Just over a week ago during lunch at the New Communication Forum, I had a great conversation with Tim Tozer from Radian6 (a social media monitoring service) about the real metrics that marketers are looking for and the increasingly common difficulty of finding metrics that are actually useful and offer actionable insights. Many people who have to contend with web analytics tools today will tell you that it is no longer an issue of having the technology available to measure things online, but rather the analytical ability to hone in on the metrics that really matter.

Shanghai - China’s online video game market is expanding rapidly, with sales forecasted to grow from $1.7 billion in 2007 to $6 billion in 2012, according to a survey released by Niko Partners today.
“This market is attractive because it is leading the way for online games,” said Lisa Cosmas Hanson, managing partner of Niko Partners, according to VentureBeat.

New York - Sales of Blu-ray standalone players plummeted 40 percent from January to February, then rose only 2 percent from February to March in spite of winning the high def format war, according to a report by research firm NPD Group. This is bad news for the home entertainment industry, which has put its hopes into a drastic increase in adoption of the next generation high def DVD players after Toshiba dropped its support for the HD DVD format earlier this year in favor of Sony's (NYSE: SNE) Blu-ray format.

Los Angeles - Gannett's USA Today said on Monday that it has partnered with Mediabase to provide music radio airplay charts in a new weekly feature, to run in the magazine's Life section and on its website every Tuesday. Mediabase monitors more than 1,800 radio stations in 180 U.S. and Canadian markets.

Last week Apple and 02 announced that they had cut the price of the 8GB iPhone by £100 in the UK until June 1st. As always with Apple, the announcement generated a huge amount of media interest – including speculation that the launch of a 3G iPhone is now imminent. ‘iphone’ was the seventh fastest moving search term sending traffic to our News and Media category last week, and searches for the term reached their highest peak this year as a result.

Online video is a hot topic these days with new entrants coming online (e.g. PluggedIn) and out of beta (e.g. Hulu) every day. We are seeing users spend a bit more more time with the video websites, spending an average of 16 minutes and 12 seconds for the week ending April 12, 2008 as compared to 15 minutes and 14 seconds during the same week last year. One interesting trend that I have noticed is that search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic. Last week (ending April 12, 2008) the share of upstream traffic from search increased 35% over the same week the previous year, while the referred traffic from social networks declined 20%.

New York - CBS (NYSE: CBS) said on Monday that its March Madness On Demand video player drew 4.7 million total unique viewers, and streamed 4.9 million total hours of live video during the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The number of unique users was up 164% over last year's 1.8 million, but 2008 was the first year that CBS offered all 63 games of the tournament live online, and without local blackouts.

On Wednesday, everyone that is heading out to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in two weeks received the news of a surprise addition to the line-up – Prince. Coachella is always surrounded by rumors about the line-up and potential to almost impossible reunions, such as The Smiths, before the official announcements are made in January. Every year, fans debate and dispel rumors regarding which bands & artists will play the festival out in Indio, CA on blogs, message boards, and MySpace.

New York - The Nielsen Company, a provider of media audience ratings and market research, announced on Monday that it will acquire IAG Research, a firm that conducts research to determine the effectiveness of TV advertising, for $225 million.

A recent Reuters article discussed the missed opportunity by the music industry to capitalize upon searches for bands & artists that result in a visit to Wikipedia. A typical search result on a band or musician will display their own website, MySpace profile, and Wikipedia entry. For the majority of the most-searched bands & artists, these results are the most visited websites, with some variations in the rankings. A quick look at the websites visited immediately following a search for the top ten most-searched bands & artists for the 4 weeks ending March 29, 2008 shows that for 8 out of 10 of them, Wikipedia is more commonly receiving traffic from the searches than MySpace (although MySpace also ranks high for many as well).

San Mateo, Calif. - Coremetrics, a provider of hosted Web analytics and marketing software, said on Friday that it has raised $60 million in its fifth round of funding, led by 3i.

Cupertino, Calif. - Apple's (NASD: AAPL) iTunes Store has surpassed Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) to become the No. 1 music retailer in the U.S., according to new figures from market research firm NPD Group. iTunes surpassed the retail giant based on the amount of music sold during January and February.

The ‘virtual fashion game’ Miss Bimbo has picked up a lot of press - Google News UK was the second ranked site receiving up traffic from the search term ‘miss bimbo’ last week. The website allows users to create a virtual "bimbo" and compete against other players to earn “bimbo dollars” by making her as attractive and famous as possible. The controversy surrounds the activities the characters participate in, which range from partying and purchasing new clothes, to breast enlargement and weight loss using diet pills. The latter activity sparked so much outrage that the site has now removed the functionality from the game.

UK Internet traffic to online video websites increased by 178% between February 2007 and 2008. A Hitwise custom category of the top 25 video websites in the UK accounted for 2.22% of all UK Internet visits in February 2008, equivalent for one in every 45 Internet visits last month.

Following on from last week's post, Is Facebook on the decline in the UK?, I thought that this chart might be of interest. Facebook's market share of UK Internet visits last week (w/e 22 March 2008) was equal to its previous record high of 2.16% during the Christmas week (w/e 29 December 2007).

This morning I was interested to see the thread on Techmeme's homepage about the success so far of Yahoo! Buzz. The RedWriteWeb story provides statistics on traffic from Yahoo! Buzz to some of the publishers involved in the Beta. ReadWriteWeb claims that Yahoo! Buzz "spells trouble for Digg". What do the figures show?

New York - Despite concerns about the recession and a cyclical slowdown, the video game industry continues to grow in 2008. Monthly video game sales statistics from the NPD Group show that video game industry sales were up 34 percent to $1.3 billion, year over year, according to VentureBeat.

Rio Caraeff, a top mobile and digital executive at Universal Music Group, claims that UMG's digital business now accounts for 40-60 percent of total revenues from new releases in the pop and urban genres.