iEstates.com

According to a study released Monday by The Nielsen Co, entitled “What Americans Do Online”  lookek at the surfing habits of 22,000 Americans.

So What Do Americans Do Online?

36% of their time is spent on social networks, blogs, personal email and instant messaging, which is 43% more time compared with the same month in the prior year.

Online gaming is now right behind social networks, accounting for 10% of all U.S. Internet time.

Email  dropped from 11.5% of time spent to 8.3%; time spent on portals like Yahoo.com and AOL.com  dropped from 5.5% to 4.4%; and instant messaging dropped from 4.7% to 4.0%.

However when it comes to Cell phones, Nielsen study says that email remains the most popular activity with Americans spenting 41.6% of their mobile online time on email, up from 37.4% a year earlier.

For cell phones tiem spent on Web portals came in second with 11.6% share of time spent, just beating out social networking’s which has 10.5% share.

According to a new report by the internet firm WebVisible (www.webvisible.com), says that the average small business advertiser spent $2,231 on search advertising in Q2 2010, up 1.4% from Q1 2010 and 159% over over Q2 2009.

The most popular advertiser categories in Q2 2010 were attorneys, general contractors and dentists.  Air conditioning contractors, landscapers, and businesses offering irrigation services, fencing and awnings increased seasonal spending from Q1 to Q2 2010.

The WebVisible Report: State of Small Business Online Advertising Q2 2010, examines trends among WebVisible’s U.S. advertisers from Q2 2009 through Q2 2010 and represents nearly $23 million in U.S. small business advertiser spending from more than 12,000 individual advertisers in Q2 2010. This report also includes an analysis of data from more than 10,000 advertisers in the U.K. in Q1 and Q2 2010.

43% of the clicks resulted in a web conversion in Q2 2010, up by 22% over Q1 2010 and 39% over Q2 2009.

Conversion activity more than doubled for form fills, video views, printed driving directions and bookmarking in Q2 2010 versus Q2 2009, suggesting that users are taking advantage of additional website options provided by advertisers.

Its an interesting report and you can request a full copy of the report by clicking here

According to USA Today, Facebook.com signed up its 500,000,000 member this week.

I know its a lot of zeros but Facebook.com now has 500 Million members.

For those keeping track that is up from about 100 million members just two years ago.

Facebook added 100 million new members since just February 2010.

On an average day 115 million “friendships” are confirmed, members post about 400,000 events.

About 70% of Facebook’s users now live outside of the United States, with the Middle East, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, India and Brazil becoming some of the fastest growing regions.

So based on USA Today’s figures if 70% of Facebook users live outside the US that means 30% of 500 Million, or 150 million live in the US.

As of 2009 the estimated population of the US is 309 million meaning that almost 1 out of every 2 people, that would be every man, woman and child as they always say has a FaceBook account.

Pretty impressive stuff.

If you want to follow us on Facebook, click here

In December we will be celebrating our 3rd anniversary of TheDomains.com.

To date we have generated over 2,200 posts which have drawn over 22,500 published comments.

Up until a few weeks ago I had deleted less than 20 comments (not counting spam).

As an attorney I’m a huge believer in free speech and I hate censoring people’s expressions no matter how much I may disagree with them or how ridiculous I many think they are.

At the end of the day I  don’t want to be the  comment police.

Up until now no such stated “rules” needed to be in place, as thedomains.com has always been a site where the members of the domain community have come to express their concerns and thoughts on the issues of the day.  One of the things things I’m most proud of the blog it is has become a place where domainers, registrars, existing and new registries, parking companies, auction houses, attorneys, even trademark interests come to comment and talk about the industry that provides so many of our livelihoods.

However over the past couple of weeks there have been issues I needed to address with removal of comments, some by known and some by unknown parties.

So the time has come for a few general rules of conduct for participation on the blog.

None of these should come as any great news or shock as 99% of the 22,500+ comments have conformed to these general rules of conduct.

First of all your comments should be posted from a real email address.  You certainly can pick any “name” that the comments will appear under but if you use a fake email address, your comments maybe deleted at anytime for any reason. We do not expect to verify every email address for every comment, however we are reserving the right to delete any comment coming  from “fake email addresses” or non existing email address, period.

We also reserve the right to delete any comment which is derogatory, inflammatory, or personally attacks another commentator, at anytime for any reason.

We ask that your comments stay on the point of the blog and the subject the blog.

Lets be civil.

You know the domain industry is pretty small.

Professional full time domainers are measured at best in low thousands.

So we are a pretty close knit community where most people know each other at least by name or reputation.

Lets not rip each other apart in a personal way.

There are plenty of people from outside the industry that are lining up to do so.

Lets stick to the issues.

Lets debate issues, policies, cases, events, news and domaining.

Lets not turn on each other in a personal way, which is inappropriate, uncalled for and unwise.

Do not post your domains for sale.

Do not post what domains you have in auction, prices of your domains, email addresses or a URL to your domain auction lists or auctions.

I don’t do it.

I’m not going to allow you to do it.

Repeated violators of any of these policies will be put into the spam folder and no further comments from that email address will be published.

Speaking of spam filters, please note that Word Press has a very good spam filter system, but sometimes it places legitimate comments into the spam folder.  While we typically check the spam filter at couple of times a day, it may take up to 24 hours to be manually approve your comment if it gets caught.

We receive up to 1,500 spam comments a single day (including all the page scrappers) so going through the spam filter is a time consuming task.

