To silence reporters and critics who cried fowl over Instagram’s recent terms of service changes, Instagram has released some traffic analytics for the first time in the service’s history.

Instagram royally pissed off its users back in December because it altered its terms of service to imply that the Facebook-owned service could sell photos that were uploaded without getting permission, or use them for third-party advertising. Furthermore, the new terms forced users to enter into arbitration to settle legal disputes, thus waiving any right to sue Instagram (something that sparked at least one class-action lawsuit). The photo service later recanted on its decision to change the terms of service in a response to the public outcry, but the damage was already done.

That user backlash supposedly caused Instagram usage to decline, as VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwing previously pointed out. A report from research firm AppData, which tracks Instagram’s daily active users, said the service may have lost up to 25 percent of its user base after the terms of service change.

But now Instagram states that it has experienced growth rather than any decline. The service brings in 90 million monthly active users (MAU) and sees an average of 40 million photo uploads per day, the company says. It also reports having 8,500 Facebook “Likes” per second and over 1,000 photo comments per second.

One thing absent from the numbers is a daily active user count. It’s likely the service doesn’t want to release that number because it could give credibility to those who previously tracked Instagram’s day-to-day decline.

Via AllThingsD

We’ve seen a great deal of speculation in the past week about Apple buying a company to help it solve its nagging mapping headache. The big rumor, both started and squashed by TechCrunch, was Waze, the crowdsourced mapping and traffic app.

The only problem with that theory? Waze would only slow Apple down.

At least, according to Skobbler’s Marcus Thielking. He’s the cofounder of Skobbler, a spinoff from Navigon that sells one of the top mapping solutions in the world: GPS Navigation 2. It’s got a No. 1 sales ranking in app stores in 20 countries and has sold more than three million copies. It’s also based on OpenStreetMap, the crowdsourced “Wikipedia of maps.”

“There are only two companies that could possibly make sense for Apple to buy,” Thielking said this morning from Europe. “There’s Garmin, which doesn’t use TomTom, on which Apple Maps is built, and there’s TomTom itself. TomTom would be my bet.”

The problem that Apple faces? Buying just any mapping company is not a solution. Apple needs a quick fix — something on the order of months, not years — and buying a company with an incompatible dataset or base technology would ensure a long, painful integration process.

“Purchasing a company that has the talent but does not necessarily solve their issues right away … it could be feasible, but it would probably take a two-year time frame … and that’s not what Apple is looking for,” he told me.

And the core mapping technology is not even what Waze is focused on anymore, according to Thielking, who sees Waze as having pivoted from its initial vision of mapping toward traffic solutions for drivers. That’s significant, because the hard part of mapping is not necessarily the basic grid of the roads: It’s the details in navigation and the richness of local data.

That hard part is why Skobbler uses OpenStreetMap data. With more than a million contributions as of today or tomorrow, the dataset is unsurpassed in some regions — especially in hyperlocal data — and growing quickly in many others. But Apple can’t use OpenStreetMap, according to Thielking, since as a global company it cannot simply focus on the areas where OSM has good data — it needs a global solution with a fairly high global level of quality.

And it needs that solution quickly.

“Owning a digital map these days and especially in the future is an incredibly valuable resource. It’s very hard to copy and very fundamental to everything, particularly in an era of mobile solutions and mobile data,” Thielking says. “That is why Google is doing what they’re doing … and it’s one of the reasons why Apple is in this space.”

Apple wanted to trump Google’s mapping product, but blew it in terms of recognizing the massive complexity of any mapping product, Thielking told me.

All of which means that if there’s any company that Apple might or should be looking to acquire, it would be TomTom.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

Today, Cisco and NXP announced they are making a strategic investment in Cohda Wireless, which builds hardware to make cars smarter and more connected. The technology creates wireless communication systems between cars, as well as between cars and infrastructure, to create a safer driving environment. It allows vehicles to interact with each other so drivers receive notifications about cars traveling at high-speeds, out-of-control vehicles, or traffic congestion, and have a better chance of avoiding a collision.

“Driving is really one of the premier use cases where we will be able to experience the power of the Internet of everything,” said Andreas Mai, director of product management for Cisco’s smart connected vehicles unit. “This technology allows cars to communicate with each other and with infrastructure like traffic lights. Various test sets have proven that this could prevent 80% of crash scenarios.”

Cisco has been working on smart vehicles for a few years now and recently funded a separate business unit to work on creating more connected cars. Even though new cars often come tricked out with safety features, millions of people around the world are still injured or killed in traffic-related accidents every year. There is still a long way to go, and by creating a stronger link between vehicles and their drivers, Cohda’s technology seeks to reduce accidents by making safety systems more dynamic and responsive.

“If you are driving and another car is approaching on a side road driving too fast, the system in your vehicle is aware of the other vehicle and can generate a warning so you can take steps to avoid the accident,” said CEO of Cohda Wireless Paul Gray. “If the time is too short for the driver to react, the vehicle may preemptively break. What this means for the driving public is significant improvement in safety.”

As this is a two-way dialogue, the technology is only useful if a significant number of cars on the road have it. Cohda has partnered with 12 car manufacturers in Europe to install the technology in their vehicles in 2015 (model year 2016). The equipment is also being tested in the US, with eight car makers engaged in trials in Detroit. While it is important for multiple car makers to collaborate to make deployment a reality, each manufacturer has control over how they implement the technology.

“From a driver-experience perspective, they want additional security for their vehicle, but there are a range of industry implications as well,” Mai said. “On the business side, the connectivity of cars will transform the automotive industry. We are going to be able to connect vehicles to the Internet, which means applications in the entertainment space, location-based service space, and insurance space. The insurance industry is very keen to understand better what really happens in the event of an accident. Then there are the services you can provide. Remote diagnostics mean that abnormalities can be detected and customers told when a service is needed.”

