January 31, 2007

2006 Top Search Terms - A Closer Look

Last week we released the Hitwise list of top search terms for the year. A closer look at the "head of the tail" search queries can offer insight into user behavior online, show trends in website popularity, as well as affirm the influence of the major cultural trends of the year.

Below is the list of the top 10 individual search queries, as reported in the press release:

myspace
myspace.com
ebay
yahoo
mapquest
www.myspace.com
yahoo.com
my space
myspace layouts
lyrics

This gives you an indication of the sheer popularity of MySpace, but not other websites, so here I have broken down the list of terms into two categories: navigational (searcher's intent is most likely to go to a specific website) and generic (no specific website intimated by query)


Top Navigational Terms

The top navigational searches for 2006 were:

myspace
ebay
yahoo
mapquest
craigslist
walmart
google
target
amazon
wikipedia

Seasoned Internet users often express disbelief that people enter such generic queries as 'myspace' and 'google' into search boxes. The search box, which is increasingly embedded into the browser, seems to serve as the navigation bar for many users. Navigational queries have always topped the search lists in the 2+ years I have been at Hitwise, and the trend is not decreasing. By virtue of reading this blog, you are most likely not the average Internet user, and probably type addresses directly into the URL bar, or use bookmarks on your toolbar to navigate to your favorite sites.

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Top Generic Terms

The top 10 generic search terms in 2006 were:

lyrics
dictionary
maps
games
weather
people search
driving directions
baby names
free music downloads
chat

The nature of the terms on the list demonstrate just how young the internet population is, with terms like 'lyrics,' 'dictionary,' 'games' and 'free music downloads' topping the list. Again, it's always surprising that people aren't more specific in their searches (or don't have these sites bookmarked) but that's that the long tail is for. It should be acknowledged that that 'dictionary' and 'weather' could be either navigational or generic, depending on where the user goes, but we'll assume they are generic for this analysis.

Staring at the below chart of all 10 terms may give you a headache, so I'll point out the highlights:

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Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 10:31 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)
Posted to Search

January 30, 2007

Microsoft Vista Searches up 53%, Wikipedia Receives Nearly 7% of Vista Search Traffic

Today Microsoft Vista is available for purchase for the first time. In anticipation of the launch, last week the share of US Internet searches for 'windows vista' increased by 53% from the previous week (week ending 1/27/07 vs. week ending 1/20/07). The volume of searches for the much-anticipated new operating system surpassed interest in Microsoft's most popular hardware products, 'xbox 360' and 'zune.' Searches for 'microsoft office' were up 49% in the same period, indicating that interest in the new Office software may also be driving interest in the new OS. Expect to see the share of searches for Vista-related terms increase substantially over the next few weeks, and interest in new computer purchases increase as the first PCs with Vista installed begin to ship in the coming months.

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Hitwise Search Term Analysis shows that 58.63% of searches on 'windows vista' ended up at the Microsoft website, while 6.84% ended up at Wikipedia. This underscores the importance of Wikipedia entries, even for large corporations. In the context of this data, last week's controversy over a Microsoft employee's request to a blogger to correct the inaccuracies on a Wikipedia entry now becomes more salient. I expect that there will be more of these kinds of controversies in the future given the dominance of Wikipedia as an information source, and corporations and individuals' interest in having themselves represented accurately. For the week ending 1/27/07, Wikipedia was the #3 site users went to when they left Google, accounting for 1.84% of Google's downstream traffic. Hitwise captured more than 203,000 unique search terms that sent traffic to Wikipedia in the four weeks ending January 27, 2007.

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While search term analysis is important in understanding where searchers go for information, it's also important to look at the demographics of the sites to understand who is more likely to go to each data source. Hitwise demographics show a substantial difference between visitors to Wikipedia and visitors to the Microsoft site: Wikipedia users are much more likely be in the 18-24 age-group and visitors to the Microsoft site are much more likely to be over 55 .To me, this is a perfect example of the disconnect between older and younger Internet users. Older users tend to look for trusted sources of information (such as the company itself) while younger users trust that their peers using Wikipedia will have pulled together the most relevant information on one page for easy viewing. Why look at the flashy marketing-speak on the Windows site, when you can find just the specs you need on Wikipedia? This is how Wikipedia (and user generated content in general) is changing the game for corporations, and marketers should take note of not only of its magnitude, but also the tone and structure of the user generated content to influence their own campaign strategies.

