Facebook Serves 37.4 Trillion Page Views Per Year! (And Other Fun Stats)

Manoj Jasra discovered this entertaining video that takes recent research and puts it into a format that is actually enjoyable to consume.

Some of my favorite statistics:

• 90 Trillion emails sent in 2009, 81% of which were spam
• 4 billion photos hosted on Flickr
• 148,000 zombie (think botnets/click fraud) programs created each day!

What catches your attention?

Harvard Professor Details New, ‘Insidious’ Form Of Google Click Fraud

One of Google’s more vocal critics says the company should cut its ties with InfoSpace over what he calls “a particularly insidious kind of click fraud” that involves a fairly complex combination of paid ads, affiliate traffic brokering, and spyware. Harvard assistant professor Ben Edelman also wants Google to repay the affected advertisers and be [...]

….

Why iCrossing is to Search Share as Viagra is to Sexual Intercourse

Imagine for a second that I’m a doctor.

Now imagine that I specialize in…ahem…erectile disfunction.

Let’s say the average married couple has sexual intercourse 3-4 times a month–backed-up by most national surveys.

But, I conduct a survey among my viagra-popping patients, and release a report that suggests married couples are in fact having sex 8-10 times a month.

Would you throw out the other data? Or, would you piece this together and say, "wait a minute, of course you’re seeing a higher number?"

Well, that’s the observation I made when reviewing iCrossing’s new study that suggests Google accounts for almost 77% of search engine visitors–compared to the 65% and 71% suggested by comScore and Hitwise respectively.

Either I’m the only one seeing this, or it’s all in my head, but wouldn’t a company that helps its clients improve their Google traffic, see higher numbers like this? Now, I know that seo firms supposedly help you with all your search engine traffic, so this Google-bias should be negated, but do they? I don’t know a single search marketing firm–or client for that matter–that doesn’t focus 90%+ of its efforts on increasing traffic from Google.

With that kind of focus, aren’t you artificially increasing the search share you realize from Google?

Look, I’m not out to bash iCrossing. I just want to help you connect the dots that this data is no more unbiased than Click Forensics’ reports on click fraud.

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Facebook Sued for Stifling Competition, Click Fraud

It’s a saga we’re all familiar with by now: create a pretty awesome web service, start a trend, become a media sweetheart, make lots of money (VC or acquisition), get slapped with a lawsuit. Or two. Or fifty billion. Facebook added two more lawsuits to its heap recently: a countersuit from Power.com and a click fraud proceeding.

Facebook filed suit against Power.com in December. Facebook claimed the one-stop social-media aggregator was infringing upon their copyright, violating their TOS and scraping proprietary data. At the time, we weren’t sure whether “proprietary data” included user information.

Power.com finally decided not to take this sitting down. TechCrunch reports that Power.com has now filed a countersuit, claiming Facebook is “unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things.”

Facebook also faces legal action from RootZoo, an erstwhile advertiser. After analytics from their Nov 2007-June 2008 campaign varied greatly from Facebook’s reported data, RootZoo requested Facebook’s logs and a refund. Facebook said no to both.

RootZoo’s complaint uses 2 June 2008 as an example of the discrepancies between the two. While Facebook reported 804 clicks on their ads, RootZoo’s analytics programs show 300 clicks from the social networking giant.

While there have been rumblings about Facebook click fraud for some time, this is the first suit in the matter.

What do you think? Does Facebook have anything to worry about from these legal claims against it? Is there anyway to avoid getting slapped with lawsuits once people see you’re making some money?

Bing’s Paid Clicks Still Up

Bing’s flash in the pan—supposed to burn out a while ago—is extending every day, at least in one important area: paid clicks. So far this month, we’ve seen that

• Bing might be making more per query than Google
• Bing saw an 8% increase in paid clicks and a 20% query volume lift
• Bing is taking a hardline on click fraud
• Bing is increasing its searcher penetration and overall share of SERPs (in the post with the best Bing title ever: Pre Bing Sting With a Post Bing Bang?)

Efficient Frontier is back again this week with more good news: Bing continues to see increases in their paid clicks:

According to our data analysis, Bing expanded its share of paid clicks for the two weeks post launch. Bing’s share of paid clicks is up 13% for the second week post launch as compared to pre-launch. And, it represents an incremental 5% lift over the first week.

So in many respects, Bing is off to a respectable start. But will it last? What do you think?

Microsoft Taking Click Fraud Battle To Court

The New York Times reports that Microsoft is taking the click fraud battle to court.
“Microsoft filed the civil complaint on Monday in United States District Court in Seattle against Eric Lam, Gordon Lam and Melanie Suen, of Vancouver, British Columbia, along with several corporation names they were believed to have used, and several unnamed parties.”
The [...]

….