Cisco’s expertise in software and networking and NXP’s experience with building semiconductors will help Cohda bring the technology to market. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has added live traffic information to more than 130 U.S. cities and the capitals of Colombia, Costa Rica, and Panama, the company announced today in a blog post.

New cities with live traffic info include Kalamazoo, Mich.; Portland, Maine; and Tuscaloosa, Ala. On top of adding new cities, live traffic conditions have also been expanded in “parts of Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K.”

Live traffic first hit Google Maps back in April 2008, and since that time the service has improved. Google Maps has come a long way since its launch, and it’s especially handy on Android phones. Sadly, Google Maps is being removed as the default maps provider for iOS users in favor of Apple’s own maps product.

Thankfully, traffic and navigation app Waze — a useful app with 20 million users — works across iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian so you don’t have to be dependent on Google or Apple for traffic info.

Check out the video below for more on live traffic in Google Maps:

Photo credit: Google

If you live in a major metro, you might be more inclined to take surface streets over highways during rush hour. Google is now making that decision — and the decision about which roads are actually fastest — a lot easier with a new glut of traffic data.

Google Maps has long shown travelers traffic patterns for highways. The data lets you see traffic speed along a given route at a given time of day. The new intel will show the same data for non-highway streets and roads.

“Have you ever been stuck in traffic during the heavy morning commute, or found yourself late for dinner plans because you left work right in the middle of the Friday night traffic?” Google Maps engineer Szabolcs Payrits writes today on the company blog. “Knowing the usual highway conditions during certain times of the day, like rush hour, can help you avoid traffic. And if you plan to avoid these highways, it’s also helpful to know the typical traffic patterns on the surrounding arterial roads.”

The new data set will encompass typical traffic patterns for “important arterials in cities around the world,” the post continues. Here’s an example showing typical traffic for highways and roads in Los Angeles, the city where only a tourist would try to take the 405:

Look at that red-lined, traffic-jammed mess! Now, Google Maps, like a local, will tell you to take Sepulveda Boulevard instead:

Also, Payrits notes, smartphone-using drivers can help the company improve its trove of traffic data by turning on the My Location feature on Google Maps for Android.

Top image courtesy of ARENA Creative, Shutterstock

The numbers from comScore reveal that average page views have fallen from more than 20 million a month to around 15 million per month. Unique visitors, which peaked at around 5 million, are now down to 3.5 million a month.

When Schonfeld stepped in for Arrington, I wrote a piece about how different his style was from his predecessor. Mike Arrington was a bomb throwing insider who knew how to get the spotlight on himself and keep it there. Two years in a row he created intense drama in the week leading up to TechCrunch’s big live event, attracting the attention not just of the blogosphere but the national media as well.

Schonfeld, by contrast, has always been more of a technocrat, well known for making sure the trains ran on time, a perfect, diplomatic complement to the fiery Arrington. As old school journalism goes, he had better credentials than Arrington. I always looked up to the work he did in New York, but his scoops and analysis were bland by comparison.

More telling was his inability to retain the site’s top talent. MG Siegler, Sarah Lacy, Robin Wauters, Greg Kumparack and Jason Kincaid all left during his tenure. He hired talented folks to replace them, but none had the same stature or “swagger”, as Fred Wilson liked to call it, that kept the old TechCrunch at the center of attention.

The challenge for new editor Eric Eldon, a VentureBeat alum, will be to turn things around — no easy task when the people who left TechCrunch, like Arrington and Lacy, are now competing directly with their old site, financed, no less, by money from AOL. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Thanks to its popular crowdsourced navigation app, Waze is sitting on a pile of valuable traffic data. Today the company announced an intriguing use for that data goldmine: powering your local TV station’s traffic reports.

Waze is launching a program to let any broadcast network take advantage of its citizen traffic data, which gives networks access to instant updates about traffic conditions. The company has partnered with 12 launch stations, which have been featuring Waze’s data in their traffic reports for months, including KABC Los Angeles, KGO-TV San Francisco, and KFAA Dallas.

Waze’s free apps, which are available on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, offers free turn-by-turn directions. But Waze’s true value is its vast amount of live traffic data. Crowdsourced entirely from its users, the data makes Waze a far more useful alternative to standalone GPS units.

“We’re thrilled to officially offer up our citizen traffic reporting to broadcasters,” Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze vice president of partnerships and platforms, said in a statement today. “We’re learning that the best local stations work at startup speed, so we can get each station up and running seamlessly in just under a week.”

Waze says it’s providing tools specifically for broadcast stations, including the ability to create branded commuter groups within its apps. This lets broadcasters directly communicate with their viewers, allowing for things like contests to choose a specific user’s traffic report. Waze says that ABC7 in Los Angeles has nearly 3,400 active members in its commuter group. While on-air, traffic reporters use an iPad to get access to Waze’s live data.

The company also announced that its apps are now being used by over 9 million commuters. That’s a jump of 2 million users since October, when Waze announced it raised an additional $30 million in funding. Clearly, the company has been growing like wildfire over the past few years, and this jump to powering TV traffic reports will only further its popularity among mainstream users. Once viewers see what Waze’s free apps can offer, they’ll have a hard time resisting the siren call.

Waze is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and has raised over $55 million thus far.

Google brought in $2.73 billion in income off that revenue in the third quarter this year, up from $2.17 billion in net income the same quarter a year earlier. Google’s traffic acquisition costs were $2.21 billion in the third quarter of 2011, compared to $1.81 billion in the third quarter of 2010.

The search giant’s newest social network, Google+, now has more than 40 million users, Google chief executive Larry Page said.

