Five easy Apple charts

If a picture is worth a thousand words, here's five grand worth of Apple (AAPL) news in charts and lists released over the past couple of days.

1. Web Brands. Apple scored No. 10 in Nielson Online's ranking of the top Web brands based on the number of unique visitors each site drew in December 2008 — which isn't bad considering Apple.com's focus is so much narrower than the brands it's up against, like Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Amazon (AMZN). (link)

2. Social Brands. The iPhone scored No. 1 — ahead even of its parent company at No. 3 — in the Vitrue 100, a new ranking launched this week by an Atlanta-based marketing company with a deliberately misspelled name. Vitrue's list ranks blue chip brands by how often they get mentioned in blogs, photo-sharing sites and such social media entities as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter — presumably a measure of how large these names loom in the minds of an emerging category of early adopters.

3. Days to 1 Million. This comes from an Engadget reader named Noel F. who used published sales data to compare the rate at which the leading smartphones achieved the market penetration milestone of 1 million units. However, as Engadget's Tom Ricker notes, this leaves out the important factor of geographical footprint at launch. The Google Android G1, for example, launched only in the United States. The iPhone 3G was released simultaneously in 21 countries. (link)

4. Volume vs. Revenue. CounterNotions's Kontra uses data from GigaOm's Jose Fermoso to demonstrate that what matters is not how many smartphones you sell, but how much you make on each sale. Unfortunately, both writers' comparisons are a bit off since Apple's Q1 numbers include revenue and earnings not just from iPhones, but also from Macs, iPods and other goodies.

5. Stock Price. Finally, a glance at Apple's share price, which having suffered a thousand cuts in the past year finally picked up a little traction in the past two weeks.