Nielsen has agreed to hold for a period of one year minimum.”

The last part of the settlement agreement is particularly interesting in my view.

comScore just released its U.S. online holiday spending numbers for the season to-date, and as predicted, consumers continued to spend online in record amounts. For the first 39 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, $24.6 billion has been spent online, which is a 15 percent increase compared to the same days last year.

The most recent week ending Dec. 9 reached $5.9 billion in spending, up 15 percent with 3 days surpassing $1 billion in spending. For the holiday season-to-date, six individual days have surpassed the billion dollar threshold, led by Cyber Monday at $1.25 billion.

To put this in perspective, seven individual shopping days have surpassed $1 billion in spending, and the majority of these took place this year. Cyber Monday 2011 leads with $1.25 billion in sales, and Monday, December 5, 2011 now ranks as the second heaviest spending day in history at $1.18 billion.

So why are so many people flocking online? It’s partly due to more emphasis on coupons and deals as well as an increased amount of free shipping offers by retailers. Another interesting factor to consider is how much mobile helped contribute to this year’s surge in online spending. More and more consumers are using price comparison apps, and making purchases on their mobile phones both from their couches, desks and from inside brick and mortar stores. E-commerce companies are quickly catching on to this trend, and are even offering strong incentives (i.e. Amazon) to use and buy via mobile apps.

And there are still more big spending days on the horizon.

Tomorrow brings Green Monday. The term “Green Monday” was coined by eBay in 2007 to describe the Monday occurring around the second week of December, which has tended to be the heaviest online spending days of the year, as it is one of the last days of the week where consumers can purchase and still receive shipping by the holidays. Over the past six holiday shopping seasons, “Green Monday” has consistently ranked among the top spending days of the season.

Free Shipping day is also this week, which is a marketing event that takes place Friday, December 16, and is also one of the last days when merchants offer free shipping with delivery by Christmas Eve. comScore says that in past years Free Shipping Day has helped boost online spending activity later into the season. Last year’s Free Shipping Day, for example, was the third heaviest online spending day of the year at $942 million, a 61 percent increase from 2009.

With more spending on the horizon, clearly e-retailers are in for a very merry holiday season.

comScore, a web and mobile data measurement company, is teaming up with Buddy Media, a company that provides Facebook Page and social media management tools to brands. The strategic partnership basically aims to give brands and agencies better data measurement on social analytics.

Buddy Media is best known for its all-in-one social media management system to help create, manage and track social campaigns on Facebook. With regard to Facebook, the platform lets brand managers agencies create, manage and track Facebook pages in a variety of languages to drive and increase user and brand engagement.

Mutual clients using the Buddy Media social marketing suite and comScore Social measurement service will be able to better quantify the impact of their social media efforts, accessing in-depth data on reach/frequency, demographics, online behavior and benchmarking of competitive brands. As part of the partnership, the companies have agreed to integrate comScore data into the Buddy Media product suite and workflow.

The integration is a premium product, and current Buddy Media clients will continue to receive the company’s in-house analytics in the social marketing suite for free. But clearly, the comScore analytics could provide more in-depth information.

Buddy Media recently raised $54 million in new funding from GGV Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Insight Venture Partners. The company also just announced a pilot program with google to allow businesses and brands to manage their Google+ Pages using Buddy Media.

Mobile shopping is undoubtedly on the rise, and today comScore is releasing new data reinforcing this continuing trend. According to the data research and analysis firm, 38 percent of smartphone owners have used their phone to make a purchase at least once in the course of their device ownership.

The most popular products purchased on smartphones during the month of September included digital goods, clothing/accessories, tickets and daily deals. In September, two-thirds of all smartphone owners performed some sort of shopping activity on their phones, including comparing products and prices, searching for coupons, taking product pictures or locating a retail store.

In September, digital content purchases, such as music, eBooks, TV episodes and movies, were the most popular mobile purchases with 47 percent the share; 37 percent purchased clothing or accessories directly from retailer, and 35 percent of purchasers bought event tickets. Slightly more than one in three mobile purchasers bought daily deals and gift certificates on their device in September.

In terms of where shoppers were when they purchase items via their phone, 56 percent did so while at home, whereas 42 percent of consumers made purchases while out of home or at work. And 37 percent of the shopper who made remote purchases did so while traveling or commuting. Slightly more than one in three purchasers used their smartphone to make a purchase while in a store.

The fact that over 30 percent of purchasers used their smartphone to buy a product while in a store is interesting, considering that many are probably using their phones as a tool for real-time price and product comparisons. This holiday shopping season is expected to be the year of mobile, so we’ll see if consumers use their phones for retail purchases in record amounts.

Consumers continue to set records with online shopping sales this holiday season. After spending a whopping (and record) $1.25 billion on Cyber Monday, online shoppers continued spending online, with two other days in the past week eclipsing the $1 billion mark in e-commerce sales, bringing the total week’s value to $6 billion. comScore reports that Tuesday, November 29 reached $1.12 billion, while Wednesday, November 30 reached $1.03 billion. These three billion dollar spending days currently rank as three of the four heaviest online spending days in history (with Cyber Monday 2010 being the other). To date, $18.7 billion has been spent online this holiday season, a 15 percent increase from the same period last year.

