Here are a few of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured this week:

6/3: AdAge.com – Why Apple, Ford and Zappos Have All Invested in Branded Mobile Codes
Dell, Apple, Zappos, Google, Ford, Oprah, Jet Blue, ESPN, 1-800-Flowers, the Girl Scouts Coke, Good Morning America and The Chicago Bulls are among the companies in the forefront of a mobile marketing trend most haven’t even heard of yet. Read more.

6/3: Forbes.com – Who Will Be Left Standing Post-Groupon IPO?
Groupon has filed the paperwork for its IPO. Already the furious debate has started about whether it is a worthwhile investment. Read more.

6/2: Wall Street Journal – Facebook Calls Ceglia Contract A Fake
Facebook Inc. on Thursday filed legal documents calling a contract alleged to entitle a New York man to a large ownership stake in the closely-held online social network a fake. Read more.

6/2: MediaPost Online – Deal Me In: Amazon Launches AmazonLocal
Amazon invested $175 million in LivingSocial last year, but Thursday it cemented a place in its own daily deals space by launching into the first local offering through AmazonLocal. Read more.

6/2: DigiDay – The Upfront’s Biggest Loser? The Web
While various pundits will debate whether Fox or CBS or ABC fared better during this year’s broadcast upfront, there’s no doubt who the Biggest Upfront Loser was: the Web. Read more.

6/2: MediaPost Online – How To Start Winning At Online Video
With the mobile and tablet market growing daily, it comes as no surprise to many that more TV ad spend dollars are shifting to online video. eMarketer estimates that by 2015, 76% of Internet users, or 195.5 million people, will watch video content online every month. Read more.

6/2: SFGate.com – Twitter to let users put photos, videos in tweets
Twitter Inc., which started as a short text-only service, on Wednesday said it will roll out a new way to directly share photos and videos in a tweet. Read more.

6/1: Guardian Online – Twitter and Google fight back against Facebook’s Like button
Facebook’s tentacular reach across the internet was accelerated by its ‘like’ button, which now seems a ubiquitous part of the browsing experience from news and blogs to corporate and retail sites. Read more.

6/1: USA Today – New Zynga game ‘Empires & Allies’ to launch on Facebook
Launching on Facebook Wednesday, Empires & Allies goes beyond the tilling of farms and construction of cities to the building of a war machine. Read more.

6/1: Reuters – Twitter CEO says 80 percent of advertisers renew
More than 80 percent of the companies that advertise on Twitter renew their marketing efforts on the microblogging service, the company’s chief executive said on Wednesday. Read more.

5/31: Los Angeles Times – YouTube counting on former Netflix exec to help it turn a profit
Google Inc.’s YouTube was counting on Hollywood’s love affair with sequels when it hired Robert Kyncl as its emissary to the studios. Read more.

5/31: MediaPost Online – How Social, Not Search, Can Retarget Ads
Nuances in announcements, rather than the news itself, should make marketers sit up and take notice. For example, when IBM announced acquisitions related to marketing and advertising signaled that Big Blue would step heavily into online marketing and advertising services. Read more.

5/31: ClickZ.com – Niche Media Planning: Ad-Supported Mobile Games
Last year, Nielsen found that when it comes to mobile use, games – both free and paid – represent the most popular app downloads (65 percent). Read more.

For more of eMarketer’s recent news coverage, click here.

Here are some of the top stories in which eMarketer data and analysis were featured this week:

4.27: Reuters: Amazon Eyes Rosy Revenue

Amazon.com gave a confident revenue forecast that suggested its aggressive expansion into new businesses is paying off, soothing concerns about its slimmed-down profit margin. Read more.

4.27: Adweek: Is the Magazine Business Doomed to Shrink?

It isn’t news that magazines are seeing their print advertising revenue disappear before their eyes; the real story is in whether they can replace that lost cash with online revenue. New data from eMarketer answers this in the negative, projecting that total US magazine ad revenue will fall from $17 billion in 2010 to less than $15 billion by 2015. Read more.

4.27: Los Angeles Times: YouTube aims to expand movie service to compete with iTunes, Amazon

YouTube has reached agreements with Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures to offer their movies the same day they are available on other on-demand services, people with knowledge of the situation say. Read more.

4.27: Fast Company: Blame It On The Youth

If you want to know where the future is headed, sometimes telling clues reside in how the youth of the world interact and share with one another. With the rise of the Golden Triangle of technology, mobile, social, and real-time, technology is not just for the geeks, technology is part of our lifestyle…it is part of who we are. Read more.

4.26: ClickZ: How Twitter Makes Money

On January 24, eMarketer predicted that Twitter would bring in a bit over $150 million in 2011 and $250 million in 2012. (You can see the chart at the bottom of this column.) Is this realistic? I think it may be from what I have learned and am writing about below. Read more.

4.25: USA Today: Facebook Deals to Debut

Facebook plans to add yet another feature to its social-networking portfolio, with what some analysts are calling a Google Offers competitor. Facebook Deals is designed to let the site’s 500 million users easily share their shopping experiences with one another, and save money in the process. Read more.

4.25: Forbes.com: Google Must Spend to Remain Sultan of Search

Google has maintained its dominant position in the search advertising market and does not plan to yield market share quietly. The search engine giant has consistently increased its market share over the years by launching products that leverage new technologies and media as well as by acquiring companies that support its search business. Read more.

For more of eMarketer’s recent news coverage, click here.