Google recently purchased Motorola Mobility, which makes phones sporting Google’s Android mobile operating system, for $12.5 billion. That acquisition, which regulators have not yet approved, also carries with it a treasure trove of mobile phone patents. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said Google did not acquire Motorola Mobility for the patents, but rather for the team, at Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco in August.

“We actually believe the Motorola team has amazing products,” he said. “We like having at least one area where we can do integrated hardware.”

Google’s share of overall online ad spending is expected to grow to 40.8 percent this year, up from 38.5 percent in 2010 and 34.9 percent in 2009, according to estimates from market research firm eMarketer. Facebook’s share of the overall US online ad market will reach 6.4 percent in 2011, up from 4.6 percent in 2010. Yahoo’s share of overall US online ad revenues will decline to an 11 percent share this year, down from 13.3 percent in 2010.

Google’s share of overall U.S. search ad revenues will grow to 75.9 percent this year, up from a 73.6 percent share in 2010 and a 69.8 percent share in 2009, according to eMarketer. That’s despite a large charge from Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine. Microsoft’s share of overall US search ad revenues is expected to grow to 8 percent this year, when the company will bring in an estimated $1.15 billion in net US search ad revenues, up 38.9 percent from $828 million and a 6.9 percent share of the total market in 2010. Google will pull most of its new ad share from Yahoo, whose share will drop to 7.9 percent this year from 10.7 percent in 2010.

Google now has 31,353 full-time employees as of the end of the company’s most recent operating quarter, up from 28,768 employees at the end of the second quarter.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google on Thursday finally launched real-time traffic tracking tools for its already-good Google Analytics service. On top of that, the company introduced premium Google Analytics accounts that offer more ways measure data.

For quite some time, Google Analytics has offered webmasters a free way to measure traffic of their sites 24 hours after the action occurs. But since real-time traffic startups like Chartbeat (a service we use) and Woopra came onto the scene, Google Analytics has looked slow in comparison. Thankfully, that’s remedied with these new stats tools, which include social media impact and campaign measurement.

The company said its real-time stats are only available in the newest version of Google Analytics, so you’ll have to click the “New Version” link in the top right corner to get started. After that, you can read real-time reports by going into the Dashboards tab.

Google used the Analytics spotlight to launch more feature-rich Premium accounts targeted at its largest customers. In the pilot phase, Google coordinated with the likes of Gucci, Travelocity and eHarmony to collect feedback.

Google lists the following new features for Premium accounts:

• Extra processing power – increased data collection, more custom variables and downloadable, unsampled reports
• Advanced analysis – attribution modeling tools that allow you to test different models for assigning credit to conversions
• Service and support – experts to guide customized installation, and dedicated account management on call – all backed by 24/7 support
• Guarantees – service level agreements for data collection, processing and reporting

Google did not list the fee it charges for the Premium service, but it said the fee was annual for users in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

A video introduction to Google Analytics Premium can be viewed below:

The service also shows how many page views a website generates for each Tweet. That includes re-Tweets and replies on the site. The service also keeps track of where the Tweets came from — whether they were custom-made or published through the Tweet button that sites embed on their pages. Twitter’s web analytics also has a leaderboard, where the most tweeted links show up at the top of the list.

It’s a lightweight analytics service that isn’t designed to compete with more in-depth analytics delivered by companies like Google, Twitter director of web business development April Underwood (pictured right) said. But the company has been toying with ways to make it easier for sites to keep track of traffic coming from Twitter.

Part of that effort was creating the “t.co” wrapper for each Tweet, which shows up as a source in traffic analytics programs. Around 95 percent of all tweets show up as links from “t.co” in analytics services, she said. But Twitter was not satisfied with that and wanted to develop more in-depth analytics.

“We know our partners use third-party analytics tools that go way beyond what we’re offering today,” Underwood said. “So we’re going to release an application programming interface (API) that will make their dashboards stronger.”

The product is still in private beta, but it should come out in the next several weeks.

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Reddit is still owned by Advanced Publishing, which owns Condé Nast, but Advance will not be directly involved with day-to-day activities as Condé Nast was, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told VentureBeat. Condé Nast will also make an investment in Reddit, he said. Ohanian will now serve as a member of the board of directors of Reddit Inc., the new company.

“Reddit is a top-50 website, all the peers in that space operate as autonomous companies,” Ohanian told VentureBeat. “Condé Nast felt like it was not adding enough value to let Reddit achieve its full potential.”

The site makes money off advertisements and a premium subscription, called Reddit Gold, that grants its users additional features for a monthly fee. That business model will live on, but the company also plans to introduce some new projects that should generate additional revenue without getting in the way of the user experience, Ohanian said.

“We’ll hopefully deploy a couple of other fun things that most importantly don’t sacrifice the user experience,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing I’m always going to push for.”

Reddit had around 700,000 page views per day when it was first acquired, but it has since grown to more than a billion page views monthly. As part of the company’s new autonomy, it has started searching for a chief executive officer to run the company. There’s also a chance the company will now work on official mobile applications and other types of ways to view the site.

“Nothing is off-limits,” Ohanian said. “If it helps the user experience and helps spread Reddit, it’s fair game.”

The reason for the large discrepancy has to do with the different measurement methods used by comScore and Google-owned DoubleClick.

The DoubleClick AdPlanner measures traffic from sites that use Google Analytics, data from Google services (like the Google Toolbar) and data from third-party market research. ComScore, however, only pulls data from two sources: a random sampling of 2 million people across the world who allow comScore to anonymously track their traffic, and data collected from over a million domains.

The data from Google services is arguably a more accurate measure of how people are actually using the web. ComScore’s random sampling of 2 million users leaves questions about how well that group represents the entire world.

