An astounding 54 percent of online display ads shown in “thousands” of campaigns measured by comScore Inc. between May of 2012 and February of this year weren’t seen by anyone, according to a study completed last month. Don’t confuse “weren’t seen” with “ignored.” These ads simply weren’t seen, the result of technical glitches, user habits and fraud.

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Employees placed bets on when native mobile app traffic would surpass Web traffic. Would it take weeks? Months?

It was actually that very same day. And since then, Pinterest hasn’t received the majority of its traffic from the Web again (it doesn’t break out a specific number).

“It’s definitely way over half,” said co-founder Evan Sharp in an interview at Pinterest’s new headquarters, in an airy brick building near the San Francisco Flower Market and the Hall of Justice.

“We’re probably the last big website,” Sharp said. “As far as I know, we’re the last startup to become high-profile on the Web.”

Those comments came at the very end of an open-ended hour-long conversation about design and mobile at Pinterest, so I’m not inclined to think Sharp was pushing some marketing spin.

It’s a provocative argument that Pinterest could be sandwiched between the Web and mobile eras — following Web giants like Facebook and Tumblr as they slide to mobile, as well as others, like Pandora and Groupon, which have made an even stronger leap to phones, and preceding more recent mobile-first stars like Instagram and WhatsApp.

So I ran Sharp’s contention by some outside sources. ComScore, for one, said Pinterest had 46 million U.S. visitors in March, with 53 percent of them accessing from mobile. Analyst Andrew Lipsman said he thinks the key distinction may be that companies in the past started on Web or mobile, and now they don’t have a choice of which. “I still think there will be emergent companies where desktop will drive the majority of activity, but it’s probably the case that the companies of tomorrow will have to develop for a multi-platform environment from the outset,” he said.

Greylock Capital partner John Lilly, an investor in the recently sold Tumblr and also just briefly in Instagram, said he probably buys Sharp’s theory.

But that doesn’t mean that the Web is over. “My instinct is to look for apps where people are in front of desks, like education and Coursera,” Lilly said. Another counterexample could be the Greylock-backed local social network Nextdoor, which is still small but intended for a broad audience. It just launched its first iPhone app last week. And then there are marketplaces like Airbnb and the merged food deliverers GrubHub/Seamless.

But back to Sharp, who leads Pinterest’s design and front-end engineering and prefers building native apps for touchscreen devices that people can take with them into all sorts of environments.

If Pinterest were to start again today, it would be an app, Sharp said. “There’s a running joke here: ‘Kill the website!’ We won’t do that, of course, but it helps us focus on these other platforms.”

Sharp might just have a bit of mobile-first envy, though he quibbles with the use of the word “mobile” to describe both smartphones and tablets.

“A lot of companies try to make their apps very consistent, but I think different platforms are literally used very differently,” Sharp said, noting that Pinterest wants to make its various versions more distinct from each other in the future.

That’s partly a matter of form — the tablet is a two-hand device; the phone often just one — but also a matter of usage. “The phone is for down moments in the cadence of everyday life,” Sharp said, whereas Pinterest users have a notable tendency to spend longer periods of time with the tablet app late at night.

For example, “recipes are really big on Pinterest,” Sharp said. “You may discover a recipe at work on your computer and pin it to a board; you may refer it when you’re at the store on your way home — so you need to retrieve the pin really fast. And then when you’re cooking, if you have lots of devices, you may have your iPad in your kitchen with the recipe on it. We want to make it really seamless through that process.”

For more on where Pinterest came from and where it’s going, tune in to AllThingsD tomorrow for coverage of Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann in conversation on the D11 stage.

As Quora’s co-founder, CEO and also a significant investor, Adam D’Angelo is the driving force behind the site as it expands from Q&A to other kinds of writing. In an interview last week at the company’s new Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, the former Facebook CTO downplayed concerns about the revenue-free Quora growing too slowly, saying he believes he can outlast the faddish companies that come and go by building a high-quality product.

Why harp on growth? Despite D’Angelo’s roots at Facebook, where the -illions of users now start with a “b,” four-year-old Quora had just 2.9 million global unique visitors in April, up from 2.6 million the year before, according to comScore. But comScore doesn’t count mobile traffic, which D’Angelo said now amounts to a third of Quora usage.

Here’s an edited and condensed write-up of the chat:

Liz Gannes: How would you describe where Quora as a company is now?

Adam D’Angelo: We’re about 50 people, and a year ago we were a third of that. We moved to Mountain View. All these startups grew up in Palo Alto — there’s us, there was Flipboard, there was Pinterest, there was Pulse, and most of the other ones went to the city, but we ended up as the only of those startup down here that’s hiring, so it’s been really good for recruiting because it’s different. We’ve become more data-driven. When you’re small, you have to do everything on intuition, but now we’re at the scale where we have a lot of users, so we can run experiments. We have a data team that’s pretty big, actually.

What do you use the data for — is it personalization?

No, it’s more about to make decisions about what to build. We’re looking at whether something’s going to be a good investment of resources. When you’re small, you can say, “I use the product myself, and I’m annoyed by these things, so let’s change this.” Now we can say, “Twenty percent of our users have encountered this issue that makes them less engaged or more engaged,” so we can test it. That’s really important, because then you don’t have to centralize the decision making. So it doesn’t all go through me.

How big is Quora? What are the most important metrics to you — volume of content, how many people use it?

We look at people who use it. We don’t share the particular numbers, but it’s pretty big, and it’s growing.

But are you happy with how big it is? There’s a perception that Quora is not as huge as it could be, or as people hoped it would be.

I’m happy with how big it is now, given it’s now, but I want it to be more in the future. I wouldn’t be happy it if stayed where it is now.

So you’re saying you like growth. Okay. It seems — and I speak as someone who has been using Quora for a while — that you guys have a bunch of growth initiatives, various things you’re trying to get people to log in more, in a way that looks like you’re trying to goose growth. But maybe people just want to read content without logging in, and that’s okay.

It comes back to the data stuff. When we get people to log in, they end up using Quora a lot more, and we can provide a lot better experience for them. We can show them a personalized news feed, we can send them digest emails, and do all this ranking to find some stuff they want to read. There’s a vocal minority that doesn’t want to log in, but most people just log in and have a better experience, long-term. We’re not trying to goose anything. It’s not like we’re about to raise money, and we’re not about to sell the company, so there’s no reason why we would be doing that unless we thought it would be better long-term.

How do you think about the long-term value of content itself? Quora seems to be all about the evergreen content, but isn’t there value in near-term, real-time discussions like what goes on over at Reddit or Twitter?

Compared to other products, we’re much more long-term. Most of the stuff that people look at on Quora today was not written in the last month. You write something really good, and maybe it’s the definitive answer on the Internet for the next 10 years. Maybe it’s only a year, but not like a tweet, where it’s only relevant for a day or a week. On Quora, it takes time for the content to accumulate, but it just builds and builds. That means growth goes a little bit slower than something like Twitter or these viral apps, but I also think it means we have higher long-term value that we’re going to reach.

You’ve introduced a bunch of new content types in addition to Q&A. What’s working?

So we have answers, blogs and now we have reviews. The area we define as what Quora’s good at is long-form text that’s useful over time, and where you care about who wrote the text. Not that you need to be friends with them, just that they’re someone trustworthy.

How do people find things on Quora? What’s the balance between search and social and topics?

I think it’s a third, a third, a third. Search is bigger than you think.

Really? But I don’t even know what to look for on Quora.

It’s not like finding a needle in a haystack like on Google, it’s finding a broad area. It’s probably most useful when you want to do something like visit a new place.

You reformulated the Quora core mission recently. Tell me about that.

Our new mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. It’s what we always thought we were doing, but it’s a different way to say it.

If you were to say, Quora is a fill-in-the-blank service, what would it be?

That’s different from the mission; that’s positioning. I would say it’s a “knowledge-sharing” service.

