Here are a few of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured during the past week or so:

The New York Times – Yahoo’s Income Drops 5% in Struggle for Market Share
Investors hoping for any hint of what is next for Yahoo in Tuesday’s earnings announcement will have to wait a little longer. Instead, they got the same old story: more cost-controls and declining revenue. Read more.

Reuters – Twitter Is Much More Than Social: Co-Founder Dorsey
Twitter is much more than a social network and has no time to waste worrying about newcomers like Google+ as it becomes more important as an information service and builds its advertising business, co-founder Jack Dorsey said on Sunday. Read more.

USA Today – Consumers in the Middle of Google-Facebook Battle
For the past two years, each company has experimented with different ways to divine more and more about how people live their lives on the Internet, without sparking a revolt. Read more.

Forbes – Twitter Takes the World: Microblogs Explode Overseas, Attract Global Brands
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but sometime during the last six months the game changed dramatically for Twitter and its overseas imitators. Read more.

The Hollywood Reporter – Amazon.com Weighs Separate Video Streaming Service to Challenge Netflix
BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield recently predicted that Amazon.com could this year launch a stand-alone video streaming service to challenge Netflix, which will report its latest quarterly financials after Wednesday’s market close. Read more.

Bloomberg Businessweek – Yahoo’s Revenue Trails Estimates as Demand for Ads Shrinks
Yahoo! Inc., the largest U.S. Web portal, reported revenue and forecast sales that fell short of estimates as ebbing demand for display advertising underscored the challenge facing new Chief Executive Officer Scott Thompson. Read more.

Bloomberg Businessweek – Facebook Said to Weigh Expanding European Head Office in Dublin
Facebook Inc. is seeking to more than double the size of its European headquarters in Dublin as the most popular social-networking site prepares for a possible $10 billion initial public offering, three people with knowledge of the matter said. Read more.

Advertising Age – New Yahoo CEO: Great Things in the Works, but I Can’t Share Them Yet
In his first earnings call since Yahoo named him CEO three weeks ago, Scott Thompson mixed bold proclamations of Yahoo’s potential with requests for just a bit more time to articulate his vision for the stalled internet behemoth. Read more.

Advertising Age – Mobile-Ad Spending Projected to Reach $2.61B in 2012
Mobile-ad spending in the U.S. is rising at a much faster clip than previously forecast and is projected to grow 80% this year, to $2.61 billion. Read more.

Advertising Age – Twitter to Roll Out More Brand Pages for Advertisers Who’ve Committed $25K
Twitter will start rolling out more brand pages next week for some brands and partners who have already committed to spending at least $25,000 on its ad products, including promoted tweets and trends. Read more.

Bloomberg – Amazon Fire Tablet Leaves Google Apps Behind
Since Google Inc. (GOOG) introduced its Android operating system in 2007, the company’s strategy has been simple: Give it to developers for free and make money when consumers click ads on the Web or through apps. That model is hitting a snag. Read more.

Los Angeles Times – Advertising Spending Online Expected to Surpass Print This Year
U.S. online advertising spending is expected to grow 23.3% to $39.5 billion this year, pushing it ahead of total advertising spending in print newspapers and magazines, according to an eMarketer report. Read more.

paidContent – Yahoo In Context: It’s Declining While The Online Ad Market Keeps Growing
Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson earlier today gave frank—and, the hopeful might say, encouraging—run down of the task ahead to turn around Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), an internet portal that was once on top of its game but has lately seem some serious decline. Read more.

Here are a few of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured during the past week or so:

The Wall Street Journal – Yahoo’s Board Games Risk Shareholder War
Silver Lake may be the yin to Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, but shareholders should at least get a say in the matter. The Internet giant is not-so-giant anymore. Its business, not to mention its stock, have been depressed for years as rivals Facebook and Google have leaped ahead in online advertising. Read more.

The Wall Street Journal – The $100 Billion Question That Looms for Facebook Fans
As initial valuations go, $100 billion is a big number to ask. But at least Facebook has a business model to buy into. Read more.

The New York Times – ‘Ford’ of Tech Companies, AOL, Must Keep Innovating, C.E.O. Says
Analysts at the research firm eMarketer estimated that AOL’s portion of display revenue in the United States would decline to 4.2 percent this year, from 4.8 percent in 2010. At the same time, AOL subscriptions have sagged. Read more.

Agence France Presse – “Cyber Monday” sizzles with US online shopping
“Overall, it is certainly shaping up to be a good season,” said eMarketer principal analyst Jeffrey Grau. “E-commerce is sort of reshaping the holiday shopping landscape.” Read more.

Associated Press – Twitter simplifies in bid to engage more users
The research firm eMarketer estimates that Twitter’s ad revenue will approach $140 million this year and rise to $260 million next year. As a privately held company, Twitter doesn’t disclose its revenue. Read more.

Reuters – Amazon’s advertising push gains steam
Amazon.com Inc is known as the world’s largest online retailer, but the company is aggressively expanding in online advertising, putting it on course for a clash with Google Inc, the leader in the space. Read more.