“ComScore is a strange animal,” said NowSourcing President Brian Wallace, whose company helps advise businesses on how to spend their ad dollars. “I’m not saying that their data is bad, but when you have things like Quantcast, what’s the point of paying so much?” Quantcast, Compete and Alexa all offer similar services to comScore, but provide a portion of their data free to the public.

ComScore’s business model relies on selling its measurement services to clients — meaning the company has a much greater interest in making sure its data measurement methodology stays accurate. DoubleClick, by contrast, is a free service that people can use to help determine the best use for their advertising dollars.

“ComScore has been presented to be an acceptable standard for businesses. Reason dictates that if you pay more you’ll get more,” Wallace said, adding that this logic doesn’t necessarily apply to web traffic measurement because it’s not an exact science. And comScore does give its clients a larger set of data broken down to fit specific needs. Rather than offer a comprehensive list of the highest trafficked web sites, the company instead provides public reports, such as “Global Audience Analysis for Top Retail Sites.”

Wallace said business clients rely on comScore as a sort of measuring stick to compare against Google’s DoubleClick and Pagerank data, which means the true number of Facebook’s monthly page views is likely somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion.

Image via Sterlic

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I already spend a good chunk of my time obsessively checking traffic analytics for VentureBeat through Chartbeat. It gives us a breakdown of where our readers are coming from and what stories are popular. Luckily there’s a least upper limit to my neuroticism, because Chartbeat only tracks the top stories on VentureBeat.

Not any more. The developers behind Chartbeat announced today that it is launching Newsbeat, a more in-depth traffic analytics tool geared toward news publishers that tracks data for every single story on the site. Now, instead of just obsessing about where my readers are coming from for top stories, I’ll be obsessing about — well, everything.

Like Chartbeat, Newsbeat breaks down individual traffic sources for a web page on a site. It gives the site owner specific information about what sites are linking to the page and how many visitors are coming from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. The site shows the number of active readers on that specific page and ranks the pages with the most readers in a list.

“Newsbeat is really about the stuff that’s under that top curve, it’s everything on the site,” Betaworks’ Dawn Williamson told VentureBeat. “Where Chartbeat tracks the top 20 or so stories on your site, Newsbeat shows and tracks every single page on your site and feeds you analytics on it.”

But unlike Chartbeat, Newsbeat breaks down the traffic for specific sections and authors on the site. The site developer just has to tag certain parts of the site with a code that indicates that it is for a certain section — say, the MobileBeat section of VentureBeat. Newsbeat then drills down specific analytics for sections and authors. It’s designed to be more useful for publishers and editors working on specific sections, Williamson said.

“There are fewer and fewer people in newsrooms, and they’re all being asked to do more and more,” Williamson said. “We wanted to give people in the newsroom the tools to be better at their jobs and to really focus in on the stuff that matters.”

Newsbeat also scrapes analytics data from previous stories and builds a predictive model for new stories published to a new site. When a reporter posts a story, for example, Newsbeat creates a predictive model for how it expects the traffic to grow and decline for that story. If the story breaks away from that model — if, say, it lands on a popular news aggregator — Newsbeat sends a text message or email to the author (an example is shown to the right.)

Chartbeat was a smash hit with both publishers and other site owners. It has clients like Starbucks and Groupon (and as full disclosure, VentureBeat also uses Chartbeat — I check it about every two seconds to find out which stories are doing well on the site). Newsbeat has already picked up a number of notable clients in its closed beta, including Al Jazeera and the New York Times.

Stories that show up in the traffic leaderboard are marked with up and down arrows that indicate how quickly the traffic is accelerating. One arrow is typical for a new story, and stories that are “blowing up” are marked with two or three arrows. It’s designed to help publishers identify what kinds of stories are popular and shape the coverage of a topic accordingly, Williamson said.

The site has been growing quickly since it launched. It raised $3 million last year and has 18 employees. That has put it in a pretty good position that it doesn’t need additional funding at this point, Chartbeat’s general manager Tony Haile told VentureBeat.

“We’re in the lucky position of having lots of customers that pay for our service,” Haile said. “We may think about a funding round some time in the future if the right partner comes along but right now we’re just focused on keeping up with the crazy growth we’re seeing.”

Betaworks is now going back to Chartbeat and figuring out what other sites — aside from publishers — are doing with the dashboard, Williamson said. The company’s goal isn’t to replicate the same features that are now in Newsbeat in Chartbeat, because that would defeat the purpose of having two clients, Williamson said. Instead, Chartbeat will be geared toward other site owners, while Newsbeat will fill a niche for publishers, she said.

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Inrix is one of the leaders in crowdsourced real-time traffic information that helps drivers skirt traffic jams and plan their routes in advance. Inrix supplies this information to auto manufacturers, mobile developers, transportation agencies, fleet operators, and internet companies.

Inrix collects information from more than 10 million sources, including taxis, cars, delivery trucks, and other information sources. It offers data for traffic in 22 countries and reaches more than 100 million users. Partners include Audi, Adac, Ali, ANWB, Ford, I-95 Coalition, MapQuest, Microsoft, Navigon, Tele Atlas, Telmap, TeleNav, Texas Transportation Institute and Toyota. Inrix’s traffic apps have been downloaded 1.5 million times on the iPhone and Android.

The company has raised $70 million to date and its valuation is a little less than $500 million. The Kleiner Perkins money came from the company’s Green Growth Fund. Inrix is profitable and growing revenue by 100 percent a year.

There are two different types of social networks, private and public — each defined by its default privacy setting. Facebook is by default private and meant to connect actual friends. Twitter by default is public and anyone can follow anyone else. Google+ is decidedly in the Twitter camp — meaning you can follow anyone, including Google CEO Larry Page. Google+ lets you see Page’s posts and “like” his photos of kite surfing in Alaska. When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes “everyone” as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. If not for the lawsuits and FTC settlement about Google Buzz automatically broadcasting posts, it is likely that Google+’s default setting would be public posts.

