comScore is excited to announce that we have released our first beta data set from the comScore Total Universe report, and we have some very interesting results to share. As background, the comScore Total Universe report provides audience measurement for 100 percent of a site’s traffic, including usage via mobile phones, apps, tablets and shared computers such as Internet cafes. This first-of-its-kind measurement capability enables publishers and advertisers to understand digital audience sizes in a cross-platform environment. As media consumption shifts to emerging platforms like mobile devices and tablets, the effects on accounting for audiences and activity levels only becomes more pronounced with time.

In order to grasp the effect that Total Universe reporting has on audiences, let’s examine the impact for a few key publishers. An excellent example is for digital music provider Pandora, which attracts a significant percentage of its users via mobile (which in this case includes web browsing on phones and tablets, as well as access via mobile apps). Pandora’s U.S. Total Universe audience in April 2011 was 31.8 million unique visitors, 74% higher than its audience coming from home & work computers. In fact, 13.4 million of that total (42%) accessed Pandora only through mobile channels. A greater number of people actually accessed Pandora via phone or tablet (20.7 million) overall than did via home & work computers (18.2 million). Pandora’s reach among home and work computers in April was a very respectable 9%, but an incredible 35% among smartphone users.

To exclude the mobile media channel from Pandora’s audience is to ignore the majority of its audience. And while Pandora may still be somewhat of an outlier case, the example highlights the extent to which mobile can drive traffic for certain brands – especially those whose value proposition largely relies on mobility, such as Internet radio. It’s also an indication of where the digital landscape is headed.

Another illustration of how mobile audiences fit into the Total Universe landscape are news sites. Some of the most commonly used media on mobile phones are email and social networking, both of which are popular sources of link-sharing, which can drive significant click-through to news sites. If we look only at mobile web traffic (i.e. mobile browsing of traditional and mobile-optimized websites) as incremental to the existing home & work computer audience, we can see the level to which the mobile channel can attract additional users.

Below is an illustration of the incremental audience reached via mobile web for several leading newspaper brands. The New York Times, the largest digital newspaper, has an incremental reach of 2.3% for its mobile web, which represents nearly one million individuals – an audience certainly too large to ignore. And as significant as the New York Times’ incremental reach might be, other leading newspaper brands like the LA Times (6.7%), Washington Post (4.9%), Wall Street Journal (5.5%) and Chicago Tribune (5.2%) have an even greater incremental reach.

We can see a similar pattern in the UK (compared to the US data) with some of its leading newspapers. The Mail Online has a Total Universe audience of nearly 11 million in the UK, with an incremental web reach (mobile + shared locations) of 4.2%. The Guardian (4.8%), Mirror Online (8.3%), the Independent (6.8%) and Metro.co.uk (6.4%) all have notable incremental reaches, as well.

What these data suggest for publishers is that their total audiences are being shortchanged if they do not account for mobile audiences, which provide access to more eyeballs. In most cases today that incremental reach may be less than 10%, which still should not be ignored, and in certain cases (e.g. Pandora) that additional reach may be even more significant.

But if we take a long-term view of the digital media landscape, we recognize that mobile media usage is only going to become an increasingly large piece of the media consumption pie. Smartphone and tablet users are shifting a meaningful share of their total media consumption away from traditional PCs. Continued adoption of these digital access platforms has significant implications for publishers who get paid by advertisers to reach specific audiences at scale.

The growth drivers are undeniable. Nearly 70% of Americans do not use smartphones, and even with the excitement around the iPad and other tablet devices, they are used by less than 5% of the population. Increased penetration coupled with the explosion of optimized content and services will change the digital landscape.

How will it change? How much digital consumption will migrate away from the traditional PC? Who will capitalize on the opportunity? These are great questions. comScore’s Total Universe report will help you answer them, so stay tuned for further developments.