Anytime you time you place a link or an email address into a comment,  9 times out of 10 the comment will go into the spam cue of Word Press.  There is no other way of keeping out those hundreds or thousands of messages a day that correctly get blocked from being published.

So if you comment contains a link to an article for example, its mot likely going to spam and will have to be manually approved.

Hopefully this clarifies what is acceptable and not acceptable conduct and interaction.

Finally thanks for all the participation over the 2 1/2 years.

22,500 comments who would have thought?

Yes the artist formerly known as Prince, and currently known as Prince once again, said in an interview today that “The Internet is Completely Over”

Prince also told England’s Daily Mirror:

“I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it.”

“The Internet’s like MTV,”

“At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated”

Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.”

“They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you”

Prince its not 1999 anymore

According to MAGNAGLOBAL, a media forecasting company, global online advertising will rise by 12.4% during 2010, to $61.0 billion dollars.

In 2010, Paid Search will account for $29.8 billion of that $61 Billion, up by 16.5% over 2009.

MAGNAGLOBAL says over the next five years, online advertising is expected to by an average rate of 11.0% through 2015.

So by 2015 online advertising will account for  $103 billion dollars a year in sales.

Latin America is expected to be the fastest growing region, with  13.3% growth over the next five years.

You can read the full report here.

Another media research company, eMarketer reported this week that it estimates the Internet will account for 15.1% of total media spending this year , with Search remain by far the biggest single category at $12.4 billion, or nearly half of overall online ad dollars.

eMarketer also predicted that online advertising will account for 20% of all ad dollars by 2014.

Now if we can only get our PPC revenue to reflect this it would be great.

In an interview published by AdAge, Joanne Bradford, the Chief Revenue Officer for Demand Media said that Demands goals were to be bigger than AOL and Bigger than Yahoo.

Some other interesting points in the Interview:

Demand has “1,000 copy editors”

Demand publishes 7,000 articles or pieces of content a day.

Demands eHow.com gets  over 50 million unique visitors a day (seems like an incredibly high number but that’s what she said).

You can read the entire interview here.

eMarketer today revised its forecast on 2010 online ad spending upwards

According to eMarketer’s, US spending on online advertisements will reach $25.1 billion, up from $22.7 billion, or an increase of 11%.

In December 2009, eMarketer called for only 5.5% growth.

“As Google makes gains, so does a large slice of online advertising,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and author of an upcoming report on US advertising spending. “When Google reported a 21% jump in net US ad revenues for Q1 2010—compared with a mere 5.3% gain in last year’s Q1—that was a key signal that the tide was turning.”

The search market will be up 15.7% year over year to almost $12.4 billion, while spending on banner ads will increase 8.2%.

Video will again post the highest growth rate, rising 48.1% to $1.5 billion.

“Display ad revenues at Yahoo! reflect that trend,” noted Mr. Hallerman. “Even as the portal’s overall net US ad revenues were down 4.5% in Q1 2010, the display ad component on Yahoo!’s sites were up by 11.7%”

Further, as marketers pull dollars away from now-weak media such as newspapers and radio, they are shifting a portion of that spend to the Internet. In addition, growth in online video advertising is bolstered by some marketers shifting dollars from their huge TV budgets.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), eMarketer’s online ad spending benchmark, reported Q1 2010 spending up 7.5% year over year. eMarketer predicts even greater double-digit increases each quarter for the rest of 2010.

Good News.

Now if we can just get that increased money flowing into Google to trickle down to domainers.

World Trademark Review (WTR) officially launched its blogs today.

“The WTR is now the only dedicated trademark publication in the world.”

“”For eight years WTR has covered the most important trademark stories of the day, and has broken some of the most significant trademark stories of recent times, from exclusive analysis of the ECJ’s recent decision in the Google keywords case to news of how the top 100 globally protected trademark list has resurfaced on the domain name agenda.”

“”WTR has the independence and objectivity to supply readers with information they cannot find anywhere else: we can interview the parties involved in a dispute, press trademark offices for their positions and statistics, and gather insightful opinions through speaking with leading brand owners. Assimilating this means that our specialist trademark journalists can strike at the commercial heart of every development in trademarks. WTR’s blog will therefore complement lawyers’ blogs and present new dimensions to industry debates, as well as highlighting and linking to other industry content.”"

WTR also welcomes comments to blog posts and invites readers to email us with their thoughts.

If you would like to sign up to view and comment on the blog just click here.

According to  Online Media Daily, Apple is preparing to announce its “next big thing”,  a new personalized, mobile advertising system that could well be called the “iAd”

The new ad platform, which will be officially unveiled to Madison Avenue on April 7th, has been described as “revolutionary” and “our next big thing” by Apple chief Steve Jobs.

It is believed the mobile ad platform has been built on top of Quattro, the mobile advertising developer Apple acquired in January for nearly $300 million.

Apple’s iAd is expected to offer location-based advertising that would enable advertisers to target ads to consumers based on their geographic proximity despite that Google recently won the patent for a systems that serve ads dynamically based on a user’s location.

On the domain front Apple does not appear to own iad.com, iad.net or .iad.org, although .iad.com and iad.net are parked pages while iad.org is owned by the Saudi Embassy.

If this announcement is made and iAd is the direction Apple chooses to go, it will be a very good day for the owner of iad.com.

locationbasedadvertising.com goes to a parked page as well but  the whois record states this “domain is not for sale”