This post was originally published at SearchEngineWatch on June 27, 2011.

Optimizing your social presence for search is important, right? That is certainly what we've all been told for some time, but determining why it's important and deciding where to focus can be challenging. Exponential growth of a medium is great and all, but your problems figuring out how to tame the wild beast tend to grow exponentially as well.

Let's discuss a couple of simple ideas regarding conversational media (i.e., social networking sites and blogs) and its relation to search:

1. How to help your social pages rank better
2. How to help your website rank better with social influences

A Little Perspective About the Market as a Whole
The growth in activity at conversational media sites is undeniable. The number of unique has increased more than 80 percent since 2007 to 213 million in May 2011, while total visits to the category grew 136 percent to 6.2 billion.

Since a search click to a website represents one type of site visit, this is where we can begin to connect the dots on influence between navigation events. The number of search clicks to the category reached 845 million in May, accounting for 13.5 percent of the total visits to the category. That number has grown 145 percent since 2007, outpacing gains in both unique visitors and total category visits.

Branded social media searches (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and people searches (e.g., friends, celebrities) appear to be the two primary growth drivers of search clicks.

Although these types of terms still make up the vast majority of the terms driving traffic to conversational media sites, the fastest growing search traffic segment is actually big name brands. Well-known consumer brands have finally begun to embrace their conversational media assets and are driving a considerable amount of traffic directly to Facebook and Twitter in addition to their own websites.

When combining the top 20 brand names in retail, finance, and travel, their branded searches delivered over 1.6 million clicks directly to Facebook, a 1,300 percent increase since mid-2009.

How to Help Your Social Pages Rank Better
Links on SERPs are like shelves in a store: Owning more shelf space, and the more varieties you have to offer, invariably will drive more sales (clicks). Because you will already own the premium position for your website for your branded searches, further promotion of your social media assets can only improve your end game.

In collaboration with SEO software vendor BrightEdge Technologies, we've identified three simple steps you can take to improve the rankings of your social pages.

Link From Your Homepage
It can’t be as simple as linking from your homepage, can it? Actually, it can because search engine algorithms absolutely value these links when scoring sites (more on this later).

Despite this reality, 6 of the top 20 most searched for Retail brands did not have any sort of social media integration on their homepages. Talk about a missed opportunity! Linking from your home page and using your brand name in the link will have immediate impact.

Use Brand Names in Posts
URLs that match search terms have a built in advantage for high SEO rankings on that search. This same principle will apply to the words you use in your social media posts, so be sure to use the brand names of your company and your products when posting for maximum effect.

Get Likes
Search engine algorithms value crowd science quite heavily in their rankings (link building relationships). This same type of value is given to likes, follows, +1's, etc. This is an inherent trust metric and will impact rankings as well.

Getting likes can be easier said than done. It may require some creative marketing tactics that engage your customers and make them smile.

Helping Your Website Rank Better With Social Influences
The first part of this column discussed how to drive better rankings for your social media pages. Clearly this has become more of a priority than it was a couple of years ago – particularly for branded terms – but will never be of the same volume and SEO coverage as your own websites. The more important goal is figuring out how to use social media influence to impact your owned media assets.

Social signals drive SEO performance, but how important is it? According to data from BrightEdge, between 75 and 90 percent of the top 10 search results on any given SERP have at least one Facebook like or Twitter tweet. These numbers and the related influence will spike sharply, especially for industries such as retail and finance.

Start With the Basics
Visitors to your website are usually interested in your company and your products, so don't miss the opportunity to invite them into your treasured social media circle. Invite them to connect, like, follow, and/or share your company and your product pages.

Target Head Terms With Social Media Friendly Pages
For most companies, head terms make up a large percentage of their referral traffic. Although these terms drive high volume in both searches and clicks, they are often very competitive for page/position rank.

Ensuring that your head term landing pages are social media friendly with further impact your overall SEO ranking for these coveted terms. The more likes and follows your landing pages have, the higher they will rank. Therefore, encouraging visitors to take social media action with a “bookmark & share” drop down menu will further your landing page SEO efforts.

Create Tools That Are Easy to Share
An easy to share tool is something that is visually appealing and simple to use. Too many times you arrive at a website that has expert only tools available for analysis, searching, sorting, and the like. Or you find a tool that is easy to use for all of these things, you would love to tell someone about it, and there is no sharing drop down.

