Statistics

AOL fell behind Yahoo in terms of its proportion of higher-priced oversized/custom ad units -- 17% vs. 25%. "This was a meaningful decline from 24% for [the second quarter of the year] and 26% in [the first quarter], when AOL led all portals in terms of oversized/custom home page ad units," according to Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter.

By 2016, advertisers will spend $77 billion on interactive marketing -- or as much as they do on TV today, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

The Internet has become so embedded in the consumer purchase consideration process that more than 40% of customers now say they will not buy a brand if they can't find the right information about it online.

Consumer electronics in general, and the smartphone in particular, are becoming an indispensable part of family life. According to a survey of more than 1,000 moms conducted by The Parenting Group publishing company and BlogHer, 71% of moms do not go more than one day without using the Internet, with 40% saying they can go only a few hours without using a mobile phone and the Internet.

While it's highly unlikely that President Barack Obama is looking to ask the founder and chief executive of Apple Inc. for a loan, it became a fact as of Thursday afternoon - the world's largest technology company now has more cash on hand than the most powerful democracy on Earth has spending room.

Video advertising continued to grow last month in tandem with the expansion of the online video audience. Americans watched 5.3 billion video ads last month, up from 4.6 billion in May, according to the latest data from comScore. Video ads also made up a larger share of all videos viewed: 13.6% compared to 12.6% in May. As a proportion of time spent, ad viewing increased slightly to 1.3% from 1.2% of all minutes watched.

According to the Compete quarterly Online Shopper Intelligence Study, online consumers are now using retailers' Facebook pages as online circulars to engage with brands online. The report says that one quarter of consumers now visit an official Facebook page for a retailer or consumer product at least once a month, and 56% of these respondents say they use retailers' Facebook pages to keep up to date on sales and promotions.

To hear Borrell Associates tell it, the internet is going to be awash in online ads, if it isn't already. Borrell has just reported that, at $22.6 billion this year, with an overall increase of 7.2%, from $21.1 billion in 2010 to $22.6 billion this year. The largest dollar increase is expected for online media, which is projected to be up 11% , from $6.6 billion to nearly $7.3 billion. Online now dominates nearly one-third of all auto advertisers' budgets and is likely to grow as dealers migrate more toward social media and mobile marketing.

Executives from Disney, Turner, and Comcast were in unanimous agreement that we are only two years away from 75 percent of TV content being available online and on mobile devices. At the Elevate Video Advertising Summit in New York this afternoon, Matt Strauss from Comcast Interactive Media, Jeremy Legg from Turner, and David Preshlack of Disney and ESPN predicted that TV "everywhere" was imminent, and that in the same time frame the networks will be almost completely agnostic about where and when their video content is being viewed.

Snapshot is the latest bold attempt by Progressive to base policy pricing more on individual behavior than population-wide statistics. Some analysts say the device represents a leap forward for the usage-based insurance movement, one that could revolutionize the industry.