The value of the click as a metric of advertising success took a serious knock from the analysis of a report released this month. The growing irrelevancy of click-through measurement was charted over nearly two years.

“A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal—and it’s certainly not to generate clicks,” said John Lowell, Starcom USA SVP and director, research and analytics, in a statement in eMarketer today.

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For the first time, banking customers prefer online banking to any other method, according to a study published last week by the American Bankers Association.

Twenty-five percent of the 1,000 customers surveyed in August responded that their preferred method of banking is online.

After online, customers most preferred visiting their local branches (21 percent) and ATMs (17 percent). All age groups under 55 preferred mobile banking to any other form.

“This marks a watershed change,” said Nessa Feddis, ABA senior counsel and retail banking expert.

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We’re entering another paradigm shift in computing.

In several years – when mobile broadband networks become universal and reliable, and when hardware and data-plan prices drop to competitive levels – phones will have replaced PCs for most of non-specialist computing needs.

More than forty percent of iPhone users already use their phones more than PCs to access the Web, according to a just-released study by comScore for the mobile advertising platform AdMob.

“While this is self-reported data, it points toward a near-term future when growing numbers people use their smartphones as primary and their PCs as secondary ways to access the Internet,” according to the study’s press release.

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Social networks had a record number of unique U.S. visitors in April, mainly on the strength of Twitter and Facebook, comScore reports.

Social networks grew 12 percent last month to nearly 140 million visitors – nearly 75 percent of the total U.S. online population.

Incredibly, MySpace still has more visitors than Facebook, albeit by a slim margin of 71 million to 67.5 million. Last week, I visited my MySpace profile for the first time in at least six months and found it vacant, many of my friends having deleted their profiles.

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The number of people using online banking continued to grow through 2008’s economic woes. ComScore attributes this to banks’ aggressive customer-acquisition strategies and a heightened financial awareness among customers.

Online banking had the same growth in Q4 2008 as it did in Q4 2007, .09 percent. Establishing a baseline in online banking growth is difficult according to comScore’s stats, as quarterly results fluctuated from quarter to quarter in 2007 and 2008.

While the average quarterly growth was 2.06 in those two years, three of the eight quarters had the same growth of .09 percent.

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The majority of the most popular Apple apps, according to comScore’s tracking of February 2009 downloads, are Games or Entertainment.

The most popular Apple app according to the number of downloads is Tap Tap Revenge, which has been downloaded by 32 percent of Apple App users.

“Tap Tap’s success demonstrates that there is ample opportunity in the app space for any publisher to obtain significant distribution with a product that engages users,” according to the press release accompanying the report.

“Since the number of app users is growing nearly ten percent each month, that opportunity will only continue to grow for both existing and emerging app developers,” according to the press release.

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Searches related to the economy have increased dramatically in the past year, according to a comScore analysis.

“Online behavior has come to reflect the interests or concerns of Americans, and we are certainly seeing this manifest itself with respect to the economic downturn,” said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni. “Search volume using terms relating to the economy has ballooned over the past year as Americans have become increasingly concerned over their economic well being.”

OK, so the news isn’t surprising, but the numbers are still interesting.

The fastest growing search term in comScore’s list is “Unemployment Benefits,” which grew 247 percent between December 2007 and December 2008. “Unemployment” grew 206 percent and bankruptcy 156 percent.

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“Cyber Monday has historically proved to be an accurate bellwether for the overall performance of the online holiday shopping season. While the year-over-year growth rates for individual online spending days vary quite significantly throughout the season, during the past few years Cyber Monday has been within a few percentage points of the final holiday season growth rate,” says ComScore about Black Friday.

While we’re used to people shopping online at work, it’s staggering to imagine that number extrapolated across the continent, but that’s what Cyber Monday (dubbed thus in 2005 by the National Retail Federation) is, the day people come back to work from Thanksgiving holiday and, maximizing office resources, shop. As the ComScore quote reveals, this, more than anything, predicts how holiday sales will go.

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As expected, online retail growth fell for the first time since 2001, when ComScore started tracking it. Growth fell 4% in so far in November. ComScore predicts flat growth for the holiday season, compared to last year.

“Despite the recent reprieve that plummeting gas prices have given American consumers, the depressed and volatile stock market, declining housing prices, inflation and the weak job market all represent dark clouds hanging over their heads this holiday shopping season,” said comScore chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

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78% of US online adults made an Internet purchase in the past six months, according to Nielsen.

Four out of ten made a travel purchase, and more than one third managed their credit card or baking accounts online. Other sites with high transaction rates were clothes/shoes/accessories (28%), books (26%), and hotel/motel reservations (18%). Top individual sites were eBay, Amazon, Wal Mart stores, Target, and Netflix.

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