Launched this morning, comScore’s “Media Metrix Multi-platform” shakes up the existing rankings in some dramatic ways. Music site Pandora, for instance, jumps from #61 on the list to #23 while ESPN jumped four slots to #19. The sports site’s jump comes thanks to the inclusion of the 35 percent of people who consume ESPN only on mobile, not desktop, devices. Other big winners included Amazon, Wal-Mart and e-Bay; the three companies all had an incremental mobile audience of more than 20 percent. Here’s a look at some of the US numbers:

The new metrics, which are based on a mix of internet tagging and census methods, also reveal that the number of so-called “unique visitors” to websites are much higher when mobile figures are included. For instance, comScore says that more than 10 websites have more than 100 million visitors when mobile stats are included (compared to only six such sites if only desktop figures are used).

comScore says its new analytics system also suggests other important lessons in how publishers and advertisers measure a website’s success. In particular, the company recommends valuing “engagement” (time spent on a site) over page views. Under the engagement method, comScore says Facebook ranked first in the mobile category.

comScore’s new metrics system is still in beta but, given that mobile consumption is an irreversible phenomenon, it seems inevitable that publishers and advertisers will have to get accustomed to the new measurements. The growing predominance of mobile also poses challenge to publishers and advertisers who are still struggling out how to extract money from smaller screens.

While comScore has offered mobile measurement tools in the past, the significance of the new product is that provides an unduplicated tally across all platforms. More details are available here at comScore’s release.

(Image by iko via Shutterstock)

Music video platform Vevo, which had been one of the fastest growing video properties on the Internet, is witnessing a steep viewership drop, at least on the web.

According to numbers released Monday by Internet usage tracker comScore, Vevo’s unique viewers in the U.S. during May dropped 20 percent from the same period last year, from 60.4 million to around 48.3 million.

Meanwhile, the average number of minutes each viewer spent watching Vevo videos in May declined 26 percent over the same period, from 105.1 to 77.7.

The online music platform, jointly launched in December 2009 by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media, had been on a meteoric rise, with unique viewers growing 44 percent from June 2010 to June 2011.

So what’s going on?

Also read: What a Facebook deal with Vevo could unleash

A Vevo spokesperson told paidContent Monday that the comScore metrics don’t offer a complete picture of a content business that has migrated to some degree from a core YouTube channel to mobile platforms, areas that not included in the research group’s measurement.

Vevo claims “active” users of its mobile apps have increased 46 percent year over year, with mobile streams up 434 percent over that period, reaching 450 million worldwide in May.

Added: Vevo additionally notes that a methodology change enacted by comScore in July 2011 renders our May 2011 – May 2012 comparison of minutes spent by user moot. In fact, minutes spent by user per month watching Vevo content have actually risen since the methodology change. 

Vevo also attributes some of the discrepancy to Google’s redesign of YouTube, which has moved away from feeds of most popular videos to a channel/subscriber model.

The comScore metrics also don’t reflect performance in other territories where Vevo operates, such as Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Note: This story was updated to include Vevo’s response.

But as monthly video data released by comScore shows, both companies have managed to significantly increase the amount of time viewers spend watching video on their respective channels.

Also read: TV nets wrap upfront week: “The biz still goes through us”

According to comScore, viewers spent an average of 434.8 minutes in April watching video on Google channels, a grouping the mainly includes the assets of YouTube. That represents an uptick of 55 percent over April 2011.

On Yahoo channels, meanwhile, viewers spent an average of 73.7 minutes in April watching video, nearly double the 37.5 minutes they averaged in April 2011.

While time spent viewing these leading digital channel operators has increased dramatically, total unique viewers watching them has not.

Tabulating 157.7 million unique video users in April, Google sites experienced only an 11 percent increase over April 2011′s tally of 142.7 million.

Yahoo, meanwhile, was virtually flat, counting 53.6 million uniques in April compared to 53.2 million during the same period last year.

These year-over-year benchmarks for the leading internet video providers follow trend lines of the broader online video industry.

For the entire online video universe, comScore tabulated 180.8 million unique viewers in April, up just 5 percent over April 2011. However, total minutes spent watching online video increased 46 percent to an average of 1,307.7 (I know, who are the people with all this time who are top-weighting these averages?).

