Digital advertising and analytics company Yieldex has raised a $10 million Series C round led by Hearst and others.

Previous investors include Amazon, First Round Capital and Sequel Venture Partners.

It has also snagged some big partnerships with major publications, including NYTimes.com.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• CONFIRMED: Business Insider Raised A Big, New Round!
• Billion-Dollar ZocDoc Raises Another $25 Million For Its $75 Million Series C Round
• Tumblr Raises $85 Million From Greylock Partners And Insight Venture Partners

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

New smartphone buyers are overwhelmingly choosing Android phones in comparison to iPhones and BlackBerrys, new data from Nielsen reveals.

Below you can see Nielsen’s subscriber share numbers. On the left are the total subscriber share numbers. On the right is the subscriber share numbers for the three months ended in August, which is a better predictor of the future of the market.

As you can see, in the three month period 56% of buyers opted for Android, versus just 28% for Apple. Rough for Apple, but if there’s a positive in there, it’s that Apple’s subscriber share is holding steady while Android eats up BlackBerry share and share from “other”.

But, with the iPhone hitting Verizon, we thought Apple would be in better shape in the U.S. Maybe once the iPhone 5 arrives, we’ll see a tilt? Or, maybe Android keeps running away with this thing.

Follow the Chart Of The Day on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chartoftheday

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Microsoft Needs A New Business Model For Windows 8 Tablets
• THE APPLE INVESTOR: Apple Closed The Quarter And The Estimate Spread Is Massive
• The Guy Who Created Facebook’s iPad App Just Quit Out Of Frustration And Took A Job At Google

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

This chart shows quarterly sales figures for each phone since the iPhone was introduced. They were neck in neck for a while, but the iPhone 4 release in June 2010 changed everything — iPhone sales took off while Blackberry sales leveled off, then started to dive.

See also: All The Delusional And Arrogant Things RIM’s CEOs Said While Apple And Android Ate Their Lunch.

Follow the Chart Of The Day on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chartoftheday

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: The iPhone 5′s "Unprecedented" Demand
• The 10 iPhone Apps As Important To Us As Oxygen
• UH OH: Apple’s Reportedly Having Problems Making The Newly Designed iPhone 5

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Facebook’s domination of time spent on the web is absolutely astonishing.

A new report on social media from Nielsen shows U.S. users spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May, which is more time than was spent on the next four biggest sites.

(If you include YouTube with Google, then it’s more time than the next three biggest sites.)

Follow the Chart Of The Day on Twitter: www.twitter.com/chartoftheday

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Facebook Revenue Is Growing Fast, But Google’s Grew Faster
• CHART OF THE DAY: The Internet Has A Short Attention Span
• Two Banks? Try Three! Yahoo Needs MORE Bankers To Figure Out What The Hell To Do

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

After traveling through Europe on vacation the past couple of weeks, nothing said I was home more than grabbing a slice of New York pizza!

Deciding to do a blog post on the topic, I wanted to find out who the “big cheeses” were in the pizza world and see if I could find some insight into their web strategies.

Using the Keyword Destination tool on Compete.com to get a list of sites referred to by a broad match for the generic keyword “pizza”, I quickly found that Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com were the hands-down winners.  Approximately 16% of all “pizza” related search referrals went to Pizzahut.com and 5.8% went to Dominos.com.

Both Pizzahut and Dominos showed strong consumer brand recognition, as seen by looking at branded vs. non-branded search referral data collected by Compete:

With similar patterns in historical UV traffic, these two brands were ripe for comparison:

You would think that two strongly similar brands would show similar ad spend profiles, but I was surprised to see that visitors referred to Pizzahut.com via a search engine were 1.8X more likely to have reached the site through a paid search link as visitors to Dominos.com.

What’s the difference?

Using Compete.com again to analyze keyword search referrals to the two brands provided a bit more insight:

For the sake of brevity I am just including a few keywords, but the general trend was the same.  Pizzahut seems to struggle to rank for organic traffic for long-tail phrases, even those containing their brand name. Paid search helps augment low SERP placement by artificially ranking Pizzahut ahead of the couponing sites vying for this sort of referral.

The Bottom Line:

While there are certainly more “slices to the pie” that this brief analysis can’t cover, the bottom line is that there is a constant struggle going on behind the scenes between large brands and third party sites looking to ride on their coattails through coupon offerings, referral links, and product reviews.  If you find your manager questioning the value of SEO, consider that the average CPC for a “pizza” broad-match term was $0.63 (source: google adwords keyword estimator), and in Q2-2011 approximately 5 million search referrals were sent to both Pizzahut.com and Dominos.com. Strong SEO efforts can translate into significant savings through reduced ad spend on paid search!

—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Photo Credit: muffet, flickr.

