comscore

Both Motorola and Research In Motion are leading their respective markets, according to market researcher ComScore. But Apple is coming on strong.

ComScore's latest data from September through December shows that Motorola was the top cell phone vendor in the U.S. with 23.5 percent market share. It was followed by LG, Samsung, and Nokia, with 21.9 percent, 21.2 percent, and 9.2 percent market share, respectively.

Motorola led the pack, but its market share still declined 1.4 percent between September and December. Samsung had the strongest increase with 0.8 percent growth over the … Read more

Hey, Web publishers! Want to boost your traffic overnight? Talk to ComScore, which is handing out millions of unique visitors.

The Web's dominant traffic counter is in the midst of overhauling its traffic counting system, in response to years of complaints from publishers who insist that their traffic has been undercounted.

Turns out, they were often right.

ComScore's old data, for instance, says the Huffington Post attracted 9.95 million unique visitors in December. But its new numbers peg HuffPo's December traffic at 20 million uniques.

The difference is that ComScore's old system tracked small panels … Read more

Holiday shoppers brought good cheer to e-commerce retailers, spending $27 billion online from November 1 through December 24, a 5 percent jump over last year, ComScore reported Wednesday.

The period from Black Friday through Christmas Eve was also bright and merry as sales grew by around 3.5 percent, even after adjusting for an additional shopping day this year. Consumer electronics proved to be the hottest selling category, rising 20 percent. Larger retailers outpaced smaller vendors thanks in part to their use of free shipping and marketing via social-networking sites, said ComScore.

The growth in this year's online holiday … Read more

A blizzard that pelted much of the Eastern Seaboard with over a foot of snow also led to a spike in last-minute online holiday shopping last weekend, traffic firm ComScore said Tuesday.

Online shopping continues to eat up a bigger chunk of holiday retail each year, but this season, with roads snowbound and temperatures well below freezing in some of the most populous areas of the country at the tail end of the holiday season, it was even more than usual. (Several cities in the mid-Atlantic, like Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., pulled in more snow in a single snowfall … Read more

This year's online holiday-shopping season has topped $19.9 billion so far--a 3 percent jump over the same period in 2008, according to ComScore.

Online sales were bolstered last week when consumers spent more than $800 million on two separate days, ComScore said. On Thursday, for example, consumers coughed up $852 million.

Monday has the potential to produce the best day of this year's holiday-shopping season, which started November 1 in ComScore's stats.

ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said that Monday "represents our best opportunity to finally surpass that elusive $900 million spending threshold. The early part … Read more

The 2009 holiday season thus far is revealing much stronger online sales figures than what was witnessed in 2008, market-research firm ComScore announced late Wednesday.

According to the company, which has monitored spending for the first 30 days of the November-December shopping season, sales are up 3 percent to $12.26 billion, compared to the same period in 2008. Cyber Monday sales hit $887 million in online spending, tallying a 5 percent gain over the same day last year. That amount also matched "the biggest spending day on record, December 9, 2008."

"We've seen an encouraging … Read more

Yahoo continues to lose share in the search market, as Google and Microsoft pick up the difference.

Comscore's measurement of the U.S. search market in October shows that Google--as usual--still dominates the search landscape. It now watches 65.4 percent of all searches pass through its servers, up 0.5 market share points from September of this year.

Yahoo, on the other hand, is going in the other direction as new friend Microsoft reaps the benefits. Yahoo lost 0.8 market share points in October compared to September, now down to 18 percent of the market. … Read more

Market research firm ComScore reported on Tuesday that touch-screen mobile-phone adoption is not only on the rise, it's growing at a rapid rate.

Touch-screen phone adoption grew by 159 percent between August 2008 and August 2009, according to ComScore. The firm also found that by the end of August 2009, there were 23.8 million users with touch-screen mobile phones in the United States alone. In August 2008, just over 9.2 million people were using touch-screen phones.

But it's not just the touch screen that's enjoying strong growth. ComScore also found that smartphones are gaining traction … Read more

Convention has a handshake like the Mafia.

Even when we resign from a job, even when we truly feel the people we worked with were weasels of the worst order, our idea of "the done thing" means we invite everyone for a painful beer in a local bar. We even buy them doughnuts.

Now one brave soul has perhaps not merely flouted convention, but, with one heartfelt e-mail, drop-kicked it to Hades.

According to The Chive.com, the e-mail was written by a senior media planner at a Chicago ad agency (I have a feeling I just might … Read more