Either of these scenarios is negatively impacting your use of social media SEO influence. Think about the types of assets you have on your site that begat social involvement and make it simple to do.

Drive Social Engagement to Your Website
Facebook offers a variety of social plugins you can utilize on your site. Different plugins encourage different types of engagement, so choose wisely on which ones work best for each part of your site.

Conclusion
Social media and search share a two way street of influence. Social media assets have reached enough critical mass to rank on the first page of search results, as well as directly contribute to the SEO ranking of your website pages.

Although many companies are taking advantage of this established medium, many others have not and are missing a sizeable opportunity. By implementing some of the best practices mentioned here, you can ensure that your social media and search teams are working together and that your organization isn’t being left behind.

comScore & BrightEdge recently presented a webinar titled “Social SEO: How to Optimize your Social Presence for Search.” You can download a copy of the slides from our presentation gallery.

Since the dawn of the Internet, spam has been one of the most prevalent issues plaguing legitimate digital businesses. This persistent pest exists in a variety of very familiar forms, such as email, link and search spam. In comScore’s business of measuring the digital world, we have recently encountered new varieties of spam affecting digital audience measurement that we are taking proactive measures to address. In so doing, we have developed new capabilities and proprietary technologies that have significantly improved our already rigorous approach.

comScore has more than a decade of experience developing world-leading methods in digital audience measurement. At the root of sound audience measurement is the ability to accurately quantify the behavior of people, which is very different than the simple counting of digital cookie-based traffic that appears in site server logs or web analytics data. comScore’s Unified Digital Measurement (UDM) methodology, which combines our global 2 million person panel with publishers’ site server data, provides us with a unique ability to differentiate behavior between people and site server logs and refine our audience estimates accordingly. This capability also enables us to employ proprietary methods to identify, quantify, and filter out the portion of server traffic that originates from bots, spiders, and other non-human sources.

comScore’s interest is in measuring digital consumer behavior, which means that we credit page views, visitation, sessions, duration, impressions and other metrics only when (1) the user took an explicit action to view the content, and (2) the content was rendered to the user in the foreground. These conditions are consistent with the audience measurement guidelines set forth by the Media Ratings Council (MRC) and Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). People – not server calls – are the ones who consume content, view ads and, ultimately, buy products and services, so it is the behavior of people that we aim to accurately measure.

Unfortunately, there are ways to mimic the behavior of people through invalid page view generation, which intends to inflate publishers’ audience numbers for the purposes of generating additional ad revenue. Ad impressions might be generated either to bots, or to users who never intended to navigate to a particular web page, leaving advertisers to foot the bill for these impressions of dubious quality. Obviously, such activity should not be counted as valid traffic, and comScore takes elaborate steps to ensure that these schemes get detected and are appropriately filtered out from our audience measurement data.

The Nature of Invalid Traffic
To understand the nature of this invalid traffic, it is helpful to start with a better understanding of the incentives and motivations of those in the advertising value chain. Certain players, such as Pay Per Click (PPC) providers, are paid solely based on their ability to drive traffic to publisher sites. Publishers want to sell advertising, so they’re willing to pay to acquire visitors as long as they ultimately profit from the ad revenue generation. There is nothing inherently wrong with this sort of arrangement, provided that the traffic generated is legitimate.

Unfortunately, some companies have been actively seeking to manipulate this ecosystem. Using a variety of mechanisms, they attempt to fake or redirect traffic to artificially inflate ad impressions, visits, or other measures that drive monetization.

There exist today a variety of ways in which web traffic can be inflated through non-human means that might at first glance appear to be legitimate, but which, on further investigation, can be seen to be inappropriate. The most common mechanisms include:

1. Generating background web calls to mimic real visitation
2. Phantom surfing calls
3. Malware-infected computers that hijack browsing
4. Bot networks creating mass visitation

Background Measurement Calls
One technique is for a site to deploy a call to a measurement analytics server with inaccurate data on an otherwise legitimate website. In the course of browsing a website, inappropriate site analytics or audience measurement pixel calls embedded in the site code are surreptitiously made and processed in the background, either once or at predetermined intervals. The aim of these calls is to credit other websites with new traffic even though the user never requested or viewed any of the other external sites’ content. In simple terms, a user browses a website and, during normal usage, multiple URL calls to other external sites are initiated from the user’s computer so as to inflate traffic to the other external websites.