How is Quora different from other companies?

We’re data-driven. We really value execution and getting things done. We do things more frequently than other companies; we have a faster cadence.

Everybody says that.

Everyone says that, but I think it’s not as true. We release code 40 times per day. And we have this thing where code, eight minutes after someone finishes writing it, is live on the site.

Also, I think we’re more focused on the mission, and people at Quora care about making an impact on the world. At a lot of other companies people are trying to make money in a short amount of time; this is their one hop in their Silicon Valley career before they go to the next thing. We talk to people before they join, and say, “We’re not acquisition-focused; you should only come work here if you’re willing to stick with it for a long time.”

What if Quora weren’t working? Hypothetically, how would you know when to quit?

I have a view that things don’t really decline for no reason. Other companies, when that’s happened, it’s because the users didn’t really like the product. Or that they were gaming Facebook, and Facebook shut them down and finally it caught up to them. I don’t think we’re doing any of this gaming stuff. Or maybe if there were competition, but I don’t think there’s competition for what we’re doing.

I have a view that if you build something that’s good, and you keep making it better, it lasts. A lot of times, companies will make these major changes that make things worse and that will lead to a decline. So if that were the case, we’d figure out what was happening and we would revert it.

The Yahoo board has approved a massive $1.1 billion all-cash deal to buy Tumblr.

It’s not clear when the official vote was taken, but sources close to the board said the acquisition was a foregone conclusion and was unanimously approved by the directors of Silicon Valley Internet giant.

The deal will likely be announced Monday morning, said numerous sources.

AllThingsD.com initially broke the story of the acquisition efforts and later followed up with details of the exact price and the board meeting to approve the transaction.

There were no other competing bids, despite reports, to snap up the New York-based social blogging service. That said, Tumblr had held some very preliminary discussions about various deals with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and also Twitter earlier this year.

As part of the Yahoo deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who will get a windfall of cash from the acquisition — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure, said sources.

Yahoo had been mulling some kind of deal with Tumblr, from a strategic investment to an outright acquisition, for about six weeks. Sources said that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had decided that buying the company was going to be “the stake in the ground of what her strategy is going forward for Yahoo.”

And that is to attract younger audiences with just the kind of user-generated content Tumblr has pioneered to impressive growth.

According to numerous sources, Mayer determined quickly in her research that the site was just the kind of property that Yahoo needed to make it both “cool” and relevant to new consumers.

Yahoo is looking to bolster its strong set of existing media offerings to appeal to a different demographic and also get into the social space via consumer-based software solutions that are both elegant and easy to use.

Tumblr’s mobile usage has also been strong, which also interested Mayer. While Tumblr started as a desktop-based service, its mobile offering has ramped up quickly in the last few years. ComScore says that a quarter of the service’s U.S. visitors now come from mobile devices.

At this price, it will be Mayer’s biggest acquisition so far. Since she became CEO last summer, Mayer has made only a series of small acquisitions of mobile startups at a low cost.

According to sources, the Tumblr brand will continue.

The deal, if consummated, will be a big win for investors. In a series of fundings since 2007, Tumblr has raised $125 million so far and is now at a reported valuation of $800 million. Investors include Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners and the Chernin Group.

While Tumblr’s Karp has resisted various offers for the company over the years, Mayer spent a lot of time with him reassuring him that Yahoo could turbocharge his business. He has also been searching for a COO to help him build out the infrastructure of its business, especially its advertising one.

And as Peter Kafka and I previously wrote, Tumblr could certainly bring Yahoo a big, young audience. Its worldwide traffic was at 117 million visitors in April, according to comScore. On its home page, Tumblr claims it has 107.8 million blogs and 50.6 billion posts. U.S. desktop traffic to Tumblr was 37 million in April, close to LinkedIn and Twitter, although Twitter obviously has much more via mobile.

But figuring out how to make money from that is a task that the company has only recently started to tackle.

Like other recent Web startups that have seen rocketship growth — see: Twitter, Facebook — Tumblr resisted advertising for its formative years, and its user base seems particularly unwilling to accept standard banner ads. In addition, many industry observers think that Tumblr’s pages are packed with porn or other questionable content that would scare off advertisers.

But within the last year or so, Tumblr has started selling modestly sized “native ads” promoting brands’ Tumblr pages, on users’ “dashboards,” which has shown promise. Tumblr has said it had $13 million in revenue last year and sources said it could get up to $100 million this year.

Tumblr has been represented by Qatalyst Partners’ Frank Quattrone, while Yahoo’s Mayer, as well as M&A head Jackie Reses and CFO Ken Goldman, have been on the company’s side.

Interestingly, what got me first focused on Tumblr last week were Goldman’s comments at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference last week, where he underscored the need for the aging Yahoo to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.”

“One of our challenges is we have had an aging demographic,” said Goldman at the Boston event. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.”

Tumblr, apparently, fits the very expensive bill.

How much porn? You’ll have to make something up, because the only people who know how much porn the blogging service hosts work at the blogging service, and they don’t offer up a number.

But let’s stipulate, for argument’s sake, that there is indeed a lot of porn on Tumblr — in fact, the company’s terms of service make a point of saying it’s okay with “not suitable for work” stuff.

Which means there are a lot of pages on Tumblr that advertisers won’t go near. Like “Girls in Yoga Pants,” where the image at the top of this post came from (yes, that’s a tame one).

So why isn’t that an issue for Yahoo, which is very close to spending $1.1 billion on the company?

Here it’s important to pay attention to the way Tumblr actually works — or more precisely, the two ways it works.

Tumblr offers tools to make simple blog pages, which anyone with a Web browser can see. So you don’t have to sign up for Tumblr to check out We Want Porn, but comScore will count you as one of the service’s 117 million monthly users.

Tumblr’s core users, though, log in to the service, and subscribe to different Tumblogs, which they view on a “dashboard” — the equivalent of Twitter and Facebook’s newsfeeds.

Not coincidentally, these are also the only people Tumblr is showing ads to, either via “radar” ads that promote Tumblr pages alongside users’ dashboards, or “spotlight” ads that promote Tumblr pages in a directory of suggested accounts.

To spell that out: Tumblr’s advertisers don’t have to worry about their stuff showing up on blogs like We Want Porn. At worst, it’s possible that they’ll end up advertising to a user whose dashboard includes posts from We Want Porn. But in general, they ought to be pretty well insulated from that stuff.

By the same token, if Yahoo wanted to, it could end up scrubbing Tumblr of porn, and losing a lot of users and views — but it probably wouldn’t lose much in the way of monetizable users. Unless it turns out that the majority of Tumblr’s core users have signed on exclusively to use porn.

So: Problem? Sure. But it doesn’t look like a costly one.

Update: Now that the deal is done, a Tumblr backer has piped up to offer a more concise version of my argument: “Non-story. Tumblr is the Internet. It’s a dashboard follower model, opt-in.” That would have saved me a bunch of typing!

Changes at AOL’s local content site, Patch: CEO Jon Brod will step down and is being replaced by COO and President Steve Kalin, according to an internal memo the New York Internet company sent to the division’s employees today.

As part of the move, Brod will be going back to run AOL Ventures, in a job where he began at the company.

In addition, sources said a little less than three percent of the 1,400-employee Patch staff will be laid off. The memo notes that downsizing, without giving the numbers, which includes consolidation of several parts of Patch by streamlining its regional structure from 20 to nine teams.

According to the memo, the layoffs are to “make Patch profitable in 2013 and a commitment to continue to improve our business model.”

AOL confirmed the contents of the memo, saying in a statement, “Patch is streamlining its regional editorial structure across the country by moving from 20 to nine teams. We are implementing this team approach based on the success of our field tests earlier this year. The team approach allows for flexibility based on the unique needs of each community and the strengths of our editors. We are not reducing our number of sites or our coverage area as a result of this change. Making these important changes came with the difficult decision to eliminate some positions. We recognize these changes are painful for individuals and for our organization — and we are committed to handling the people impacted with care and sensitivity.”

