February 23, 2007

YouTube Visits Up 14% Since Viacom Takedown Order; Surpasses Television Network Sites

YouTube's traffic has not suffered since Viacom demanded that it remove 100,000 video clips on February 2, 2007. The market share of US visits to YouTube increased by 13.9% in the two week period between the weeks ending 2/3/07 and 2/17/07, and its average weekly traffic increase since the start of the year was 7%. As of 2/20/07, YouTube ranked as the 12th most visited Internet domain in the US. The sites that received more traffic than YouTube were MySpace domains, Google, Yahoo domains, Hotmail, MSN, eBay, Live Search, and Facebook.

During the week of February 3, YouTube's traffic surged above the combined traffic to all of the television network websites.* This is a landmark event in the changing face of web traffic and entertainment consumption, now that entertainment seekers are now more likely to go to YouTube than any other television network or gaming website. The custom category of 56 television cable and broadcast network sites received 0.4865% of all US Internet traffic for the week ending 2/17/07, while YouTube received 0.6031%.

*The custom category of television networks excludes news, sports, weather, and shopping networks, whose websites serve a distinct purpose beyond supporting their unique television content, and does not include individual television show websites such as American Idol and The Simpsons. Here is a list of the top 10 sites in that custom category.

Now that Google owns the leading entertainment website in the US, it is faced with the challenge of offering copyright protections to content owners. This is a case in which user behavior is far ahead of the technology that content owners need to harness it, and hopefully companies like Audible Magic (via Techcrunch) or the start up Attributor (via WSJ) will make this possible.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Entertainment | Television

February 20, 2007

Odeo Traffic up 84% Year over Year; Leads Podcasting Sites

Odeo is looking for a buyer. I have been keeping track of traffic to podcasting sites since the trend began to take off in 2005, and unfortunately haven't had much to write about, as few of the various podcasting sites have gained much traction. It seems that most podcast searching and downloading is being done on iTunes or being downloaded directly from host websites. Odeo is the only vertical podcasting site that has emerged from the pack: it received 5X more traffic than its nearest competitor, PodcastAlley.com for the week ending 2/17/07, and achieved an overall rank of 14,982 in the Hitwise rankings. The market share of visits to Odeo was up 84% when comparing the week ending 2/17/07 vs the same week last year (week ending 2/18/06). Twitter, the site that Obvious Corp wants to focus on, is gaining traffic, but since it's a mobile solution, web traffic may not be the best indicator of success.

Just how popular is podcasting? The share of searches on individual terms like 'podcast' and 'podcasting' have not shown a significant upward trend over the past year, but the share of searches containing related podcasting terms has increased. Keyword breadth, or the share of unique search queries containing a term, for 'podcast' and 'podcasts' has increased by 43% and 18% respectively when comparing the week ending 2/17/07 vs the week ending 2/18/06. Still, there were only 311 unique terms containing 'podcast' and 103 terms containing 'podcasts' for the four weeks ending 2/17/07. In contrast, there were 12,686 terms containing 'mp3' in the same period, which demonstrates that podcasting has not yet come close to reaching critical mass.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 06:10 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Community

February 16, 2007

Google Traffic To Wikipedia up 166% Year over Year

We have been asked to shed some insight on how much traffic Wikipedia receives from Google. Hitwise data showed that for the week ending Feb 10, 2007, 70% of Wikipedia's upstream visits came from search engines, with 50% from Google alone. Google's share of Wikipedia's upstream traffic from Google has increased by 19% over the past year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06), at the same time that Wikipedia's market share of US visits increased by 143%.

If it seems like Google is sending more traffic to Wikipedia than in the past, it's because it is. The percentage of Google's downstream traffic going to Wikipedia increased by 166% year over year (week ending 2/10/07 vs. week ending 2/11/06). Last week Wikipedia was the #3 website in Google's downstream, after Google Image Search and MySpace.

Note: all data referred to is US only. www.wikipedia.org includes en.wikipedia.org. Other language sites tracked separately.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:08 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack (2)
Posted to Education | Search

February 14, 2007

Pajamas, Teddy Bears and Chocolate Covered Strawberries - Fast Movers Last Week

One of the useful Hitwise features that we don't often mention is Fast Mover Alerts. I have configured my alerts so that each Monday I receive an email that showing the fast movers in the Shopping and Classifieds category for the previous week. I was not surprised to see that for the week ending Feb. 10, 2007, Valentine's Day oriented gift sites were prominent, but was pleasantly surprised by the types of sites listed, which showed the sweet intentions of Valentine's Day shoppers.

Pajamagram and Vermont Teddy Bear Company figured prominently in each other's clickstream last week, which is not surprising considering that they are sister companies, and teddy bears and fuzzy pajamas probably have similar customers. It's nice to see that lovers want to add fruit to their chocolate via Shari's Berries, and are thinking of the planet when they visit Organic Bouquet.

Fast Mover Alerts are a great way to keep track of trends in your category, and otherwise stay informed of growing sites. Happy Valentine's Day!