Phantom surfing calls
Some firms will direct traffic to another site that the user did not intend to visit. For example, in the course of browsing a streaming video website such as an adult content site, Javascript embedded in the website’s content can be used to cause the user’s browser to request and download entire pages from a third party website in a way that is invisible to the user. In many of these cases, the browser opens a new window in a 1x1 pixel iframe and redirects the traffic to it. This means the phantom activity is unobservable to the user; however, the calls are being generated in the background with full page loads for the third party site including the full page, the full ad load, analytics calls, etc. For all intents and purposes, this traffic looks real and legitimate to the publisher and advertisers at the end of this daisy chain, but was never seen by an actual person. Further engagement can also be faked using this method.

Malware
Malware, which is typically contracted due to vulnerabilities in a user’s operating system or browser, is also frequently used to generate erroneous site visitation. These computer viruses are designed to manipulate the flow of traffic on the web. One example is redirect viruses; instead of having misleading links or pushing a user through intermediate websites, the redirect virus actively hijacks the links clicked on by the user. For example, a user conducts a search query on a search engine and decides to click on a result. Instead of arriving at the intended destination, the redirect virus forces the user to another website. The click is also laundered through a network of sites to generate clicks and therefore revenue for the party involved with the hijack.

Botnets
The next most common method is the use of bot networks, also known as botnets. A botnet is a network of infected computers which can be used to perform distributed attacks online. The recent denial of service of attacks against Visa, Paypal, and other large web entities were perpetrated using botnets. Besides distributed attacks, a botnet can be used to direct a large number of users towards a website.

comScore’s Solution
comScore is committed to leading the way in developing the most advanced technologies for filtering out invalid clicks and traffic. We are compliant with the IAB’s guidelines for what constitutes a legitimate click, and for prevention of click fraud. The audit standards applied by the MRC require that measurement companies filter out traffic originating from the IAB list of bad agents; they also require that we proactively and continuously work to identify and exclude suspect and non-human traffic not on the IAB list. comScore’s processes for identifying and removing non-human traffic were a part of the audit of comScore Direct, which received MRC accreditation in March.

Over and above the standards set forth by the MRC and IAB, comScore has developed proprietary algorithms for invalid click detection. comScore has several additional assets that allow for more sophisticated detection of invalid traffic. The comScore panel allows us to see the full browsing activity of millions of panelists, which provides insight into the complete clickstream behavior leading up to any site visit. (Unlike comScore’s panel-based methodology, site-centric analytics services are limited to only seeing the immediately previous site visited if the referral is even available. And, in many cases, that referral is unavailable or obfuscated through a series of hops to hide the real origin of the traffic.) In addition to the panel, comScore’s census network, which reaches 95% of U.S. computers, provides deep inspection of the site-centric analytics data that publishers use. The combination of these assets gives comScore the ability to detect push traffic, malware influence, automated clicks through bot nets, and other mechanisms that can inflate audience and ad measurement beyond the ‘user–intent’ definition that the industry needs to follow.

What Can Publishers Do to Protect Themselves?
comScore is committed to help the industry’s charge against these illegitimate practices. Make no mistake about it, this is an arms race that will constantly demand ingenuity in fraud detection. All of us must remain ever vigilant about the constantly evolving nature of these practices. We believe the industry’s interest, including advertisers and publishers, is best served by preserving the integrity of the ecosystem, and working together to neutralize practices that might inhibit the industry’s continued growth and development.

There are a few ways to protect against this fraud. The first is for publishers to keep a close eye on their web analytics data for clues that invalid traffic inflation is occurring. For example, the clicks generated by a particular third-party might at first glance appear similar to any other click, but their downstream metrics, like site engagement and conversion, will look significantly lower. If a publisher knows that its average conversion rate is 2% but all the clicks coming from a certain provider have a conversion rate of 0.01%, that’s a good potential clue that the provider is steering users to a site they never intended to visit. Another clue might be that the search terms driving traffic to the site have nothing to do with that particular business, an indication that search clicks are being hijacked. Publishers should have good forensic web analysts look into the sources of traffic, searching for these clues as a first line of defense against this type of fraud.