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Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:17 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Computers and Internet

January 23, 2007

Clinton Campaign Website Receives 2X More Traffic than Obama Website on Campaign Announcment Day

Saturday's launch of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign sent traffic to her campaign website soaring as voters sought more information. On January 20, 2007, the market share of visits to HillaryClinton.com was more than 2X greater than the market share of visits to BarackObama.com on January 16, 2007, the day of the Illinois senator's official campaign announcement. Clinton's site was the #1 site in the Lifestyle - Politics category on Jan. 20, while Senator Obama's campaign site reached a rank of #4 on Jan. 16.

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Not only are political candidates taking advantage of the web to get their messages out, but also to gain volunteers and raise campaign contributions. Analysis of Hitwise Clickstream data on both sites shows that visitors were indeed considering making donations: 14.8% of the downstream traffic leaving HillaryClinton.com went to contribute.hillaryclinton.com, and 8.9% of the traffic leaving BarackObama.com went to secure.barackobama.com, his domain for collecting campaign contributions.

While it may appear that Senator Clinton could be attracting more donations, an analysis of demographic data shows that visitors to Senator Obama's website are more likely to have annual household incomes over $150,000, which means they may be motivated to make bigger contributions. They are also older and more likely to be female than visitors to HillaryClinton.com. Senator Clinton's website is showing a very strong representation with 18-24 year-olds, which could be good news for her campaign, as the 2008 election will almost certainly be strongly influenced by the web, and YouTube in particular.

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Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 08:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Election2008

January 22, 2007

'iPhone' Search Volume Already Greater than 'iPod'

Since Steve Jobs' announcement of the iPhone at Macworld two weeks ago, Internet users have been flocking online to find out more information. For the week ending 1/13/07, the share of searches for 'iphone' was greater than the weekly share of searches for 'ipod' at any time during 2006. The week ending 1/20/07 still showed a greater volume of searches for 'iphone' versus 'ipod.' This early surge in interest should indicate a rosy future for the iPhone when it becomes available in later in the year. Interestingly, the volume of searches for 'ipod' peaked during the last week of the year, rather than before Christmas as one would expect.

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After the announcement, I wrote that Engadget was the leading site for news on Macworld. Engadget received a 29% lift in market share of visits during the week ending 1/13/0 versus the previous week, 7, and was the #4 site recieving visits from the term 'iphone' for the four weeks ending 1/20/07. The most common search term suggestions for 'iphone' get right to the point of its biggest perceived issue: 'iphone price' and 'iphone cost' were the number 3 and 4 highest volume phrases containing 'iphone' for the four weeks ending 1/20/07.

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Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Computers and Internet

January 19, 2007

2006 in Review - iMedia Connection Article

Yesterday my year-end wrap-up of 2006 online trends was published in iMedia Connection.

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YouTube, "Lazy Sunday," Eepybird and more: Hitwise's research director explains why 2006 was the year for marketing and UGM.

2006 gave us LonelyGirl15, exploding bottles of Diet Coke and Mentos, movie character friends on MySpace and paparazzi photographs of Britney Spears that could never be shown in a reputable magazine. While seemingly trivial, these events were representative of a shift in the creation and consumption of media that finally hit the mainstream.

The cover story in the December 12, 2005 issue of Business Week was entitled "MySpace Generation," showing the business world that social networking and MySpace finally mattered. Throughout the following year, dozens of leading publications ran stories on the users as well as the founders of MySpace and YouTube, as well as other up-and-coming sites that featured user-generated content. Finally, in October 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, and in December 2006, Time Magazine named YOU the person of the year, namely, the you who is creating content on the internet.

One year ago I wrote a year-end wrap up of what I believed were the most significant trends in online user behavior in 2005. If 2005 was, as I stated "the year consumers took control of the internet," 2006 was the year that the disruptive effects of user-generated media were so great that the big media players took it seriously. There were three significant ways that user-generated content disrupted the consumption of media in 2006: online video, music and celebrity gossip.

Online video
YouTube was THE tech story of the year. The site emerged from relative obscurity in December 2005 when a Saturday Night Live skit called "Lazy Sunday" was posted to the site. During the next six months, as YouTube's traffic skyrocketed, MySpace launched its own video section and a host of YouTube wannabes emerged, but none came close to touching YouTube's dominance.

Television networks and movie studios debated whether they should sue YouTube for copyright violations or partner with the site. Data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. internet users show that the market share of U.S. visits to YouTube in December 2006 was five times greater than the share of visits going to the four broadcast network sites combined. In Fall 2006, each of the major television networks hosted streaming episodes of popular shows on their own websites, but users were more interested in going to YouTube to view highlight clips of their favorite shows, as well as news clips and user-created videos. The prospect of partnering with YouTube became more attractive, and currently CBS, NBC, Capitol Records and Sony Pictures Classics have YouTube channels which they use for promoting television shows, movies and music.

