Nielsen came out with its third quarter mobile numbers today and the demographics are intriguing. The reason that young people feel like everybody has smartphones is because they do. 62% of people 25-34 years old have smartphones. Of all cellphones in the U.S., 43% of them are smart.

These numbers more or less mirror what comScore came out with in early October. Since the last time Nielsen released its numbers, the total percentage of smartphone users has risen from 40% to 43%. The mobile industry thought earlier this year that the inflection point for smartphone adoption, 50%, would be reached by the end of 2011 but that is not likely to be the case at this rate. The holiday shopping season should give smartphone adoption a boost and the major OEMs have devices lined up for the season, such as the Motorola Droid RAZR, Samsung Galaxy II and Nexus Prime and the iPhone 4S. BlackBerry and Windows Phone are not likely to see any appreciable gains this holiday season as the BBX platform from RIM and Windows Phone from Nokia will be released in the first quarter of 2012.

The demographic numbers are intriguing. Nearly one out of every five senior citizens has a smartphone at 18% while teens and their parents (the 13-17 and 45-54 demographics) hover around 38-39%. Check out the chart below.

Nielsen did not release numbers that segment platform among demographics but it would be interesting to know how many smartphone users in the 25-44 bracket use iOS or Android, for instance.

When and what is your next phone purchase? When do you think the U.S. will hit 50% smartphone penetration? Let us know in the comments.

The study tested a 15-second car ad on different subject groups. Some saw no ads, others saw them on various combinations of TV, PCs, smartphones and tablets. Those who saw the ad on TV alone recalled the brand of car correctly 50% of the time. The people who saw it across all devices got it right 74% of the time.

The study also found that multi-screen advertising increased "engagement," meaning that subjects remembered more details about the product. Twenty-two percent of the TV group remembered that the car was a 4-door sedan, versus 39% of the multi-screen group.

These results come on the heels of multiple Google analyses of tablet use, one showing that users flock to their tablets in the evenings, and another breaking down the kinds of activities tablets are used for. News flash: it's mostly for consumption. So the moral of today's story is, if you want to get inside people's heads, it's measurably worth the money to reach them across devices all day long.

Google's Smooth Moves

To that end, Google has also announced AdWords for video today. This makes it easy to place ads on YouTube videos.

Google has also recently launched new incentives for advertisers who optimize for mobile devices. Google, of course, is almost entirely in the advertising business, so its partnership with Nielsen on this study conveniently defines a problem to which Google is the solution.

How do you feel about advertisements in general? Do they make for a better Web?

That being said, mobile video continues to see substantial increases in viewership, up over 41% from last year and more than 100% since 2009. Internet video streaming is also on the rise.

Even though Americans are consuming more video content across multiple devices, the Nielsen report does point to some interesting demographic differences in media consumption - something that definitely suggests that even though traditional TV viewership remains strong, that is likely to change.

Until the fall of 2010, Nielsen found that typically the heaviest media consumers did so across all platforms - mobile, streaming, television. But there is now a new sector that defies that pattern - a group that watches little TV but streams significantly more Internet video. Nielsen says that this is being led by the age 18-45 demographic, a group that is "significant but small." About 20% of this group spends 27 minutes per day watching streaming video online. Just as importantly, this particular group watches the least amount of traditional TV.

Nielsen says that as people age, they do spend more time watching television. But it remains to be seen as to whether or not traditional TV viewership will be the media that we turn to as we grow older.

59% of women and 52% of men say that they have privacy concerns when it comes to the apps they download onto their smartphones. Those older than 45 were the most concerned about their privacy, while those between the ages of 25 and 34 were the least concerned.

This Nielsen study specifically targeted those mobile subscribers who have downloaded an app within the last 30 days, so this is a demographic that is familiar with apps and that, at first blush, could be open to trying out the spate of new services that utilize location-based data. That could involve "checking in" or that could just saying "yes" to transmitting GPS data in order to deliver specific content.

Regardless, the Nielsen study does seem to suggest that, despite the popularity of location-based apps, many consumers are still reluctant to share this sort of information. Only 8% of women and 12% of men say that they aren't concerned about their privacy and location data.

Says Nielsen, "this race might still be too close to call."

However, as noted above, the margin of error is too close to really give the winning title to any of the three.

The stats are remarkably different when looked at in terms of recent acquirers (as defined by Nielsen, "recent" means within the past 6 months). Here, you can more clearly visualize Android's dramatic rise over the course of 2010, from June to November, the months which Nielsen analyzed. Clearly, more new smartphone users are choosing Android (40.8%), instead of BlackBerry (19.2%) or Apple (26.9%).

Nielsen doesn't go so far as to speculate on why Android is gaining, but it could very well be the lower price points for Android devices that seal the deal for many consumers. Some Android phones are priced so low - for example the $179 Huawei Ascend on MetroPCS or the $99 (with rebate) Samsung Intercept on Sprint - that they're almost comparable to feature phone prices. Considering that, up until recently, roughly two-thirds of the market consisted of feature phone users, pricing has been a critical component in mobile phone choice. But now, thanks to the availability of more low-cost phones combined with the new, lower-priced data plans offered by many carriers, smartphones are becoming more affordable for price-sensitive consumers.

So Who's Winning? You Are.

Although much of the focus of today's news is on who's winning the smartphone race, the real answer is simple: it's the consumer, of course.

Smartphone adoption is increasing in the U.S. In November 2010, 45% of recent acquirers chose a smartphone, said Nielsen, compared with 34% back in June. It's obvious that the demand for smartphones is growing as the race between the different platforms heats up, with each trend fueling the other. For consumers, this means the manufacturers and operating system makers will battle for their attention - a battle that will bring new and better hardware, more features and functions and even more price drops. Sounds like a good time to buy a smartphone, if you haven't already.

As much as the CTAM tries to spin these current results as positive, though, the current discussion feels somewhat reminiscent of the debate over the "death of the newspaper." The CTAM's study and press release completely ignores that bringing the Internet to your TV was barely worth the hassle until just a few months ago. Now, however, with the arrival Google TV, cheap boxes from Roku and the Boxee Box, bringing the Internet to the living room is getting easier and with online services like Hulu+ and Netflix, getting interesting content to these devices is also pretty straightforward. DVRs are now a standard feature in most households, so switching from time-delayed viewing to online TV is a relatively easy transition for many households, though the fact that a lot of live sporting events and a number of prominent shows aren't available yet is surely holding some potential cord-cutters back. The CTAM study ended in August. It'll be interesting to see what these results look like 6 to 12 months from now.

To gather its data, Nielsen monitors about 200,000 panel members, a technique that is clearly informed by Nielsen's method for gathering data about TV viewers. Other metrics companies use data from toolbars, ISPs, and other sources, though Quantcast also gives site owners the option to embed a code snippet on their pages that reports data directly to Quantcast (Hulu does so, for example, and so does RWW).

Stats Need Standards

The real problem here, of course, isn't even about knowing exactly how many people watched videos on Hulu last month (even though we have to admit that this discussion is quite interesting in its own right). Instead, this kerfuffle once again shows how hard it is to correctly estimate usage numbers on the web, especially in the absence of any real standards. As every blogger can easily attest, three different stats programs will give you three different numbers.

We have to take publicly available stats, no matter from which provider, with a grain of salt. In our experience, it is always worth looking at a number of different sources, and while the trends that these services show tend to be relatively trustworthy, the exact numbers are always open for debate.

Nielsen breaks the data down into categories, which is really the most interesting part of their report because it indicates what sort of properties are currently the most popular on the mobile web. The biggest benefactors of mobile were weather and entertainment, categories that each saw a 22% average audience lift when factoring in mobile sites. As Allen Stern on CenterNetworks notes, though, mapping seems mysteriously absent from Nielsen's data.

TotalWeb - Average Online Audience Lift Provided by Mobile Web, by Category (Q4 2007)
Category	Average Lift (%)
Total	13
Weather1	22
Entertainment	22
Games	15
Music	15
Email	11
Sports	10
Business/Finance	4
Social Networking	3
Search	2
Shopping/Auctions	1
Source: TotalWeb Q4 2007, The Nielsen Company. Based on 200+ Internet sites measured across both Home PC and Mobile Internet. 1To be read: In Q4 2007, weather sites measured by TotalWeb averaged a 22% lift in overall audience reach through mobile web traffic, over home PC traffic alone.

Enter in two or more keywords, like "Clinton vs. Obama vs. McCain," and the graph will display a comparison of those terms using a different colored line for each. A pie chart will also display showing the percentages of mentions for each term throughout the blogosphere.

Tracking the Political Candidates

Beneath the charts are the blog search results for the items, with each term as a separate tab. The graphs themselves are interactive, too - you can click anywhere on the chart's lines to see the articles from that particular date.

Trendpedia also offers advanced search tools from a separate page that let you perform searches using the word "AND"  to search for multiple terms in one search to compare to multiple terms in a separate search. (Example: "twitter and jaiku" vs. "wordpress and typepad and blogger") You can also make your own label for the searches which will appear on the chart that displays. (Ex: "microblogging" vs. "blogging"). The advanced search page also lets you specify which language to cull the search results from, if desired.

Blogging vs Microblogging

After performing the search, you can use the provided social media buttons to share the trend on del.icio.us, reddit, Digg, Facebook, StumpleUpon, or via email. However, a glaring omission is absence of an embed code for pasting the chart onto your blog or web site, forcing you to do screen grabs instead.

Trendpedia is clearly meant to be a competitor to Nielsen Media's Blogpulse, a site which Peter Kim points out appears to be on "auto-pilot." The Blogpulse homepage still features a section called "2005 Year in Review" and the latest news section's last update is from April 2007. Trendpedia's homepage, on the other hand, shows featured trends, popular trends last month, and popular trends last week. So, perhaps now with Tredpedia's offering, we'll start seeing some movement and innovation in this space once again.

Trendpedia homepage

The reasoning is simple enough: While unique visits and page views are useful in measuring how much incoming traffic a site has, it isn't exactly a good or accurate way of measuring impact or even engagement. You could have high incoming traffic (for example, any site that is hugely successful on social sites) but if there is an incredibly high exit rate and only 30 seconds to a minute spent on the site, the traffic numbers don't mean much (i.e. not all traffic is created equal). Furthermore, the rise of new web technologies such as AJAX which don't require page reloads to refresh elements or modules in a page, or video embeds (such as from YouTube) that allow you to watch a video and then browse related videos without ever refreshing the page, are making page views a mostly inaccurate measure and rendering it largely irrelevant.

While most people agree that page views are becoming irrelevant, the same people are uncertain about the future. For example, many agree that attention-based metrics are the future. Attention metrics calculate the total time spent on a site or interacting with a page (or element on a page in the case of Facebook applications) as a percentage of total time that people spend online, to measure a site's relative importance on the web. However, there are many others, like the Tel Aviv-based Nuconomy Studio and even Yahoo's Buzz, that believe using factors like comments on posts, ratings from users, number of times something is shared, and clicks on ads as a measure of how popular something is is a better/more accurate metric.

The problem it seems, arises because there is a disconnect between the advertising industry and the publishing industry. The reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you're generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks). While it is true that the page view as a metric is on it's way out, this isn't going to happen unless a new metric comes from within the advertising industry, which, with over $20 billion at stake, has the most to gain from a more accurate way of determining where to spend their money.

But it's not that simple either. As Scott Ross explains, different web technologies and applications have unique effects on different sites. What technologies you use and how they effect engagement and interaction on your site may depend on the size of your site, the niche you operate in, and a host of other factors. In fact, the metric that is most applicable could even change from page to page depending on the content on those pages. That being the case, perhaps one metric that is applied to everyone is just not enough and just not practical/efficient. As web technologies evolve, the page view is bound to die as a metric, but unless the advertising industry can get it's act together and work alongside the publishing industry, a good set of new metrics that would be widely adopted is not imminent.