If such clues are found, the next step should be to ask the third-party traffic providers how they are generating traffic for the site. They ought to be able to clearly explain their methodologies. Those engaging in fraudulent activity will not be able to do so.

Some Final Thoughts
Invalid traffic exists to the detriment of the entire industry. Even those who might experience short term benefits, such as being able to claim a higher audience to advertisers, need to understand that invalid practices are being actively identified and might face the reputational downside of knowingly engaging in such practices.

It is in publishers’ best interest to actively employ forensic web analysis to ensure that no one is unintentionally supporting invalid clicks. If such activity is discovered, publishers should immediately reexamine relationships that are enabling this activity. comScore will continue to be proactive in identifying invalid traffic and alerting affected publishers when such threats are found. By partnering together, we believe we can stay ahead in this dangerous cat-and-mouse game.

This post was originally published in Ad Age on July 08, 2011.

In today's digital world, it is clear now more than ever before that pricing power is rapidly shifting to the consumer. The digital medium has brought transparency to prices and made it easy for anyone with a computer or mobile device to quickly find the lowest price for any product. The typical online purchase now involves the use of either a price comparison engine, a search for online coupons or discounts, a free shipping offer, a daily deal or some other incentive that reduces the price paid.

But this is no longer relegated only to online commerce. Consumers have also become accustomed to using the Internet to root out the best price for any product before they buy in a retail store. And, the rapid emergence of smartphones – which are now being activated at the rate of nearly 1 million per week – has made these pricing tools mobile, giving consumers the ability to use them in brick-and-mortar locations in addition to online. As one retailer recently proclaimed to me "I never thought I'd be competing with Amazon in my own stores!"

This of course spells trouble for any manufacturer or retailer who doesn't have either the low price advantage or some other more compelling value driver that appeals to consumers. As merchants are forced to appeal to these other value drivers, it places a premium on great advertising. It is this new reality that has convinced me we may now be on the verge of a renaissance in advertising, where compelling multimedia creative emerges as the antidote to low prices.

Advertising's role in this new world becomes not just a demand driver but also a counterbalancing force to price as the main determinant of consumer choice. Ad spending trends certainly support this conclusion: TV ad sales rose 9% in the first quarter of this year, while the IAB just reported a 23% growth in online advertising. Tellingly, in 2010, display advertising grew faster than search - for the first time since the IAB began reporting its data - driven by a 35% increase in spending on video ads.

These numbers indicate a new-found focus on branding advertising at the expense of direct response or price / promotion communication. And, if the growth in ad dollars spent in branding media is indeed driven by advertisers' efforts to garner higher prices, then it's possible we can also expect to see an increased focus on creative. It's been about twenty years since some ad agencies first concluded that they were able to make more money through media planning and buying than through their efforts at developing great creative. I remember vividly one advertiser telling me sarcastically that it almost looked as if "agencies had outsourced creative." Those days might well be history.

Dion Hughes, the creative director at Persuasion Companies, points out that investing in a better brand experience all 'round is a clear way to differentiate and create value. And by all 'round, Dion isn't just referring to paid-media communications, but "what the brand does, how it talks, what it looks like, where it appears, what it stays away from, etc." Dion also believes that we're undergoing a creative revolution, and not necessarily just in digital, though that's where it might look like it's happening. As he sees it, the revolution (or maybe it's the frontier) today is in orchestrating a brand's behavior across so many different media channels.

In an age of consumer pricing power, we need to remember that advertising plays a key role in building consumer demand and creating the willingness for consumers to buy a more expensive "premium brand" rather than a lower priced alternative, or a generic, or private label brand. In fact, research conducted by comScore ARS has shown that TV creative is responsible for 52% of the changes over time in a brand's market share, four times greater than the impact of other elements of the media plan.

That said, it's vital that marketers make sure that their creative is doing its intended persuasive job by testing it. I wrote about this in a blog post entitled "Four times zero is still zero", pointing out that even dramatically increased spending behind poor creative will not move the needle. That's the bad news. The good news is that it's been proven time and again that great creative helps build great brands... and great brands don't have to join pricing's race to the bottom. Today, especially, that's a vital point for marketers to remember.

comScore today announced its latest innovation in ad effectiveness measurement with the introduction of the Smart Lift Attribution Model™. This new methodology, currently being applied to AdEffx Brand Survey Lift™ studies in the United States, overcomes the issue of ‘last exposure’ bias, allowing for the proper allocation of display ad campaign performance to the specific publishers, data and advertising creative that generate lift. To understand why this innovation is so important to the industry, let’s first travel back a few years in time to evaluate the evolution of ad effectiveness measurement.

