April 20, 2006

Simply Hired, Indeed and Jobster Compete for Market Share

Yesterday it was announced that job site Simply Hired would receive $17.5 million in funding from Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. I thought I'd take a look and see how it ranks within the Hitwise Business & Finance - Employment and Training Category. For the week ending April 15, 2006, it ranked at number 60 in the category, accounting for a 0.22% market share of category visits.

Simply Hired is somewhat similar to two other meta-search job sites, Indeed and Jobster. Indeed received a market share of visits that was 3 times greater than Simply Hired for the week ending April 15, 2005, but Simply Hired is receiving a larger share of visits than Jobster. All three sites have shown strong growth over the past year, as shown on the chart below. The December dip in visits is quite typical for the category, as the job market slows during the holidays and picks up again dramatically in January. These sites are also doing their job of sending visits to other Employment sites, with between 55 and 60% of their downstream traffic going to other Employment sites in March 2006. While Monster.com, Careerbuilder and Hotjobs reamain the leaders in job listings and visits, it appears that job-seekers are eager to find results on one site.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:03 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Employment and Training

April 14, 2006

Fan Fiction: Another Form of Consumer Generated Content

On Tuesday I was interviewed by CNBC about consumer generated content, and while I was prepared to talk about online videos, MySpace, and even blogs, one of the topics I was asked about was fan fiction. I had barely looked into that topic here at Hitwise, although I knew it was popular. Fan fiction is the practice of writing stories about fictional characters, whether from TV shows, novels, anime, movies, or even celebrities. The largest site for fan fiction is Fanfiction.net, ranking at number 207 for the week ending April 8, 2006. That puts it ahead of sites like FedEx and Yahoo! Travel.

Visitors to Fanfiction.net were more likely to be female (63%) for the four weeks ending 4/8/06, and 35% were in the 18-24 age group. We can tell just how young visitors to that site are by looking at their weekly traffic chart over the past year - visits skyrocket during summer vacation, Thanksgiving, and during Christmas break when students are home and have some extra time on their hands.

Writing and reading fan fiction does consume a lot of time for its participants - the average session time for a visit to Fanfiction.net for the week ending 4/8/06 was 37 minutes 30 seconds. That's a long time, even compared to MySpace at 29 minutes and even YouTube at 14 minutes. Just what kind of fan fiction are people interested in? Here's a list from Search Term Suggestions. I can't say that I'm familiar with many of these topics.

harry potter fanfiction
one tree hill fanfiction
ethan and theresa fanfiction
bonanza world fan fiction
firefly fanfiction
kurama and kagome fanfictions
orlando bloom fanfiction
beatles fan fiction
nsync fan fiction
eminem fanfiction
avatar the last airbender fanfiction

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 04:01 PM | TrackBack (1)
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April 10, 2006

"Videos" Link on MySpace Profile Page Causes Spike in Visits

A regular MySpace user clued me in on the phenomenal increase in visits to MySpace Videos on March 31, 2006 that I mentioned last week. On that day, MySpace began including a "videos" link on all profile pages, as shown below in the profile of Tom Anderson, one of the MySpace founders. Clicking on the link directs the user to the vids.myspace.com domain. Most MySpace users don't have any videos loaded, so the result page shows message that says "this user has not uploaded any videos."

Hitwise data shows that when visits MySpace Video took off, its daily average session time decreased from 5 minutes 17 seconds on March 30 to 3 minutes 10 seconds on March 31. The chart below demonstrates this quite dramatically: MySpace Video's market share is shown in the thick dark blue line, and its average session time in the thin blue line. Less than a week after the dramatic spike, traffic has leveled off, and average session time has increased to only 4 minutes 25 seconds. YouTube's market share in the thick red line did not take a hit, and its session time, in the thin red line, actually increased to over 15 minutes in the past week.

What's even more telling about the success of YouTube vs. the threat posed by MySpace Videos is the number of plays that the top ranked videos have received. As of this writing, "Pokemon Theme Music Video" has been viewed 7,823,195 times on YouTube, while "Crazy Longboard Slides" has been plyaed 439,890 times on MySpace Video. That's a difference by a factor of 18.

Because "MySpace Tom" has over 69 million "friends," MySpace certainly has the potential to drive video traffic, but YouTube has far superior content, and thus its market share is still increasing on a weekly basis.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 02:21 PM | TrackBack (0)
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April 07, 2006

Deal or No Deal a Hit for NBC.com

Recently I noticed that the top TV show search term sending visits to the Hitwise Entertainment - Television category was 'deal or no deal,' and that terms related to the show accounted for 4 of the top 11 terms
sending visits to NBC.com. When taking a look at daily site traffic, I found that visits to NBC.com, home of Deal or No Deal had been increasing by 100% or more on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays when the show aired. Not only did visits increase, but session times did as well, to over 11 minutes on Deal or No Deal show days. This could indicate that visitors are playing the Deal or No Deal game on the site to test out their own luck and level of risk aversion. The spike to NBC.com on Monday April 3 was larger than normal, most likely due to Katie Couric's announcement that she would leave the Today Show for CBS.