I understand why entertainment giant Disney bought social game developer Playdom. I also understand that sometimes it’s better to buy than build, and this is probably one of those times for Disney. Disney president and CEO Robert Iger stated it clearly when he told BusinessWeek: “You don’t get the kind of growth we want by building from the inside.”

What I’m wondering is whether Playdom was worth the $563 million price tag that Disney plunked down — which will swell to $762 million if Playdom meets predetermined performance benchmarks.

Now, you might say that a few hundred million is a drop in the bucket for Disney. After all, this is a company that had $36 billion in revenues and almost $6 billion in profits in FY 2009. And Disney paid $8.1 billion for Pixar in 2006 and $4.2 billion for Marvel last year, so nosebleed acquisitions are nothing new for Mickey’s team.

Perhaps more to the point, Disney just unloaded Miramax for $660 million, so you could say it “swapped” an aging art-house film unit for an up-and-coming social game developer. Disney made a handsome profit on Miramax, which it bought for $80 million in 1993.

But the fact that Disney can afford this hefty price for Playdom doesn’t mean it makes good fiscal sense. Electronic Arts snapped up Playfish for a comparatively reasonable $275 last year — and Playfish is bigger than Playdom.

Disney is gambling on Playdom’s ability to outmatch its competition, which includes Playfish and the grandaddy of social game makers, Zynga. But Disney is also betting that social gaming won’t die off as a passing fad, and that Facebook and other social venues will continue to support these games. (If it weren’t for Facebook’s massive scale, Zynga would not be anywhere near where it is today). These are some pretty aggressive gambles.

The price tag of this deal reminds me of other notorious acquisitions of the past decade, some of which crippled their buyers: Time Warner/AOL, AOL/Bebo, News Corp./MySpace.

The latter deal didn’t seem so overblown while MySpace was riding the crest of a popularity wave during its acquisition in 2005. Of course, that was before Facebook blew it out of the water, both in user growth and advertising sales. Facebook is expected to top at least $600 million (though recent estimates put the number closer to a billion) in advertising revenue this year, while ad revenue to MySpace is expected to decline 21% to $385 million, according to eMarketer estimates. At this point, MySpace seems like an albatross for News Corp., which on multiple occasions has had to fend off rumors of a fire sale for the flagging unit.

This underscores the risks of paying top-dollar for flavor-of-the-moment properties. It’s all fine and good if those properties can retain their cool and appreciate over time. But very few do. Remember Bebo? It pioneered many of the same concepts that made Facebook successful today, and look where it ended up.

Or take Disney’s own purchase of Club Penguin for $350 million in 2007. The kids-oriented virtual world failed to meet performance benchmarks that would have sweetened the deal, and traffic to the site has been declining. Barring a stunning turnaround, it’s not looking like Club Penguin will go down in history as one of Disney’s corporate coups. Given the steep price Disney is paying, we may be saying the same thing about Playdom—another company who makes its money selling virtual goods—a few years from now.

Image courtesy of Facebook.

The not-so-mad scientists at YouTube—aka, Google’s video laboratory—just launched Leanback, their latest beta project.

As the name implies, Leanback looks to get online video viewers to sit back and just watch a bunch of videos—no mousing needed. The specific videos that YouTube shows are based on past YouTube viewing experiences (for registered users), or can be further personalized by linking YouTube with Facebook accounts.

As a regular YouTube viewer, my first Leanback experience meant a bunch of older video clips, since I like watching jazz musicians from the 1940s and 1950s, and bike mechanic instructional videos, since I always have a bike or seven that need tuning up. Sounds nice, but part of the problem is that all the videos were shown full-screen, and even with my high-res 24-inch iMac screen, none of the videos were suited for enlargement. However, other than arrow keys for going forward and back along the Leanback queue, I couldn’t readily find a way to change video sizes.

What’s more, it’s questionable how much people want a lean-back experience when watching video on the web. While the service reminds me of Pandora, the online music service—giving you related content based on your interests—unlike music, video doesn’t lend itself to such passive consumption.

However, if new YouTube services are truly part of Google’s test lab for Google TV—and if the content available is bulked up with more professional-level video—then Leanback video could be a useful incentive when people watch internet-based video on their big-screen TVs.

As I said to Laurie Sullivan of MediaPost, “It would make sense for Google to try out these incremental changes on YouTube first before integrating them into Google TV. These features could integrate into a larger package later on.”

For more info about YouTube’s Leanback, here’s their blog posting about it.

A big day: Experian Hitwise announced that social networks attracted more UK online traffic than search engines in May 2010. Since May of last year, social network visits have climbed from about 10% of all UK site visits to 11.88% of the total. During the same time, traffic to search engines fell from about 12% to 11.33% of all visits.

Google UK remained the most popular site overall among UK Web users, representing more than 90% of searches in May, said Hitwise. But Facebook ranked second in popularity, and accounted for 55% of all UK traffic to social network sites. YouTube claimed 16.5% of social network traffic, and Twitter placed third, with just over 2%.

These Hitwise results bear out some of the first rankings from the recently launched UK Online Measurement company (UKOM), which bases its audience estimates on Nielsen panel data. UKOM found that Google was indeed the top Web brand in April 2010, attracting 35.3 million unique visitors. The combined audience of Microsoft’s MSN, Windows Live and Bing search engine registered 28.3 million users, ahead of Facebook with 25 million.

These audience figures go some way to explaining why Facebook is also being widely credited with saving the display ad industry virtually single-handed. According to comScore’s Ad Metrix, the leading social network delivered almost 21 million display impressions to UK Web users in March 2010. That was more than 30% of all display ads served that month, comScore reported.