March 19, 2007

Twitter Traffic up 55% Last Week, Still Very Niche

Last week the blogosphere was all a twitter about Twitter, the latest way to share your every move (or keep track of your friends' activities). There's even a site called Twitterholic, so you can see who the most popular Twitterers are. Follwing on Heather's post from last week, here are some more US statistics.

The market share of visits to Twitter increased by 55% from the week ending 3/10/07 to the week ending 3/17/07. It ranked 41,100 among all sites and 1,412 out of the 4,867 sites in the Net Communities & Chat category, which shows just how far it has to go to reach mass adoption (although the true measure of its success will be mobile usage, not just web usage). The average session time for Twitter was 8 minutes 56 seconds, showing that the website is engaging its users. We will definitely keep an eye on on this one.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 06:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Social Networking

Social Search Growth, Speaking at OMMA Hollywood

Tomorrow I will be moderating a panel on Social Search at OMMA Hollywood. David Gilby from ChaCha and Cameron Olthius from ACS will be speaking about advertising and optimization strategies within social media. As background, here are some US traffic statistics on the key social media sites.

The growth rates for these sites are quite impressive over the last six months - when comparing traffic in August 2006 to February 2007, Digg was up 92%, Technorati up 88%, del.icio.us up 130%, and Google Blog Search up 316% (largely due to placement on Google News, as I wrote here). Since late January, Technorati has been keeping ahead of Google Blog Search.

I'll be sharing some more details on where these sites are getting their traffic, so stop by the session if you are at OMMA tomorrow.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search

March 14, 2007

March Madness - Top Tournament Pool Websites

March Madness officially begins on the Ides of March, and basketball fans around the country have been scrambling all week to fill out their brackets in time. Most likely you have signed up with Yahoo!, ESPN or CBS Sportsline bracket pools - all three have been jockeying for the top spot in market share this week. As of Tuesday, ESPN led by a small margin. Session time data show that it takes about 15 minutes to sign up and fill out a bracket.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Sports

Buzznet and IMEEM: Fast Growing Social Networks

Today's press release from Hitwise lists the top 20 social networking sites for February 2007, and discusses growing sites. Here are some key points:

• The market share of visits to the custom category of the top 20 social networking sites increased by 11.5% from January 2007 to February 2007. Year-over-year (February 2006 - February 2007) category traffic was up 87%.
• Traffic to MySpace was up 10.2% from January to February 2007 and 107.3% year over year.
• Buzznet and IMEEM showed the fastest growth within the category, with visits increasing 148.4% and 145.7% respectively from January to February 2007.
• Other fast growing sites included Hoverspot (up 19.6%) and Bebo (up 17.8%).

While MySpace is still by far the dominant social networking site, capturing more than 80% of visits to the category, the category is still growing at a rapid pace, and the growth of these newer sites shows that it hasn't yet plateaued. Hitwise custom category clickstream, which will launch tomorrow, shows that as a group, the other 19 social networks on the chart above received 25.8% of their upstream visits from MySpace. In other words, one in four visits to the 19 other leading social networks came directly from MySpace, demonstrating the vast breadth of its influence among users of most of these other sites.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Social Networking

March 07, 2007

Yelp Visitor Profile: Young Digerati Deep Dive

Last week I posted on Yelp's impressive growth in the local search space. Hitwise demographic and lifestyle data reveal some interesting insights about the users of Yelp, and could point to Yelp's potential as a force within local search.

For the four weeks ending March 3, 2006, 57% of visits to Yelp were from females, and 34% were from users between the ages of 25-34. Not surprisingly, regional demographics skewed toward the states that contained its featured cities: 40% of visits came from California (SF and LA), 11% from New York and New Jersey (NYC), 10% from Illinois (Chicago), 6.4% from Massachusetts (Boston) and 5.8% from Washington (Seattle).

