E-mail is out, social networking is in, and all the advertising in the world can't topple Google, according to the ComScore 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review.

The report, which was released on Monday, provides a snapshot of usage trends across the digital space. Perhaps most noteworthy was the shift in e-mail usage, particularly among young people. Total Web-based e-mail use was down eight percent last year, led by a walloping 59 percent drop among 12 to 17 year olds. The second biggest drop was among 25 to 34 year olds (18 percent) and third biggest was among 45 to 54 year olds (12 percent). The only age category to increase its use of e-mail in 2010 was 55 to 64 year olds (up 22 percent), which the report attributed to continuing Internet adoption among that age group.

"What's really happening is the emergence of so many new communications channels" such as mobile and social networks, said Andrew Lipsman, spokesperson for the Reston, VA-based research firm, which are siphoning off e-mail users. However, those channels are primarily affecting social communication, he said, accounting for the much larger drop-off among those under 17.

Social networking continued its rise as the dominant Internet activity, with nine out of every 10 Internet users visiting a social networking site each month in 2010. "Social networking sites accounted for 12 percent of all time spent online in 2010 with the average Internet user spending more than 4.5 hours on these sites each month," the report read. Women continued to spend more of their Web browsing time on such sites (17 percent) than men did (12 percent).

Facebook was still the 800-pound gorilla in the social networking space, adding millions of users and accounting for 10 percent of all U.S. page views for the year. Three out of every 10 Internet sessions included a visit to the site. Despite MySpace's very public struggles - its audience declined 27 percent and total time spent on the site declined by half - the News Corp. property held on to the number two spot.

Tumblr was a surprise success among social networking sites in 2010, upping its monthly visitors to 6.7 million, an increase of 168 percent. Formspring.me also caught on with young users, growing over 1000 percent for the year and attracting 5.3 million visitors in December.

Lipsman attributed Tumblr's success to its unique balance of blogging and social networking. "It seems to tap into a couple of trends in terms of social media," he said. "And I think the simplicity of it is starting to catch on."

In the search category, despite the continued marketing onslaught of Microsoft's Bing, Google maintained its share of about 66 percent. Yahoo sites maintained their distant second of about 16 percent despite a minor drop of about 1 percent, and Microsoft sites came in third with 12 percent, a two percent increase over 2009.

Google also dominated "powered by" searches, Web searches conducted at third-party entities that carry the branding of major search engines. Google owned 24 percent of searches on the "powered by" market, whereas Bing owned 6.2 percent. Last year was the first time ComScore tracked the "powered by" market.

A recent study by Zokem reveals that the use of apps and mobile web goes up in relative terms in the evening and night time, whereas traditional communication services capture more user attention in the day time. For advertisers, this indicates the most important venues for mobile advertising during the lucrative evening time, where apps are, in fact, already ahead of web.

In the future of mobile, advertising will play an increasingly important part of the whole ecosystem. There exists a great opportunity in understanding how to target ads, when and where to advertise, and to whom. An interesting fact is that mobile is everywhere and all the time, so the possible contexts where to advertise and engage with consumers are numerous. As there are various ways to deliver ads through mobiles, choosing the best channel, such as the mobile web versus an application, the right app category or ad network, for the right time of a day have to be decided.

Figure 1

In Figure 1, based on our international Mobile Life panel, we have compared the relative use of smartphones at different parts of the day, calculating for each of the main smartphone use cases (browsing, voice, messaging and apps) an index reflecting the likelihood for people to use them, or launch the application, given they actually do something with their phones during that particular hour. For this we compare the number of usage sessions per category to the total number all usage sessions in a particular hour.

As expected, voice and messaging dominate day time usage, but fall towards the night as people communicate less through calls and messaging in the night time. Voice drops quicker than messaging, perhaps because it is a more business oriented service. In absolute terms, day time usage is still higher than evening time usage for all categories (Figure 2), but interestingly mobile apps and web browsing are stronger in the evening and night time, at least in relative terms.

Figure 2

“The evening hours are actually very crucial for advertising purposes, as people are not so much into work, and are more likely to make decisions, such as whether to go to movies, pick a nice restaurant for a dinner, or purchase a new track on iTunes”, says Dr. Hannu Verkasalo, CEO of Zokem. “If you take a closer look, it is shown that in the evenings apps still continue to capture user attention, actually more so than in day time, even though e.g. voice and messaging usage is already going down. Also mobile web browsing continues to capture user attention, even off the day time hours, but apps are relatively more important than mobile web sites for the purposes of advertising”, continues Verkasalo.

In the publicly available Zokem Insights, these analytics are packetized into more granular form, and more specific results for different application categories, sophisticated user segments, and device models, are available, providing tools for more actionable optimization of ad campaigns and targeting models.

This exemplary piece of analytics was published as a courtesy by Zokem, based on a vast dataset of smartphone users, part of Zokem Mobile Life panels, from the US and main markets of Europe.