Example:  The data indicates that 62.1 million home and work Internet users visited at least one of the Wikimedia Foundation-owned sites or launched a Wikimedia Foundation-owned application during the month, and each person spent, on average, a total of 17 minutes and 7 seconds at one or more of their sites or applications.

The parent level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single company or division. The brand level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs that has a consistent collection of branded content.

Example:  The data indicates that 60.4 million home and work Internet users visited at least one of the Amazon-owned sites or launched an Amazon-owned application during the month, and each person spent, on average, a total of 22 minutes and 44 seconds at one or more of their sites or applications.

The parent level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single company or division. The brand level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs that has a consistent collection of branded content.

“Primarily, we believe mainstream gamers are playing more of the broadly appealing games (i.e Wii Fit, Guitar Hero and Rock Band) pushing their hours of gameplay up,” said Michael Flamberg, director of client consulting, Nielsen Games. “The social aspects of these games have engaged them. We don’t believe hardcore gamers are driving up the usage averages we’ve observed. Second, gamers may be looking to stretch their entertainment dollar further through playing games they own more. The importance of value for them is evident in the findings on used game purchase.”

In terms of why new game sales have been soft, Nielsen offers three contributing factors that explain this:

1. Used game purchasing is at all-time highs in 2009, looking back since 2006. Claims about how many used games are being purchased in absolute terms and as a share of the total (used vs. new) have increased substantially (see graph). This is corroborated by GameStop’s record-breaking first quarter financial results, on the strength of used game sales. Best Buy recently announced it was getting into the used game market as well and Wal-Mart is testing this out.
2. There has been an uptick in claimed subscriptions to video game rental services by mail, to all-time highs since 2006 (14% of gamers in May). This is a plausible substitute for new game purchasing.
3. New game sales have been soft compared to last year in part because of unfavorable title comparisons in terms of how popular the releases have been this spring vs. last spring. This is a hit driven business and there haven’t been as many hits. Awareness of new titles, when prompted with their names, has dipped in 2009 to lows not seen since 2007.

For more, download The Value Gamer: Play and Purchase Behavior in a Recession and read the coverage in the Los Angeles Times.

A gamer is defined as claiming to have purchased a title in the past 6 months and played for at least 1 hour per week on any of the current consoles or the PC.

Top 10 Search Providers for May 2009 (U.S.) 

 * A year-over-year comparison is not possible because of a definitional change to Yellow Pages Search.

Google topped the list of top 10 web brands, with a unique audience of 131.2 million.  Yahoo! took second place, with a unique audience of 118.9 million, followed by MSN/Windows Live at 101.5 million. 

Read the full press release here.

When Microsoft rebranded their search engine, Yusuf Mehdi explained that they settled on the name Bing “because it sounds off in our heads when we think about that moment of discovery and decision making – when you resolve those important tasks.” Still in the early weeks of the launch, he is probably hoping that Bing resonates more like the sweet sound of trialability.

With only 22 percent of all active U.S. searchers using MSN/Windows Live on a monthly basis, user trial and acquisition is Bing’s first critical hurdle to overcome. And looking at the first week, there is certainly some promise.

Bing kicked off with a bang on June 1, doubling the number of unique visitors MSN/Windows Live received on the previous day and nearly overtaking Yahoo! Search for the No. 2 spot. By the end of the week, Bing propelled a 6 percentage point increase in Microsoft’s share of search pages (among the top five search engines), going from 8.7 percent during the week of May 25 to 14.7 percent during the week of June 1.

Redefining Search
It would be premature to think about whether Bing is already flaming out after a raucous start. However, Bing’s stagnation in daily visitors since its launch does make me wonder about the opportunity for significant growth in a mature search market with a well-established leader. While Microsoft’s expected $80 million to $100 million campaign will drive more awareness, raising visitor levels at least temporarily, what happens after that? Ultimately, Microsoft needs to be able to win over already satisfied searchers by providing a truly innovative alternative.

If we think about Bing in terms of the Technology Lifecycle Adoption Model, where Everett Rogers illustrates adoption over time as a “bell curve,” then we may be able to get a sense for growth potential. With over 87 percent of the Active Internet Universe already searching, we’re presumably near the end of the curve. But if Bing can successfully redefine search from a tool that aids online navigation to one that helps make decisions, then perhaps Microsoft is carving out a new space where their product is in a different stage of adoption. Maybe the 40-50 thousand daily visitors represent early adopters, in which case Microsoft could expect that the current Bing audience represents only 16 percent of the potential market, allowing more room for growth.

I think that many of us can agree it is very optimistic to think of Bing as an entirely new piece of technology, but the point is that online search hasn’t really changed during the last ten years. So in order for Microsoft, or any other competitor, to pick up search share in this market they will have to redefine what people think of search.

It’s safe to say that expectations of search capabilities and delivery have risen over the years, and Microsoft is betting that this will translate into widespread adoption of their new and improved search engine, Bing. In anticipation of its debut this week, Microsoft posted a teaser video and allowed select individuals to preview the tool, resulting in some substantial pre-launch buzz.

The Early Verdict on Bing

To understand how the buzz on Bing has unfolded over the last few days, we watched commentary—specifically reaction and sentiment—of social and traditional media site users as they discussed Bing. So far, sentiment towards Bing has been generally favorable, although most people appear to be neutral on the topic. However, more than half of top bloggers–those associated with the most influential and high-reaching blogs– expressed an opinion, with the result being more positive than negative.

So how can we interpret this? In order to understand sentiment, it is helpful to know which keywords are driving the opinions.