Patch is growing, according to comScore. In April, traffic was up 26 percent since last year to 13 million unique monthly visitors, who are consuming about 1.3 million pieces of content that are now being served up per month.

Still, Patch has attracted a level of investor pressure and criticism, even as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has stuck strongly with the hyperlocal content effort and invested heavily in growing out a network of sites across the country aimed at neighborhood news and events.

But Armstrong signaled changes when he was queried about Patch during AOL’s recent quarterly call: “What you’re going to see as we approach Q4 is us trying to get to the finish line of profitability, and we will use all means possible to get there.”

Apparently, Armstrong means what he says and says what he means.

Here’s the memo:

Patchers,

Since the day Jon, Warren, and I founded Patch, we have had one mission in mind — improve the lives of people in local communities by 25 percent. Patch has become an important brand in the hundreds of towns we serve, and it is a staple of our communities. With the average Patch just over two years old, we are well on the way toward our goal of improving peoples’ lives and building a sustainable business in the process.

Over the past year, Patch has made an enormous impact in our communities. The coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings, the lifeline that Patch provided residents during the Sandy Hook school shootings and Superstorm Sandy, and the exclusive Sanford-Colbert Busch debate in South Carolina stand out as powerful examples. The new Patch platform that is rolling out now will only increase Patch’s ability to instantly improve communities.

As we have made a commitment to improve our Patch towns and communities, we made a similar commitment to make Patch profitable in 2013 and a commitment to continue to improve our business model. Just as we have rolled out new products and services to Patch, we are announcing today the rollout of the recently tested town structures, which will help us serve communities in a more local way and move Patch meaningfully toward profitability.

The changes have two main goals:

1. Improve and increase our hyper-local programming and deepen our user engagement through the Patch 2.0 platform; and
2. Implement a structure that unlocks the path to profitability.

To accomplish these goals we are taking the following steps, effective immediately:

We are combining the East, Central and West editorial zones to create a simpler structure that will enable faster decision-making and a more coordinated editorial effort across Patch. Anthony Duignan-Cabrera has been promoted to VP, Editorial Director, overseeing day-to-day editorial field operations, and will continue to report into Rachel in her role as Chief Content Officer.

We are streamlining our regional editorial structure across the country by moving from 20 to nine teams. We are not reducing our number of sites or our coverage area as a result of this change.

We are promoting Katie O’Connor to Director of Editorial Operations and Content Strategy. In this role, she will work with our editorial teams to help create new content and programming.

We are implementing a “team approach” for our sites, based on the success of our field tests earlier this year. This approach allows for flexibility based on the unique needs of each community and the strengths of editors.

Jon and I have decided to elevate Steve Kalin to the CEO position at Patch. Steve has done a fantastic job since he began at Patch in December as President and COO. Jon and I hired Steve with the thought that his extensive background in scaled, local platforms would eventually allow him to run Patch on a day-to-day basis.

Jon has led Patch since it was just an idea and helped scale it into one of the most significant brands in local communities in the U.S. Under his guidance, Patch has gained tens of millions of users and more than ten thousand advertisers; and it has covered millions of local stories. Going forward, Jon will return to AOL Ventures full-time and lead our push into several areas we have identified as significant future growth opportunities for AOL.

The changes we are making at Patch, however, come with the difficult decision to eliminate some positions. These employees have contributed greatly to Patch’s business with passion and dedication. We sincerely thank them for all they have done to make Patch what it is today. Their impact will always be felt here. We wish all affected employees continued success. They are truly Patchers for life.

This is an important time for Patch. We have many great opportunities in front of us, and we continue to make decisions to ensure Patch’s success. AOL’s Board of Directors and I remain firmly supportive of Patch and our mission. Together we are building a company for the long term, one that can grow and thrive — now and far into the future.

We will be having team calls today and a Patch All-Company call this afternoon at 6pm ET, to discuss these changes in more detail. I encourage you to join these calls. Keep an eye out for invitations to follow.

I want to thank you for your continued commitment to Patch and to serving your communities, and for staying focused on our goals. Patch is one of the fastest growing sites and brands on the Internet. We have the right plan, we have a great team, and I’m confident we can win together.

Keep going — TA

According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recently met with top execs at Hulu, the premium video service whose big media company owners have been considering selling it for some months.

Sources said Yahoo is “in the process,” although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has not made any kind of formal bid. Other players whom sources said are considering purchasing all or parts of Hulu include: Former News Corp. COO Peter Chernin, who now has a successful and well-funded multimedia and investment company called the Chernin Group; Guggenheim Partners digital arm, which is led by former Yahoo interim CEO Ross Levinsohn; and Amazon.

Sources said Mayer also had an extensive getting-to-know-you meeting, which was apparently not held at Hulu’s offices in Santa Monica, Calif., along with COO Henrique De Castro. The discussion is taking place in the wake of Yahoo’s failed bid — largely engineered by De Castro — to purchase a majority stake in France Télécom’s Dailymotion video service, after a top French government official said Yahoo could not own 75 percent of the company.

Had the deal — which was reportedly valued at $300 million — gone through, it would have been the most significant by Mayer since she took over at the company last July. Thus far, she has limited her purchases to small mobile startup.

While the meetings with Hulu are only preliminary, Yahoo has been to this video rodeo before, having seriously considering buying Hulu when it was previously being shopped by its owners, News Corp., Disney and Comcast. (News Corp. also owns this site.)

Of course, if Yahoo’s interest becomes more serious, Mayer will have to make important visits to top execs at those media giants, since they control the rights to critical content, and thus Hulu’s value.

As Peter Kafka noted in a previous post about Hulu’s possible sale, “much hinges on the licensing rights News Corp., Disney and Comcast would provide for the money-losing site, as well as what happens to the $300 million debt its owners have taken on in the last year.”

Without those rights, Hulu by itself is a very pretty Web site and video platform, but not worth the billions it would be with very long-term television rights, content that attracts users. Currently, sources said its media owners are offering two to three years of rights, with a lot of flexibility over removing content from the site, which is not quite as attractive a deal (to say the least).

But video is a key component of Yahoo’s strategy going forward. Along with mobile efforts, Mayer has explicitly told investors that video was a key to company under her tenure.

Coincidentally, today in an onstage interview at a Wired conference in New York, Mayer broadly addressed the video issue when asked a question about the topic, noting it was important across all of Yahoo’s properties.

“I think video is really important … video is something that we’re all innately designed and born to experience, everyone is born being able to watch and to hear,” she said. “Video is just this amazing format.”

Mayer would know that well, having been at Google when the search giant bought YouTube, ironically snatching it at the last minute from a competing bid by Yahoo, which was then led by Terry Semel. Since then, YouTube has become the most important and powerful player in the space by far.

Yahoo, despite being one of the largest video players on the Web, has mostly been a lackluster competitor in the arena, pinging over the years from creating original content to doing branded deals with media companies, but never establishing a major beachhead with consumers as Hulu did from scratch.

Short of a full acquisition, there may be a way for Yahoo to partner and invest in Hulu, instead of buying it outright that works for all sides — owners get a new owner to foot part of the bill and also increase distribution, and Yahoo can claim that it’s providing users with exponentially more content that would help Yahoo’s long-declining engagement problem.

Sources said News Corp. and Disney have mulled scenarios where one or both companies hang on to the site, while Comcast has no control over Hulu’s fate, having given up its management rights to the site as a concession to federal regulators.

But the strength of the Hulu brand is clear and it has had some success in building a more significant business. While a lot of its video offerings are free, about four million people are paying for a Hulu Plus subscription.

Still, Hulu’s strength might be lagging, especially given after talented founding leader Jason Kilar recently left. Last year, Hulu was a top 10 video site, according to comScore. No longer — in a report in March, it had dropped out of the top 10.

