Skip to main content

Mindshare Metrics: Google, AOL & MSN

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, with Google and Comcast in discussions with Time Warner about purchasing a minority stake in AOL, the following are some Internet mindshare metrics worth noting.

MSN, Google and AOL ranked as the third through fifth most popular Web brands during September 2005. Were AOL & Google or AOL & MSN to merge, the resulting Web entity would clearly be the No. 1 Website, each comprising an active reach of 72 percent or 79 percent, respectively.

Google and AOL would attract 107 million unique visitors, while MSN and AOL would garner 118 million unique visitors. Clearly, any potential partnership or merger could potentially change the future course of the online advertising business.

Popular posts from this blog

The Billions Bet on Tentative AI Demand

Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....