Even with the uptick in consumption, YouTube and Yahoo’s rise in usage has come at a cost to others.

Vevo traffic continues to slide

Music video giant Vevo, for example, saw its unique viewers plummet 10 percent to 49.5 million over the same period, while its average viewership time declined by 41 percent to 57.9 minutes. (The comScore report doesn’t track mobile usage, so it’s hard to tell how many viewers are migrating to mobile platforms.)

Also, Viacom digital, the leader among traditional media companies in the digital video realm, saw its average viewer time drop 27 percent to 58.9 minutes (unique viewers were flat year over year at 41.2 million).

In either case, the phantom ads amount to a frightful waste for ad buyers and a problem for publishers who still face skepticism about the efficacy of online ads.

A New Era of Online Ads

Now, new ad technology is promising to eliminate ghost ads while also giving publishers new tools to assign premium or bargain prices to ads on different parts of a webpage.

Both comScore and SAY Media say they’ve solved the phantom ad menace with kits that let advertisers use dashboards to confirm the ads they buy are seen and not just served.

“Advertisers will know what’s rendered and what’s not,” says Matt Sanchez of SAY Media, whose partner sites include popular tech destinations like TechDirt and ReadWriteWeb. He says the technology produces click through rates three to four times higher than the industry standard.

The upshot of the new ad metrics should be a drop in overall ad inventory and an increase in CPM (cost per thousand impressions) because advertisers can now have more confidence about about what they’re buying.

The new tools, which both companies have unveiled in the last few weeks, may also juice the market for ads based on views alone.

According to Forbes’ Chief Insight Officer, Bruce Rogers, many brands responded to the financial crisis by retrenching to ads based on “transactional activities” — in other words, they’ll pay for ads that are clicked but not having their ads simply appear on a site.

Rogers hopes that Forbes’ decision to use comScore’s new tool, called “Validated Campaign Essentials,” will lead more ad buyers to build brand awareness by paying for pure impressions.

‘Gold below the Fold’

New ad verification techniques are likely to change not only ad buyers’ calculations but those of publishers as well.

According to Andrew Lipsman of comScore, content companies may be undervaluing some of their “below the fold” inventory. In practice, this means they’re selling down-the-page ads at a clearance even when those ads may be getting some of the best exposure on their site.

“There’s gold below the fold,” says Lipsman, who claims the new technology will allow publishers to identify and properly price their best ad space.

SAY Media’s Sanchez argues that the technology will also force publishers to remake their page layouts, and optimize their design to accommodate fewer and more effective ads.

“There’s too many ads on a page. It’s time to pull of the clutter.”

Build it — but will anyone come?

The new tools seem like a win-win for both ad buyers and publishers, and could end much of the black magic that many people associate with online ad buying.

But that doesn’t mean people will use them.

“For advertisers, this should be like ‘sound the flight of the angels.’ Who would say no? But I’ve been somewhat surprised that the impact and uptake wasn’t immediate,” said Forbes’ Bruce Rogers.

Rather than rushing to embrace the product, he says, the industry has so far responded with “inertia.”

Rogers thinks this is understandable given supply chains and entrenched habits. He hopes that the site of the new ad tracking dashboards will soon lead more advertisers to jump on board.

“It’s going to happen.”

The findings are part on a white paper that summarizes the ad experience of twelve major brands including Sprint (NYSE: S), Ford and Kelloggs.

In a preview of the paper released in January, comScore reported that 31 percent of the 1.8 billion ad impressions purchased by the companies were not seen at all.

The findings are significant because brands are shifting a greater percentage of their marketing budgets to digital advertising. And, unlike a TV or radio ad, it’s hard to tell when and where an online display appeared — or even if it appeared at all.

Today’s white paper shows that brands are struggling not only to make sure their appear, but that they appear to the right viewers.

According to the study, 3-10 percent of all ad impressions are shown to non-humans — bots and spiders that induce a web page to display an ad. It also finds that 72 percent of all ad campaigns resulted in brands placing their ads next to “objectionable” content. In practice, this means that brands paid to have their ads appear on sites dedicated to file-sharing or phishing:

These findings may worry ad buyers but may actually symbolize overall progress for the still-emerging online ad industry. That’s because this is the first time, according to comScore, that brands have been able to validate their ads across a variety of ad services.