Importantly, the value of the Total Universe report depends on publishers tagging their digital content entities, including traditional web pages, mobile-optimized web pages, and mobile apps. Any publishers interested in participating in comScore tagging in order to be featured in the Total Universe report, please visit comScore Direct.

On Monday, we were especially pleased to see comScore’s data featured prominently in the keynote kicking off Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. There’s nothing like a 20’ tall pie chart to make a data wonk smile!

The chart, entitled “Mobile Installed Base,” was used to illustrate how the iOS has the largest platform footprint in the U.S. Since there have been a few questions floating around the web about what this data represents exactly, we thought it would be worth taking a moment to explain. This particular data representation is based on comScore’s most recent U.S. data on the current installed base of smartphones and a subset of “connected devices,” which is a new category we began reporting on earlier this year. The iOS data includes the three primary devices on which the platform resides: iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. Similarly, the Android slice includes Android-based phones and tablets, while The RIM slice includes Blackberry phones and Playbook tablet. The Other slice includes smartphones or tablets running Windows, Symbian, WebOS, or other operating systems. (Excluded from this chart are eBook readers, which to date have not been broadly and easily addressable by application developers.) These data are published monthly as a standard part of our syndicated MobiLens service which is available in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, and Canada.

As smartphones become ubiquitous and device manufacturers follow Apple’s lead with the release of an array of tablets and other networked devices, consumers are increasingly connecting to their digital world while on the go or sitting on the couch. This is a shift that we’ve anticipated for some time at comScore. Through MobiLens, our Media Metrix Total Universe reports, and other products to be released later this year we’re focused on providing clients with industry-leading insight on these powerfully disruptive trends.

This post was originally published at NewMediaAge on June 2, 2011.

With the Olympics now just over a year away, the first test of consumer excitement has just finished with a reported 1.8m individuals applying for tickets before the end of April deadline. London 2012 organisers have every reason for optimism, with over half the events already oversubscribed, and the site’s existing audience provides even more cheer. A look at the data for April shows that over 1.6m UK users visited the site, and that the social grades that over-indexed were A and B (perhaps indicative of the ticket prices reaching as much as £2,012 for the best seats at the opening ceremony!). Regarding the demographic profile of stereotypical visitors to the official Olympics site: she’s a 45-54 year old woman, with a household income over £50k a year and lives in London.

The household income and social grade demonstrate that the site’s audience is a very valuable target for many marketers, and is reflected in the blue-chip nature of the official sponsors such as Coca-Cola, Omega and P&G. The early signs are that this sponsorship is working extremely well for a number of these partners, with official Olympic site users far more likely to visit the sponsors’ brand sites than the average internet user overall. Visa, the official payment provider to the Games and the only payment method accepted for online ticket applications, has seen the largest impact with over a six-fold increase in reach. Amongst the consumer-focused brands, only Acer and Panasonic have failed to see a lift in visitation amongst this audience so far.

Whilst 90% of the audience for the official site is from the UK for now, the localisation features of the site will become more and more important as the Games approach. A similar phenomenon could be seen in August 2008 during the Beijing games, when only a quarter of the users visiting the site came from China.

Building on the growing level of interest in the Games, several of the sponsors have just started their related digital advertising campaigns, with the Lloyds Banking Group booking most display ad impressions in the UK in April 2011 of all the sponsors. Some of these creatives were Olympic-themed display ads with a call to action to apply for tickets ahead of the deadline. These campaigns kicked off in March, mainly on News International sites, Glam Media, Guardian Media Group, Transport for London, Telegraph Media Group and Ticketmaster.

The Games promise to deliver an incredibly emotive, inspiring experience to a global audience next summer. The early evidence suggests that sponsors will not only reap the benefits in 2012, but that their marketers are already out of the starting blocks in the race for increased consumer engagement and interaction.

