No Yahoo! anywhere in the list. How weird is that?

Quite right too.

Extraordinary. Al Jazeera came in the top five in Europe & N Africa regional vote too. Also, dont they have iPods in Europe or what??

Europe & North Africa

1. Ikea
2. Virgin
3. H & M
4. Nokia
5. Al Jazeera

Google gets their revenue mostly from search, they rely on people going to their site and search for keywords and click on the pay per click.

If their traffic is flat, there is very likely that their revenue is going to be flat.

You can track google traffic at Alexa.com. In the past 3 months, their traffic is almost flat, with slight increase in Dec.

Apparently, they try to put in marketing dollars toward in Dec. to generate revenue.

Their reach per million went up by 16%, which is good, however, the average page views per users went down by 13%.

And now this.

Where was Coca-Cola, it is nowhere to be found in this year's global top five list - not even in the regional one, i.e. in the US? If this trend continues will we all get less fat on Coke's empty calories, and go jogging to the sound of our iPods instead. Sounds great! Googling isn't quite as good exercise but it beats drinking Coca-Cola too anyday as a worthwhile activity. Geeks agree? (Maybe not alas.)

##who owns Brandchannel anyhow, not Murdoch obviously!!##

No idea, but here are some other weird surveys they've done recently:

:: Singapore's Most Valuable Brands 2004

:: France's Best Brands by Value

:: Brazil's Best Brands 2004

If Al Jazeera is the world's fifth most influential brand, then Fox must be eating its heart out - who owns Brandchannel anyhow, not Murdoch obviously!!

Maybe this Rusch guy can also explain why Apple still sticks with a one-button mouse! ;-)

I think I'd rather have an iPod than an Al-Jazeera video thanks.