April 30, 2007

Virtual Worlds Ranking - Runescape #1

Virtual worlds for children and teens have been growing in popularity recently: the market share of visits to a group of seven children's and teens' virtual worlds (sites shown below) has grown by 68% in the past year. (week ending 4/28/07 vs. week ending 4/29/06). Runescape is by far the #1 site, with 44% of visits to the category.

Webkinz, Club Penguin and Stardoll have been the fast movers over the past year. When comparing the weeks ending 4/29/06 and 4/28/07, the market share of visits to Webkinz was up 1141%, Club Penquin up 545%, and Stardoll up 275%. You can see on the chart below that visits to most of these sites surge when school is out: summer vacation, Thanksgiving, Christmas break, and most recently, spring break. Average session times can be very long, with the average visit to GaiaOnline lasting more than 44 minutes, Neopets at 35 minutes and Stardoll at 26 minutes. A few weeks ago I saw presentations from Habbo and Stardoll at the Millennials Conference. Habbo has a very large user base in Europe, and both sites are finding creative ways to partner with advertisers in-game. Expect a lot more growth in this area.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 12:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Social Networking

April 25, 2007

Apple Traffic up 34%, iPhone Attracts Young Users

In light of Apple's earnings announcement later today, here are some traffic numbers: the market share of visits to Apple.com was up 34% from March 2006 to March 2007. Keyword breadth (the number of keyword phrases containing a term) for 'ipod,' which is a great measure of brand popularity, was up by 18% for the 12 weeks ending March 31, 2007 versus the 12 weeks ending April 1, 2006.

The iPhone is being eagerly awaited by many, and the demographics of visitors to www.apple.com/iphone show that those in the 18-24 and 25-34 year old age groups are the most likely to be looking for the product, making up 51.5% of visitors to the website for the four weeks ending April 21, 2007. Those visiting the iPhone section of Apple.com were even younger than overall visitors to the Apple.com domain, which bodes well for the future of the product.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search

April 23, 2007

Virginia Tech Shootings Cause Surge in News Video Traffic

Last Monday's shooting spree by a Virginia Tech student was a tragedy that deeply affected the nation, and resulted in the largest surge in visits to News and Media websites since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Hitwise News and Media category accounted for 3.83% of all US online visits for the week ending April 21, 2007, an increase of 11% from the previous week (ending April 14, 2007). As is typical with major news events, visits to Broadcast Media sites surged more sharply than visits to Print category websites: the market share of US visits to the Broadcast Media category increased by 28% for the week ending April 21, 2007 versus the previous week, while visits to Print category websites were up only 11%.

On a daily traffic basis, visits to MSNBC and CNN.com were up by 102% and 75% respectively on Monday April 16, 2007 versus the previous Monday. Andy Plesser at Beet.TV reported that CNN experienced a record breaking 11.4 million video views on that day. Hitwise Clickstream data confirm that there was a huge surge in CNN's downstream traffic to its video site, with more than one in five visits (22%) to CNN going to its video service on that day.

Next week Hitwise will be releasing a US News & Media Report, which examines the increasing interaction between News and Media sites and video sites, as well as looks at overall News and Media Industry trends, sources of news traffic, and fast-growing websites. I will also post highlights from the report here on the blog.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to News and Media

April 19, 2007

Milliennials - What are 18-24 Year Olds Doing Online?

Yesterday I spoke at the the Millennials Conference in Los Angeles. I talked about some websites that have a high concentration of users in the 18-24 age group, and are enabling users to share content beyond the usual activities on social networking sites. 18-24 year-olds make up 19% of the adult online population, and based upon their website preferences, are much more interested in creating and sharing content than the average online user. Here are some popular sites you may not have heard of:

CarDomain, "the place to show off your car pictures and photos" ranks #1 in the Automotive - Recreation category, with 8.3% share of the category for the week ending 4/14/07. Its average session time last week was over 14 minutes, and 44% of its visits were from users between 18 and 24, and they were more likely to reside in small towns and rural areas.

deviantART is a website where users can search for and upload original artwork. For the week ending 4/14/07, it ranked #1 in the Entertainment - Arts category, with a 36% share of visits. Its average session time was nearly 22 minutes, 57% of users were female and 37% were between 18 and 24. Its market share of US visits was up 67% from March 2006 to March 2007.

FanFiction.Net users write stories containing their favorite characters from television shows, movies and books. Writing these stories takes a lot of time, as the average session time for the week ending 4/14/07 was more than 38 minutes. Its visits skewed female, at 59%, and 40% of visits were from 18-24 year olds. It ranked #1 in the Entertainment - Books and Writing category with a 26% share for the week ending 4/14/07, and its market share of visits was up 17% from March 2006 to March 2007. I posted on it last year here.

These sites enable users to create content and communicate about topics that they are passionate about. One of the themes that came up on the panel was that the activities young people engage in are not that much different now than before the current technology explosion, but the tools are different. For artists, writers, and car aficionados, these sites offer a form of expression and facilitate connections that would not have been possible 20 years ago.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 12:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (2)
Posted to Social Networking

April 16, 2007

Local Search Marketing - Panel at Web 2.0 Expo

Today at 1:30 PM PST I will be moderating a panel on Local Search Marketing at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. In the introduction, I'll be sharing some Hitwise traffic data on local search.

Over the past year, the market share of US visits to the top 5 yellow pages sites has declined by 7%, while visits to the next-generation local search sites have increased: for March 2007 versus March 2006, visits to Google Maps/Local were up 70%, Yahoo! Local up 20%, Local.com up 29%, and Windows Live Local arrived on the scene.