If you've spent any amount of time on Yelp, you will get the sense that there is a shared vibe among its users. They are young, hip, urban, and have plenty of disposable income to eat out frequently and go to bars, salons, and spas. Hitwise Lifestyle data, in conjunction with Claritas PRIZM NE Segmentation, gives us and even deeper view of who Yelp users are and what other sites they tend to visit on the web.

PRIZM NE segments the US population by 66 segments, based upon where people live, along with other factors like age, household income levels, household size, etc. The profile of visits to Yelp has a very strong skew toward the Urban Uptown social group, which is made up of the highest earning segments of the urban population. For the four weeks ending March 3, 2007, 31% of visits to Yelp came from Urban Uptown, versus less than 10% of the online population. The segment which accounted for the largest share of Yelp's traffic was Young Digerati, which we will explore further. Below is the complete PRIZM NE profile of traffic to Yelp. You will notice that the segments are color coded by where they are located, and that their descriptive names gives you a sense what type of people they are.

Rarely is a site's PRIZM NE profile so focused on so few segments. Yahoo! Local, for instance, has a much broader user base, with less of an urban skew, which is not surprising considering that it has been collecting reviews for a long time, and has the benefit of Yahoo's broad reach. Here is a comparison of the segmentation for Yahoo! Local versus Yelp.

Young Digerati is a segment that many web marketers would like to attract. The Claritas description of the segment states

Young Digerati are the nation's tech-savvy singles and couples living in fashionable neighborhoods on the urban fringe. Affluent, highly educated and ethnically mixed, Young Digerati communities are typically filled with trendy apartments and condos, fitness clubs and clothing boutiques, casual restaurants and all types of bars-from juice to coffee to microbrew.

The lifestyle and media behaviors they are more likely than the general population to engage in, according to Claritas, are: shopping at Banana Republic, Amazon.com and Bloomingdale's, going snowboarding and scuba diving, visiting spas, spending more than $3000 on foreign travel in the past year, watching IFC, Showtime and HBO, and driving an Audi A4. Sound familiar? There are even more statistics that can be gathered about the lifestyles of this segment, as shown here.

Using the Find > Websites by Lifestyle Groups or Types function within Hitwise, I looked for sites that have a similar skew toward Young Digerati. This is a great way to find potential site partners, affiliates, advertisers, or just get a sense of the online behaviors of a group. Below is a list of sites for which skewed very high toward Young Digerati.

Shopping: BigBadToyStore, TechBargains, BuyDig.com, Banana Republic, Ann Taylor LOFT, Anthropologie
Entertainment: MyAmericanIdol, 411Mania
Banking: World Savings
News: Salon
Automotive: VWVortex
Food: Chowhound

Currently the Yelp user base is centered on its major markets and a distinct population within those markets. Similarly, in October 2004, the Craigslist home page received 39% of its traffic from Urban Uptown. As it has grown to have sites for 22 US metros and all 50 states, only 22% of Craigslist.org traffic came from Urban Uptown for the most recent 4 weeks. The momentum created by Craigslist in its first cities spread as city dwellers spread the word to friends and family and relocated to smaller markets for new jobs or to start families. Yelp appears to be growing in the same way, and if it continues to nurture and grow its core user base while at the same time expanding into new markets, it could disrupt the local search space, just as Craigslist disrupted local classifieds.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Audience

March 06, 2007

Apple vs. Microsoft Visitor Profiles: iMedia Connection Article

Last week this article was published in iMedia Connection. I looked at search trends for the recently announced iPhone compared to the newly launched Windows Vista along with demographic profiles of traffic to the Apple and Microsoft websites in order to assess the differences in the two computer giants' marketing strategies.

January was an exciting month for techies, with Apple's announcement of the iPhone at Macworld on January 9 and the release of the long awaited Windows Vista operating system. The strategies of the two companies could not be more different, particularly when it comes to their product launch strategies. While it may seem like a stretch to compare the announcement of the upcoming release of a smart phone to the actual release of a new version of an operating system, there are important lessons for marketers in how to communicate to differing target audiences.