Although Twitter is growing (having just hit 200 million tweets a day), Twitter has left itself open to be displaced with a slow pace of adding features. Even newly returned founder Jack Dorsey has said that it was too difficult for “normal” people to use Twitter.

So, how can Google go after the 21 million people who are actively publishing on Twitter, and, more importantly, the few thousands that own the majority of Twitter followers? These types of posters are generally publishers, and Google’s core competence is serving publishers. Publishers pay a lot of attention to Google, from search engine optimization to increase the ranking on Google searches, search engine marketing keyword ads to drive traffic, and on-site advertising solutions ranging from AdSense to DoubleClick.

Publishers are interested in increasing their search rankings and improving their reach. Posting content to Google+1 increases search rankings. The black toolbar across the top of all Google services (other than YouTube), which integrates both Google+ and Google+ notifications, definitely provides reach and is now in front of as many user minutes as Facebook commands. Users commenting or liking on items from publishers will show up in their friends’ toolbars. Even if they only have a few friends, the overall traffic bump will be significant. The Google+ bar has not yet been activated on YouTube, a key publisher and celebrity channel, and likely will broadcast YouTube likes, comments and shares.

While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube. Google was turned down when it tried to buy Twitter for $10 billion, and now it is going to try to replicate it. With Google+, the company actually has a shot.

Peter Yared is the vice president of apps at Webtrends, which acquired Transpond, a social-apps developer he founded. You can  follow him on Twitter.

From January to May 2011, the site has seen a 37 percent increase in unique visitors (13.7 million to 18.8 million) and a 25 percent increase in page views (999 million to 1.228 billion), according to Reddit General Manager Erik Martin (a.k.a. Hueypriest), who added that the average time a person stays on the site remained an impressive 15.5 minutes.

Martin said he attributes the steady growth to members of the Reddit community scoring mainstream news attention and the creation of new sub-Reddit communities, which are sub-categories of the main site that focus on a specific topic.

Condé Nast, which owns the site, also made good on its earlier pledge to give Reddit the resources it needed to manage the insane growth. The post announced that three new programmers have been hired to join the team: Logan Hanks from Google, Keith Mitchell from Oracle and recent graduate Brian Simpson.

“Thank you to everyone in the reddit community who made these new hires possible — be it in the form of submissions, community moderation, brand sponsorship, t-shirt-ownership, adblock-not-doing, sponsored-link-buying, or reddit-gold-subscribing, Martin wrote. “It’s a very exciting time here at reddit HQ, and we are extremely grateful for your support.”

With the addition of the new programmers, Reddit’s engineer staff now has a total of five employees, which seems luxurious compared to earlier in the year when the departure of Mike Schiraldi left the site with only one.

Netflix also accounts for about a third (29.70 percent, up from 21 percent last fall) of all download traffic — not surprising, since high-definition streaming is a major bandwidth hog. Netflix ended up surpassing BitTorrent for both download (29.70 vs. 10.37 percent) and aggregate Internet traffic (24.71 vs. 17.23 percent).

The traffic numbers show us that Netflix is an even more dominant force on the web than some think, and it also shows us just how quickly new markets will jump on the Netflix bandwagon.

After launching in Canada last September, Netflix managed to snag over 800,000 registered users there by the end of March 2011. Sandvine points out that that number accounts for around 10 percent of Canada’s broadband households, and that Netflix traffic now consumes 13.5 percent of downstream traffic during evening peak hours in Canada.

A big reason for Netflix’s quick growth in Canada is the company’s focus on licensing content that would appeal to Canadian viewers, Sandvine says. Netflix generated $12 million in revenue in Canada last quarter, but still lost $11 million due to money spend on licensing.

Netflix is now gearing up to launch in another international market this year, although it hasn’t given any hints as to where.

Via TechCrunch

Reports poured in indicating that Bin Laden was killed in a CIA operation in Pakistan, a report U.S. President Barack Obama later confirmed in a live broadcast. The news skyrocketed to the top of news aggregation sites Reddit and Digg, which are traditionally frequented by tech-savvy individuals. The main story on the front page of Reddit has already received more than 34,000 votes — which has blown past the last record-engaged story that picked up around 30,000 votes over the course of its entire lifetime.

The news has only been fresh for a few hours and it has already spawned a number of offshoot stories — such as comics and jokes. One top link: “Osama should not have registered his real name on the Playstation Network,” a jab at the online gaming network that was taken down last week and led to hackers stealing massive amounts of private information.

Even startup incubator Y Combinator’s Hacker News, another online news aggregator, didn’t escape the Internet’s frenzy. A link to the New York Times’ report on Bin Laden’s alleged death was the second top story on the site, which typically links to sites that have some kind of programming or entrepreneurial advice.

The tally included all Internet sites owned by Google, namely its main Google.com search engine, YouTube, GMail, Google Maps, Google’s office suite of products like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and others. One expects a major contributor to the statistic to be its juggernaut video-sharing site YouTube, which transmits an average of 24 hours of video every minute according to an estimate by Website Monitoring.

Since January, Google’s site-wide traffic has gained a whole percentage in Internet traffic share, the firm estimated, adding that it would be the second largest Internet Service Provider in the world if it were to operate as one.

The company has said in the past that long-term increases in Internet and mobile users ultimately help its traffic at a large scale, claiming that this is one of the factors that has led to its decision to enter the mobile market with Android. It has also shown initiative in building its own gigabit fibre network, which, were it to transpire, would also interestingly crystallize the company as an official Internet Service Provider.

The tally, which was obtained through more than 110 ISPs in 17 countries, comes after Google announced a record 2010 third-quarter revenue of $7.29 billion earlier in the month, up 23% from last year.