What seemed like a fad in the beginning of the year became a full-fledged trend and online video viewing became a leading internet activity. In December 2006, YouTube was the 16th most visited domain on the internet in the United States, and its user base was not just limited to teens. A comparison of Hitwise demographic data from December 2006 versus December 2005 reveals that visitors to YouTube's user base grew older as its traffic grew.

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Online video will continue to shake out in 2006, but internet users have clearly become addicted to YouTube. Will Google's investment pay off as broadband adoption increases and more users come to the site, or will they become disillusioned with an increasing amount of commercially oriented content?

MySpace and music
In 2006 MySpace became the most trafficked internet site in the United States. In August, Google agreed to pay $900 million to be their preferred search partner. Hitwise Clickstream data show that in December 2006 nearly 12 percent of the clicks to Google came directly from MySpace, up from less than seven percent a year ago. While MySpace's effect on the social lives of its millions of users has not been debated, what about its effect on the music industry?

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) reported declining CD sales in 2006, while digital music sales skyrocketed. MySpace and other social music websites like Last.fm and Pandora have changed the way people learn about and listen to music. In December 2006, MySpace Music comprised less than five percent of the visits to the Hitwise Music category. In six short months, MySpace Music quadrupled its share of visits to the category, and in December 2006 comprised nearly 23 percent of category visits. MySpace also had an increasing influence on traffic to band websites. Many bands maintain a MySpace page as well as a band website, but there is flow between the two, and Hitwise Clickstream data show that the share of traffic to the Music - Bands and Artists category coming directly from MySpace doubled in 2006-- from 3.7 percent in December 2005 to 7.8 percent in December 2006. MySpace and other social music sites will continue to usurp the recording studios' power to influence the music habits of millions of Americans.

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Celebrity gossip blogs
Several blogs, with Perez Hilton leading the way, emerged out of near obscurity in 2006 and began to pose a threat to celebrity gossip magazines and their websites. While People.com showed strong growth in 2006, with its market share of visits increasing 176 percent from December 2005 to December 2006, the combined market share of visits to the top four celebrity gossip blogs (Perez Hilton, The Superficial, Egotastic, and Hollywood Tuna) increased by over 400 percent in the same period. The ability to break celebrity news on a daily and even hourly basis makes these sites hot destinations for celebrity watchers, and the irreverent attitude of the bloggers has become a refreshing change from the PR focused entertainment weeklies. Perez Hilton has become a celebrity in his own right, with multiple television appearances. AOL site TMZ has adopted a similar irreverent attitude and uses RSS feeds to distribute content, as does People.com. In 2006, the voyeuristic tendencies of internet users were fed by blogs, and life for celebrities will never be the same as the paparazzi have new outlets to post candid photos and videos.

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2007- what's next?
If 2005 was the year that consumers took control of the internet, and 2006 was the year that media business took it seriously, then 2007 will be the year that user-generated content becomes a business in its own right. Look forward to more deals, more disruption and more internet celebrities!

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Website Content

January 18, 2007

Web Based Feed Readers - How do they stack up?

Bloggers who use FeedBurner have a general idea of the most popular feed readers based on their subscriber statistics. FeedBurner subscriber statistics on the Hitwise Blog show that Bloglines is by far the most popular feed reader, and Hitwise data also support this. The market share of US visits to Bloglines was 3 times greater than Rojo, its nearest competitive web-based feed reader. The chart below shows the traffic trend over the past year for the leading web-based feed readers. You can see that Google Reader has grown lately, but as of the week ending 1/13/07, it had only 1/13 of the market share of visits of Bloglines.

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While comparing web-based feed readers is not a perfect measure of the true size of the feed-reading market, as it does not take into consideration client-based (i.e., NetNewsWire) or portal-based (i.e., My Yahoo!) feed readers, it can give us an indication of the popularity of blog consumption via feeds. Last week I posted a list of the most popular blogs by market share of US visits. Below I added PerezHilton, Huffington Post, and Engadget, three of the most popular blogs in their respective verticals, to the above chart of web-based feed readers.