It’s hardly a secret that daily deal startups - and their valuations - are growing exponentially. In the summer of 2010, Groupon was said to be worth $1.5 billion. Months later it reportedly declined a $6 billion buyout offer from Google. Having recently filed its IPO filing with the SEC, a public offering could value it as high as $20 billion — similar to both GM and Google at their offerings. The prospects of competitor LivingSocial are similarly bright: over the course of just a few funding rounds, its valuation roughly doubled to $3 billion while gaining the support of an important strategic investor, Amazon.com.

What is behind the intense interest in these companies? Part of the excitement surrounding Groupon and LivingSocial is that they are part of the new tech boom, led by companies such Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Zynga, and others reportedly on the road to going public. But some question whether these sites warrant this much investor interest, or if their valuations are fueled by the rosy assumptions and optimism of a bubble yet to burst.

A comScore analysis sought to better understand the daily deal market, its competitive environment, and how Groupon and LivingSocial are positioned within it. It found that the businesses—despite their strikingly similar concepts—reach different segments of the market and have somewhat different user profiles. We will chronicle these findings in a two-part series that will first examine their audience profiles and then investigate how they engage their customers, gain loyalty and encourage repeat usage.

Geographic and Demographic Differences between Groupon & LivingSocial
The daily deal industry is the new American West of the Internet. Stark differences in the geographic, demographic and advertising targets of Groupon and LivingSocial suggest that the sheer size and raw potential of the unclaimed market has meant that group buying businesses are engaged in a free-for-all land grab of markets and merchants. Guided by the logic that it’s easier to build a new market than to steal one away, these companies seem to benefit more from expansion rather than direct head-to-head competition.

We begin by taking a look at the geographic profile of their respective user bases. Each has a geographic strength. While LivingSocial is heavy in the East, Groupon pushes west towards the Midwest and Pacific regions. These splits may in part reflect where these two companies are headquartered, with Groupon in the Chicago and LivingSocial in Washington, D.C.

Groupon and LivingSocial also attract different types of customers. Groupon’s visitor base skews somewhat more towards younger users and females while LivingSocial’s is more normally distributed around middle-age users and proportioned roughly equally between genders.

A final important aspect of this daily deal gold rush is the willingness to spend heavily on advertising to acquire customers, with the idea that investing in customer acquisition now will generate significant returns later over the user’s lifetime. Both Groupon and LivingSocial share the mindset that advertising and customer acquisition is an investment rather than expense, but they execute on this paradigm differently. LivingSocial concentrates the lion’s share (73%) of its display ads on the top five U.S. properties – specifically in news and email sections –and scatters the remaining 27% around the web. Meanwhile, Groupon’s strategy is a mirror opposite. It delivers only 31% to the biggest publisher’s sites with the remaining 69% covering a range of other publishers.

Is There Room for Competitors in the Daily Deal Market?
The daily deal industry is busy, to be sure. There are hundreds of regional and internet-based competitors in the space, with one of the newest entrants being Glenn Beck’s Markdown.com. Anyone and everyone, it seems, is trying to grab a piece of the pie. But despite the deluge of new entrants, the market is not necessarily crowded – especially at the top. The tail is long and fragmented and Groupon and LivingSocial sit as gorillas among ants, accounting for over 90% of all visits among all group buying websites tracked by comScore. Among the top daily deal sites, we notice a significant drop-off after the top two players.

The comparatively modest email bases of niche and regional competitors suggest they are not yet mounting a serious competition to Groupon and LivingSocial. Moreover, their comparatively limited financial resources make it difficult to compete by outspending to acquire customers. There is still space in the rapidly expanding market for savvy competitors to break through and carve out a healthy position in the market, but many will likely be compelled to consolidate or turn to a differentiated, vertical-oriented strategy, such as Jetsetter’s cornering of the travel deal niche.

In part two of this post, we will examine the long term prospects for Groupon and LivingSocial based on customer growth and loyalty to help understand how this market might develop as it matures.

With each passing month it seems that social networking becomes more deeply ingrained into our digital lives. If we take a look back at the past few years we can see just how pervasive it has become. Back in 2007, social networking represented about 1 out of every 12 minutes spent online, while today it accounts for 1 out of every 6 minutes spent online.

While it is perhaps not surprising that social networking continues to gain market share, what is interesting is the rapidly changing dynamics of the market today. For a long time, the social networking story was almost exclusively the horserace between Facebook and Myspace. In mid-2009 Facebook finally darted out ahead of Myspace and hasn’t looked back.

Today Facebook is the 4th largest U.S. web property in audience size with 157.2 million visitors in May, representing its all-time high and a gain of 3.2 million visitors vs. the previous month. While other reports have been circulating that Facebook witnessed a pronounced user decline this month, comScore data shows quite a different story. Given that Facebook now reaches 73% of the total U.S. Internet population each month, one thing we should anticipate is that the site’s audience cannot grow forever. The law of large numbers says that once a site has penetrated the majority of a market, each incremental user becomes that much more difficult to attract. So given its size, Facebook’s future U.S. growth is likely to come more from increasing usage per visitor than its ability to attract new users in perpetuity. One impressive stat to note is that Facebook’s average U.S. visitor engagement has grown from 4.6 hours to 6.3 hours per month over the past year, so it appears to be succeeding in that regard.

The picture is not so rosy for Myspace, which continues to see attrition in its U.S. user base. While it is currently holding onto its #2 position among social networking sites with 34.9 million visitors in May, its audience has declined by nearly 50% in the past year while average user engagement has dropped 85%.

So perhaps it’s time to turn our focus away from the Facebook-Myspace horserace for a moment and focus some attention on other players in the market deserving of mention. Upon the release of comScore’s May U.S. data, I immediately noticed that it was not just a banner month for Facebook but also for several other leading players in the social networking category who also reached all-time U.S. audience highs: Linkedin.com (33.4 million visitors), Twitter.com (27.0 million) and Tumblr.com (10.7 million).

Beginning with Linkedin, the popular business networking site’s success should not come as a complete shock following its blistering May 19th IPO. Others can debate the merits of the company’s current valuation, but I will simply point out that there is definite underlying strength in Linkedin’s user adoption curve at the moment. In fact, it has reached all-time U.S. audience highs in 7 of the past 12 months and has grown 58 overall percent in the past year. As Linkedin continues its evolution from being an online business rolodex to a more social and interactive content experience, it will be interesting to see if its rapid visitor growth is accompanied by a surge in user engagement.

Twitter.com also had a particularly strong month in May with 27 million U.S. visitors, representing an increase of 13 percent in the past year. (Note: while much of Twitter’s usage occurs away from the Twitter.com site, past comScore research has indicated that approximately 85-90% of Twitter users visit the website each month). Twitter’s success in May can likely be attributed in part to the exceptionally buzzworthy news story of Osama Bin Laden’s death, as well as ongoing discussion of the Royal Wedding.

Also not to be overlooked is social blogging site Tumblr, which has made some noise this year and become a serious player in the social networking category. The site has grown an impressive 166% in the past year, reaching 10.7 million visitors in May, its first month ever surpassing the 10 million visitor mark. Tumblr is clearly experiencing a viral adoption curve right now and may be nearing that point at which other social media sites have reached that critical mass threshold that propels it to more widespread adoption. It still has a ways to go before we can mention it in the same breath as Linkedin or Twitter, but it just might get there if it maintains its current trajectory.

So even as we look back at about 8 years of social networking mania here in the U.S., we can see there are still a lot of new wrinkles emerging in the storyline as established players reach new highs (or lows) and emerging players raise their profile. Only time will eventually tell which stories are still yet to be told…

Campaign gross ratings points (GRPs) have recently been discussed as a breakthrough in online ad campaign measurement and cited as the ‘new online currency.’ However, there is nothing new about it. These metrics have existed for many years, with comScore supplying online GRPs for more than five thousand ad campaigns since 2007. Today, comScore’s Campaign Essentials service, first introduced in 2010, is the global industry leader, being used to analyze hundreds of online campaigns each month across 17 countries. Campaign Essentials builds upon Campaign Post Buy, a comScore service first introduced in 2007, which first delivered campaign GRPs and demographics, and has been used to evaluate thousands of campaigns since inception. This product evolution is consistent with comScore’s track record of leading innovation in all aspects of online measurement.

