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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Yahoo! Answers - Happy Birthday

December 13, 2006

Noticed the post on Search Engine Land this morning about Yahoo! Answers turning one and wanted to do a quick post on the growth of the website and the commercial opportunities for the site.

Last week, Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers ranked 240 among all categories of websites and 22 in the Hitwise Net Communities and Chat category, based on share of UK internet visits. The market share of UK internet visits to Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers has grown 9% in the past four weeks, 39% in the past eight weeks and more than 30 fold in the past six months (comparing weeks ending 10th June 2006 and 9th December 2006). (The spike in visits to Yahoo! Answers in July appears to be due to above the line advertising run throughout the UK.)
Yahoo! Answers Traffic.png

Last week, 43% of upstream visits to Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers came from search engines, 6% from email services, 6% from retail websites, 6% from entertainment websites (including television and games sites) and 4% from net communities and chat.

Last week, 11% of search traffic to the site was from paid listings and the following table shows the top 10 terms sending visits to the site.
Yahoo Anwers paid and organic.png

I thought it was pretty funny that Britney Spears should figure so prominently in the list. A quick search for "britney spears no knickers" on Google revealed that Yahoo! Answers is the top organic result. (The comments in the thread are pretty funny.)

The Search Engine Land post pointed me to an article on Brand Republic about plans to white-label Yahoo! Answers next year. Which categories are the most likely candidates? I checked Hitwise clickstream to see if there are any natural affinities between Yahoo! Answers users and commercial categories online.

There seem to be some natural affinities to retail websites and Business and Finance. In particular, within the Business and Finance category, Charcol (the mortgage specialist) and RightMove.co.uk were among the top downstream websites from Yahoo! UK & Ireland Answers last week.

Within the retail category, price comparison websites such as Kelkoo and Shop.com UK were popular as well as Department Stores Amazon UK, Argos and LX Direct.

Happy Birthday Yahoo! Answers.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 06:11 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Social Networking