The findings may also presage a shift in how brands and publishers approach ad buying. According to Anne Hunter, an SVP at comScore and one of the study’s authors, ad-buying will become less a leap-of-faith for advertisers. Publishers, meanwhile, will have a greater ability to ensure they don’t off-load premium ad inventory at discount prices.

The study also found that, for now, “good guys” are not being rewarded for providing a quality advertising audience — brands have been paying the same amount for an ad regardless of whether it is seen or not.

comScore has an interest in the findings because it sells ad monitoring tools. The company gathers its research by working with a large sample group of internet users who let comScore track their web surfing behavior.

comScore’s report can be found here.

As tablets and e-readers become more popular, “acceleration of e-book downloads…represented a strong driver of this growth,” ComScore says in its new report, “U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2012.”

Retail e-commerce spending — which does not include spending on travel — hit $161.5 billion last year, up 13 percent from 2010. Digital content and subscriptions were the fastest-growing category, followed by consumer electronics (you need devices to consume all that content, right?).

Download the full report here.

Comscore’s latest numbers reinforce the same trends we’ve seen all year in the U.S. smartphone market. RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) and Motorola (NYSE: MMI) are struggling, the former because each month fewer people in the U.S. are using a BlackBerry and the latter because of product delays and strong competition. RIM lost 5 percentage points of smartphone operating system market share in August as compared to May, dropping it to just 19 percent of the market.

Meanwhile, Android gained a nearly identical amount, 5.6 percentage points, to hold 44 percent of the market as measured by operating system in August. That doesn’t even take into account the launches of Samsung’s Galaxy S II and Motorola’s Droid Bionic, both of which arrived in September and have been very well-received by the gadget reviewers.

Apple is of course still chugging along, picking up 0.7 percentage points of platform market share in August during a month in which speculation about a next-generation product began to mount. The iPhone 4S will go on sale for AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon, and Sprint’s network next week. But Samsung is still the leading smartphone vendor in the U.S. with 25 percent of all mobile subscribers sorted by device maker as of August.

A few broad conclusions: Android is hurting RIM more than it is hurting Apple. Apple is in excellent shape heading into the holiday season but will want to keep an eye on Samsung and Google’s CTIA event next week. And Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) better hope that the first few Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Windows Phone 7 devices spark some demand, because its share of the U.S. mobile market is at 5.7 percent and it is not going in the right direction.

ComScore’s MobiLens research takes its data from online surveys of people over the age of 13 in the top-five markets in Europe: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. It found that in the three-month period ending in July 2011, some 88.4 million mobile subscribers in those countries reported using smartphones.

In something of a statistical coincidence, researchers found that usage of Android and Symbian phones respectively grew and declined by nearly the same percentage: Android’s share went up by 16.2 percent, while Symbian’s share went down by 16.1 percent. Despite that, Symbian remains the region’s most popular smartphone OS, accounting for 37.8 percent of all devices — although that’s a big drop from the 53.9 percent share a year ago. Android has lept to number-two position, with 22.3 percent of all smartphones, a huge jump from the six percent share it had a year ago.

Although Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is a close third to Android with 20.3 percent, it appears that its growth has stalled somewhat: it’s rise was only 1.2 percent — lower than RIM’s at 1.5 percent. Many expect Apple to launch at least one new device before the end of this year, which should reignite Apple’s growth in the quarters ahead.

And — I am starting to feel like a broken record with this one — Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) once again is reported to be losing some market share for its smartphone OS, the second-biggest decline in the rankings after Symbian, with a drop of 4.8 percent. It also swapped places with RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) for the smallest market share for a smartphone OS in the region. (That Mango is as ripe as it will ever be for picking, it seems.)

OEM shares. Among Android OEMs, HTC is taking the lead in the EU5 with a 34.6 percent share, while Samsung in second position at 31.7 percent. That’s the reverse of what is unfolding in the U.S. and the wider world, where Samsung is the leading Android maker. From comScore’s numbers, it looks like HTC’s pole position comes from its huge strength in the UK market. It commands a 50 percent share of all Android smartphones in the UK, but Samsung is the leader in France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

Worth noting, too, that in the EU5, Motorola (NYSE: MMI) has a very small share of the Android market — only 3.6 percent. That points to the challenge that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) might have in the region as the would-be owner of Motorola Mobility.