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

February 09, 2007

Google Base and Google Checkout Traffic Analysis

This week it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that MySpace -Google negotiations hit a roadblock due to MySpace plans to partner with eBay for commerce. Google has its own online commerce ambitions with is relatively new services, Google Base and Google Checkout. But how have those sites been faring since last summer?

Market Share Comparison
According to Hitwise data, last week (week ending 2/3/07) the market share of visits to eBay was 844 times greater than the share of visits to Google Base. Paypal's market share exceeded Google Checkout's by 71 to 1 in the same period. Clearly Google Checkout has been doing better than Google Base, thanks to aggressive promotions, which is not something that Google typically does. Windows Live Expo, Microsoft's Craigslist play, currently has a slightly larger market share than Google Base.

Traffic Growth
Google Base's market share of visits has declined by 18% when comparing January 2007 to July 2007. Google Checkout's market share was up 362%, but it remains to be seen if those users will keep coming back. eBay and Paypal showed minor increases of 1.3% and 1.9% respectively in that period. eBay commanded 1.6% of all Internet visits in January 2007, so an incremental 1.3% growth for eBay is almost 10 times larger than Google Base's entire January market share of 0.0019%.

Session Time
Visiting an online auctions or classifieds site can consume a lot of time. eBay's average session time last week was almost 20 minutes. Visitors to Craigslist New York, the most visited Craigslist subdomian, had an average session time of nearly 16 minutes. Visitors to just Google search alone stayed more than 12 minutes, while visitors to Google Base stuck around for less than 8 minutes. Google Checkout's average session time was about 2 minutes shorter than session time for Paypal.

Google Base Clickstream
Last April I did an analysis of the downstream traffic from Google Base in an attempt to surmise what the site was being used for. It's evolved a bit since then. In January 2007, the top downstream categories of traffic leaving Google Base were:

Real Estate - 16.79%
Employment and Training - 14.84%
Automotive - Classifieds - 7.99%
Food and Beverage - 6.85%
Shopping and Classifieds- 6.03%
Search Engines - 5.92%

If Google Base is primarily being used by house, job, car, and recipe hunters, it doesn't seem to pose a very big threat to eBay, and is more of a classifieds play on Craigslist. The second most popular site in eBay's downstream in January was Paypal, at 10.7% (after eBay Motors, at 20.5%), while 4.3% of Google Base's downstream traffic went to Google Checkout.

The Big Picture
Google and eBay both are getting more traffic from MySpace than ever before. From December 2006 to January 2007, MySpace accounted for 19% more of eBay's upstream traffic, and 11% more of Google's upstream traffic. Both MySpace and Google are growing in market share, while Google's efforts with Base are floundering. Google needs to show that has an e-commerce offering that is even remotely competitive for it to have a say in eBay - MySpace discussions.

Note: www.google.com/base is included in base.google.com, and www.google.com/checkout is included in checkout.google.com.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

February 08, 2007

Bears Vs. Colts and Post Game Merchandise Shopping

If the Super Bowl was a popularity contest, looking at the traffic levels to the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts websites before the game would have led me to predict a win for the Bears. During the month of January, the market share of visits to Chicago Bears website was twice as large as the share of visits to the Colts website. Even on game day, Bears' traffic exceeded Colts' traffic, and only after the game did traffic to the Colts website exceed the Bears.

The leading downstream site for both teams' websites in the month of January was their respecitve teams' pro shop. Store.chicagobears.com accounted for 15.5% of visits leaving ChicagoBears.com in January, while Indianapolis Colts Pro Shop accounted for 13% of Colts.com downstream traffic. However, analysis of traffic to the pro shop sites shows that Colts fans were nearly as passionate as Bears fans in looking at team merchandise, particularly after each team's league championship game. Of course after the game on Sunday and Monday, traffic to the Colts pro shop skyrocketed by 218% when comparing 2/3/07 to 2/5/07, while traffic to the Bears' pro shop plummeted by 54% in the same period.

Not surprising, but it makes me wonder, why is anyone at all visiting the Bears pro shop after they lost the game? The minds of sports fans will remain a mystery to me, as I spent Sunday afternoon enjoying a nearly deserted health club (thank you, YouTube!).

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 10:05 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Sports

Super Bowl Advertising - A Way to Increase Web Traffic?

Super Bowl Ads now have a much longer lifespan, since viewers can go directly to a myriad of websites to watch the ads. Because ads can be viewed on YouTube, CBS Sportsline, etc, there is even less motivation for users to visit the advertiser sites, which used to be one of the few places the ad could be watched post-game. So can it be expected that a Super Bowl advertisement will increase traffic to advertiser sites?

On Super Bowl Sunday (2/4/07) the market share of US visits to the custom category of Super Bowl advertiser websites (excluding film promotion websites) increased by 5.2% versus the previous Sunday (1/28/07). The increase the day after the Super Bowl (2/5/07) compared to the previous Monday (1/29/07) was slightly lower, at 4.6%.

