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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

Analyst Weblog

5 Minutes of Facebook Celebrity

February 04, 2010

Notice anything different about your friends on Facebook? Suddenly they all look a bit more like celebrities! The latest trend to hit Facebook has been to replace your profile picture with one of your celebrity doppelganger. Last week, the top 2 search terms including the word ‘celebrity’ were ‘what celebrity do I look like’ and ‘celebrity look alike’. Also in the top 10 search term variations were queries for celebrity lookalike generators.

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The top website last week to benefit from the celebrity profile picture trend was MyHeritage who received 35% of the clicks from searches for ‘what celebrity do I look like’. The market share of visits to celebrity.myheritage.com increased 500% for the week ending Jan. 30, 2010 as compared to the previous week. Similarly, visits to FaceDouble, another celebrity lookalike generator, increased 200% from the previous week.

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These trends can offer a good opportunity for customer acquisition, for example, last week 32% of the upstream traffic to celebrity.myheritage.com was from Facebook and 90% of the visitors were new to the site (meaning they had not visited in the past 30 days). The challenge will be keeping those visitors once a new trend hits Facebook & the Internet.

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 07:00 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Facebook | Social Media | Social Networking

Social network impact for retailers

January 29, 2010

Social networking has become the most popular activity online and visits to the category represented 13% of all US Internet visits in December. As the social networking audience continues to grow, the category has become a major source of traffic for retailers, surpassing categories such as Rewards and Directories, comprised of comparison shopping tools and affiliate websites. In December, the share of upstream traffic to the Retail 500 custom category increased 37% as compared to the previous year, the highest year-over-year increase among major traffic sources.

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One common question regarding the relationship between social networks and retailers is how to be sure that the traffic coming from social networks is not just a by-product of their popularity. For many users, there is tendency for visitors to either always have a tab open logged into a social network or returning frequently to check for updates. One measure of success is the sheer number of followers or fans, etc. along with the amount of interaction and dialogue taking place. Many marketers have used promotions to attract new users, which quickly grows their base within the social networks and provides opportunities to at least passively provide messages to the users (although possibly amongst a significant amount of clutter). Another way to consider the intent of the users is through search queries where either retail-related terms are driving traffic to the websites of social networks in search engine result pages or users are searching internally within the networks for retailers.

As an example, we ran a custom analysis of internal searches on Facebook to look for retail brands during the holiday season. The chart below shows the weekly downstream traffic from Facebook to the Retail 500 and the top retailer names within the internal search results. During the holidays over 2% of the traffic to Facebook (the 2nd ranked website in the US) visited a website in the Retail 500 immediately after. Retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and Bath & Body Works (and others) all appeared within the internal searches taking place on Facebook signifying that consumers were actively seeking their content and offerings.

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Affluent shoppers increase during holidays

January 28, 2010

Last week, during our Holiday Recap webinar, we examined how the demographic profiles of the visitors to the Retail 500 shifted in 2009 as compared to the previous year. When looking at the household income of visitors during the peak weeks of the holiday seasons, there was an increase in those earning $100k and over. Visitors that earned over $150k increased 21% and those that earned between $100k and $149k increased 8%.

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Similarly, when looking at Mosaic Lifestyle Groups for the same time periods, the two most affluent groups, Affluent Suburbia and Upscale America experienced the highest increases. The share of visitors from each group increased 31% over the previous holiday season and also represent the largest groups of visitors.

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With more affluent shoppers emerging online during the holiday season, visits increased to a custom category of Designer & Luxury Retail websites and returned to levels similar to the 2007 Holiday season. Visits increased 14% during the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday over last year and 20% during the peak week, ending Dec. 12, 2009. This is not to say that the affluent shoppers were strictly visiting the websites of luxury retailers, but following last year's decline in visits and subsequent clearance sales, the increase in visits is a positive sign of increased willingness to spend.

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 06:40 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Holiday | Retail | fashion

YouTube Launching Movie Rentals

January 21, 2010

An announcement came out yesterday that YouTube is going to begin testing movie rentals starting Friday with movies from the Sundance Film Festival. This move represents a new opportunity for YouTube to generate revenue in addition to advertising with its’ large, engaged audience. Last week, YouTube ranked 6th among all websites in the US and visitors spent an average of 25 minutes and 25 seconds with the website.

Already a destination for viewing both short and long videos online, YouTube ranked second behind Momo Mesh for websites that receive traffic from the search term ‘movies online’ for the 12 weeks ending January 16, 2010. Last week, among all of the search terms that drove traffic to YouTube, 2179 included the word ‘movie’ or ‘movies’, although 291 also included the word ‘free’. Migrating users into paying customers may be an initial challenge for those unaccustomed (or unwilling) to pay for content, the same problem facing all media companies.

There are many competitors to the new service offering from YouTube including NetFlix, Apple and Amazon. However, in general, NetFlix has become synonymous with movie rentals online and appeared three times in the top ten search term variations of ‘movie rentals’ for the 12 weeks ending January 16, 2010.

For any of the players in this space, video quality, breadth of selection and ease of use will be the key drivers of success.

Heather Dougherty

Director, Research at Hitwise.