In the early days of display advertising, the digital economy was deeply entrenched in the use of the click-through rate for evaluating online ad performance, and only insomuch as it led to a direct sales conversion on a website. This over-reliance on the click caused many to view digital advertising as merely a direct response tactic, rather than for strategic brand building.

In 2007, comScore (along with research partners Starcom and Tacoda) released results from the Natural Born Clickers study, which demonstrated the perils of relying on the click for measuring display ad performance. The study found that only 6% of Internet users – who were not representative of the total Internet population – accounted for 50% of display ad clicks in a given month. This provided strong empirical evidence that the click was not a holistic measure of display advertising performance. Ultimately, this research helped to support the belief that measuring the effect of any type of advertising by relying solely on the CTR means leaving a lot on the table for all involved parties.

Around the same time, the Atlas Institute released a seminal research paper entitled “Engagement Mapping: A New Measurement Standard is Emerging for Advertisers,” (PDF) which gave voice to the issue of last-click attribution. The paper noted: “The current ‘last ad’ model attributes 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last ad seen or clicked. This is the current standard the industry has relied on to justify their digital media spend. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the contributions of any previous ads that led the customer down the road to that conversion.”

These types of measurement issues, along with the industry’s over-reliance on the click, encouraged many in the industry – including comScore – to engage in research to prove the value of display advertising beyond the click. In late 2008, comScore released another groundbreaking research study known as Whither the Click?, which provided proof that view-through exposure to display ad campaigns – even in the absence of a click – drove lifts in consumer behavior, including website visitation, trademark searches, online sales and offline sales. These results conclusively illustrated that exposure to display advertising campaigns generated a branding impact resulting in latent behavioral lifts, including sales conversion.

Finally, our industry began to think about display ad campaigns in a new way, where measurement beyond the click mattered and we began to give credit where credit was due. In the past three years, through a steady drumbeat of corroborating research, the digital advertising industry has come a very long way in demonstrating the view-through impact of display advertising.

Yet despite this progress, there is still significant room for improvement in measuring display ad effectiveness, especially as it pertains to branding. More specifically, the prevalent methodological approach for conducting this sort of research has been plagued by its own bias – ‘last exposure’ attribution. Current research methods that are based on surveys of Internet users typically attribute one hundred percent of the branding effect of an ad to the publisher or creative associated with the survey respondents’ last exposure to the ad prior to, the survey experience. This approach not only ignores some of the legitimate branding impact of the campaign, but also misattributes to a single publisher and creative credit that should be shared across publishers and creative types, thus hindering holistic effectiveness measurement and truly accurate campaign optimization.

comScore’s Smart Lift Attribution Model overcomes many of the shortcomings associated with ‘last exposure’ measurement approaches. Specifically, this new model:

• Accounts for all exposures, including those prior to, and following, the survey experience. This complete view of ad exposures allows for accurate, holistic campaign measurement and proper attribution by publisher and creative.
• Accounts for exposures delivered until the point in time a survey was taken but also throughout the duration of the campaign. This means that lift results reflect the true effects of the entire campaign rather than a survey-only view.
• Allows for a more granular analysis of the data than other market solutions, providing more actionable and valuable results. The model can generate advertising exposure impacts by publisher or publisher type, demographic groups, interest segments, audience segments from third-party data providers, creative type, creative placements and client-defined segments.
• Measures the absolute and relative lift contribution by these various variables, offering the ability to truly understand the efficiencies of various and making campaign optimization more impactful.

For a more detailed understanding of how the Smart Lift Attribution Model works, take a look at the following infographic. Want to learn more? Please contact us today.

Download PDF

Much ado has been made about the significant economic impact a National Football League (NFL) lockout would have on merchandising, Fantasy Football publications, stadiums and sports bars. Even as it looks like owners and players could come to a deal as early as this week, the potential losses that could be brought about by a lockout continue to loom over the professional football industry.