While some sites did show massive increases (see table below), such as Snickers, Budweiser and Bud Light, the total market share of visits to those growing sites was so small as to barely impact traffic to this group of sites. After all, how often does one go online to find a beverage or a snack? TV watchers need a compelling reason to go to the website of a food or beverage manufacturer - in this case, the reason was to watch the ads again, or view additional ads. The sites that did show increases were the ones that had the best ads: Budweiser, Snickers, Sierra Mist. Some sites, like MyCokeRewards draw regular users with the potential for prizes and swag, but for the most part, food and beverage manufacturer sites are typically limited to a few ads, games, or sweepstakes registration forms.

Advertisers whose business is entirely web-based would most certainly expect and increase in visits, and this year GoDaddy and Salesgenie.com did show strong increases, of 75% and 156% respectively (see chart here) . Careerbuilder.com and E*Trade showed minor increases of about 3% on the Monday following the game (see chart here), when one would expect potential job-seekers and investors to go online. What kind of traffic increase would be expected from $2.6 million in online advertising? Super Bowl advertising is an interesting trade-off for dot-coms - while the exposure is far greater than an online campaign, it's far less targeted. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

On another note, I'd like to point out why I think the table above is fascinating. We rarely compile custom categories of unrelated sites, and just seeing how a site like Careerbuilder.com ranks against Toyota is eye-opening. Both sites are #1 in their respective categories, but Careerbuilder.com has a market share of visits 16X greater than Toyota. Snickers, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser are leaders at retail, but their websites have a small impact online. To me, it demonstrates the importance of online brand management through consumer generated media, and the vast opportunity brands these have to become part of the conversation, as Doritos did with its Crash the Super Bowl contest.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 09:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Advertising

February 01, 2007

One-Hit Wonders - Top Search Terms of 2006

For my final post on the top search terms of 2006, I thought it would be fun to look at the 'one-hit wonders' of search - strange discoveries or events that drove people to search more information for a week or two, then were forgotten. Like the celebrity queries my previous post, these queries made it to the top 200 overall search terms during their peak week. I put 'ipod' on the chart as a point of comparison - 'ipod' is generally the most searched for product throughout the year. The fact that the volume of searches for these queries surpassed 'ipod' shows just how significant they were in capturing the public's attention for a short time. Oddly, all of these search events occurred in the first half of the year.

• Cyclops kitten - It seemed like a hoax, but was later proved to be real.
• Human quadrupeds - the BBC showed a documentary on a Turkish family who mostly traversed on all fours.
  
• Assassin spiders - a new species of spider was discovered in Madagascar that stab their prey, but are harmless to humans, at only 2mm long.
  
• The Gospel of Judas - the restored document was unveiled in April and featured in the May issue of National Geographic, shedding new light on the relationship between Jesus and Judas.
  
• 666 June 6, 2006 was apparently a Satanic day for some.

My guess is the spread of these news items was to some extent viral, and that many of the searches were performed by students. I can only imagine how exciting these findings would be if I was a 14-year-old with a curious mind and an Internet connection. Here's to search engines for helping to spread knowledge throughout the world!

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search

Celebrity Gossip - Top Searches of 2006

Yesterday I looked at the top search terms of 2006 by navigational and generic queries, and today I'll take a look into the top celebrity searches of 2006. All of of the search queries examined in this post were among the top 200 searches overall during their respective 'big hit' weeks, and can tell us a bit about the flow of the celebrity news that captures public's attention.

Britney Spears was by far the celebrity who generated the most news in 2006: another child, an impending divorce, and an unfortunate lack-of-wardrobe incident brought her to the top of the search charts. I am not including her in this analysis, because if you put her name on the chart below, the early December spike in searches would dwarf the volume of searches for all the other celebrities on this list, and I already covered it here.

Below is a chart of the biggest celebrity 'blips' on the search charts for 2006.

• Chris Daughtry - being voted off American Idol made him more popular with searchers than winning American Idol did for Taylor Hicks. Now he's got a hit album.
• David Blaine - his 'drowned alive' experiment got him a lot of attention, but his 'revolution' experiment in November barely made a blip on the search charts.
• Aishwarya Rai - being rumored to be dead is a great way to get attention if you're a Bollywood star.
• Star Jones - lost weight, left The View, and divorce rumors abounded.
• Lance Bass - the former 'N Sync start came out of the closet. Searches for his boyfriend, Reichen Lehmkuhl, also surged in the same period. They have since broken up.
• Mel Gibson - drunk driving again? Get a chauffeur!
• Anna Nicole Smith - sadly, her son died. She also had an illegitimate child. People still want to see pictures of her.
• Sara Evans - the singer left Dancing with the Stars, citing personal reasons relating to her divorce from politician Craig Schelske.
• Michael Richards - racist rants are not good publicity, especially when they are posted on YouTube.
• Katie Rees - posing for photos when you're drunk is not a good idea if you want to be Miss USA, but great if you want millions of horny men looking at your pictures.

There doesn't appear to be much difference in the nature of the hot celebrity stories in 2006 versus past years, but where people got the news from greatly influenced by celebrity gossip blogs (covered here and here) , as well as YouTube in the case of Michael Richards.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search