Hitwise search data can give an indication of the level of consumer interest in a new product. Based on a massive surge in searches, the iPhone will be a hit. The week that Steve Jobs demonstrated the iPhone at Macworld, the volume of searches for 'iphone' soared to rank as the 55th highest volume search term overall for the week ending January 13, 2007. Engadget, the tech blog that live-blogged Steve Jobs' keynote, received a lift in market share of visits of 127 percent on January 9, 2007 versus the previous day. All Apple had to do was show its product at a conference, and let the consumers do the evangelizing.

Windows Vista was launched on January 30, 2007 with a huge marketing campaign with the tagline, "The Wow Starts Now." Searches for 'windows vista' ranked at 322 among all U.S. internet searches that week, increasing by 63 percent for the week ending February 3, 2007 versus the previous week. Microsoft had to tell us that we would be 'wowed' by its new operating system, while consumers fretted over whether or not they would need to purchase the new software or wait to buy a new PC with the OS pre-installed.

Examination of the age range of visitors to each company's website explains why they each have such different messaging and marketing strategies. According to Hitwise demographics, the majority of traffic to the Apple website came from users under 45, while the majority of traffic to the Microsoft website came from users over 35, with a full 22 percent of its traffic coming from those in the 55+ age bracket. Accordingly, the spokesman on the Windows Vista promotional site is Tom Skerrit, a 73 year-old actor. Even Apple's advertising team picked up on this difference, casting an older geek as a PC and a young hip guy as a Mac in its television commercials.

Computer users who did not grow up using computers are typically slower to adopt new technologies, and may even be fearful of the difficulties that might ensue upon upgrading an operating system or even purchasing a new cell phone. Younger users, on the other hand, have less hesitation about buying a new product, confident that they can quickly learn how to use it, as they have been figuring out how to use computers and cell phones since a young age.

Microsoft's launch strategy is a smart one: The company knows it needs to convince older users that there is a reason to make the upgrade, and it recently hired an established industry analyst as a blogger evangelist to promote Vista. Young PC users will probably upgrade regardless of any marketing or advertising they might see, unless they happen to defect to Apple. Companies will slowly upgrade as IT managers learn about the new OS and gain confidence in its security features.

In contrast, Apple understands that its customers are its best marketers. Its younger customer base spreads news virally through blogs, text messages and MySpace, and thus it does not need to rely as heavily on offline marketing, except to convince older users to switch from a PC.

Both companies understand their audience and their challenges. Apple inspires a cult-like following, while Microsoft gets little love, despite its OS market dominance. The gulf between the appropriate tactics to reach these different audiences is ever widening, and thus reinforces the importance of understanding who your customers are and how they seek out and consume information.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 06:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
Posted to Audience

March 02, 2007

Local Search Update: Yelp up 91%, Insider Pages up 34% in Past Six Months

This week Insider Pages was acquired by the Citysearch division of IAC. Hitwise data shows that the market share of US visits to Insider Pages was up 34% in the past 6 months (August 2006 vs. February 2007). The market share of visits to Yelp, another user-generated local review site, was up by an impressive 91% in the same period. Judy's Book did not show an increase, although traffic jumped in September and October 2006 when it received a substantial increase in traffic from Local.com, suggesting a content deal that was turned off.

How do these smaller UGC-focused review sites compare against the bigger players in local search? Yahoo! Local and Google Maps, which includes local content, received more than 10X the market share of visits of Insider Pages in February 2007. Traffic to Google Maps increased by 26% from January to February 2007. It appears that this increase was due to an increase in upstream traffic from Google, which occurred on February 7, according to this daily clickstream chart shown here. Did anyone notice a change in how Google drives traffic to Google Maps around this time?

Based on traffic to Local.com, Yahoo! Local and Live Local Search, it does not appear that interest in local search is increasing, but the substantial growth in Yelp's traffic indicates that the social networking/local search combo is an effective means of engaging users around local content. The demographic and lifestyle differences between Yelp's user base and that of other local search sites are quite interesting, and merit another post - look for one next week.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:53 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search