At the same time, our customers, who have collectively measured thousands of online ad campaigns, tell us that GRPs, while useful in TV, are much less useful unto themselves for online measurement. The very nature of online advertising, where cookies are used by ad servers as the determinant of exposure frequency but which are deleted by about 30% of Internet users in a month, can result in severe delivery skews and exposure overkill, with a small number of users being exposed to hundreds of impressions, while a substantial number of users receive only one impression (that they may not even see because they never scroll down “below the fold”). An illustration below shows an example of two campaigns with the same level of GRPs but more than a 300% difference in audience reach.

Campaign Essentials leverages comScore’s pioneering Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) methodology, which combines person-level data from our proprietary panel with census-level page views or campaign impressions obtained from ad server data, to deliver a highly accurate measurement of people reached with an ad campaign. comScore first introduced UDM two years ago and expanded this approach globally in early 2010. We currently receive census page-level information from more than 90 of the top 100 U.S. media properties, and 80 of the top 100 global media properties. This industry adoption reflects a consensus that any accurate online measurement service must have a combination of a robust person-level panel data with a census-level site-side measurement overlay.

comScore Campaign Essentials’ approach helped overcome the perils of cookie inflation caused by cookie deletion and users using multiple browsers or machines, offering a significant breakthrough in online campaign measurement. Similar to site audience measurement, campaign measurement needs to be unified with ad server counts, which measure every delivered impression but can only report campaign reach based on unique cookies rather than people. This cookie-based reach is typically inflated by 50% to 300% because of cookie inflation. Obviously, reach is a critical objective that advertisers need to have measured accurately.

comScore has solved the complexities of adapting the UDM methodology to campaign measurement, including granular reporting at the creative, placement, publisher and country levels. It is because of the UDM methodology that we are able to provide this granular methodology at scale on a global basis for the 43 individual markets currently reported by comScore. The methodology even allows clients to create custom segments to answer specific business questions related to their campaign objectives. This granularity is available for demographics beyond just age and gender, such as household income, household composition, region and any other demographics reported in comScore Media Metrix.

So the availability of GRPs is not news, but the learning about their applicability in the digital environment has not yet been broadly absorbed. In short, comScore’s position is that GRPs in and of themselves are simply not sufficient for either planning or measuring the effectiveness of campaigns. By leveraging the extensive learning we’ve had from our UDM initiative – which combines panel and census data – over the last several years, comScore is working on a number of initiatives to address this, which we think will have important implications for the industry.

A core ingredient in these developments is the comScore panel, which is the largest continuously measured panel of its kind. This enables us to accurately measure the audience demographics of a campaign at a granular level. Our available sample size is many multiples of the sample size required for accurate statistical measurement of audience demographics. Larger sample sizes are only better if they accurately reflect the overall demographic composition of the population.

Our goal has always been to provide our customers with the highest quality and most useful information possible. Importantly, the accuracy of the demographics used in the sample is significantly more important than the size of the sample alone. In contrast to getting person-based demographic data as used in Campaign Essentials, resorting to the use of demographics from cookie data provided by third-party source sites, can be problematic for a number of important reasons:

1. Publishers each have unique demographic profiles which might be disproportionately represented in the reported campaign demographics. As a result, when comparing campaigns that run across different publishers, the demographics will favor the publisher that was used as the source site.
2. The demographics available from source sites, particularly social networks, are often restricted to age and gender and are missing important variables such as income and household size. Many global advertisers also need to understand dynamics among locally relevant demographics that reflect the way planning and buying is done in country. For example, in France and the UK, reach among different social classes is important, while in many markets, the presence of children is a critical segment.
3. Self-reported age information is not always accurate in an online environment. Teenagers often overstate their age and adults (especially women) tend to understate it.
4. Reach within a typical campaign may be limited to machines logged into the source site at the time of exposure, which represents a fraction of the total campaign audience. In addition, there is no guarantee that the logged-in ID, stored in the login cookie, represents the real person using the machine at the time of exposure. With widespread sharing of machines by individuals within a household (60% of U.S. Internet users are on multiple-user computers), this cookie-based method can result in falsely attributing the demographics of one user to another. Therefore, the cookie approach adds substantial error far overshadowing any marginal improvement in precision that a larger sample size may ostensibly provide.
5. To measure the entire campaign, outside of the reach of the source site, there is a need to ascertain the demographics of cookies with unknown demographics using panel data, and the size and breadth of comScore’s panel provides optimal quality of results.

Perhaps a larger issue is that when data from select publishers is used to generate reporting on other publishers, it is no longer objective third-party measurement. For example, when media planners receive a report on how well site A is reaching the demographic target, site A will tend to look strong if it is the source of the demographic information, because its own data are used for both targeting and demo reporting. If media buyers are buying on percentage of target delivered, site A may appear to hit 100% of the target while site B ends up only delivering 80%. The reality is that site A might have also delivered 80% but appears to have delivered 100% because its data was the source of the reporting. Naturally, publishers, advertisers and agencies are interested in neutral third party measurement which does not favor one site’s audience over another.

Finally, comScore Campaign Essentials is delivered via a powerful but intuitive UI. This UI provides for flexibility to view a host of variables (audience by site, placement, creative size, creative type, creative theme, etc.) and also allows for custom aggregation of placements. For example, if a marketer would like to bucket various placements into themes such as contextual, audience, remarketing, etc., simple drag-and-drop technology enables this powerful insight.

comScore’s perspective is that accurate demographic, reach and frequency reporting is critical, but is only the beginning of a marketer’s need for campaign insights. Through the comScore AdEffx suite, we also currently provide information on creative messaging optimization, branding impacts, online and offline sales, and behavioral interactions with the ad campaign, such as searches for the advertised brands, or subsequent visitations to the advertiser’s site.

True to comScore’s heritage of forward-looking innovation, we have been hard at work for the past twelve months developing the next generation of campaign measurement products tailored to meet fast-changing industry needs. During the next 60 days, we expect to introduce solutions that we believe have the potential to revolutionize the industry and usher in a much more valid new currency. Our strategy has always been to be the first to develop the solutions our industry seeks, and to constantly renew our edge even when our competition eventually catches up with yesterday’s innovation. Our approach to campaign measurement is no different.

Russian search giant Yandex recently completed the biggest dot com IPO since Google, raising $1.3 billion as it debuted on NASDAQ on May 25th. The listing, allied with subsequent share dealings, gives the Russian search engine a market cap of more than $10 billion. Putting that into the context of the global search market, Yandex currently has a market cap approximately one sixteenth the size of global behemoth Google, Inc., and one quarter the size of Baidu, Inc., the leading search engine in China.

One might question how Yandex, which focuses almost exclusively on the Russian Internet market, might justify such a lofty valuation. The answer can likely be attributed, in part, to the phenomenal growth of the Russian Internet market over the last few years and its potential for future growth. The illustration below shows how the Russian Internet audience has grown 73% since 2008 to 48.3 million users in May 2011.

This amazing growth has propelled Russia to become the second largest European market, now trailing only Germany in terms of total audience size. However, with a total population of approximately 140 million, there is still significant room for growth in Internet adoption and potential to increase search activity among existing users.

