Digital Media

Microsoft's new Bing search service is the fastest-growing U.S. search engine among the top 10, according to a Nielsen report released Monday.

The total amount of searches on Bing rang in at 1.1 billion for the month of August, a leap of 22.1 percent over July, winning Microsoft a 10.7 percent share of the search engine market.

Google remained in the top spot with a commanding 64.6 percent share, accounting for 7 billion searches in August, a gain of 2.6 percent over July. Yahoo saw its search results drop 4.2 percent for the month to 1.7 billion, earning it 16 percent of the market.

(Credit: Nielsen)

Other players in the top 10 included AOL Search in fourth place with 333 million searches and Ask.com Search in fifth with 186 million searches.

Similar studies have also seen a boost in Microsoft's search business. An August report from ComScore discovered that Microsoft's share of the global search engine market lept 41 percent from July 2008 to July 2009. Bing was introduced in May, taking the place of Microsoft's Live Search.

Earlier this week, Microsoft showed off a "visual search" feature for Bing that returns thumbnail images for at least some search results. Microsoft reportedly will be debuting a Bing 2.0 sometime soon sporting a variety of new features.

A screen capture of BigChampagne's new BC Dash, which enables users to monitor music consumption across the Web.

(Credit: BigChampagne)

Count BigChampagne among the companies trying to cut into Nielsen's media-measuring empire.

Universal Music Group, the largest of the four major recording companies, has agreed to a multi-year deal that calls for BigChampagne to help track the popularity of the label's music online. Traditionally, Universal has relied on Nielsen's SoundScan for such chores.

BigChampagne tracks online music and video consumption. Headquartered in Beverly Hills, Calif., BigChampagne is perhaps best known for being the first of the business-intelligence companies to measure activity at file-sharing networks, such as the original Napster.

"With the addition of BigChampagne, we provide a comprehensive view of the marketplace," Jim Urie, president and CEO of Universal Music Group Distribution, said in a statement. Urie said that the ability to measure radio, the Web, and brick-and-mortar retail stores "results in more opportunities for our artists and labels."

Universal's embrace of a Web intelligence product is symbolic of how important the Internet has become to the traditional music business, and the latest example of how Nielsen's competitors in a number of entertainment sectors are moving in on its core business.

On Saturday, Kenneth Li of The Financial Times reported that NBC Universal, Time Warner, CBS (parent company of CNET News), and Walt Disney are part of a consortium that intends to challenge Nielsen's decades-long control over the measuring of U.S. television viewership.

Nielsen representatives did not respond to an interview request but were quoted in Tvbythenumbers.com. They said the company "is committed to measuring across all screens--known in the industry as 'three screens': television, computer and mobile--as part of our long-term strategy. Over the last three years, we've invested more than a billion dollars in research and development as part of this effort."

Without accurate tracking numbers, advertisers say they risk wasting some of the $70 billion they spend on the U.S. TV industry annually. The perception by some in a multiple media areas is that Nielsen isn't equipped to provide all the answers--especially when it comes to the Web.

"The most deficient thing is there's no single source measurement (for TV and digital video)," Sam Armando, senior vice-president of audience analysis at Starcom Mediavest, told the Times.

Some in the music industry say a similar void exists in that sector. BigChampagne, which reached profitability not long after launching in 2000, hopes to fill it.

BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland

(Credit: BigChampagne)

Last week, the company rolled out BC Dash, a new browser-based tracking system that allows a user to monitor in real-time song sales or streams at a host of Web sites, offline locations and peer-to-peer networks. Some of the sources include iTunes, YouTube, MySpace, retail brick-and-mortar record stores, and Limewire.

The data can help the music director at a regional radio station learn what tunes are hot and that information can help him or her decide what songs to play.

BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland is the first to admit that the company has benefited from the massive shift in listener's habits the past several years. Ten years ago, Garland said, his company was surrounded by doubters, people who didn't think there would ever be anyone willing to spend to acquire intelligence about Internet-music listeners. Nine years ago when BigChampagne was founded, the market was insignificant. Not anymore.

"The Internet has inherited the music business," Garland said. "When you look at MySpace plays, Rhapsody, iTunes, Last.fm, all of that dwarfs traditional music purchasing. Instead of CDs, we paid attention to this sleepy little Internet thing, but it happened when no one was watching. Well, we were watching."

To be sure, SoundScan offers customers its own Internet tools and the company has been the nearly unchallenged leader in counting music purchases in the United States since 1992. Anytime a song or album moved up the Billboard charts, it was SoundScan that said it was so. Before SoundScan arrived on the scene, music companies gathered sales information calling stores and asking clerks which records were moving. Not surprisingly, the system was easy to manipulate.

SoundScan changed all that when it brought in bar codes and computers to objective sales tracking.

In a 1992 story in The New York Times, a source told the newspaper that the major record labels likely paid SoundScan $750,000 a year for the company's data.

Things have changed in the 17 years since. Music industry sources say that SoundScan charges the top recording companies "on a market-share basis." That means the larger the share of overall music sales a label possesses, the more it must pay SoundScan for its data. Exact figures weren't available but Universal was paying between $7 million and $8 million a year in the middle part of this decade, the sources said. The third largest label, Warner Music Group, was paying about $4 million.

SoundScan will likely be forced to lower prices as the importance of tracking CD sales decreases--the bread and butter of its business--and Internet sales go up. The company's prices will also be under pressure from smaller but less expensive competitors, such as BigChampagne.

