Daily Marauder

ONLINE SERVICES/INTERACTIVE MEDIA

In November 2008 Facebook drew 200 million unique worldwide visitors; more than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet that month visited the site. When sites are that big growth generally stagnates, but in Facebook’s case it’s still skyrocketing. In December, 222 million people visited the site says newly released Comscore stats, a 10.8% month over month growth rate. 22% of the total Internet audience went to Facebook in December.  Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which added 4 million new users in December to 125 million total. The page view difference is more dramatic – Facebook had 80 billion monthly page views in December v. 43 billion for MySpace. Just six months ago the sites were about the same size. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/facebook-now-nearly-twice-the-size-of-myspace-worldwide 1/22)

Google just released fourth quarter earnings. Net Income was down a whopping 68 percent to $382 million (compared to $1.2 billion a year ago), primarily because of a $1 billion impairment charge related Google’s ownership stakes in AOL (for which it took a $726 million writedown) and Clearwire ($355 million writedown). (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/google-takes-1-billion-charge-to-write-down-aol-and-clearwire-investments-profits-take-a-68-percent-hit 1/22)

Amazon.com was visited by 73 million unique users last month, a 20% spike over December 2007, according to the latest figures from Compete.com. That performance put Amazon way ahead of the Web portals of brick-and-mortar retailers Target and Wal-Mart. Dealerscope (1/22)

On a day when Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, the 7 or so people losing their jobs at Digg may seem like a drop in the bucket. But that represents about about 10 percent of Digg’s 75-person workforce, whereas the 5,000 at Microsoft represents 5 percent. (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/as-growth-flattens-digg-downsizes 1/22)

Google is testing a feature that automatically turns direct links to YouTube videos copied into the instant messaging application (seems to work only from within Gmail, not the desktop client) into embedded clips.( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/22/new-in-google-talk-embedded-youtube-videos 1/22)