Yandex is well-positioned within this large and rapidly expanding Internet market. It is currently the most visited web property overall in Russia, with more than 38 million Internet visitors in April, making it more popular than Google, Microsoft and Facebook combined (34.6 million unduplicated visitors visited at least one of these sites). But audience size alone does not drive revenue and profitability. That depends on Yandex’s ability to monetize its audience, which in this case comes primarily from search advertising revenue. In April, comScore observed 2.5 billion searches conducted on Yandex in Russia, with an additional 300 million from elsewhere in the world.

Not only is Yandex leading the Russian market as the top online destination, it also commands the greatest share of the search market at 64% of all queries, up from 56% at the beginning of 2010. With nearly two-thirds of total search volume today, it wields significant market power.

Whether Russia is written about in future generations as one of the global markets that Google failed to lead depends almost entirely on the continued success of Yandex. With such a large and growing following, Yandex’s market position appears secure for now. A bigger question, perhaps, is whether it can effectively branch out beyond Russia’s borders and increase its long term avenues for growth.

To meet the demand for more measurement combining all sources of digital traffic, comScore recently announced the release of Device Essentials™, an exciting new solution providing insight into digital traffic coming from all types of devices on a global basis. Device Essentials utilizes comScore’s Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) methodology, which captures media web traffic coming from more than a million domains tagging with comScore around the world. In May alone, comScore observed 150 billion census-level page views worldwide.

Our visibility into this detailed activity on web entities has provided us with a treasure trove of new data that is helping us understand the complexities of the increasingly fragmented digital media environment. We have spent the past several weeks poring over the new data, and we’d like to share with you several of the interesting new findings based on our analysis of 15 different countries* reported in Device Essentials:

1. Mobile phones are second only to computers in driving digital traffic: While we saw computers accounting for at least 93 percent of digital traffic across the 15 markets studied, we also saw mobile contributing the most amount of traffic following computers. The U.S. has the highest share of non-computer device traffic at 6.2 percent, with mobile phones making up about two-thirds of that traffic (4.2 percent overall). Singapore and the U.K., which also have considerably high shares of non-computer device traffic at 5.9 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively, also show mobile comprising the majority of that traffic.
2. Apple leads the way for non-computer device traffic across markets: In the U.S. alone, the iOS platform accounted for 53.1 percent of non-computer device traffic, led by traffic coming from the iPhone (23.5 percent), iPad (21.8 percent) and iPod Touch (7.8 percent). In all the other markets reported in this analysis, with the exception of Argentina and India, iOS comprised more than half of non-computer device traffic, topping out at 83.0 percent in Australia, Canada, and Singapore.
3. Android outpaces iPhone in U.S. traffic despite overall lead for iOS: While the iOS platform accounts for the majority of overall traffic flowing through non-computer devices in the U.S., Android phones account for 35.6 percent of non-computer traffic vs. 23.5 percent from iPhones.
4. Mobile traffic is not only driven by smartphones: Among the markets analyzed, India stands out as one of the markets where mobile phones account for a significant amount of non-computer device traffic (94.8 percent), but this activity is driven by primarily by feature phones (71.9 percent of non-computer device traffic) as opposed to smartphones (22.9 percent share). Other markets where feature phones drive significant non-computer device traffic include Argentina (27.5 percent) and Brazil (17.3 percent).
5. Tablets account for a significant share of non-computer traffic: Next to mobile phones, tablets contribute a significant share of total non-computer device traffic. Two-thirds of the markets in this analysis saw tablets driving more than 20 percent of all non-computer device traffic. The Netherlands (35.6 percent), Canada (35.2 percent), and Brazil (33.4 percent), led the way, with tablets accounting for more than a third of non-computer traffic.
6. Apple dominates the tablet market around the world: In all of the markets in this analysis, the share of total digital traffic coming from tablets was driven largely by iPads. In 13 of the 15 markets, Apple captured at least 95 percent of the tablet market, while Android tablets accounted for most of the remaining tablet share.
7. E-readers and gaming consoles barely register any traffic: Device Essentials measures traffic from other web-enabled devices beyond computers, mobile phones, and tablets, such as e-readers and gaming consoles. In all of the markets studied, these other devices contributed less than 1 percent to overall digital traffic, with the highest share of traffic seen in Canada and the U.S. at 0.6 percent.
8. iPod Touches drive one fifth of the traffic of iPhones: Because they’re not mobile phones, iPod Touches can sometimes be overlooked as important drivers of non-computer device traffic. When compared to its sister device, the iPhone, iPod Touches actually drove about one fifth the level of traffic across most markets. In Argentina and Canada, iPods had even greater relative importance, driving approximately half of the traffic of iPhones. At nearly 15 percent of non-computer device traffic, Canada is the only market where the iPod Touch accounts for more than 10 percent of non-computer traffic.
9. WiFi access fuels the U.S. non-computer device landscape: Interestingly, more than half (54.5 percent) of all non-computer traffic in the U.S. comes via WiFi connection. 91.9 percent of U.S. iPad traffic comes via WiFi access, indicating that the majority of iPad surfing is done at home, at the office, or in other WiFi-enabled locations. Similarly, this high percentage may also reflect that many people aren’t paying for additional 3G service for tablets at the moment.
10. Even across devices, WiFi and mobile network activity varies: Even within the same device types, there are differences in the way users are connecting online. In the U.S., 78.3 percent of total digital traffic coming from Android phones occurred over mobile networks, compared to a much lower 52.5 percent on iPhones. A significant 47.5 percent of iPhone traffic came through a WiFi connection, reflecting the importance iOS device users place on being able to easily connect via WiFi.

