Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific

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Oh what a week - Phelps and a Yeti!

August 18, 2008

The fastest moving search terms in Australia last week were:

1. bernie mac
2. olympic medal tally
3. medal tally
4. michael phelps
5. olympic results
6. bigfoot
7. falls festival
8. olympic schedule
9. yahoo7 olympics
10. royal Adelaide show

Note: Data is based on week ending 16/08/2008 compared with week ending 09/08/2008.

No surprises that the Olympics is top of mind, featuring in 6 of the top 10 search terms, plus Michael Phelps created a surge of interest at No.4. In retrospect it's a shame that Phelps didn't come in at number 8 to correlate with the number of his amazing performance in the pool, taking 8 gold medals in Beijing.

We decided to look at search volume over the past weeks to see just how Phelps stacks up against Australia's triple gold medalist Stephanie Rice. As you can see below the parochial nature of the Australian population has driven interest in Stephanie Rice well past all comers including the amazing Phelps.

phelps v australians.png

The largest beneficiary of searches for both 'stephanie rice' and 'michael phelps' was Wikipedia, followed by the news.com.au and The Daily Telegraph for Stephanie, with searches for 'michael phelps' delivering traffic to his personal site Michaelphelps.com.

The passing of comedian Bernie Mac created the fastest moving search term of the week, traffic went to Wikipedia, Google News Australia and international news sites, with the Australian media receiving little of the resultant downstream traffic.

Speaking of Australian media, the fight for Olympic glory is not only happening in Beijing, but there is also great importance for the host broadcasters (Seven Network and SBS) in launching new shows and increasing sampling of existing shows. Yahoo!7 hit the top 10 this week and this is borne out further in the traffic shares against the competitive networks.

Seven is having success on the back of the Olympics broadcast with search volume up and being the most visited TV network online. Keeping in mind that TV network partnerships with online properties (Yahoo!7 & MSN) would mean the above comparison cannot be viewed as a definitive view of the TV network market.

The popularity of the Falls Festival on Victoria's west coast is gaining momentum leading into the closing date for the ticket ballot on August 27th. This year's festival features Franz Ferdinand, The Hives, The Cat Empire, Gomez and Eli 'Paperboy' Reed among others.

For more family oriented entertainment the Royal Adelaide Show kicks of in 17 days highlighted by the increase in search activity.

But my favourite for the week is the discovery of Bigfoot in the US. Currently being kept on ice (as you would) until the scientists can confirm what the remains are. Bigfoot standing at 2.3m, weighing in at 230kg and 41cm long feet may turn out to be a very tall tale. Australians headed to local news sources, Google News Australia, Sydney Morning Herald and news.com.au to keep abreast of the hairy find.

And, as always, we urge you to follow Hitwise Asia Pacific on Twitter to keep up with the latest Internet data and trends.