"Given the current economic conditions, every business is trying to do more with less," Garland said. "We have to help them find efficiences because the industry is constricting."

Are you ready to go digital? Almost 3 million American homes may not be...yet.

Friday is the deadline for the country's move from analog to digital TV. At that point, most analog signals will be shut off. But 2.8 million homes still lack the necessary equipment to receive digital transmissions, says a report released Wednesday by Nielsen.

The number of homes not ready for DTV represents 2.5 percent of the TV market. The report notes that younger, African American, and Hispanic households are disproportionately unready, while the elderly are the most ready.

Geographically, the greatest number of unprepared homes are in the Western U.S., where cable isn't as prevalent as in other parts of the country, says Nielsen. The highest number of ready viewers are in the Eastern U.S.

The digital switchover was originally set for February. But with too many people still unprepared, the government delayed the move. Without a digital TV, cable or satellite connection, or a converter box, viewers won't be able to tune into their favorite shows.

Nielsen is optimistic, though, noting that the delay from February to June gave more people time to get ready. And those still not prepared are expected to catch up.

"Since February, when the U.S. government postponed the transition for three months, the number of households that are completely unready has been cut in half - from 5.8 million to 2.8 million homes," said Sara Erichson, president of media client services at Nielsen. "Given the importance that television plays in the day-to-day life of most people, we expect that the most of the remaining unready homes will take the necessary steps to get ready once the stations make the final switch to digital transmission. We will continue to follow this trend closely."

From the government's end, the Federal Communications Commission expects some bumps in the road, but is optimistic.

The explosion in social networking may be even greater than imagined. The time that people in the U.S. spend on social network sites is up 83 percent from a year ago, according to a report from market researcher Nielsen Online.

Facebook enjoys the top spot among social networks, with people having spent a total of 13.9 billion minutes on the service in April of this year, 700 percent more than in April 2008, Nielsen said. Minutes spent on Twitter soared a whopping 3,712 percent to almost 300 million, versus around 7.8 million from the same month a year ago.

Former top dog MySpace watched its usage drop nearly one-third to around 4.9 billion minutes, from 7.2 billion in April 2008. MySpace still scored the number one spot for online video among the top 10, thanks to its users streaming more than 120 million videos from the site for April of this year.

"We have seen some major growth in Facebook during the past year, and a subsequent decline in MySpace," Jon Gibs, Nielsen's vice president for online media and agency insights, said in a statement. "Twitter has come on the scene in an explosive way perhaps changing the outlook for the entire space."

But the report also offered a cautionary note: the social networking user can be fickle, quickly bouncing from one service to another. "Remember Friendster? Remember when MySpace was an unbeatable force? Neither Facebook nor Twitter are immune," said Gibs. "Consumers have shown that they are willing to pick up their networks and move them to another platform, seemingly at a moment's notice."

Despite its growth and popularity, Twitter may be especially vulnerable to users who don't stick around. Another Nielsen report from April found that 60 percent of Twitter users--dubbed Twitter Quitters by the media--abandon their tweets after only one month of use. Only about 30 percent of users on MySpace and Facebook jump ship.

Nielsen Online, part of the Nielsen Company, measures consumer use of online and mobile services and other related media.

Digital music, long the bane of the music industry, may finally be something that record label executives can smile about.

For 2008, total music sales rose 10 percent to 1.51 billion units sold, up from 1.36 billion units the year before, according to industry tracker Nielsen. Units tallied include physical albums, digital albums and tracks, and music videos.

The biggest contributor to the growth was digital music, Nielsen reported. There were 1.07 billion digital tracks sold in 2008, up 27 percent from 2007, and there were 65.8 million digital albums sold, up 32 percent.

Those numbers square with recent reports on music downloads. For the third quarter, for instance, legal music downloads from sites such as iTunes and AmazonMP3 were up 29 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to NPD Group.

And coincidentally or not, the Recording Industry Association of America in December said that it would dramatically curb its practice of suing people that it suspected of illegal sharing of copyrighted music.

All told, according to Nielsen, the number of albums sold--including CDs, LPs, and digital albums--fell 14 percent to 428 million in the year just ended. Physical albums sold through e-commerce sites fell 8.6 percent to 27.5 million units from 2007 to 2008.

Universal Music Group came out on top among record labels for total album sales in 2008 (31.5 percent market share, down ever so slightly from 2007) as well as for digital albums and digital tracks (market shares of 27.8 percent and 31.8 percent, respectively). Sony BMG was second overall, with 25.3 percent of all album sales for the year, Nielsen said.

The top-selling digital song for 2008 was "Bleeding Love" from Leona Lewis, with 3.4 million units sold, while Rihanna was the top-selling digital artist, with 9.9 million units sold.

Radiohead claimed top honors in the vinyl realm, both as an artist and for one of its albums. The rock band sold 61,200 vinyl albums during the year, of which 25,800 were its In Rainbows album. In 2007, In Rainbows was the focal point of an experiment by Radiohead to let people pay whatever they saw fit to download the album.

Nielsen noted that vinyl sales set a record in its SoundScan era, at 1.88 million units sold, beating the previous record of 1.5 million from 2000. (Nielsen SoundScan tracks point-of-purchase sales of recorded music.)

Leona Lewis, Rihanna, and Coldplay were among the top-selling artists in the digital realm for 2008.

(Credit: Nielsen)