Estimates suggest millions of dollars could be lost by each city with an NFL team, with collective losses in the billions.¹ Also at the forefront of the discussion are TV networks and advertisers, who face an estimated $3 billion in losses should an NFL season disappear from the networks.² In addition to all these, the potential impact a lockout could have on online advertising should be factored in, considering what’s at risk for advertisers – losing key male targets who traditionally spend a large amount of time on official league sites such as NFL.com.

Among the top 3 U.S. sports league sites (MLB.com, NBA.com and NFL.com), NFL.com attracted the greatest number of unique visitors during its most recent active season, who were in turn exposed to a significant volume of display advertising on the site. During the 2010-2011 playing season, NFL.com averaged more than 16 million monthly ad-exposed unique visitors and generated the highest number of unique visitors among all three sites in a single month with nearly 17 million unique visitors in November 2010.

However, portending possible effects a lockout could have on NFL.com, the off-season traffic spike in April (which coincides with the NFL draft) was notably lower in 2011 for NFL.com with 5.4 million unique visitors compared to 7.7 million unique visitors in 2010. With professional football having a shorter season than the NBA or MLB, the NFL’s website may have the most to lose from a season cut even shorter by a lockout.

A demographic analysis of the audiences for these three sports leagues reveals an overrepresentation (i.e. index greater than 100) among males age 18-34, a particularly attractive demographic for advertisers. With 18-34 year old males visiting more pages on these sites on average, they are exposed to a relatively higher amount of advertising.

A look at May 2011 comScore Ad Metrix data for NFL.com reinforces this point by showing how closely the percent composition of pages viewed by 18-34 year old males lines up with the percent composition of display ads seen by this demographic. 38.7 percent of all pages viewed on NFL.com were viewed by 18-34 year old males, contributing to the high percentage – 45.1 percent – of display ads seen by this group.

What could happen if a lockout were to persist and diminish visitation to NFL.com? Interestingly, our May 2011 data showed that while this important segment of males continued to make more visits to NFL.com than the total audience, they averaged fewer pages per visit – to the point of almost converging with the site’s total audience. Could this decline in page view behavior mean visitors from this group were checking on the latest negotiation news and, seeing nothing promising, and moving on to other sites?

It’s important to note that in spite of all this, the number of total display advertising impressions in April 2011 did not decrease for NFL.com compared to the previous year. But more complete insights are needed to fully understand longer-term changes to visitor behavior in the face of an event with as far-reaching implications as a lockout. Continuing developments even in the negotiation process could have affected consumer behavior and advertisers in ways that might not be reflected in online advertising spend or display ad impressions.

Even with a resolution potentially on the horizon, a few questions remain. Will the prolonged negotiations continue to have an effect on the average number of pages per visit following a resolution? Because a lack of previous NFL activity may have caused 18-34 year old males to shift their online surfing time to other sites, will visitation to NFL.com continue see a decline in the average time spent on the site? Or will the impending resolution cause pent up demand from NFL fans to create a surge in traffic to NFL.com, with users spending even more time than before and visiting more pages to get up to speed on the season outlook? Even as it appears the NFL may come to terms on a new deal, it remains to be seen whether or not advertisers might change their mind as the year continues.

1. http://www.sportsnetworker.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/www.focus_.png
2. http://www.adweek.com/news/television/nfl-lockout-looms-billions-advertising-stake-125898?page=2

During a recent conversation with our friends at NPD (the company, incidentally, where I began my career), they shared with us an interesting bit of Internet history. Many of you may not be aware that back in the mid 90’s, NPD measured Internet audiences through a business unit known as PC Meter. PC Meter would eventually become Media Metrix, whose U.S. business was acquired by comScore in 2001.

That brief history lesson aside, we all got a kick out of looking at the very first data collection from PC Meter, which dates back to early 1996, showing the list of the 20 most visited websites among U.S. Internet users. Remember that in 1996 most people in the U.S. population were still not able to access the Internet, and Commercial Online Proprietary Services dominated the phone lines. NPD’s launch sample for collection was based on only 287 U.S. Internet users. (Today, comScore’s sample covers approximately 1 million U.S. users.)

The list of top domains in 1996 includes a few names that are very much still around and among the biggest Internet companies, while many others have long since been acquired or forgotten. Ranking at the top of the 1996 list was AOL.com with a penetration of U.S. Internet users of 41%. Webcrawler.com ranked second at 33%, followed by Netscape.com (31%), Yahoo.com (29%), and Infoseek.com (21%).

