Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

Moments after news got out that Yahoo’s next CEO will be Carol Bartz, the stock started dropping like a rock. Her selection is not inspiring confidence on Wall Street, where investors are scratching their heads as much as tech pundits in Silicon Valley. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/wall-street-not-impressed-with-bartz-as-next-yahoo-ceo 1/13)

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Facebook, which became the largest worldwide social network in mid 2008, is still playing catch up to MySpace in the U.S. They have 54.5 million monthly unique visitors, says Comscore, compared to nearly 76 million for MySpace. But Facebook’s growth rate in the U.S. averaged 3.8% per month over the last twelve months. MySpace’s U.S. growth rate is 0.8% per month. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, but unless things change a lot, Facebook will overtake MySpace to become the largest social network in the U.S. in…2010. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/social-networking-will-facebook-overtake-myspace-in-the-us-in-2009 1/13)

Even the adult industry is experiencing shrinkage. The 2009 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas is seeing an 18% drop in exhibitors. While the adult industry makes more money from digital distribution than mainstream media, the business is being hurt by free content online. (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117998399.html?categoryid=2112&cs=1 1/12)

If the porn industry is hurting, we’re all going to hell… But we love you too.

Google continued to increase its share of the U.S. Search ad market in Dec. 2008 according to Hitwise, increasing its market share by 14% year-over-year to 72% for the 4 weeks ending Dec. 27. Both MSN Search and Yahoo! Search saw increases of 2 percent and 1 percent, respectively, in December 2008 compared with November 2008 but lost market share from a year earlier. (Cynopsis 1/13)

Percentage of U.S. Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain         Dec. 2007   Nov. 2008  Dec. 2008  Overall 2008
Google            65.98%     71.97%     72.07%     69.48%
Yahoo             20.88%     17.70%     17.79%     19.16%
MSN                7.04%       5.45%       5.56%        5.88%
Ask.com           4.14%      3.35%       3.15%         3.80%
Source: Hitwise