Comscore has just published data showing Facebook worldwide unique visitors are up, to 73.5 million from 69.2 million, suggesting not all is too bad afterall.

So what’s with the earlier national numbers? Well, to everyone’s relief, there came the quick red herring explanation from Comscore competitor, Quantcast: Student members of Comscore’s panel went back to school in September, and so their surfing patterns were no longer being tracked. Facebook visits measured by Comscore plunged, even though the students were still using Facebook from their dorms. Comscore was wrong! Facebook was doing fine after all.

However, in talking with each of the traffic measuring services, including Comscore, Quancast, Compete and Hitwise, we’ve concluded the explanation isn’t this easy. While Facebook may be doing fine, it points to some serious problems with the leading measurement companies that are more complex than most people realize — and advertisers could get very unhappy.

Every one of the panel companies showed a decline for Facebook in September. Moreover, their panels are pretty sophisticated. They’re each tracking more than a million people’s traffic patterns. And Comscore even has a special “educational panel.” Comscore won’t say exactly how large it is, but it’s reported to be something like 15,000, filled with students, and in fact they don’t vanish from the panel in September. There is no “home bias,” as Quantcast alleged, Comscore tells us. The panel tracks student traffic patterns from student in their dorm-room computers, too. Andrew Lipsman, spokesman for Comscore, says it is “nonsense” to say the September decline stemmed from students vanishing from panel.

Moreover, Comscore readjusts the weight of its educational panel, so that its influence in Comscore’s data corresponds with the overall student population of the U.S.

So, if the panel methods are robust, and they’re all showing Facebook traffic down, you’ve got to assume Facebook dropped in September, right? The traffic companies tried to assert this politely: “I’m going to settle the question once and for all, said Bill Tancer, Hitwise’s manager of global research, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Thursday. “It hasn’t plateaued, it’s just experienced a seasonable dip in traffic.”

Not so fast, Bill. There’s a big problem with even saying its seasonal. Facebook itself says traffic was up. It saw active monthly users – those defined as returning to the site at least once a month – increase to 19.4 million in September, from 17.7 million. That’s not merely growth. That’s huge. That’s a 10 percent increase! Globally, the growth is more impressive still: Facebook ended September with 44 million users, compared to nearly 9 million a year ago, spokeswoman Brandee Barker tells us. [Comscore, however, today says that number is 73.5 million, which looks to be way off. Facebook wouldn't undercount by that much.] Now, you can choose to be a conspiracist, and believe Facebook is fudging numbers. But here’s why that’s very unlikely. Facebook, a venture backed company in the midst of raising big cash, and has no interest in fudging. There’d be internal dissension, and investors and potential suitors would call them on it. This place is so incestuous – Silicon Valley is so networked, and so prone to leaks – they’d never get away with it. So, our default is to take Facebook at its word. Page view growth is also straight in line with the growth, says Barker, at 57 billion, up from 54 billion.

You can’t dismiss Faceook’s growth as being driven by “cookies” either. If you use Facebook, you’ve got to login. So if you’re using Facebook from the office, from home or the dorm, only one of you shows up in Facebook’s stats. In other words, Facebook’s way is more reliable than that used by other sites. Many companies use Google Analytics, which tracks visitors by placing a cookie on the visitor’s browser. This inflates the visitor count up to about 2.5 times, say experts at Comscore and elsewhere. Facebook confirmed that it only measures member activity: It isn’t counting random hits on their page from say, a non-member sitting in a cybercafé in China.

So where does this leave us? Well, unfortunately, it means you’ve got to throw out of the window any short term statistics trends from the panel guys. The New York Times has also just weighed in this morning with a story about the statistics mess.

One notable model is pursued by Quantcast, which places a pixel tracker directly on a Web site (with the permission of the site’s owner, of course), and so is as good as Google or your own server log in getting direct results. While Quantcast’s approach is promising, it also has serious shortcomings – in part because of misunderstandings from site masters about where to place the code (more on that in a second).

Moreover, panels break down badly for niche sites. If you have only a thousand readers, for example, it’s possible there’s no one on the panel reading you, and so the bias can’t even be compensated for with statistical methods.

Here’s a summary of key points on each measurement service:

Comscore – Notably, despite the decline it showed for Facebook in September, it shows unique monthly users for Facebook at 30 million in the U.S., a rate that is not only higher than Facebook’s 19.4 million, but ridiculously higher. And we’re talking only U.S. It’s global numbers are even more out of line on the high side. See chart below:

Comscore is the measurement company we all rely on (for example, VentureBeat partners with Federated Media to handle much of our advertising, and they tell us advertisers all track Comscore data). That it is apparently so wrong raises huge questions about the underpinnings of the Internet advertising economy. Advertisers may only pay for the page views their ads are being placed on, but they’ll never know for sure how many unique readers they’re getting.

To be sure, after cross-examining Comscore about its panel, we felt pretty comfortable with the seriousness of Comscore’s approach, and came away understanding why it is considered industry standard, even if there are apparently big bias problems with its end results.

Regarding the student Comscore panelists: Let’s say a student logs on from a dorm room, and then later logs on from a university terminal. Comscore doesn’t want to count them twice. For this reason, Comscore doesn’t track results from university terminals, Internet cafes or other public computers. That way, they avoid inflating numbers. [As noted, Google Analytics is misleading, as are most server logs, because they do double count users. They'll count you if you come in from home, and they'll count you if you come in from work, giving your browsers at each place separate cookies. Google provides you a number called “absolute unique visitors,” because it can’t tell how many of them are duplicates. Divide by 2.5, and you’ll get a rough estimate of real unique visitors.]

Here’s an example of why the double-counting issue is so frustrating: Sugar Inc. says it has 5 million “absolute” unique visitors, while Comscore shows it having less than two million. This would be understandable if Sugar was counting each visitor twice as they sign up from work and home. However, CEO Brian Sugar says 80 percent of his traffic comes between 9am and 5pm, suggesting there’s not a lot of home usage going on. In other words, even though Comscore says it isn’t double counting, Sugar still says Comscore “is so radically wrong.” (Sugar also says some of his sites aren’t tracked by Comscore — in part, perhaps, because they are too small for Comscore’s panel to pick up).

Comscore suggests the Facebook dip came because September is a seasonal month. February has 28 days and is the most seasonal. September is the second most seasonal. It has one fewer day than August, and has a holiday weekend in it. Search data shows major dips during this month too. But this doesn’t explain a nine percent dip.

Comscore data is relatively clean compared to other services. It doesn’t get its data through Internet Service Providers, like some other vendors do. This can be biased. High-speed internet users, via Comcast, are likely to consume twice as much content as dialup users, and they’re likely to traffic different site. Here’s another example of bias: Since SBC has a relationship with Yahoo, users of SBC are more likely to start on Yahoo’s homepage, thus distorting that company’s traffic. (Competing service s like Hitwise, Quancast and Compete all rely on ISP data).

Comscore has a 125,000 people on its core US Media Metrix panel for the U.S., but has a million in U.S. total counting panels it uses for other purposes. It has 2 million worldwide.

Hitwise – This company’s data is not easily accessible by the masses. You have to be a subscriber. It also doesn’t show unique, just relative market share. Here’s what Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer says of the “dip.” It is seasonal, he says, and it’s something he’s seen in past years. Looking at his chart, you’ll see the decline in Facebook’s traffic came earlier last year. This is logical. In past years, Facebook was more student focused, and traffic dropped when school was out. Only last year did Facebook allow non-students. These new users, many professionals, actually have more time to play with Facebook in August than they may in early September, when they’re back and rushing kids to school. Note how this year’s drop happened more pronounced in September. This is a highly plausible explanation. But again, Facebook has rejected these explanations.

Compete – These guys, like Quantcast, are no longer to be dismissed. It decided to pass on offering a direct pixel tracker, but it also has a panel of two million users. Like Quantcast, however, it relies on ISPs, which can be dangerous for the reasons explained above. It showed a 7.7 percent dip in Facebook’s traffic in September. It’s 24 million number is way higher than Facebook’s own numbers.

Quantast — Quantcast’s advantage is that it can put a tracker on your site, and get direct measurement. However, many sites are reluctant to give it such access. In return for giving Quantcast the tracker, the publisher must let Quantcast publicly release monthly user stats. Facebook does not use Quantcast. Quantcast’s panel also shows Facebook having 24 million unique in the U.S. (see chart). It also has a panel of two million, some of them ISP customers, and so it has the same bases as Compete and others.

A site called Streetfire however, shows the risk. Earlier this year, the race car enthusiast site chose to use Quantcast’s direct tracker (see our coverage). However, Quantcast soon disappointed, said Adam Bruce. First, it was causing too much latency, since it was piled on top of all the other scripts Streetfire was running. While Quantcast wasn’t taking much more time to load on average than other scripts, sometimes it would take seconds, says Bruce. Other times, it looked like the script would time out, and just not record any traffic at all. It depended on whether the tracker script was higher or lower on the page. If it was higher, Quantcast would load first, and perform accurately. If was lower down, it would the last to load, and sometimes readers would be gone before it could count them.

Finally, Streetfire decided to remove Quantcast from its site. But things didn’t’ get any better. Streetfire’s traffic has plunged, according to Quantcast site. It’s apparently due to misunderstandings. Bruce assumed Quantcast had defaulted to using its panel to measure Streetfire. However, this wasn’t the case. Streetfire still had some Quantcast tags on some Streetfire subdomains. That meant Quantcast’s servers were still relying on the direct tracker even though it was woefully underreporting, says Quantcast’s Feldman. The two sides are now trying to clear it up. Conclusion: If Streetfire, a venture backed company obsessed with its traffic couldn’t figure this out, imagine what most other sites will go through.

Konrad Feldman says Web performance problems are unavoidable, for all companies. However, he rejects the notion that his servers have suffered under increased load. Tracking is difficult, he said, It requires tracking billions of page views daily, and having to do it with no latency, and with enough backup measures to ensure nothing is lost. That means hundreds of terabytes of data.

While Facebook hasn’t signed up for Quantcast’s tracker, hundreds of others have, from Fox and CBS to new media companies, Hi5, Slide, and Rockyou.

Alexa – This is a toolbar. Toolbars are unreliable, and Alexa has been so discredited and so wrong in the past, there’s no point trying to debunk it. Its problems have been thoroughly documented.

Statsaholic – This is a repackaging of Compete data.

More and more publishers and retailers rely on so-called “widgets,” little boxes placed on other web sites, to deliver their news, entertainment and product advertisements.

So measuring Web traffic to those widgets is important for deciding what content to deliver, and what sites to deliver it on. A number of companies now offer widget traffic measurement tools, with Quantcast being the latest.

Here’s a summary of some of the main players in this nascent but increasingly important field:

Quantcast – This relatively new San Francisco company monitors traffic to Internet sites. Today, it adds a video and widget measurement service, also free. It is still a test version and publishers include Slide, PictureTrail, RockYou, MetaCafe and MochiMedia. It reports on traffic to all Flash-based media, including online games and downloaded desktop widgets. The service reports a widget’s “reach,” the number of times a video has been “played” or that widget has been clicked on, and the categories chosen (a publisher can tag a widget or video as a “game” or “comedy,” for example). It will also report things such as which users clicked on the widget most often (frequency), and the demographics of these users, based on other information Quantcast collects. It provides this information in a pie chart. To use it, you have to register here www.quantcast.com/quantified-publisher.jsp, and more info is here www.quantcast.com/quantified-video.jsp. See chart below.