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All three of these blogs have been receiving more traffic than Bloglines for the past year. Perez Hilton is actually one of the leading sites on the Internet, with a US rank of #463 for the week ending 1/13/07. Bloglines ranked at #4,676 in the same period. This analysis leads me to two conclusions: 1) RSS usage, while growing, is still a niche activity and mainstream adoption is still a ways off, and 2) the most successful blogs are being consumed in the standard Web 1.0 fashion - by visiting the websites. These blogs have become destination sites for their readers and have an active community of commenters, which encourages website visits. It seems that the bigger disruption from the growth of blogging is not how we consume the news, but where we get it from.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Blogs and Personal Websites

January 11, 2007

Engadget Live Blogging Leads in Macworld Coverage on January 9

On Tuesday, January 9, technology watchers eagerly awaited Steve Jobs' keynote at Macworld in San Francisco, partially fueled by rampant rumors that Apple would announce the release of an iPhone. The iPhone was indeed announced, and discussion of the merits of the product and dismay at its June release immediately ensued in the blogosphere. To many tech fans, a Steve Jobs keynote ranks higher in importance than a presidential address, which has the benefit of live television and radio broadcast coverage. The Macworld keynote was not televised or streamed live, unlike Bill Gates' keynote at CES the same day, which could be viewed live on the Microsoft website. Thus live blogging was the best option for tech fans get as close to real time coverage of the event as possible. Hitwise daily traffic data shows that Engadget was the most popular tech site covering the event on January 9, followed by Gizmodo.

The market share of visits to Engadget increased by 127% on January 9 versus January 8, and outnumbered visits to Gizmodo by 5 to 1. Visits to Gizmodo showed an even steeper daily increase, at 167%, but clearly Engadget offered the coverage of choice. The sites used different posting strategies, with Engadget offering updates by refreshing the same post, while Gizmodo issued updates with individual posts every few minutes. The Engadget community was very vocal in commenting, with 544 comments on the post to date. One commenter demonstrated his excitement about the product by typing "pressing refresh right now feels better then sex." Ryan Block, the Engadget blogger, peppered his report with comments on crowd reactions as well personal commentary, which often was mirrored by the blog commenters.

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog, iLounge, and MacRumors also offered live coverage of the event and showed steep increases in traffic on January 9. Macworld magazine showed only a 26% increase in visits, as it adhered to traditional journalistic standards, with a report after the keynote was over. This type of reporting could be found at myriads of other publications, tech focused or not. I bring this up to point out that, in the absence of live broadcast or streaming coverage, live blogging has filled a need for tech fans, and the community aspect in the comment streams fuels engagement with the blog and blogger that is not typical for a traditional news publication. This is disruption in news consumption that will continue as more and more users discover blogs as a news source. It's also happening with celebrity gossip blogs closing in on celebrity gossip publications' websites, as you can see on the last chart in this post about Britney Spears. I showed last summer that gadgets, celebrity gossip and politics lead in terms of website traffic to blogs, and many of these blogs have a greater share of visits than vertical publications' websites in their respective categories. Here's an updated list of the top 10 blogs by market share of US Internet Visits (not RSS subscriptions) for January 9, 2007. I had neglected to include TMZ in the July post.

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Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 02:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Computers and Internet

January 03, 2007

Google Calendar Up Threefold Since June

As you resolve to get your schedule more organized in the new year, do what more and more people are doing - use Google Calendar. A few weeks ago, Google Calendar overtook MSN Calendar in market share of US visits, and is quickly approaching Yahoo! Calendar. In the six months from June 2006 to December 2006, the market share of visits to Google Calendar increased by 333%, at the expense of its main competitors.

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As I mentioned last May in my first post about Google Calendar, having a calendar service, along with email and all of the other services it has been launching makes Google seem more like a portal. However, Google Calendar is actually less a part of the Google fold than you might think. Yahoo and MSN calendars are primarily used by people who use their respective email services - Hitwise Clickstream reveals that for the week ending 12/30/06, 88% of the upstream traffic to MSN Calendar came directly from Hotmail, while Yahoo! Calendar received 48% of its upstream from Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Address Book, and the bulk of its remaining traffic from other Yahoo! sites. Google Calendar, on the other hand, received only 19% of its upstream traffic from Gmail for the week ending 12/30/06, and 42% from Google search. Yahoo! Mail was Google Calendar's third largest source of traffic, with 2.7% of upstream visits, and Hotmail was sixth at 1.2% of visits. What this indicates to me is that people who are not necessarily heavy Gmail users are now using Google Calendar, including users of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. Its easy to use features and sharing capabilities have allowed it to steal share from its competition, and in this case, catch them in less than a year.


Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:05 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Computers and Internet