Online flower marketers experienced another great Mother’s Day season.   Traffic to these sites grew by a healthy 7% from May 2010 to May 2011. 

The online flower business is a great example of how small, mom and pop businesses might have been given new life thanks to the web.  A flower shop in a drab storefront can be re-energized thanks to sites such as Teleflora.

As you can see, the sites are hugely dependent on the Valentine’s and Mother’s Day holidays.  Outside of that, traffic is respectable but significantly lower.

One of the more fascinating trends to look at over this past Mother’s Day holiday is the range of cross-shopping that went on across online flower marketing sites.

FTD.com, which has the most loyal followings and largest volumes in the competitive set, saw it’s customer cross-shopping rate double this year.  Meanwhile, sites such as Proflowers, BloomsToday and 1-800 Flowers saw an improvement in customer loyalty during the Mother’s Day flower buying season.

You have to wonder just how much more these sites can continue to grow in their current form.  The seasonality issue is challenging.  Right now, the sites are all focused on delivering fresh-cut flowers and other gifts to celebrate a special occasion.

As a recent homebuyer, I would not mind seeing more attention paid to outdoor plants and trees.  The products are subtly marketed on sites, but the marketing is not prominently displayed.  Imagine being able to log onto 1800flowers.com and create a “gift registry” of plants and trees that you wanted for a housewarming gift.  Friends could log on and arrange to have them delivered the same day as a housewarming celebration.

What about ordering vegetable plants for mom’s garden during the upcoming summer as a Mother’s Day gift?  The opportunities are endless out there to either increase the average order value and to shift consumer mindset from holidays and birthdays to other life events / purposes.

A considerably higher percentage of Twitter users who tweet while watching a TV show discuss the show they’re watching than Facebook users who log in during a TV show, according to May 2011 data from TVGuide.com. The “TVGuide.com User Research Study” indicates 50% of Twitter users discuss a show they are watching, one-third more [...]

Startup ServiceMax, a company that develops SaaS field service software, has raised $14 million in new funding led by Mayfield Fund with Trinity Ventures, Emergence Capital and Salesforce.com also
participating in the round. To date, the company has raised $26 million.

As field service software, ServiceMax essentially helps manage other company’s equipment at their sites. ServiceMax software automates workforce optimization, advanced scheduling and dispatch, parts logistics, inventory and depot repair, and installed base entitlements. ServiceMax is being used currently by 150 different customers including DuPont. And the company reports 380 percent year-over-year growth in first quarter 2011.

Built on top of Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform, ServiceMax has gained considerable support from Salesforce. The technology giant participated on both of ServiceMax’s funding rounds and the startup features an app on Salesforce Chatter’s app marketplace ChatterExchange.

ServiceMax also recently released an iPad app that gives service agents a mobile solution.

In 2010, attendance in Major League Baseball was down for the third straight year. And early indicators suggest that 2011 will just be more of the same.

If we look at every team and what their attendance was after the same number of home games a year ago, we see that attendance is down 1.9 percent. That doesn’t seem that bad. But at this pace it would be just another step in continuing trend.

But more importantly, we can now see that some teams are suffering much more than others.

So far in 2011, five teams are down at least 10 percent in attendance from the same point a year ago. And one of those teams (Tampa Bay) has a winning record.

But attendance isn’t down everywhere. The Blue Jays and Rangers are both up more 30 percent from a year ago.

And also keep in mind that we are dealing with percentages here, not absolute numbers. It is much easier for the Blue Jays to achieve a 44.3 percent increase when they were only averaging 15,000 fans per game at this point last year than it would be for the Yankees who were averaging 45,000 in 2010.

Data through Wednesday. Data via ESPN.com and Baseball-Reference.com

For the latest in sports, visit Sports Page. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The Dodgers Finances Are Tied Up In A Complex Web Of 26 Different Companies
• Watch Evan Longoria Save A Reporter’s Life (But Not Really)
• What Is The Mysterious Stem-Cell Treatment That Saved Bartolo Colon’s Career?

Figuring out where you next adventure will be can be tough. Whether you are just looking for something fun to do this Saturday or something a bit more broad like a trip to a different country, Everytrail.com is an awesome tool for those who like to get out and go.

Everytrail.com takes geo-tagged information from mobile devices and Garmin GPS units to create an interactive map of trip you or someone else has taken, and once uploaded to their website you can add photos and commentary to your route and share it online for anyone else in the world to download, so they can relive the exact same adventure you did.

The online tool is super easy for creating a route yourself, but if finding a new thing to do yourself is more your style, they have a huge database of thousands routes worldwide. You can search by location, or activity, making it super easy to find something to do no matter where you are. (Here’s a route I uploaded.)

Everytrail.com