Clearspring – The company offers traffic analytics for publishers like Time, NBC, Universal and Maxim – which together now have more than 4.2 billion widget views. Last month, the company began letting developers write, distribute and tracking widgets through Clearspring. Like other offerings, it provides a dashboard, and tracks things like a widget’s source domain, number of visits and geography of visitor. Clearstone, like Quantcast, is hands-off on the widget creation process. You’ll need a third-party developer to build a widget if you want one built.

WidgetBox – This company provides a “wrapper” to widget developers so that they can track the widgets. Again, you’ll need to build the widget yourself.

Musestorm -– The company distributes widgets for both the Web and the desktop. Notably, though, this company goes a step further. Other companies put a “wrapper” around the widget and then track that widget. However, they can’t track activity of content within the widget. Musestorm lets you do that -– for example letting you know how many times a video within the widget has been played, and how users switch between surrounding audio and text. Quantcast, Widgetbox and Clearspring don’t offer that. Musestorm also lets you update widget content, adding and removing items, and so lets you track performance of variable kinds of content. Musestorm has a new release coming this summer containing other features.

Update: Comment below mention other providers, Comscore (see here) and Yourminis.

It also sucks when you’re trying to measure the significance of someone else’s site, and are getting conflicting signals.

Here’s what we’ve learned over the past few days, after our initial piece on the problems of Alexa, Quantcast and Compete, all sites that independently verify how much traffic a site is getting.

We’ve learned that if a measuring company doesn’t have a tracking pixel directly on the Web site it is tracking, the numbers are extremely unreliable.

This may be nothing new for insiders, but the public data provided by Alexa, Quantcast and Compete can be misleading for the rest of us, because they purport to be accurate. In fact, that data is almost all collected from the surfing patterns of a very small sample of people. Those people are not going to be surfing certain niche sites as much as the general population.

Take the example of Streetfire, a very popular video site for car enthusiasts. Until our initial post, co-founder Adam Bruce was somewhat content with Google analytics, which showed his site had three million unique visitors a month (he let us login to his Google account to confirm). This matched information of his server logs, which Google also manages, and it was compatible with the ad server tracker from Adjuggler. Of course, this was all internal information.

Outsiders had access to Alexa (see its Streetfire rankings), a free site measuring tool, but Bruce believes most people recognize Alexa’s shortcomings, so he isn’t taking Alexa too seriously. Then along came two more sites, Quantcast and Compete, saying they can do a better job than Alexa. After we pointed to them in our post, Bruce checked them, but he found they were both showing his traffic at about an eighth to a twelfth of his internal numbes. Alarmed, and filled with renewed doubt about the reliability of his internal numbers (because server logs can be unreliable too, as can Google Analytics), he called up Compete and Quantcast to find out more.

Notably, both companies cooperated. Quantcast responded by offering him a tracking pixel, to be put directly on his site. This opened Quantcast’s eyes: It saw Streetfire’s traffic was indeed much higher than it had estimated, and told Bruce it will readjust its numbers after a full month’s reading. Compete, however said it couldn’t deliver a tracking pixel — in part, it said, because Nielsen/Netratings owned patents on this sort of thing, and that Quantcast can get away with it because it is too small to sue. (Although, we’re not certain whether Netratings really does have a patent on this).

To be fair, Compete does have impressive data: It says it gets data from the surfing habits of two million people, which is more than comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen and Alexa. It takes extensive measures to ensure data is diverse — gathering it from multiple Internet and application service providers, panels and its own toolbar — all this is more than can be said for the others. Compete has an impressive list of testimonials, but read through the list — most of those people aren’t experts, and even if they are, our hunch is that they wrote positively about Compete, just like we did initially, because it looked so much better than what Alexa was offering.

All these strengths of Compete, however, serve to underscore our point. If it really has such a industry-leading sampling, why did it go so horribly wrong with Streetfire? We called up Compete, and asked. We talked with product manager Jay Meattle, and Stephen DiMarco, who is in charge of “emerging markets.” They said they went back to their panel sampling and studied why a video site like Streetfire would be undercounted. Their analysis found video-oriented sites like Streetfire were being undercounted by a factor of four. Adjusting their numbers, that put Streetfire’s monthly uniques back up to 1 million or so, but not at the 3 million the other trackers were showing. In other words, it is still undercounting — and it came only after Streetfire requested a revision.

This is particularly worrying because Streetfire is a major site. If a car enthusiast site of 3 million uniques is being undercounted by the biggest objective panel out there, then well, the rest of us little chickens are hosed. The Compete guys told us they are more interested in serving general consumer sites (their main customers), and don’t really care about niche sites like say, VentureBeat . “Our clients are big consumer marketers,” they said. Fair enough. They take Streetfire seriously, they said, because it is a big site. But that also leaves us with this hunch: Most consumer sites are overcounted by Compete. Both may have an interest in that being the case.

Meanwhile, Adam Bruce, of Streetfire, is relieved because Quantcast’s tracker, at least, vindicated him. He can still trust his internal numbers. Bruce’s conclusion: Quantcast offers the best of both worlds. It offers you all the third-party data it can get (see screenshot at bottom; it shows gender, geographic and other data that Bruce says coincides with his sense of his readers), but if you ask it to, it will put a tracker on your site, to verify. Now, not all sites will allow Quantcast do to this. But its livelihood is on the line, like Streetfire’s small team’s is, it makes sense.

Conclusion: When you go to Quantcast for data on a site, be sure it has a tracking pixel on the site before drawing conclusions.

Finally, a note on Site Meter. Bruce said that company’s stats make sense since they are in line with his other sources, though Site Meter doesn’t report unique visitors, just visits.