Bloomberg – Google’s AdMeld Deal to Clear U.S. Antitrust
Google Inc.’s $400 million acquisition of AdMeld Inc. has been recommended for antitrust approval by U.S. Justice Department staff attorneys, two people familiar with the matter said. Read more.

Advertising Age – Twitter Launches Self-Serve Ad Platform With Small Group
Twitter began the roll-out of its long-awaited self-serve ad platform with electronic payments enabled — a cornerstone of its revenue model — in mid-November with a group of fewer than 20 advertisers. Read more.

MediaPost – M-Commerce To Hit $6.7B In 2011
Mobile commerce will nearly double to $6.7 billion this year — fueled by rising smartphone adoption and growing mobile Web use, according to a new eMarketer forecast. Read more.

A much-debated tax on internet advertising in France took a big step toward approval on Monday, December 13, only to be withdrawn two days later—and big US companies breathed a sigh of relief.

This blog post is only available to eMarketer Total Access clients. To learn more about becoming an eMarketer client, click here.

It’s certainly a big piece. Barcode scanners are not widely adopted in the US – yet – but consumer awareness is rising fast. The popularity of the RedLaser iPhone app, which topped five million downloads earlier this month, is a sign of what’s to come. To keep pace, Amazon just added scanning capability to its iPhone app.

As my colleague Jeff Grau noted in his June 2010 “Mobile Shopping from In-Store: A Potential Game Changer” report (full version available here to Total Access clients only), shoppers who scan barcodes to compare prices, locate product reviews and create wish lists are still in the minority. Not surprisingly, Generation Y shoppers, who were raised on the internet and view their mobile devices as an extension of themselves, are the early adopters. They are the ones pushing retailers to offer a more interactive in-store shopping experience.

But clearly, they aren’t the only ones. According to the September 2010 “ScanLife Mobile Barcode Trend Report” from Scanbuy, a provider of mobile barcode solutions, traffic generated from scans has climbed 700% since January 2010.

Price comparison is a key driver of this increase in scanning. In a survey conducted by BuzzBack Market Research for NCR, 43% of consumers in nine major markets, including the US, said they view barcode scanning to find the best prices as an important way to give them more control over the shopping experience.

With its competitive pricing, efficient service and extremely well optimized product catalog, Amazon benefits directly from the steep increase in barcode scanning activity. Adding the capability to its own app only increases Amazon’s competitive advantage, not just over brick-and-mortar retailers but other online merchants as well. As ReadWriteWeb put it succinctly:

With Amazon’s new barcode-scanning technology, it’s not so much of a global price comparison engine but one that answers the simple question: “I wonder if this is cheaper on Amazon?”

Integrating the scanning capability is a smart move for Amazon because it removes friction from the buying process and enables interested consumers to pull the trigger on a purchase right from within the app.

The takeaway: barcode scanning is slowly transforming the in-store shopping experience. But if Amazon has anything to say about it, barcode scanning will make the shopping and buying experience more mobile than ever.

We all knew this day would come but it arrived sooner than some of us had expected. On July 19, Amazon announced it had sold more e-books than hardcover books over the past three months. Further, the growth rate in e-books accelerated during that time. In the month leading up to the announcement, Amazon sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, compared with a ratio of 143-to-100 during the three-month span.

Amazon also said unit sales of its Kindle reader devices had accelerated every month during the second quarter, both on a year-over-year basis and on a sequential basis. The company further noted that growth in Kindle unit sales had tripled since Amazon cut the price of the device to $189 from $259 on June 21, 2010.

There’s a lot that these numbers don’t tell us, starting with the raw numbers of Kindle and e-book units or the revenue associated with those product lines. Growth rates can be dodgy without broader context, particularly if the trend curve starts at a low point.

What we can glean from Amazon’s update is that the e-book business is a vibrant and fast-growing segment of the digital content universe. Analyst Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of the Idea Logical Company, predicted that, within a decade, fewer than 25% of books sold would be print versions.

The Amazon figures also suggest that predictions of a head-to-head battle between the Kindle and the Apple iPad may have been overstated. When the iPad launched earlier this year, The New York Times said Apple was on “on a direct collision course with the Kindle.”

However, in the second quarter, Apple sold 3.27 million iPad units, according to the company’s latest earnings report. While there’s no data on how many consumers own both devices, I’d be willing to bet that the overlap is significant.

Jefferies & Company managing director Youssef Squali suggested as much when he said Amazon’s announcement was “clearly an indication that the iPad is complementary to the Kindle, not a replacement.”

Mike Egan of ComputerWorld elaborated on this point by summing up 13 reasons why iPad owners still need Kindles. The main takeaway from Mr. Egan’s commentary is that the iPad does exactly what the Kindle doesn’t, and vice-versa. As long as this remains the case, there should be room for both items in consumer’s gadget wish lists.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia