November 27, 2006

Google Checkout Update - Visits up 158% Last Week

Here's a quick update on Google Checkout, which I posted about last week.

The market share of visits to Google Checkout was up 158% for the week ending 11/25/06 versus the week ending 11/18/06. ToysRus, which is showing the $10 off $30 purchase offer on the home page, was the leading site sending traffic to Google Checkout, accounting for 24% of its upstream visits for the week ending 11/25/06. Google is making a huge effort to sign up users during the busiest online shopping period of the year, and the $10 off $30 purchase appears to be working. While it still has a long way to go to catch Paypal in terms of visits, Paypal's lead was cut in half in just one week: last week I reported that Paypal's market share was 96X Google Checkout for the week ending 11/18/06 - this week Paypal was 38X Google Checkout in terms of market share.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 08:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Black Friday Searches up 462% Over Last Year

Every year, there are dozens of stories about shoppers standing in line for hours outside of stores in order to buy discounted items on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. It's no wonder then that last year, a teenager from San Jose made headlines when he obtained leaked copies of the Black Friday circulars in advance and posted the sale items on his website, BFads.net. The site reached a rank of 44 among all Shopping & Classifieds sites for the week ending 11/26/05. This year, it reached a rank of 31 during the week ending 11/25/06, and four other Black Friday sites achieved rankings in the top 300 Shopping & Classifieds sites last week. See our press release for more coverage, including rankings and demographics on Black Friday sites.

Black Friday sites are a great example of the Internet disrupting an offline experience. Shoppers want to know what deals they can get in advance so they can decide how to allocate their shopping budgets and time. 'Black friday' was the #3 search term (after 'ebay' and 'craigslist') sending visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending 11/25/06. That means that more searches were conducted last week for 'black friday' than 'target,' 'amazon,' 'nintendo wii' or 'ipod.' The share of searches for just the one term 'black friday' was up 462% over Thanksgiving week in 2005. Hitwise captured 4,101 unique search terms containing the words 'black friday' during the 4 weeks ending 11/25/06, an increase 71% from the 2,393 terms captured during the 4 weeks ending 11/26/05. Shoppers now expect to know, far in advance, what deals to expect on Black Friday, and they know where to find that information. Expect them to remember next year as well.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 08:24 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

November 22, 2006

Google Checkout Visits up 30%, Buying Traffic with $10 Off Offer

Google Checkout has been quietly building traffic by adding merchants and offering new customers $10 off a purchase of $30 or more. Its market share of visits was up 30% in the past four weeks (week ending 11/18/06 vs. week ending 10/21/06), and soon it should rank in the top 20 Google properties (See Bill's post from yesterday). Paypal could be considered the nearest competitor to Google Checkout, but Paypal is still dependent on eBay for the majority of its traffic: for the week ending 11/18/06, 70% of Paypal's upstream traffic came directly from eBay. Google Checkout is partnering with a wide variety of merchants, as you can see below in its list of upstream websites from the Shopping & Classifieds category for last week.

Hitwise clickstream data can offer competitive insights into how companies are using Google Checkout. Downstream traffic from a site to Google Checkout could be considered a loose proxy for conversion. The chart below shows the trend in visits leaving merchant sites to Google Checkout. Both Buy.com and Jockey sent 16% and 7% of their respective traffic to Google Checkout last week, which seems like a very high conversion rate. Both sites are promoting the $10 off Google Checkout offer on their home pages, which indicates that the offer could be increasing conversion rates. The other sites on the chart are only showing the offer on the checkout page itself.

Google, with its deep pockets, is effectively buying traffic for its Checkout service, and smart retailers are using the offer to increase their conversion rates, but it could be a long time before it reaches Paypal's traffic levels - the market share of visits to Paypal was 96 times greater than for Google Checkout last week (week ending 11/18/06). Possibly Google's promotional efforts that will launch on Monday 11/27/06 will help.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:18 PM | TrackBack (2)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

November 21, 2006

Recipe Sites Embrace User Generated Content, Video, RSS

Every year at Hitwise we see huge Thanksgiving- and Christmas-related spikes in visits to the Food & Beverage - Lifestyle & Reference category as dinner hosts plan their holiday gatherings. In 2005, visits to the category increased by 41% for the week of Thanksgiving compared to the previous week, and by 30% for the week of Christmas compared to the previous week, as illustrated on the chart below. While this may seem obvious, it shows that food planning and preparation is the most last minute of all holiday activities - we start seeing increases in searches for decorations, gifts, and children's activities much earlier in advance of the individual holiday dates. The search term suggestion report for 'thanksgiving' shows just how much people were searching for non-food related Thanksgiving content in the last 4 weeks.

You might not think about online recipe sites as ripe for "web 2.0" innovation, but recipe sites have long been collecting user generated content in the form of recipe reviews, which are incredibly helpful to cooks. All Recipes is the leader of UGC in the food world, with both user submitted recipes and reviews - just like YouTube, the best recipes move to the top based on the recipe ratings and reviews. This has been going on far longer than YouTube has been in existence. In addition, many of the leading sites, such as Epicurious and Food Network have adopted RSS feeds and are promoting video clips not only of cooking shows, but instructions on things like how to make the perfect pie crust or how to cook a turkey. These videos can be extremely useful for those attempting specific dishes for the first time. Epicurious is also offering mobile services, which include sending recipes and shopping lists to your phone.

I examined the top 10 recipe sites for last week to see how many are offering reviews, videos and RSS Feeds. Eight of the top 10 offer user generated recipe reviews, five offer videos, and seven offer RSS feeds. Yahoo! Food, the category's newest entrant, ranked at number 11 after only 2 weeks online, is actively promoting video content, and the leading downstream site for the week ending November 18, 2006 was Yahoo! Video Streaming, which accounted for 8% of its downstream traffic. Video viewing is also fairly popular on Epicurious, with video.epicurious.com as the 7th most popular downstream domain that week, accounting for 1.95% of its downstream visits.

It's encouraging to see that recipe sites, including those from big brands such as Food Network, Kraft and Betty Crocker are engaging in conversation with their customers by embracing user generated content making as well making moves toward delivering content in new ways.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Food and Beverage

November 09, 2006

AOL Gold Rush Show Drives Value for AOL and Advertisers, Site Attracts Women 35-44

Today the final episode of AOL's original Internet show, "Gold Rush" will air on goldrush.aol.com. The Gold Rush website reached a rank of 1,037 among all Internet sites in October, and Hitwise clickstream data show that this new effort was successful in driving visits to not only to its advertising partners but to other AOL sites as well.

One quarter (25.4%) of visits leaving the Gold Rush site in October 2006 went to another site in the AOL network. Leading AOL sites receiving traffic from Gold Rush were AOL Search, the AOL portal, AOL Mail, AOL Music, and Mapquest. Advertising partners received an additional 12.5% of the traffic leaving the Gold Rush site in October 2006 and broke down as follows:

Google (www.google.com)
4.9% of downstream visits

Chevrolet (www.chevrolet.com)
1.4% of downstream visits

Coke Zero (www.cocacolazero.com, mcr.us.icoke.com, www.cokezero.com)
4.5% of downstream visits

Best Buy (www.geeksquad.com and www.bestbuy.com)
1.3% of downstream visits

T-Mobile (www.myfaves.com and hotspot.t-mobile.com)
0.51% of downstream visits

Hitwise demographic data for the four weeks ending November 4, 2006 show that 69% of visitors to the Gold Rush site were female, and were 20% more likely than the average Internet user to be between the ages of 35 and 44. They were also 38% more likely than the average internet user to have annual household incomes under $30K. Following is the age and income breakdown.

This data shows that an Internet only TV show can be successful in not only attracting an audience, but also driving value for advertisers. The demographic data demonstrates that the concept appeals to women of parenting age, a valuable audience for advertisers. It also is a smart move for AOL to create awareness of its online properties as it continues the transition from subscriber-only content to free content.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:39 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Television

November 08, 2006

Social Networking Sites Recover from September Decline, Facebook visits up 16%

Today we released the Hitwise US Consumer Generated Media Report, which examines trends in social networking, photo hosting and sharing, and online video. According to the report, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking sites accounted for nearly 1 in 20 internet visits in September 2006 (4.9% of all Internet visits). That number remained the same in October 2006.

It has been reported that there was a decline in visits to sites like MySpace and Facebook in September, which is a typical seasonal occurrence as school-aged users shift their attention from socializing online to academic pursuits. Last year, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreased by 7.6% from August to September 2005, but recovered in October, increasing by 10.8% from September to October 2005. This year, a similar pattern emerged, with visits to the top 20 social networking sites decreasing by 7.3% from August to September 2006. Category traffic was flat from September to October 2006, indicating a slow down in growth, but by no means a decline.

The report shows how photo hosting sites like Photobucket, Imageshack and Slide have grown in conjunction with social networking as they provide a service necessary to the creation of user content. Online video, as we all know, has exploded as well, and has been the most significant shift in consumer content creation and entertainment consumption in the past year.

To put all of this in perspective, below I've charted Facebook, YouTube, Photobucket, and Wikipedia to show the significance of the seasonal trend. Notice the increase in visits to Wikipedia in May (during finals) and slight decline during the summer months. YouTube overtook Wikipedia in market share in August, but as soon as school started, Wikipedia's growth outpaced that of YouTube. See this post for more detail on the Wikipedia school year trend. Not only is entertainment consumption and social networking affected by the academic year, but so is photo hosting, a tool for social networking. Visits to Photobucket also declined in September, but recovered in October. As I've reported before, Photobucket receives the majority of its upstream traffic from MySpace, making it privy to the same seasonal fluctuations in traffic.

The good news is that visits to some of the leading CGM websites are again on the rise. The market share of visits to Facebook were up 16.4% from September to October 2006, possibly due to its opening up of the site to non-school users. Visits to YouTube were up 7.8%, GaiaOnline and Orkut were each up 5%, Slide was up 13%, and Photobucket was up 3.1% in the same period.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:41 PM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Community

November 03, 2006

Top Political Websites from 2004 Elections Re-Emerge in 2006

Next Tuesday's election has both Democrats and Republicans anxiously awaiting results to see which party will maintain or regain control the House and the Senate. Interactive maps abound on the web, but one in particular seems to be a favorite of political watchers. Electoral-vote.com was the #2 ranked website in the Hitwise Lifestyle - Politics category for the week ending October 30, 2004, and has re-emerged at #15 for the week ending October 28, 2006. Visits to the site have been steadily increasing as poll results are updated on the site.

Another favorite site of the 2006 elections has been going strong this campaign season: JibJab was ranked at #16 in the Lifestyle - Politics category for the week ending October 28, 2006. During the 2004 presidential election, it was the #6 Politics website (week ending October 30, 2004), when the flash video "This Land" spread virally over the web.

The average session time for Electoral-vote.com was 4 minutes and 52 seconds for the week ending 10/28/06. The length of time surprised me because it doesn't look like there is much content on the site, but if you dig a little you can find straightforward information about the House and Senate races on a state by state basis. Hitwise Demographic data show that the average visitor to the site for the four weeks ending 10/28/06 was male (70.5%), aged 35-44 (37.1%) with annual incomes of $60-100K (34.7%). This is different from the average visitor to sites in the Politics category, which was 59% male and more likely to be over 45 (49.5%) during the same time period.

JibJab visitors stayed an average of 8 minutes 29 seconds during the week ending 10/28/06. Visitors were equally male and female, and were more like typical visitors to the Politics category than visitors to Electoral-vote.com, with 47.4% over age 45. Visitors to JibJab were over-represented in the group earning more than $150k per year, at 13.6% of visits. What's interesting about JibJab is that while we think of online video as for the younger folks, this site appeals to an older, higher income audience. It's a different type of entertainment and could provide clues for content creators and marketers looking to attract older users.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 10:54 AM | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Politics