While this likely has more to do with methodology than real decline in Hulu ratings, it does show that while it’s the biggest thing Yahoo could buy or invest in, Yahoo itself has plenty of video views, many more than Hulu.

The question for Mayer then is how much of Yahoo’s multi-billon-dollar cash kitty she wants to bet on a big video play. She might also be considering buying several smaller ones, said sources, with Yahoo having also looked at some smaller video sites, including Blip and Grab Media.

A spokeswoman for Hulu declined to comment and Yahoo PR has not responded to a query for comment (if ever).

According to the latest metrics from comScore, Apple was the top smartphone manufacturer in the U.S. during the quarter, capturing a 39 percent share of the market, up from 36.3 percent in the prior quarter. With a 21.7 percent share, up slightly from the 21 percent it posted in December, Samsung placed second in comScore’s rankings.

Bringing up the rear: HTC, Motorola and LG, which all claimed less than 10 percent shares after quarter-to-quarter declines.

On the smartphone platform side of the business, Google claimed the top ranking despite a decline in market share from 53.4 percent to 52 percent. Apple placed second with a share that rose to 39 percent from 36.3 percent. BlackBerry ranked third — declining to 5.2 percent from 6.4 percent, and Microsoft ranked fourth with a 3 percent share, up from 2.9 percent.

Now he’s singing the same song with a new title: Hansen’s SpinMedia is buying Vibe, the 20-year-old hip-hop and R&B magazine, from a consortium led by Intermedia and Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies. It plans on ending Vibe’s print run in the coming months, and will add Vibe.com to its roster of 40+ pop culture and music sites.

This will be bad news for some of Vibe Media’s 52 employees, who are being told today that layoffs will accompany the change of ownership. Hansen said that after the cuts — an “inevitable consequence” of the deal — Vibe will be left as a “substantially standalone property for the next three to six months.”

Eventually, the plan will be to integrate Vibe into SpinMedia’s tech platform and ad sales machine, Hansen said. Vibe is a small site — comScore says 1.4 million people visit its Web and mobile sites each month — but Hansen said it will be valuable because it “reinforces us as a market leader in the 18-to-34 demographic,” and adds Vibe’s “multicultural readership” to SpinMedia’s marketing pitch. (Lots of people have made that assumption: Vibe has had multiple owners, and one shutdown, in the last couple decades.)

Hansen, who came to the company last summer and took over the CEO spot late last year, also said he is raising more money, in the “mid-to-high seven figures,” to help him expand SpinMedia. The company (which changed its name itself from Buzzmedia to SpinMedia in March) just raised $15 million a few months ago. But Hansen said he acquired Vibe with equity, not cash.

As with Spin, Hansen said he’s not ruling out a return to print for Vibe. Someday, somehow. But he doesn’t sound like he’s planning on returning to ink and paper anytime soon.

“We’re still trying to find a print model that works with digital economics, and that continues to be a challenge,” he said. “It’s not as though I have an aversion to print. It’s just a matter of the economics.”

For the three-month period ended in February, the iPhone was the most popular smartphone in the U.S., with a 38.9 percent market share — up 3.9 percentage points from the November quarter. And with a 38.9 percent share, iOS was the second-most-popular smartphone platform, also up 3.9 percentage points from the preceding period.

Welcome gains for Apple, particularly for their origins. The growth of iOS, for example, appears to have been achieved largely at the expense of Android. Google’s mobile OS lost two percentage points during the period comScore surveyed, falling to 51.7 percent from 53.7 percent. BlackBerry slipped as well, losing 1.9 points and ending the period at 5.4 percent (caveat: BlackBerry didn’t begin selling its new Z10 handset in the U.S. until late March). Together, the two companies lost 3.9 points of platform share, precisely the amount Apple gained.

In the smartphone hardware market, Apple’s gains also appear to stem largely from the losses of its top Android rivals — save one. HTC, Motorola and LG all saw their market share decline in the three months ended in February. Only Samsung managed to capture additional share — a single point, lifting it to 21.3 percent from 20.3 percent. That’s about a quarter of the growth Apple charted.

Now, Samsung is likely to see a more significant increase in the current quarter, thanks to the launch of the Galaxy S4, but it certainly won’t be enough to close the gap with Apple. If anything, it will simply offset the market-share losses of other Android handset makers.

In other words, Apple’s in no danger of forfeiting its lead in the U.S. smartphone hardware market anytime soon, and in the platform market, its position is secure as well, thanks to that unshaken Android-iOS duopoly, which commands a combined 90.6 percent market share.

Update: Horace Dediu has some great insight into these metrics over at Asymco.

You can find plenty of anecdotes about people who have bailed on the social network, or are at least spending a lot less time there, sometimes because they’re using rivals like Twitter, WhatsApp or Snapchat, and sometimes because they’re doing other stuff, period. And that thinking must have resonance inside Facebook, too — otherwise it wouldn’t be trying to roll out a Facebook phone.

But J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth thinks those concerns are overblown. In a note this morning, he uses his own data and comScore’s to make two conclusions:

1) Facebook users are spending much less time with the service on the PC. But they’re spending much more time on Facebook on the phone, so overall engagement is up.

2) Facebook’s mobile competitors — including Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Instagram* — have seen a lot of growth in the last year. But Facebook has seen more. 

(You can see a full breakdown of the data set at the bottom of this post.)

And Anmuth figures all of that means that even as Facebook plays around with different ad tactics and strategies, the overall trend is still moving up and to the right. He predicts the service will end this year with $5.5 billion in ad revenue, up 30 percent, and that it will do $6.9 billion in 2014.

If you want to poke holes in Anmuth’s argument, you could note that his data doesn’t break out usage by demographics. Which means it doesn’t address what ought to be the most worrisome of the people-bailing-on-Facebook stories — that teens and preteens are either quitting the service or not signing up at all. If those stories are true, though, we’ll see it show up in the numbers eventually.

*Obviously, Instagram is now a Facebook asset, but for the purposes of the study, Anmuth treats them as a competitor — which makes sense, since right now time spent on Instagram versus Facebook is a revenue hit for Facebook.

The new boss is Neil Vogel, who is probably best known as the guy behind the Webby Awards, the Internet’s take on the Oscars. He replaces Darline Jean, who stayed with the answers website after IAC bought it from the New York Times last summer.

At the time, IAC officials said that About, which relies on freelance “guides” to generate a wide range of short, search-engine friendly posts, was already working well. They argued that simply by linking it with their Ask.com site, IAC could boost its performance.

That turned out to be true, says Ask.com CEO Doug Leeds, who says traffic at About is up 20 percent since the acquisition. But Leeds says that IAC has also concluded that it could do better. One big problem: Even though About is one of the Web’s most popular sites — comScore says it has 64.8 million unique users, which puts it in 17th place in the U.S. — few people know about it.

“We were a litle bit surprised when we started doing surveys to see how little the brand resonated with our users,” Leeds says. “A significant portion of the time, [visitors] aren’t even aware that they were on an About site. We didn’t realize how little penetration the brand had.”

Enter Vogel, who founded Recognition Media, the marketing company behind events like the Webbys, as well as New York’s Internet Week; prior to that, he was at Alloy Media, a Web 1.0 media conglomerate.

At About, his task will be to overhaul the site’s look and user experience, and eventually promote the new version to the public. Vogel says he doesn’t want to change the site’s content, but does figure he can display it better, and says he wants to promote the site’s guides/authors as well.

“I think we’re going to do things with design that makes About look a lot more like things on the Web that are successful,” he said. Asked for examples of those sites, he called out BuzzFeed and Pinterest. “There are people that are doing really really smart things, and if we can cherry-pick from the best of them, we’ll do some interesting stuff.”

Business Insider’s co-founder and editor is the subject of a Ken Auletta profile in this week’s New Yorker, which means Henry Blodget is now in some rarefied media mogul air (see: Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, etc.)