The primary way users navigate to local search sites is through search engines, which make up more than 50% of the upstream traffic for Local.com, Yahoo! Local and Google Maps/Local. Both Google and Yahoo! provide links to local search above the search bar, as well as one box links in search results for locally oriented searches. In contrast, the largest source of traffic for yellow pages sites (and Live Local) is the Portals category. The search traffic coming to yellow pages sites is largely from navigational terms (ie, 'yellow pages').

More of search engines' downstream traffic is going to local search sites than it was a year ago: the Hitwise Business Directories category accounted for 1.36% of traffic leaving the Search Engines category in March 2007, an increase of 37% from a year ago. Standard search engines are increasingly the starting point for local searches, underscoring the importance of SEO and inclusion in local search sites for small businesses.

Today's panelists are Frazier Miller, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Local, Jennifer Black, Vice President of Marketing at Local.com, Perry Evans, CEO at Local Matters, and Kendall Fargo, GM at Intiut (Step Up Commerce). I am sure they will have some fascinating insights into the future of local search, so please stop by if you're at the conference.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Business and Finance | Search

April 13, 2007

Photobucket Accounts for 73% of MySpace's Photo - Related Traffic

On Wednesday, April 11, MySpace blocked videos and slideshows hosted by Photobucket from appearing on the site due to an apparent violation of the MySpace terms of Service agreement. Did this blockage have any effect on Photobucket's traffic, and how much traffic do the two sites share?

The market share of visits to Photobucket was up 3.9% on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 versus an average of the previous 4 Wednesdays. As I wrote last week, Photobucket received 57% of its upstream traffic from MySpace in March 2007. The table below shows the Photography sites in MySpace's downstream in March 2007, and Photobucket accounted for 73% of Photography category visits leaving MySpace (1.60/2.19) Photobucket is by far the most dominant photo website for MySpace users. (Note: this data counts actual visits to the photo websites, not views of the websites' hosted content within MySpace.)

In looking at the video sites in MySpace's downstream, as shown in the table below, we see that MySpace is managing to keep many of those users on its own site - at MySpace Video, which accounted for 64% (2.22/3.48) of MySpace's downstream traffic to the top video sites in March. YouTube accounted for 31% of MySpace's downstream video visits. In this case, MySpace has opted to host videos itself, and thus keep users within its own network while they upload content. (Note: this data counts actual visits to the video websites, not views of the websites' hosted content within MySpace.)

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 08:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Social Networking

April 12, 2007

Google's Search Share up 10%, Increasing Source of Traffic for Key Categories

Yesterday's press release covered how Google's share of executed searches was 64% in March 2007, an increase of 10% versus March 2006. Here at Hitwise have seen search engines, and Google in particular, become a more important source of traffic for many websites and industry categories. The second table in the release lists key industry categories and increases in their share of traffic from search engines and Google. For instance, the Shopping & Classifieds category received 5.99% more upstream traffic from search engines from March 2006 to March 2007, it received 14.24% more traffic from Google. Thus, Google is growing faster as a source of traffic for sites in these categories than other search engines are. The chart below illustrates this increase nicely:

The increases in the share of traffic from Google over the past year is not surprising considering that market share of visits to Google (not including other Google properties such as image search or news) has grown to 4.52% of all Internet visits in March 2007, an increase of 18% since March 2006. There are no signs of Google slowing down anytime soon.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 12:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search

April 04, 2007

Photobucket Captures 41% of Photography Category Visits, Slide at #4

When I first wrote about Photobucket last year, many people were surprised by the large amount of traffic it received, as its traffic was mainly driven by users uploading images and posting on their MySpace or other social network pages. Traffic to Photobucket has continued to grow along with MySpace and social networking - from March 2006 to March 2007 its market share of US visits increased by 113% and it captured 41% of visits to the Hitwise Entertainment - Photography category, which contains more than 1,400 websites.

Yahoo! Photos still receives a greater market share of visits than Flickr, but Flickr's traffic is catching up, growing by 68% from March 2006 to March 2007. You can see in the above table that photo sharing sites like Yahoo! Photos, Flickr, and Kodak Gallery receive much less traffic from MySpace than the sites that allow users to post content on other pages, which means that usage of photo sharing sites is mainly limited uploading and viewing activities.

In contrast, traffic to a site like Slide, which allows users to tell stories through slide shows that can be posted on social networks and other pages around the web, consists mainly of users uploading and personalizing their content that will be posted and viewed elsewhere. Traffic to Slide has grown by more than 2000% from March 2006 to March 2007, and if you consider that the slide shows posted around the web are branded, its presence is far greater than its market share would imply. Similarly, some bloggers have Flickr photosets embedded in their blogs, but they are not necessarily branded.

Usage of photo sites varies widely by generation - the chart below shows the age group swing between Photobucket and Kodak Gallery. 40.9% of traffic to Photobucket came from 18-24 year olds for the four weeks ending 3/31/07, while only 8.8% of Kodak Gallery's traffic was from that age group. Kodak Gallery's two largest age groups were 55+, at 33% of traffic, and 24-34, at 27% of traffic, indicating sharing between new parents and grandparents.

Teens and young adults approach photo sharing very differently from the older generation - their social network pages are the distribution points for their photographs, rather than albums on photo sharing sites. They also invest more time in personalizing and adding features to their images. Flickr bridges the gap to some extent, by combining the social networking features with photo sharing, but not necessitating the ownership of another social network account for communication and sharing.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 02:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Entertainment | Social Networking