In all, comScore says that Android devices accounted 19.7 million of all smartphones in the EU5, with the UK ranking the highest among them at 6.3 million.

In terms of what users are doing on their smartphones, it looks like they are continuing to text more than anything else (82.5 percent reported texting). Using the mobile browser just slightly edged out using apps on devices: 26.2 percent versus 25.3 percent. Meanwhile, games and music were dead even at 24.6 percent.

Full tables below:

comScore says that in the last three months to July 2011, Android reinforced its lead as the top smartphone platform in the country, accounting for 41.8 percent of all smartphones, a rise of 5.4 percent compared to the previous quarter. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) did not grow as much, but still picked up one percentage point to remain in second position, with 27 percent of all smartphone subscribers using iPhones.

Meanwhile, RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), Windows Phone 7 and Symbian all lost market share, with RIM seeing the biggest drop of all, widening the gap between itself and iOS in the rankings:

Overall, Samsung has continued to hold the title of biggest OEM in the U.S., with a 25.5 percent share of the market, a growth of one percent. Apple, which only makes smartphones, comes in at number-four in the rankings, but its share grew the most compared to the preceding quarter: it now has a 9.5 percent share of the market, representing a growth of 1.2 percent. At the rate that Apple is going, it looks like it will soon overtake the next-biggest OEM on the list, Motorola (NYSE: MMI), which makes both feature and smart devices and lost 1.5 percent of its market share this quarter:

http://paidcontent.org/images/editorial/_original/comscore-july-2011-u.s.-mobile-oem-rankings-o.png

comScore says that today 82.2 million use a smartphone, while overall there are now 234 million U.S. consumers using mobile phones. That works out to a smartphone penetration of around 35 percent — a sign that there is still more growth to come in the market.

And it is perhaps because the majority of U.S. consumers still use feature phones (and a few very low-end ones at that) that the figures on mobile data usage are not higher. Although more than 70 percent of people used their phones to send an SMS, when it came to other mobile data services, the numbers were not as high. During the quarter, only around 40 percent used a mobile browser or an app (which incidentally are virtually level in terms of usage — so much for apps killing off mobile web use, or the converse). Only around one-third used a social networking service; less than a third played a mobile game; and only around 20 percent used their devices to listen to music.

On the positive side for the mobile world, though, all those numbers are going in the right direction at the moment — up.

Unlike many recent privacy lawsuits, which have focused on new forms of online tracking that consumers aren’t aware of, the suit against comScore focuses on a piece of software that consumers knowingly choose to install on their computers. About 2 million consumers worldwide have installed software that allows comScore to monitor their internet browsing habits. comScore gets people to sign up for its software by offering sweepstakes enrollments and prizes, as well as free computer games.

The plaintiffs in this suit say that the scope of comScore’s data collection is “terrifying”, and that the company’s disclosures aren’t good enough. For instance, the suit alleges that comScore software scans PDF and word-processing files on the computers of those who use it; and that it even scans files of other computers via local networks. The suit also accuses comScore of tinkering with a computer’s security settings and firewall settings.

The suit also alleges that computers that install comScore’s software can’t get rid of it when they want to. “In many cases, consumers are forced to purchase automated spyware removal software to fully eliminate any traces of Defendant’s software,” the suit states.

In general, internet privacy lawsuits that are proposed class-actions, such as this one, have not fared well in court. That’s because plaintiffs are often, as in this case, using pre-internet laws to try to punish what they see as internet-age misbehavior. For example, this suit accuses comScore of breaking a federal anti-wiretapping law and an anti-hacking law, both of which were passed in 1986.

However, even if the suit doesn’t succeed, the forensic evidence could be very embarrassing to comScore, if it is as the complaint describes. On one of comScore’s survey sites, it discloses that it monitors the internet behavior of users who install its software, but doesn’t say anything about behavior many consumers would find objectionable-scanning documents and emails, for instance.

The law firm filing the suit, Edelson McGuire, says it has been investigating comScore since 2010. “We retained multiple digital forensic firms, who each conducted dozens of independent tests,” name partner Jay Edelson told Reuters (NYSE: TRI).

A comScore spokesman said the company would aggressively defend itself against the suit, which it finds “to be without merit and full of factual inaccuracies.”

Mike Harris and Jeff Dunstan, and Plaintiffs v. comScore