And at the end of Auletta’s piece, which you should be able to read here soon, Blodget tells Auletta he would like to come back to Wall Street, where he has been barred from working since his 2003 SEC settlement. Or at least he’d like the option:

“Ten years ago, I got what amounted to a dishonorable discharge from the industry, and I’ve always been ashamed of that. At some point, if it seems appropriate, I would like to explore the possibility of being reinstated.”

So there you go.

Is this an attempt at an attention-grabbing way of summarizing an extensively reported story someone else produced? Yep! And am I going to (respectfully) aggregate the rest of this piece? Of course!

• Henry Blodget says he was a “loner” when he went to Yale in the mid-80s. His extra-curricular activities included tennis, chess, frisbee, rock-climbing, a capella singing and studying for a pilot’s license.
• Business Insider, which claimed revenue of $5 million in 2011, lost $3 million in 2012.
• TBI chairman Kevin Ryan says the company will do $11 million this year (last summer someone told the WSJ the company would do $12 million in 2012); he says the site has only spent $7 million of the $13 million it has raised.
• Though Comscore pegs the site’s traffic at 9 million, Blodget tells Auletta that his Google Analytics numbers are at 24 million unique monthly users, many of whom come from outside the U.S.
• If you’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about Henry Blodget, you won’t find a lot that is new here. But Auletta is thorough, and does a particularly good job of explaining Blodget’s Wall Street past, and its context. So the time you put in on the 7-page piece is most definitely worth it.
• I’m quoted in the piece a couple of times, accurately. I still own a few shares of Business Insider. So I hope if it is acquired by a big media company, as a board member predicts will happen one day, it’s for a lot of money.

Sporting News owner Advance Publications — the same folks that own Conde Nast — has folded the title into a joint venture with Perform, a London-based digital video distributor. The idea is to create a bigger U.S. presence for Perform, which already distributes sports highlights clips to some U.S. newspapers and other publications.

Perform will own 65 percent of the joint venture, and has the right to buy out Advance’s stake for $65 million. Perform will kick in $1.2 million, and Advance, via its American City Business Journals unit, will chip in $4.2 million.

ComScore says SportingNews.com, which also acts as AOL’s sports hub, generated 6.7 million U.S. uniques in February, a number that has stayed fairly constant for the last year.

That makes sense, given that Apple preinstalls a whole bunch of key apps on iOS (though some of us have stopped using some of them), and gives us little reason to go to its websites.

It’s also pretty clear why people would shop on Amazon and look things up on Wikipedia on the go, even if they don’t do these things on their desktop every month.

The folks who measure how many people visit websites have been slow — sloooow — to count up mobile Web, smartphone and tablet users. But comScore is catching up, with its new “Multi-Platform” rankings that combine desktop, Android and iOS usage by U.S. users. (What would really be great is global numbers, but this is a start!)

These are the same new rankings we wrote about in November, but today is their official launch out of beta. From now on, they’ll come out every month.

The order of the Top 10 U.S. properties are remarkably unchanged when you add mobile, though. The only significant gainer at the top is Apple, which comes in at slot No. 8, with comScore calculating an incremental audience of 54 percent.

ComScore notes that the average Top 100 property adds 38 percent to its audience when you count mobile-only visitors who wouldn’t previously have been included.

The biggest mobile gainers were Groupon at No. 47, with 36.9 million visitors, an incremental percentage gain of 223 percent; Zynga at No. 44, with a 211 percent gain — echoing the company’s bragging about mobile-only users on its last earnings call; and Pandora at No. 19 with a 183 percent gain. Aside from those three, nobody else in the Top 50 had a triple-digit mobile bounce.

The Los Angeles-based Rubicon Project has hired two execs to fill top spots at the digital advertising company, in what looks like preparations for an eventual public offering.

Greg Raifman, the founder, chairman and CEO of Dragon Media, will become president, reporting to Rubicon CEO and co-founder Frank Addante. And SocialVibe CEO Todd Tappin will take over in the role of COO/CFO, reporting to Raifman.

Founded in 2007 and armed with more than $50 million in funding, Rubicon is one of the larger real-time bidding platforms that allows automated buying and selling of global online ads.

“Greg and Todd are extremely intelligent and capable executives who have guided significant, publicly traded companies,” said Addante in a statement. “Both Greg and Todd have great relationships within our industry as well as on Wall Street. Their presence will enable me to focus on our overall vision and product strategy so we can take best advantage of the opportunities we see.”

Tappin is replacing Brian Barnum, who will leave the company, along with Chief Revenue Officer Nick Hulse. The pair only arrived less than two years ago, presumably to also help professionalize the organization.

In addition to the other exec moves, general counsel Victoria Von Szeliski will add the title of EVP of culture and business affairs and will also be adding 100 employees this year via organic growth and acquisition.

Rubicon said Raifman — who recently served as the executive chairman of video ad-serving company LiveRail, as well as being founding and running ad-serving pioneer Mediaplex — will “manage the day-to-day operations of the Rubicon Project as he ramps the company’s buy-side automation initiatives.”

Tappin will be in charge of Rubicon’s operating and financial plan and also lead mergers and acquisitions for the company. Before running SocialVibe, a video real-time buying startup, he was founding CFO of Overture and helped sell the search automation company to Yahoo many years ago.

The exec roundelay — a not entirely uncommon thing for Rubicon over the years — is apparently part of a larger bid to eventually IPO the company. Rubicon had also been in recent preliminary discussions with several larger companies — Yahoo and Adobe — about being acquired. The ad tech space has heated up of late, with a range of startups, such as AppNexus, Pubmatic, Turn and others, looking to gain ground, get funding or sell out.

But with a large price tag and some strong growth over the last year, along with becoming profitable, Rubicon appears to now be aiming to remain independent. Over the last few years, the company has grown its business significantly — according to comScore, Rubicon Project reached 214.2 million monthly unique users.

Whether that is enough to keep up with powerful rivals such as Google is, of course, the big question, especially as the way publishers and marketers interact with the online ad market is changing quickly.

But one thing is crystal clear: This isn’t the Magic Kingdom, folks, it’s business. We need to dispense with the magic because marketers and publishers are dealing in real money, not fairy dust, and both deserve a comprehensive understanding of online video ad metrics to help them make sound investments.

The nearly limitless variety of online content, devices and viewing habits has scrambled the measurement picture and created a lot of static around business value. Media and ratings giants have been circling around the online video ad measurement standard, each deciding where to stake a claim.

Nielsen’s recent foray into radio and social media measurement vis a vis its acquisition of Arbitron and partnership with Twitter upped the ante considerably. AOL, comScore, Google, and many others have thrown their hat in the ring by announcing their adoption of frequency and audience metrics like Gross Rating Points (GRPs) and Target Rating Points (TRPs) — but not exactly.

Industry organizations — including the Association of National Advertisers, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and the American Association of Advertising Agencies — are weighing in on the discussion, with a focus on driving definitions that can support standardization. There’s little consensus, and it seems the variations on measurement standards are as diverse as the devices, content and viewers being measured.

The irony over the entire measurement brouhaha is that practically all of the online video ad measurement methods vying for “standards-hood” are still mostly magic. Don’t get me wrong: GRPs, variations thereof and other common online video ad measurement techniques all have a place in the mix.

But they aren’t enough.

The online paradigm offers us something we didn’t have before. In a word: Accuracy. Online targeting and personalization doesn’t have to be based on a sample of data, but instead “all” of the data accessible. It’s the difference in saying males between the ages of 30-45 generally like to watch ESPN and “Bismarck Lepe” watches Bloomberg TV over breakfast on his iPad in the morning, and then watches the Food Network on Cable TV from 11-12 in the evening. The latter paints an accurate picture of a person who is more likely to consider and purchase well-targeted products and services.