Several Internet Service Providers also featured prominently on the list, such as Prodigy.com, Compuserve.com and Primenet.com, as did a handful of university web domains such as UMich.edu, CMU.edu, MIT.edu and UIUC.edu (at least one of which was apparently a pioneer in file-sharing of adult content!).

Interestingly, AOL and Yahoo! have withstood the test of time and continue to rank among the top 5 U.S. web properties. Yahoo! Sites is currently the #2 U.S. web property with a penetration of 83%, while AOL, inc. is #5 with a penetration of 52%. While many large businesses would expect to last 15 years, the speed and pace of change in the digital world tells us that survival is significantly less predictable than in more traditional and established industries.

Anyway, thanks again to the good folks at NPD for sharing this tidbit of Internet lore, which serves as a wonderful reminder of how far we’ve come in the past fifteen years and, possibly, how much more change might be in store as the digital world continues to evolve.

Google’s new social product Google+ launched to great fanfare a few weeks ago, and since then many have been speculating about how quickly the site has grown and whether or not it’s the fastest growing site in history. It’s fair to say the initial market response has been very positive overall, with accolades going to its design, usability and approach to group networking with Circles.

To get a better understanding of how Google+ is performing to date and who is using it, comScore pulled together some figures based on the first 21 days of its public existence (June 29, 2011 – July 19, 2011). Importantly, these data are based on unique visitors (which is different than “users” in that people who never sign up may visit Google+ pages) from home and work computers (which excludes usage via mobile devices). In addition, comScore is measuring behavior from people who visit plus.google.com pages, which may not include usage that occurs through the Google+ bar at the top of most Google pages.

With those parameters in mind, let’s take a look at the tape…

As of July 19, comScore showed Google+ at just about 20 million visitors worldwide, an extraordinary number in just its first three weeks. That number represents an increase of 82% from the previous week and 561% vs. two weeks prior. The U.S. audience recently surpassed 5 million visitors, up 81% from the previous week and 723% from two weeks earlier.

It would be difficult to think of many sites that reached such a large number in such a short period of time. That said, Google does have a built-in visitor base of more than 1 billion to work with, so there is clearly potential to convert a high number of users to its new social tool – even if it is still invite-only.

What is also interesting about the rapid growth of Google+ is its proliferation on a global basis. While the U.S. leads in Google+ audience, it currently accounts for 27% of the total worldwide audience. Interestingly, India holds a strong #2 position with 2.8 million visitors. The UK (867,000 visitors), Canada (859,000 visitors) and Germany (706,000 visitors) round out the top five.

U.S. Demographic Analysis Reveals Strong Early Adopter Profile
Though Google+ is already a global phenomenon, there are some interesting user dynamics within the U.S. that help us understand the profile of early adoprter. Some initial reports speculated that 9 out of 10 Google+ users were male, and while this sort of skew might have been possible in the first couple of days we are seeing a much less pronounced gender gap after three weeks, with males accounting for 63% of visitors to 37% females. In addition, 58% of the total Google+ audience is between the ages of 18-34, with 25-34 year olds representing more than 1/3rd of the total.

One final usage dynamic underscoring the early adopter profile of Google+ is how usage skews by local market. Two of the most tech-savvy markets in the U.S. – Austin, TX and San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA – are approximately three times as likely to be represented (i.e. Index of 300) among the population of Google+ visitors as might be expected given their percentage of the total Internet population. Other markets that index on the higher side include Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN, Pittsburgh, PA and Washington, DC.

Strong Network Effect Spells Future Success
The evidence shows that Google+ is off to a strong start in its first few weeks with a global audience of 20 million visitors. It has clearly captured the attention of the technorati and as usage incubates among this crowd it will likely continue to proliferate to a more general audience.

As we’ve seen in the social networking market before, success often hinges on a strong network effect, which says that the more people in the network the more useful it becomes to others and the more incentive there is to participate. Early interest in Google+ is certainly important, but it will also need to attract regular participation among users to cultivate such an effect. In the past week, we have seen the number of average usage days via home and work computers increase by more than 30%, an early indication that the network effect just might be beginning taking hold.

Time will ultimately tell if Google+ can leverage its early momentum to reach critical mass among users and capture a firm foothold in the well-established social networking market.