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The Rimm-Kaufman Group
comScore’s most recent paid search traffic report may have sparked a bit of paranoia about the stability of Google (and search in general) on Wall Street, but search firms like the Rimm-Kaufman Group continue to release stats that prove the giant is still on top when it comes to paid search–and that the market itself is quite healthy.

For example, from January to February, Google picked up 2.3 points of the Group’s clients’ ad spend–directly at the expense of Yahoo (down by 1.6 points), MSN (down by 0.6 points) and Ask (down by 0.1 points). Meanwhile, same-client spend on Google was up 22% year-over-year, while corresponding same-client PPC sales were up 26%.

“Because most of our clients instruct us to buy all the high-performing clicks we can for them (rather than, say, establishing absolute dollar budgets by engine), changes in relative share reflect changes in click quality across the engines,” says Alan Rimm-Kaufman. So Google’s rise in ad spend is likely linked to the giant’s move to reduce “accidental” or erroneous clicks–the same quality-assurance change that led to the reduction in overall clicks reported by comScore.

As for the market overall, Rimm-Kaufman acknowledged that there were certain clients in specific verticals that have been “hit hard by the larger economic slowdown”–but Web sales continue to grow, “albeit with somewhat less strength than in the past.”

TechCrunch
EBay owns a 25% stake in local classifieds leader Craigslist, but still decided to launch competitor Kijiji to capitalize on the huge hyper-local search market. Kijiji went live overseas first and then came to the U.S. last summer. Since then, traffic to the U.S. version of the site has grown dramatically, from 362,000 visitors in July 2007 to 1.8 million in January 2008, according to comScore.

This places Kijiji ahead of Microsoft’s Windows Live Expo with just 176,000 visitors, Yahoo Classifieds with 97,000 and Google’s classified service and Google Base–whose traffic didn’t even register as blips on comScore’s radar. Kijiji also ranked ahead of smaller competitors like Oodle and Vast.

While Kijiji’s traffic represents less than 10% of the 26.7 million U.S. visitors Craigslist had in January, Erick Schonfeld says that it begs an inevitable question. “EBay is obviously doing something right with Kijiji. But can it ever catch up to Craigslist?”

Two out of every three Internet users visit a social networking site each day, according to the web statistics company, Compete. This means that social networking sites are quickly approaching the traffic level of the big portals like Google and Yahoo. That’s a lot of new online ad inventory.

But a big question looming over the social networking horizon is whether or not that inventory is valuable for advertisers. To answer this question, we need to understand the target market and the environment—both of which are sure to grow and also change in 2008 and beyond.

Right now, social network visitors are relatively young. For this demographic, the impact of these sites is indisputable. Just as today’s Baby Boomers still listen to the Rolling Stones on their iPods, it’s likely that social network users will continue to make these networks an ongoing part of their lifestyle. Case in point: Though Facebook was launched for the university population, half of all current users are outside of college.

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