You can see from these preliminary Device Essentials data that there are many insights about traffic patterns across the digital landscape today that we’re just beginning to uncover, especially on a market-by-market level. As new devices and methods of staying connected online continue to proliferate, it will be interesting to see how these traffic patterns evolve. Stay tuned as we continue to unearth more interesting nuggets of data about the bigger picture surrounding digital traffic with Device Essentials.

*The markets covered in this study were Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom, and United States. The Netherlands and Malaysia were not included in the press release and added to this data set at a later point.

Last year, comScore marked another mobile first with the release of the GSMA Mobile Media Metrics (MMM) product suite in the United Kingdom. This remarkable collaboration among comScore the GSMA mobile trade association and UK mobile operators provided, for the first time, a view of mobile browsing behavior based on a census of mobile operator traffic.

Last week, we marked the first full day of summer by announcing the immediate availability of MMM application reporting. By providing media owners and agencies a view into both browsing and connected application usage, MMM offers a significantly more complete and more granular view of mobile media consumers and their habits. For the first time the market is able to see the audience reach of mobile apps together with a measure of the media consumed by users; media owners are able to characterize their properties by traffic and audience profile from both browsing and application use.

This initiative and its underlying technology and expertise are relevant far beyond the UK market. The ability to process, analyze, and report on massive amounts of network operator data in a way that resonates with the needs of media buyers is on public display in the GSMA MMM product suite, but it’s a capability comScore has demonstrated and deployed to operators in a wide variety of markets. It’s not simply a technology and measurement win—the solution has passed the muster of strict EU privacy regulations and a third-party audit.

The mobile market - and particularly the smartphone and connected device sectors - are growing dramatically. It’s a challenge to accurately and meaningfully measure a phenomenon as important and dynamic as mobile, which is why comScore has focused on investing in and building out an array of measurement approaches. Network census, as illustrated by our work with the GSMA and the UK operators, is a key component of this strategy, as is our sophisticated MobiLens survey and our work to provide content owners and app developers with the tools to properly tag their sites and apps.

Over the next several months we’ll be enhancing our products in the UK, the U.S. and other global markets with mobile data from tagged sites and apps. Content publishers who wish to participate - and provide advertisers with independent third-party metrics to help evaluate and justify their marketing spend - are invited to see what we have to offer at direct.comscore.com.