It appears that NBC.com has finally hit its stride with its web efforts - since Deal or No Deal launched in late February, weekly visits to the site have increased by 121% (week ending 4/1/06 vs. week ending 2/25/06), and visits have reached their highest point in the past 15 months, as shown on the chart below. We covered in a press release how well the NBC Olympics site fared, and here how the SNL skit sent You Tube skyrocketing. It also helped out NBC.com, as you can see from the late December spike on the chart. Now that NBC has stopped YouTube and other online video sites from showing copyrighted content, it needs to improve search functionality on the site to match how users actually search for videos. A search on NBC.com for 'lazy sunday' does not show me where I can view the skit. To find it, I have to navigate to the page for Saturday Night Live, and hope that it appears in the featured videos section.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:23 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Entertainment

April 06, 2006

MySpace Video: A YouTube Killer?

On March 31, 2006 the market share of visits to MySpace Video increased by 1,242%, sending it far ahead of YouTube and the other video search services. As I've written before, MySpace is the leading source of traffic for YouTube, accounting for 23% of its upstream visits for the week ending April 1, 2006. It makes sense that MySpace would launch its own video service and MySpace Videos began showing up in Hitwise data in January, shortly after YouTube began to take off in December. Now that MySpace is owned by News Corp, it has the perfect distribution mechanism for Fox content, and could be testing out its video capability with viral videos, which have been so successful for YouTube.

I'd like to know if anyone has insight into what MySpace did on March 31 to send MySpace Video's traffic though the roof - our Clickstream data shows that before March 31, about 82% of traffic to MySpace Video was coming from MySpace, and on March 31 and thereafter it's been at about 95%. So obviously MySpace is promoting their video capabilities within the site. MySpace Video is not nearly as robust in terms of content and functionality as YouTube - it appears to be mostly homemade videos, and searching is not as easy. YouTube traffic has not suffered this week, and it is still receiving the same amount of upstream traffic from MySpace. What has MySpace got up its sleeve?

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 07:07 PM | TrackBack (0)
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April 04, 2006

Google Base: What Is It?

Since Google Base launched last November, many have speculated on the threat it poses to eBay, Craigslist and other classifieds sites. By examining Hitwise Clickstream data by industry, we can see which categories of sites people are visiting after Google Base, thus getting an indication of what kind of content is being searched for on the site. For the month of March, Shopping & Classifieds was the largest downstream category, with Rewards & Directories site Shop.com accounting for 5.1% of downstream traffic from Google Base. So yes, it looks like people are interested in shopping when they go to Google Base.

An additional 15% of Google Base users went back to Google or another search engine in March, and another 13% went to recipe sites (Food & Beverage). Automotive sites accounted for 8.2% of downstream traffic, and auto classifieds sites accounted for the majority of the automotive downstream traffic. Job listings also appear to be a popular use of Google Base, with employment sites accounting for nearly 8% of its downstream traffic. Average session time was fairly brief, at just under 6 minutes for the month of March. So what is Google Base? Part shopping directory, part recipe search service, part classified service. It remains to be seen which of these services will take hold with Google Base users.

Hitwise market share data shows that Google Base, after a fairly strong start, received approximately the same market share of visits for the week ending April 1, 2006 that it did a month after launch. The January increase shown in the chart below can be attributed to the yearly increase in visits to Employment sites after the start of the New Year. The week ending January 14 was the peak for visits to the Employment & Training category, and 16.7% of Google Base's downstream visits went to Employment & Training websites during that week, more than double the number sent to the category in March 2006.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:51 PM | TrackBack (2)
Posted to Computers and Internet | Search | Shopping and Classifieds

April 03, 2006

Immigration News Search Term Analysis Reveals User Intent

In recent weeks the debate over immigration has intensified as the Senate considers a bill that could fundamentally change US immigration policy. Searches on 'immigration' have increased by 69% in the last week (week ending 4/1/06 vs. week ending 3/25/06), and further analysis of these searches proves revealing:

The leading site typically receiving traffic from 'immigration' is U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the first organic Google result. By charting the share of 'immigration' searches that sent visits to sites in the Hitwise Government category, we see a good deal of volatility and only a 45% increase in the most recent week.

The chart showing the share of 'immigration' searches sending visits to News & Media sites shows a different picture - a 96% increase in the past week, well above any activity during the past year.

Search term analysis shows that Google News, Yahoo! News, and NPR.org each received more than 4% of the traffic from 'immigration' searches for the four weeks ending 4/1/06. Just five weeks ago, no news site ranked in the top five sites receiving traffic from 'immigration.' The combination of charting search terms to a category or website and search term analysis can be a powerful tool to gauge the intent of Internet searchers.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:15 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Government | News and Media | Search