Keyword Topics Driving Bing Sentiment

Interestingly, those topics that drive negative sentiment for some people are the very same ones that drive positive sentiment for others (such as comparisons to other search engines, quality of results, and the reaction to the brand). The good news for Microsoft is that the balance is tipping toward positive, especially among influential individuals, and some of the negativity will be moot once Bing goes live (such as the video demo).

Making a Dent in Search Share

While I’m sure that there are many critics who are willing to weigh in on what the future holds for Bing, the real question is are people are willing to switch to Bing from their current search engine? Maybe so.

Although Google has typically been the top dog in the search engine battles, searchers are a little less loyal than you might think. Around one-third of all searchers, and 72 percent of heavy searchers (the top 20 percent of searchers that generate 80 percent of total searches in the U.S.) use three or more search engines per month. These heavy searchers are the ones that Microsoft will want to attract, since they drive the majority of search activity on the Web.

Furthermore, 30 percent of Google searchers also use MSN/Windows Live, accounting for 30 percent of all their non-Google search activity. So this relative disloyalty means that Microsoft may initially have a smaller hurdle to overcome in the battle for search share than one might assume. Meaning, they don’t necessarily need to get non-MSN searchers to switch from Google (or Yahoo!) to Bing – they just have to get people that already use MSN/Windows Live to use Bing more often. And from the glimpse that we’ve seen so far, they seem to be doing just that by focusing specifically on Travel, Shopping, Health, and Local search. Gaining these vertical specific searches to grow overall share isn’t going to be easy, but it seems like a better, more innovative approach than simply trying to make a better Google.

With a bevy of announcements expected from press conferences of the major players in the gaming industry, what are gaming enthusiasts discussing prior to the show? Even though most gamers agree that new developments for existing hardware is cool, console enthusiasts are more focused on what the future holds for upcoming games. One week before the conference, upcoming titles were mentioned in just over half of all E3 discussion, while the new PSP Go! and anticipated Xbox 360 motion sensor each garner less than 10% of E3 buzz. Unveilings are expected to occur for a long list of titles, but prior to the expo, games generating the most buzz include Gran Turismo 5 for PS3, Mass Effect 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 + Oxide for Xbox 360, and Legend of Zelda: Spirit Track for Nintendo DS.

We’ve all been there. We’re at the store sizing up that shiny new product, and everybody from the floor manager to the checkout person to our Significant Other is telling us how much we can save if we just went ahead and bought the darn thing. And we know that spending money isn’t actually saving it, but we do it anyway because it feels so good. Well, last May, Microsoft saw opportunity in our soft spot, and told us that they would actually pay us to buy products we found using their search engine.

And so Live Search Cashback was born. With technology derived through Microsoft’s acquisition of Jellyfish.com, the Cashback program immediately took off, driving 140 percent increase in traffic to MSN/Windows Live Shopping Search from the previous month. As many wondered if the novelty would quickly wear off, the Live Shopping Search audience grew 615 percent over the year. Even more impressive: it was one of only two Top Ten Shopping Search Providers to grow their audience from April 2008 to April 2009.

Turning Search Activity into Cash

Of course, none of this matters unless the searches are turning into referral traffic for the retailers. And since we know that people search for products outside of the shopping-specific area of the search engines, I thought I’d take a look at how effective each search engine is in referring traffic. One obvious finding is that most Internet Retailers can claim their highest percentage of traffic from Google and Yahoo! Interestingly though, MSN/Windows Live Search can claim more efficiency than any other provider on a dollar per visitor basis, driving 8 percent of visits but 12 percent of dollars to major e-commerce sites during Q1.

The Big Picture

I have to admit to being a little surprised at the findings. If Microsoft is doing so well in connecting shoppers with retailers, then why haven’t they been able to close the gap in search share? If we take a step back for some perspective, we find that searches conducted on shopping-specific engines only comprise between one and two percent of total search activity. Nextag, the leading shopping search engine, can only claim 0.3 percent share of all U.S. searches. This in mind, it’s not surprising that shopping search alone does not significantly impact the overall landscape.

For me, the interesting piece in all this is Microsoft’s approach of breaking search into chunks, and (presumably) attacking each of them one-by-one. Of course, it’s premature to declare Live Shopping Search the likely winner, given how far it trails Google and Yahoo!, and that Shopping is such a small piece of the search pie, but it’s going to be interesting seeing how its strategy of taking on Google one vertical at a time plays out. In the meantime, I’m going to try and cut down on all the saving I’ve been doing.

The parent level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs owned by a single company or division. The brand level is defined as a consolidation of multiple domains and URLs that has a consistent collection of branded content.

In addition to gaming consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, PC gaming is alive and well, while new platforms like mobile phones offer new possibilities for game developers.  More than ever before, video games encompass a broad spectrum of genres, platforms and price.

Other key findings from Nielsen’s report include:

• PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 attract the more engaged users, who are less likely to be watching prime time TV that users of other consoles.

• PlayStation 2 still leads all other consoles in total minutes of usage, but continues to have the highest downward trend.  Data suggests that the PS2 will lose the top usage spot within the next few months.

• Females 25 years and older make up the largest block of PC game players, accounting for 46.2 percent of all players and 54.6 percent of all game play minutes in December 2008.

• The most played games on the PC are card games from Microsoft, with Solitaire being the most played game in December 2008 with over 17 million players.

“Gaming, once the domain of kids and a small group of core fans, is now more mainstream than ever.  As the number of platforms continues to expand, we would expect that more people will be drawn to the entertainment video games can offer.  Along with this, the evolution of gaming consoles into multimedia devices has changed consumption habits of traditional media such as TV, movie and Internet content,” said Bradley Raczka, Marketing Manager for Nielsen Games.

View the complete State of the Video Gamer report here.