If Apple does indeed make a deal with Microsoft that makes Bing the iPhone’s default search engine, exactly how hard would Google be hit? According to our numbers, Google would immediately lose some 27% of the smartphone market. Featured in MacWorld, ReadWriteWeb, ChannelWeb, and others.

Six months after the launch of iPhone OS 3.0, almost half of all iPod Touch users still refuse to pony up the fee to upgrade. With how little is offered to non-iPhone users, and given the fact that only iPod Touch users are charged, is it any wonder? As seen on Apple Insider, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Geek.com and elsewhere.

Following up on our comparison of clickthrough rates by search engine, we expanded our scope, looking at web browsers and operating systems. Across the board, Microsoft products mean a higher likelihood of users clicking on advertisements. Featured in TechCrunch, Adotas, Huffington Post, and more.

What is the value to a website that runs ads of a single Bing user versus a Google or Yahoo! user? Looking at the ad clickthrough rates of traffic sent by the big 3 search providers, it appears that one Bing user is worth more to a website than one Google user. As seen in TechCrunch, Ars Technica, iMedia Connection, and more.

All Google traffic is not made the same, at least when it comes to the likelihood of that traffic to click on your advertisements. Chitika looked at 11 million impressions from various Google sources, and found that people who go to Google’s homepage and click “Search” are 50% more likely to end up clicking on an ad than any other Google searcher.

Chitika looked at the ad-click habits of a sample of over 86 million Internet users during a two week period to determine what percentage of web surfers actually click on the ads that pay for Internet content. Only 2% of people actually clicked on ads during that time. Featured on Geek.com and The Independent.

Microsoft’s decision engine, Bing, saw a large number of individuals trying out the service in August. Since then, the user base has declined more rapidly than the impressions, indicating that many tried out Bing during the summer months and moved back to Google for their full-time searches.

A look at the website genres that receive the most traffic from Twitter and Facebook across the Chitika network. Twitterers seem interested in being on the bleeding edge of breaking news, whereas Facebook users seem more interested in tech and lifestyle sites. Featured in AdWeek, WebProNews, and more

When bringing new visitors in to a website, where do you go? Well, according to our latest study, you go to Facebook and Digg if you want them to be loyal, repeat readers. As seen in eMarketer, Mashable, Marketing Pilgrim, and more.

Breakdown of referrals to the Chitika network comparing 7 days in July with 7 days in September, 2009. Some key insights: Twitter users becoming link-blind; Bing losing referral market share; search continues to dominate, with no obvious threat from social media.

We take an apples-to-apples comparison of the same ads on the same websites across the Chitika network to gauge mobile vs. non-mobile users’ attitudes towards in-browser advertising. Featured in TechCrunch, WebProNews, MediaPost, GigaOM, digiday:Daily,and more.

Compared with other browser/search engine bundled combos (Firefox/Google, Safari/Google, etc.), the Internet Explorer/Bing combo garners very little loyalty for Microsoft’s decision engine. Covered by eWeek, TechCrunch, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and more.

With the upswing in the number of Linux boxes (thank you netbooks and Dell) and as much interest we have in the search engine market, we at Chitika thought we’d take a look at the search habits of our open-source friends. We compared the OS and search engine data for 163,211,927 searches – a sample [...]

We at Chitika are quite fond of search engines: since all of our ads serve only to search traffic, they’re our bread and butter in the online world. So with Microsoft’s new Bing decision engine making so much noise, we thought we’d take a closer look at the clickthrough rates of visitors from the [...]