To achieve truly effective, useful measurement that delivers ROI for marketers and publishers alike, it’s essential we bust open the magic myth and confront the realities of the new online video ecosystem. Viewers, much like the content they enjoy and devices they use, are incredibly varied; their habits, likes and dislikes are similarly nuanced.

Those nuances, and a rich understanding of them, are the metrics that can drive advertising as well as content personalization. With the right metrics, advertisers could, for example, opt to connect viewers with only the ads uniquely relevant to them. Publishers benefit because more targeted, effective reach spawns more ad purchases.

Personalized content and advertising isn’t fantasy. It can be accomplished with measures that are dramatically more comprehensive and meaningful, that provide real-time granular metrics across dozens and dozens of variables and that combine those variables to create an accurate picture of each individual viewer in the online video world.

Real, comprehensive online video ad measurement should account for distinctions in not only geography and demography but also in psychographic variables like age, gender and especially interests. (Sure, Ariel and Cinderella are both 20-something princesses from the Magic Kingdom, but that doesn’t mean they want to watch the same online content!)

Information regarding devices — including type, operating system and domain — and viewing habits such as trending content, conversion rates, video completion rates and social sharing events, must be factored in as well. Most importantly, marketers need the tools to mix and match metrics and analyze and report on all variables in real time, so decisions can be made on the fly — because that’s how online audiences roll.

Online video ad measurement standards are important; we need consistency so the industry is comparing apples to apples when selling and buying advertising. But the proposed standards, with their samples, GRPs and a little bit of magic won’t suffice in this rapidly growing, highly diverse, dynamic market.

Measurements that provide a more granular understanding of viewer preferences, behavior, device, location and other metrics can dramatically optimize online video advertising efficacy and reach. Without more comprehensive metrics in online video ad measurement, marketers will continue to be like magicians throwing knives blindfolded — they come close to their target but rarely hit it dead on.

Bismarck Lepe is a co-founder and the President of Products for Ooyala, a provider of online video management, publishing, analytics and monetization technology. As Ooyala’s founding CEO, Bismarck raised the company’s early funding and signed many of the company’s first media partnerships. He was previously a Senior Product Manager for Google, where he managed the early growth of AdSense display and video advertising and launched more than 25 different Google AdSense products, including Click-to-Play video ads. Bismarck has a B.A. in Economics from Stanford University.

In the past year, we’ve seen several niche social media networks blow up around images, music and ideas — Instagram, Spotify and Pinterest. But what happened in the digital video space? Many mobile video start-ups entered the scene this year, yet despite the increasing demand among consumers for Web video, none of these companies could crack the code on the most critical element of digital video: Discovery. But as content multiplies at an increasing rate, 2013 will finally be the year that the future becomes clear on the next advancement in video.

• Online video consumption hits a historic inflection point, doubling in 2013
  We are at the threshold of the second digital video revolution spurred by better and more affordable hardware and connectivity. Smartphones are in the hands of nearly one billion across the globe, and tablets, or “the second television,” are blowing up. The iPad alone has climbed the ladder of adoption three times faster than the iPhone and Gartner predicts tablet sales will hit 13 million in 2012, with this number expected to triple by 2016.

  Couple the rapidly increasing penetration of tablets and smartphones with LTE connectivity, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that consumer appetite for video will grow, transforming mobile video consumption into a daily habit. This will ignite a digital video revolution that mirrors the shift from dial-up Internet to broadband. The revolution that happened on desktop years back is about to transpire on mobile, as 2G and 3G are traded up for LTE networks on smartphones. Even with its incredible user adoption, the broadband’s impact on desktop video will pale in comparison to the more accelerated mobile video craze that’s about to kick off.

  In the last three years we’ve seen about a 140 percent increase in the amount of video content viewed online. comScore’s Video Metrix from April 2009 — when total video views hit 17 billion — sharply contrasts with 40 billion videos viewed across Web on November 2012. As consumption of video continues its march from the living room and desktop to smartphones and tablets, I predict that demand, production and consumption of video will double, and video views will hit 80 billion per month by the end of 2013.

• A newcomer will challenge YouTube for the other half of video consumption
  Declining hardware and distribution costs coupled with a steady increase in consumer demand for video has provoked a huge surge in production of pro and semi-pro video. Because of this increase in more professional-grade video, we have seen a major shift in where people are going to find digital video content.

  People are still watching just as much video — but they are now looking to different sources on the Web. In the past five months there has been a 34 percent drop in the total volume of video consumed on YouTube compared with the rest of the Web. YouTube views peaked in June 2012 at 18.3 billion, but have since declined to 12 billion on November 2012. comScore’s Video Metrix measured total Web video views in June 2012 at 32.9 billion; fast-forward to November 2012 and total video views across the Web hit 40 billion. While YouTube lost about six billion views within that five-month period, the other half of Web video shot up by 13 billion. As online video fragmentation increases in 2013, so will the need for a newcomer that aggregates YouTube and the second half of the Web’s video under one roof.

• TV networks and the top content creators will be forced into unchartered distribution and economic models
  Big media has seen the rapid shift toward Web and mobile consumption, and sites like Discovery.com, Disney, MTV and CNN continue to produce more online content. Now the real challenge becomes the fight for more audience, monetization and market share. These content creators and their advertisers won’t be satisfied with the results they get within their own silos, and will start looking for a way to expand their reach while still maintaining control over their videos.

  We have seen that relying on social networks like Facebook and Twitter for viral spread is not enough. At Twitvid, we saw major brands with over five million followers post videos to Twitter and receive only a few thousand views. Even major television networks such as CBS and ABC are struggling with this issue. ABC’s Modern Family and Glee, which previously only distributed episodes to Hulu, are now opening distribution to anyone as the effort to reach viewers continues. But no one has found a sustainable combination of large audiences and ability to drive traffic and revenue back to content creators.

  In 2013, studios and networks will be eager to experiment with new disruptive models, and expect to see a new breed of startups that can cater to their desire for both large audiences and strong control over content.

• All of this will lead to a new opportunity in video discovery that resembles something more like Spotify and less like Instagram
  Digital video is currently plagued by the lack of any real means of video discovery capable of meeting the needs of a social, mobile world. I’m confident that in 2013, someone will solve video discovery through social content aggregation — not just from YouTube, but from the exploding long-tail of semi-pro video. Many have pointed to an “Instagram for video” as the cure-all for the video space’s current state of disarray. But this is much bigger than that. Instagram focuses on user-generated content, which as Socialcam and Viddy proved this year, is not the way to win in the long term. Digital video is insanely larger than just user-generated content. The long-tail of video content is where consumer eyes draw the brands, and ultimately, revenue.

  In the same way that Spotify, Instagram and Pinterest successfully solved discovery for music, pictures and ideas, new models will emerge aiming to figure out a way to tap into this massive new world of video and somehow find a way to weave it all together.

What other predictions do you see for the world of digital video in 2013? Please submit your predictions in the comment section below.

Mo is the CEO and Founder of Telly, a social video network for discovering and sharing the best videos. You can follow him on Twitter @maladham and on Telly.

This week in Las Vegas, the new management team running Yahoo — including CEO Marissa Mayer — is at International CES to schmooze with big advertisers and convince them that Yahoo is the place to put large chunks of their marketing budgets.

One of the longtime selling points of the company is the sheer size of its audience, especially for the key money-making parts of the site — the homepage, Yahoo Mail and search.

But private stats from comScore show that those three areas have continued their longtime decline over the last year, in some cases dropping significantly. In November and December, for example, compared to the same two months a year ago, U.S. search was down 28 percent and 24 percent respectively, while mail was down 16 percent and 12 percent.

This matters a great deal, since the troika of homepage, mail and search have been the critical driver of the Yahoo value ecosystem for advertisers.

The impact of those drops is felt all over Yahoo, whose music, movie, games and travel site have also seen massive drop-offs in traffic year over year in those same months.