So what is the reason why more consumers are spending online? comScore says that free shipping is one major factor many shoppers are considering when paying for presents this holiday season. This incentive, says the data research company, is being used at record levels over the first few weeks of the holiday season.

In fact, more than half of all transactions have included free shipping with rates increasing later into the season. The week of Thanksgiving (week ending Nov. 27) saw free shipping occur on 64.4 percent of transactions, while Cyber Week has maintained a similar level at 63.2 percent. In each case, these rates were approximately 10 percentage points higher than last year, showing that more consumers are using these incentives.

comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni says that most consumers actually expect free shipping deals during holiday promotion periods, and retailers are realizing that including this incentive is necessary to lock-in shoppers. More than three-quarters of consumers say that free shipping is important to them when making an online purchase, and nearly half say they will abandon their shopping cart at checkout if they find free shipping is not being offered, he explains.

Interestingly, free shipping also it tends to generate higher average order values, which helps retailers to at least partially offset lower margins. In fact, on Cyber Monday, IBM reported that the average order amount was up 2.6 percent this year from $193.24 to $198.26.

As retailers continue to offer free shipping in the next few weeks, we’re left to wonder if ‘Free Shipping Day’ and the last few weeks of the holiday season will bring even higher sales. For background, Free Shipping Day is a marketing event that generally takes place Friday, December 16, one of the last days when merchants offer free shipping with delivery by Christmas Eve.

comScore says that in past years Free Shipping Day has helped boost online spending activity later into the season. Last year’s Free Shipping Day, for example, was the third heaviest online spending day of the year at $942 million, a 61 percent increase from 2009.

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and now the remaining holiday shopping period continuing to break online sales records, clearly more and more consumers are flocking online to get better deals. And brick and mortar stores may be in trouble if this trend continues in future holiday seasons. With the massive amounts being spent this season, it does make you wonder if there will be a day when all of our holiday shopping will be done online.

comScore just released its monthly U.S. mobile data report, which took a look at trends and activity during the three month average period ending October 2011. While Google Android continued to gain ground in the smartphone market (with 46.3 percent market share); Apple’s OEM share gained during this period (perhaps with the introduction of the iPhone 4S and Sprint as a carrier in the market), with one in ten mobile subscribers now using an iPhone.

According to comScore, 90 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in October, which is up 10 percent from the preceding three month period. And during the time period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices.

In terms of OEMs, Samsung to be the top handset manufacturer overall with 25.5 percent market share, followed by LG with 20.6 percent share and Motorola with 13.6 percent share. Apple took the fourth spit with 10.8 percent share of mobile subscribers (up 1.3 percentage points), while RIM rounded out the top five with 6.6 percent share.

With respect to operating system, Google’s Android OS continued to dominate with a nearly 50 percent market share, up 4.4 percentage points from the prior three-month period. Apple OS share only grew 1 percentage point to 28.1 percent of the smartphone market. And RIM ranked third with 17.2 percent share, followed by Microsoft (5.4 percent) and Symbian (1.6 percent).

As mobile phone usage increases and smartphone adoption grows, more and more consumers are actually using their mobile for functions other than phone calls. In October, 71.8 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device, up 1.8 percentage points. Browsers were used by 44 percent of subscribers (up 2.9 percentage points). Downloaded applications were used by 43.8 percent (up 3.2 percentage points).

Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 2.2 percentage points to 32.3 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 29.2 percent of the mobile audience (up 1.4 percentage points), while 21.2 percent listened to music on their phones (up 0.9 percentage points).

The U.S. comScore Video Metrix stats are out now for October, revealing that 184 million U.S. Internet users watched online videos last month, with an average of 21.1 hours per viewers. The total U.S. audience viewed 42.6 billion videos, an all-time high, says the measurement firm. Meanwhile, “Google sites,” led by YouTube, retained its number one ranking. However, in October, Facebook staged a comeback by moving up into the number two slot from its previous position of fifth place.

Facebook had been the number three property in August, but dropped down to the fifth slot in September, losing out to VEVO, Microsoft Sites and Viacom Digital. This month, Facebook saw 59.8 million viewers, second only to the ever-dominant “Google Sites” (mainly YouTube) and its record-high of 161 million views and 20.9 billion videos viewed.

VEVO is still going strong, with 57 million viewers, followed by Microsoft Sites with 49.1 million and Viacom Digital with 48.2 million. As noted above, there were more than 42 billion videos viewed this past month, which meant a lot of ads were viewed too. 7.5 billion video ads were shown in October, the most of which were on Hulu where over 1.3 billion impressions were served. Hulu also had the high frequency of ads, with an average of 46.5 ads per viewer.

Time spent viewing ads totaled over 3.2 billion minutes during the month, with Tremor Video delivering the highest duration of ads at 614 million minutes. Tremor Video ranked second overall in ad impressions, too, and highest among video ad exchanges/networks, as it crossed the 1 billion mark for the first time. BrightRoll Video Network ranked third with 756 million, followed by Specific Media with 512 million and CBS Interactive with 415 million.

53% of the U.S. population watched video ads in October, at an average of 47 times per month. (Makes you want that part of your life back, doesn’t it?)

ComScore also ranked the top YouTube partner channels this month, with the top being VEVO (54.2 million viewers), Warner Music (30.4 million viewers), gaming channel Machinima, Schmooru, Maker Studios, Demand Media, FullScreen, Warner Bros, IGN and Big Frame.