The UK online display advertising market for the third quarter of 2010 showed strong gains compared to Q3 2009, according to the latest report from comScore.

UK Internet users received more than 221 billion display ads during the third quarter, marking a 34 percent increase compared to a year ago.

Online retail spending reached $32.1 billion in the third quarter, up nine percent over the third quarter of 2009, according to a new report from comScore.

The growth rate represents the fourth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth after a year of flat or negative growth rates.

A new report on the state of the search market has been released, and, in keeping with tradition, it represents good news for Google.  The search giant gained a significant amount of ground in September, according to comScore, although the real story might be Yahoo’s loss.

Yahoo’s market share fell from 17.4 percent to 16.7 percent on a month-over-month basis, which is rather a lot if you consider that 0.7 points count as four percent of 17.4 points.

An analysis of mobile activities in Japan, the U.S. and Europe found significant differences among consumers by geography, according to a new report from comScore.

Mobile users in Japan were the “most connected” of the three markets, with more than 75 percent using connected media (browsed, accessed applications or downloaded content) in June, compared to 43.7 percent in the U.S. and 38.5 percent in Europe.

So as not to mislead anyone, we’ll be clear from the start: Facebook’s nowhere close to overtaking Orkut in terms of unique visitors in Brazil.  But new comScore stats at least show that Facebook is growing at an amazing rate, and Twitter’s doing well for itself in the country, too.

Facebook saw its user base increase by 479 percent in the last year, according to comScore, which means its audience has gone from roughly 1.5 million visitors in August of 2009 to 8.9 million in August of this year.  Not bad.

Today, new comScore statistics regarding the mobile market were released, and it looks like RIM and Apple – and Microsoft and Palm, for that matter – are in trouble.  Android was the only mobile operating system to increase its market share between May and August.

New data from comScore indicates that smartphone users now make up the majority of mobile browser and app users, at least in the United States. 

The firm finds that the number of Smartphone users accessing mobile content through browsers and apps now surpasses that of non-smartphone users, claiming that in the 3 month average ending in August, Smartphone subscribers made up 60% of those who used a downloaded app and 55% of those who used a browser. 

The number of people viewing video on mobile devices has increased 66 percent in the past year to 12.1 million mobile consumers in the EU5 (U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy), according to a new report from comScore.

The U.K. and Italy each have 2.7 million mobile video consumers, up 75 percent from July 2009 in the U.K. market and up 55 percent in the Italian market. Spain has the fastest growth, with mobile video consumption up 90 percent in the past year to 1.7 million subscribers.

Although it obviously took a little while for anyone to notice, it looks like August will go down as a very important period in Twitter’s history.  comScore has determined that Twitter passed MySpace in terms of unique visitors last month.

In one sense, the changeup wasn’t a huge deal: Twitter just saw 96 million visitors versus MySpace’s 95 million.  But the switch looks permanent, considering that, on a year-over-year basis, Twitter’s visitor count increased 76 percent while MySpace’s fell 17 percent.

Google continued its reign over the U.S. search market in August with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo with 17.4 percent (up 0.3 percentage points) and Microsoft with 11.1 percent (up 0.1 percentage points), according to the latest analysis from comScore.

 Ask saw no change month-over-month capturing 3.8 percent of the search market, followed by AOL, which also remained flat with 2.3 percent of the market.

Samsung was the top handset manufacturer in the U.S. in July with 23.1 percent market share, while RIM led the smartphone platforms with 39.9 percent market share, according to the latest report from comScore.

For the 3-month average period ending in July, 234 million Americans used mobile devices. Device maker LG ranked second with 21.2 percent share, followed by Motorola (19.8% share), RIM (9% share) and Nokia (7.8% share.)

The Symbian platform has 54.4 percent of the smartphone market in Western Europe, according to a new report from comScore.

Even with Symbian’s continued growth in the number of smartphone subscribers, its market share has decreased as growth in the Apple OS and Android platform has risen in the past year.

Apple trails Symbian with 19.2 percent of the Western European smartphone market, followed by Microsoft (11.6%), RIM (8%) and Google with 6.1 percent.

Although it’s perhaps not a worldwide phenomenon like Facebook, new statistics from comScore indicate that LinkedIn is at least an international success.  It turns out the network is more popular in the Netherlands and Ireland than in the U.S., and it has quite a lot of fans in other countries, as well.

One thing we should note: these popularity rankings were adjusted to account for the number of local Internet users.  So no one’s suggesting that there are more LinkedIn users in Denmark than in the entire United Kingdom.

comScore announced today that it has acquired Nedstat, an online analytics and optimization firm based out of Amsterdam.

The acquisition enables comScore to substantially expand its presence in Europe, with offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. The company says this will help it reach out to new clients in these markets.

comScore released its monthly Media Metrix top 50 revealing the top 50 U.S. web properties. Here are the top ten:

More than half of Malaysians online visited a news/information site in July, reaching more than 5.5 million visitors, according to a new report from comScore.

Yahoo News led as the most visited site in the category reaching 1.2 million visitors, followed by the New York Times Digital with 873,000 visitors.

Like most studies, surveys, and stat counts related to Internet user behavior, search market stats should generally be taken with a grain of salt. While they can give us a general idea of which search engines users flock to, there are too many variables to paint a completely accurate picture.

What’s your search engine of choice? Why? Let us know.

For a long time, Orkut has been the one bright spot in Google’s social media stable; it’s been the sole product that became really popular in some markets, even as everything else struggled to gain users (and/or not get the axe).  Only new stats indicate that Facebook’s beaten Orkut in India, which represented one of its two strongholds.

comScore released its Video Metrix data for July today. According to this, 178 million people in the U.S. watched online video content during the month, watching an average of 14.7 hours per user.

During the month, Facebook moved up from the fourth position to the third position behind Yahoo properties, and of course Google properties at number 1. Facebook accounted for 46.6 million viewers.

comScore has released some interesting research on Twitter usage in different countries. The firm found that in June, about 93 million people visited Twitter.com, up 109% from the previous year.

Of course this doesn’t even take into account all of the third-party Twitter apps, which many users access Twitter regularly from. A lot of users rarely go to Twitter.com.

Online retail spending in the U.S. reached $32.9 billion in the second quarter, up 9 percent over a year ago, according to a new report from comScore.

The growth rate represented the third consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth following a year of flat or negative growth rates.

"The second quarter’s continuation of the first quarter’s strong retail e-commerce growth rates is encouraging," said comScore chairman Gian Fulgoni.