Stopping the decline is critical for Yahoo, since Mayer herself has underscored the need for size in her pushing for new businesses at Yahoo that are 100 million users in size and/or have revenue prospects of at least $100 million.

While this is a lofty vision, the reality of traffic falloffs on key properties is a vexing issue, especially since they remain its main source of revenue and also an important element in launching future products Mayer is promising will turbocharge the company.

It’s not that Yahoo is not huge, especially compared to most sites on the Web.

As one of the top Internet brands, according to a recent Nielsen report, the average number of total monthly unique visitors for the longtime Silicon Valley Internet company in 2012 was 141.6 million, No. 3 behind Google and Facebook in the U.S. market. Similar rankings were reported by comScore, which placed Yahoo at the No. 2 spot after Google, with 171.4 million monthly visitors in November.

But, for many years, traffic to those important consumer destinations of Yahoo has been on a clear and unstopping decline, statistics (usually from comScore) that the company nonetheless always dutifully puts in its earnings slides — see below — for investors to get some idea of the major and vexing issues facing the company.

That was suddenly ended in the last quarter with the engagement slide removed from Yahoo’s public deck entirely. Not all companies include such stats, so when I inquired as to why the company had made the change, Yahoo PR never returned my phone call.

But it’s not hard to guess the reason for the shift — the numbers were not good and they called more attention to Yahoo’s glaring challenge, which is getting users reengaged with its products by creating what Mayer has dubbed several times “delightful” experiences.

According to numerous sources, that has also been the case within the company too, with the new regime restricting an internal transparency initiative pushed by former Chief Product Officer Blake Irving that shared product performance numbers with the top 100 leaders at Yahoo.

And while it’s an interesting strategic choice, several sources inside the company this week urged me to get ahold of increasingly worrisome numbers from comScore — available to its private clients — comparing November 2011 to November 2012 and also December 2011 to December 2012 at home and work in the U.S.

So I did, getting the same stats from numerous sources — numbers that a spokesman for comScore confirmed were correct.

And, as promised, they are worrisome indeed.

In November 2012, compared to November 2011, the monthly unique visitors to the homepage declined 17 percent to 91.8 million from 110.9 million; Yahoo Mail dropped 16 percent (from 92 million to 77.7 million); and Yahoo search dropped 28 percent (from 93.3 million to 66.9 million).

Also off significantly for all three areas, often by one-third, were a plethora of other stats: Percentage of reach, total minutes, total page views, total visits and more.

One of the only bright spots for Yahoo was the relatively small Flickr sites, which were up 37 percent — 26.7 million versus 19.4 million — in unique monthly visitors year over year. The photo-sharing site — which has been getting a much-needed refresh — was also up in all other stats.

But Flickr — which Mayer (pictured here) has laudably touted and supported after years of inexplicable neglect — is not a money-maker for Yahoo, even if its return does burnish the company’s tech and innovation cred.

In December 2011 to December 2012, the homepage was more stable, gaining four percent in monthly uniques from 109.4 million to 114.2 million, but with other key stats both rising and falling. Total visits were up 14 percent, for example, while average minutes per visit was down 13.6 percent.

But the trouble for mail or search continued, off 12 percent (89.9 million to 78.7 million) and 24 percent (88.7 million to 67.4 million) respectively in monthly uniques, with similarly major declines in all other stats.

Mail recently got a refresh too under Mayer, despite some recent security glitches, so new stats will show if that will help stem the declines. Search is another story all together, with Yahoo in what can only be described as a dysfunctional partnership with Microsoft that numerous sources tell me Mayer is seeking to end.

The homepage, too, is undergoing a redo, with a design that has a decidedly more mobile and social feel, and pushing an ethos of Yahoo becoming a hub for content discovery. It is hoped the new look will boost traffic relatively quickly from its current downward trajectory.

To be fair, there can be lots and lots of reasons for these declines, although most of Yahoo’s competitors are, at worse, seeing a flattening of growth and not outright declines.

And sometimes Internet sites complain that services like comScore undercount, although Yahoo had previously used the firm in its public documents. More to the point, as multiple sources within the company note, the stats are directionally correct in that they closely track with internal Yahoo numbers.

Which is to say, traffic is going down rather than growing. That is clearly why Mayer has loudly stressed mobile since arriving at Yahoo, an area not included in these numbers that many sources said has strong growth to about 70 million monthly unique visitors via its apps and mobile-enabled Web offerings.

But unlike the homepage, mail and search — which push and pull traffic all over Yahoo and are responsible for most of its current monetization — mobile also makes very little money now. And Yahoo — unlike Facebook, which recently did — does not break out mobile results.

So, it will be interesting to see if the company does so when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on January 28 and also if it says anything about continued traffic declines of its traditional Web business in the period and the impact on revenue.

Still, there are lots of ways to counter declining or flat revenues, even with declining traffic — via cost cuts, efficiencies, charging more and selling assets (as Yahoo did in the last quarter). And Yahoo has ably managed to keep its operating margins growing over the years, despite both the declines in traffic and moribund growth in its revenue.

But the real and only fix is the drastic fix to existing tentpoles Yahoo has and the creation or acquisition of products that excite consumers and, therefore, advertisers.

It’s not an easy thing, of course, as well-known venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recently wrote in his blog about the need to focus on products over building and improving culture — one of Mayer’s other big initiatives at Yahoo.

Wrote Horowitz in what I consider one of the clearest articulations of what it takes to win for startups, as well as big companies like Yahoo:

“The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10X better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does.”

If you want to take a gander, here are some more of those old Yahoo quarterly engagement slides, which were recently eliminated from its presentations:

(Note: I reached out to Yahoo’s outside PR firm — since they do respond to queries — and also some company execs to get a comment on this story, but so far there has been none.)

Nicolas Raymond / Freestock

According to comScore’s final tally for the November-December shopping season, spending for the two-month period totaled $42.3 billion, a 14 percent increase over 2011.

“This year’s growth rate is essentially on a par with last year’s,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni. “But despite many positives for the online sector, this year’s season did not quite perform up to our initial expectation for growth rates in excess of 16 percent as we fell a billion dollars short of our expected total of $43.4 billion.”

The research firm, which tracks online shopping habits over broadband connections in the U.S., said a slowdown occurred after Thanksgiving due to low consumer confidence.

“As it turns out, this December swoon coincided closely with a significant decline in the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index that was attributed in large part to consumers’ fiscal cliff concerns. You might say that had it not been for Congress, every other indicator suggested it would have been an even merrier Christmas for online retailers,” Fulgoni said.

This season’s high points included some particularly outstanding days for online retailers, including Cyber Monday, Nov. 26 ($1.5 billion); Monday, Dec. 17 (up 76 percent to $1.013 billion); and Christmas Day (up 36 percent to $288 million). But those good days could not make up for three solid weeks in which the growth rates failed to surpass 12 percent.

Here’s a week-by-week breakdown of spending this season. A noticeable lull is present during the middle weeks:

This softness may have been expected based on preliminary results that some retailers released this morning. The figures indicate that sales may have been soft for many in December, not just online retailers.

For instance, Target said sales in December were flat; and Wet Seal, Macy’s and Kohl’s either cut their fourth-quarter outlooks or said quarterly results will be at or near the low end of their previous guidance range, according to MarketWatch.

Online sales are still growing at a much faster clip than retail as a whole. For instance, overall, December same-store sales, excluding drug stores, rose 4.8 percent, according to data from Retail Metrics.

While comScore’s report may be disappointing to some, it won’t affect all online retailers evenly.

For one thing, comScore’s results don’t include purchases made over mobile phones. Mobile commerce, which includes orders placed on tablets and phones through mobile browsers or applications, were a highlight for many retailers this holiday season. Second, there will be some retailers that overperformed and others that lost share.

As an example, Baird Equity Research’s Colin Sebastian raised eBay’s price target earlier today to $60, up by $2, based on evidence that eBay and PayPal excelled during the holiday season. The company’s full results will be out on Jan. 16.

And the one to watch closely will be Amazon.

Many brick-and-mortar companies resolved to fight the giant e-tailer by guaranteeing to match online prices. Whether that had any impact is still not known. Additionally, there was some question earlier this holiday season if Amazon was performing as well as expected.

Wells Fargo Analyst Matt Nemer said that for the first time in years, Amazon was giving some customers coupons for 10 percent off their orders. But it was unclear whether Amazon was only trying to reactivate old customers or if it was doing it because sales were short. Another plausible reason was that customers were procrastinating. Amazon allowed some customers to order as late as Dec. 21 with the promise of delivery by Dec. 24, which may have delayed some purchases.

Image via mtkang

The most notable growth occurred during the last work week before Christmas, which saw an increase of 53 percent compared to 2011.

According to comScore’s top 10 days by rank, Cyber Monday still rules for online shopping — as do Mondays and Tuesdays in general.

The deal will give Arbitron shareholders a 26 percent bump on yesterday’s closing price, and both boards have signed off on the transaction.

Here’s Nielsen’s pitch to shareholders, in slide form; the deal will need regulatory sign-off.

Measuring radio and TV is a slow-growth business, but it’s still a big business. The two companies do a combined $6 billion a year in revenue.

And both companies have been impervious to attempts to break their locks on their respective businesses — Nielsen, for example, has tried and failed to make headway in the radio market itself.

What about Web measurement? Isn’t that a big deal, too? Sure, and it will get bigger. And Nielsen already does some of that, too.

But comScore, the dominant digital-measurement company, did just $232 million last year, and shareholders value it at less than $500 million. Old media habits die hard.

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Amazon, which is known for being the king of fulfillment, says orders placed through Tuesday will arrive by Christmas Eve, and for its Prime members, orders can be made as late as Friday.

Deadlines for other retailers are scattershot during the rest of the week — Wednesday for Walmart and Thursday for Sears — but nearly all of the big retailers are willing to push delivery times even later for consumers willing to pay for expedited shipping. Some will accept orders as late as Dec. 20 and 21.

As of right now, online retailers should be pretty thrilled with what Santa has delivered this year.

For the first 44 days of the holiday season, sales have totaled $33.8 billion, a 13 percent jump over the same period last year, according to comScore, which measures purchases made online through broadband connections.

“With this most recent week in the books, the peak spending period may now be in our rear-view mirror — but the online holiday shopping season is not over yet,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.

Last week, four days surpassed the $1 billion threshold, making it the heaviest five-day online shopping period on record, comScore reports. So far, 11 days have exceeded $1 billion in spending, compared to 10 last year. It’s important to note that the results do not include sales that occur over mobile phones and tablets.

ComScore expects tomorrow to be another heavy shopping day as procrastinators scramble to order gifts in time. Years ago, Monday was coined “Free Shipping Day,” and that continues to be the case, but enthusiasm over the offer seems to have mellowed as free shipping has become standard for many retailers.

In a memo to investors, Wells Fargo Analyst Matt Nemer wrote that, for the first time in years, Amazon is giving some customers coupons for 10 percent off this holiday. Nemer hypothesizes that there are two logical explanations for the promotion: Either the e-commerce giant is trying to get customers active again or holiday sales are tracking below expectations.

Yesterday, comScore, which tracks online spending from computers using landline broadband connections, reported that so far this holiday, spending is up 13 percent year over year, which is below its 2012 prediction of 17 percent.

Nemer also offers a plausible explanation for why sales are slow: Procrastination. “As Amazon’s base of Prime users continues to grow, customers will be more likely to delay purchases,” he wrote.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

On Tuesday, Amazon gave customers even more reasons to wait. It announced that orders can be placed through Dec. 18 and still get free delivery in time for Christmas. In particular, Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 a year for free two-day delivery, can wait even longer. They can place orders until 7 pm ET on Dec. 21 to receive deliveries by Dec. 24. In some cases, Amazon will offer one-, two-, or even same-day delivery for a small fee.

ComScore chairman Gian Fulgoni said there is perhaps less urgency than there once was to make those final purchases. “What we’ve seen over the past few years is a tendency for heavy spending to continue late into the week of Green Monday (Dec. 10) and right up until Free Shipping Day, which this year falls on December 17,” he said in a release.

Quirky names have been given to several days around the holidays.

“Free Shipping Day” tends to be a widely celebrated event, with dozens of e-tailers offering to cover postage during a 24-hour period. However, the prominence of the day is wearing off as more online retailers offer free shipping year-round. On “Green Monday,” which is the second Monday of December, sales reached $1.275 billion, up 13 percent over last year, according to comScore. At that level, the day ranks as the third heaviest online spending day in 2012. So far this year, spending has totaled $29.3 billion during the first 40 days of the holiday shopping season, representing a 13 percent jump over last year.

At San Francisco’s Westfield mall, PayPal tells customers that is now accepted at a handful of retailers.

While that’s lower than what comScore was originally predicting, Hill Ferguson, PayPal’s VP of Global Product, said he’s seeing no indication that sales are falling below expectations.

In general, he said, the trend is for shopping to start earlier and end later, with the peak shopping days being closer to Christmas, rather than the more prominent heavy days, like Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) or Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving).

He attributes that shift, in part, to consumers shopping on their mobile devices. ”So much of shopping is generated by promotions, but with mobile you can make a purchase whenever or wherever you are, so people are willing to wait and not change their lives around what retailers are offering,” he said.

For instance, on Dec. 2, PayPal reported its global mobile payment volume hit a new high, exceeding its record set only six days earlier on Cyber Monday. PayPal’s parent company, eBay, saw its biggest mobile shopping day on Dec. 9.

Here’s a snapshot of the weekly trends for the past four years, showing how spending ramps up as we get closer to Christmas:

As AllThingsD previously reported it would, Yahoo has released a new version of its Yahoo Mail offering, updating its Web offering and also adding native mobile apps for Apple iPhone and Microsoft’s Windows 8. It also updated its Google Android app.

The new Web mail has a decidedly cleaner design and improved search, part of an effort to better compete with Google’s Gmail, which has taken major share from Yahoo in the arena in recent years.

In fact, one source told me that the aim was to be “more Gmail-like.” And, indeed, it looks like it is. Yahoo is also working on a radical rehaul of its homepage, which is set to debut in the coming weeks, although the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been rolling it out in testing for months now.

Redoing Yahoo’s flagship properties — especially to focus on mobile — is a key priority at the company under new CEO Marissa Mayer. She said in a blog post that the new Yahoo Mail will be rolled out to most users soon.

It’s an important step, as I noted in my post about the impending changes to Yahoo Mail, which got its last refresh a year ago:

At the time, the first change in five years got good reviews, with a cleaner design, Twitter and Facebook integration, improved spam filters and speedier delivery.

Unfortunately, since then, Google’s Gmail has become the most popular email service in the world, passing Microsoft’s Hotmail (which is now called Outlook.com after a recent rejiggering), according to recent stats from comScore. That has added up to Gmail’s 287.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, 286.2 million for Microsoft’s email product and 281.7 million for Yahoo Mail.

Still, in the U.S. at least, Yahoo is holding onto its longtime — though dwindling — lead, with 76.7 million using Google’s email product and 35.5 million using Microsoft’s.

It’s an important spot to maintain for Yahoo, since many of the users of its products now come to the site to access email and it has been a key driver to its content properties.

But to keep mindshare, Yahoo faces increasingly strong competition. Google’s Gmail released a series of solid improvements last fall. In addition, along with the positively reviewed Microsoft Outlook.com redo, AOL has just announced a new email product called Alto. While it is in beta to a small audience, it is aiming to help users with multiple email accounts organize them better.

In others words, the mail business — especially using it via smartphones and tablets — is another place Yahoo has to make sure it remains innovative.