May 31, 2007

Revolution Health Traffic Doubles in 4 Weeks

This Wednesday AOL Founder Steve Case spoke at D5 about his new venture, Revolution Health. Revolution Health is setting out to be far more than just a health information source on the web, but it is already succeeding on that front. For the week ending May 26, 2007, Revolution Health was ranked #11 in the Health & Medical - Information category, and traffic increased by 113% since the week ending April 28, 2007, when it was ranked #23.

Like most health information sites, Revolution Health's primary source of traffic is search engines. Last week it received 49% of upstream visits from search engines, on par with the Health Information category average of 53.5%. While Google is the dominant search engine for Revolution Health, it received 16% of its search traffic from Ask for the four weeks ending May 26, 2007. The category as a whole received 8.8% of search visits from Ask in that period. It turns out that Ask is a good partner for health websites, since 2.69% of the visits leaving Ask went to Health Information sites for the week ending May 26, 2007, compared to 1.39% of visits leaving Google.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Health and Medical

May 22, 2007

Google and FeedBurner - Strong Growth in the Blogosphere

Rumors have been flying since last week that Google might acquire FeedBurner. The FeedBurner site is mainly a destination for bloggers seeking to measure their feed and blog stats, and US traffic has grown by 204% over the past year (April 2006 to April 2007). This reflects not only the growth of blogging in general, but also the increased need for analytics in the blogosphere.

Google has made some headway in the blogosphere in the past year - traffic to Google Reader has grown by 290% in the past four months (week ending 5/19/07 vs week ending 1/20/07), and Google Blog Search briefly overtook Technorati as the most visited blog search engine earlier this year. Google's recent acquisitions have reflected its interest in broadening its advertising platforms (YouTube and DoubleClick). It makes sense that Google would want to expand its advertising reach into feeds, with so many blogs already running AdSense. In addition, the fast-growing Google Reader is currently not displaying ads, and Google must have an interest in monetizing it.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Blogs and Personal Websites

May 21, 2007

Facebook Visits up 106% Since Opening Up in September

Today's Hitwise press release updated April figures for social networking sites: MySpace still dominates the category with nearly 80% market share of visits to the top 20 sites. US Visits to MySpace increased by 70% from April 2006 to April 2007, while visits to Facebook were up 126% and visits to Bebo were up 184%.

Facebook opened up to accept Internet users without a school affiliation in September 2006. Previously it had been limited to those with a college or high school email address. From September 2006 to April 2007, the market share of visits to Facebook grew by 106 percent.

Beyond looking at marketing share of visits, Hitwise clickstream data can give an indication of the influence of a site. MySpace makes up the largest percentage of upstream traffic for almost all of the other social networks in the above table. One in four visits (24.9% of upstream clicks) to the 19 other top social networking sites came directly from MySpace in April 2007. Facebook accounted for a much smaller 2.85% of the upstream traffic to its 19 competitors in April, but that represented an increase of 185% compared to September 2006.

Facebook's increase in market share and increased presence in the clickstream of the other networks show that its influence is growing rapidly, and that opening up to the entire Internet audience had a positive effect. It appears that users at other social networking sites are experimenting with Facebook as an alternative site, which may help it attain critical mass among non-collegiate users.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 11:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)
Posted to Social Networking

May 17, 2007

Swimwear and Diets - The Search Correlation

Swimsuit season is upon us - magazine racks are full of headlines promising not only to help us find the perfect swimsuit for our body types, but also the perfect diet and fitness plan to help us look our best on the beach. Not surprisingly, it turns out there is a seasonal correlation between 'swimwear' and 'diets.' The search term chart below shows that the lowest volume of searches for the two terms is in October, November and December. Of course, searches for 'diets' surge in January when people make their New Year's Resolutions, but 'swimwear' doesn't pick up again until March, when spring break approaches. It is odd though, given how much time it takes to loose any significant amount of weight, that the correlation between 'swimwear'' searches and 'diet' searches is timed so close. Apparently, we're shooting for immediate results, since some of the popular search terms are '3 day diet,' 'fad diets,' and 'fast weight loss diets.'

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 03:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

May 16, 2007

US Searchers Jaded by Record High Gas Prices

Gas prices have once again reached record highs. How many times in the past few years have we heard this? The cost of filling up the tank is about 75% higher than it was two years ago. When prices first spiked in after Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, people went online to find the cheapest gas stations in the area and find out more about fuel economy, at sites like GasBuddy.com and FuelEconomy.gov. Now it seems inevitable - saving a dollar or two doesn't seem worth the cost of driving a few extra miles. Despite the astronomical cost of filling up the tank, the volume of searches for 'gas prices' and 'hybrid cars' for the week ending May 12, 2007 were respectively 92% and 82% lower than during the week ending September 3, 2005. According to the US Energy Information Administration, the average US price for a gallon of regular gasoline, all formulations, was $3.07/gallon for the week of September 5, 2005, an did not surpass that level again until the week of May 14, 2007, when it was $3.10/gallon.

You can see on the chart below that with each subsequent gas price hike after September 2005, searchers were less interested in going online for information. Visits to GasBuddy.com and FuelEconomy.gov, two of the leading sites receiving traffic from those terms, showed a similar pattern. It appears that we've reached a point of apathy, and have grudgingly accepted the cost of driving.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Automotive

May 10, 2007

Gmail Traffic Up 17% Since Opening Up, Still Early Adopter Appeal

On February 14, 2007 Google's Gmail opened up access to anyone worldwide. Previously Gmail, which is still in beta, was only available by invitation from another Gmail user. The market share of US visits to Gmail increased by 17% from February 2007 to April 2007, and was up 30% year over year, from April 2006 to April 2007. Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are still by far the dominant web-based email services: their market share of visits was respectively 13x and 6x greater than Gmail in April 2007.

Users of Gmail are a different breed than the average Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail users, which closely resemble the online population in terms of age and socioeconomic status. Gmail users are much more likely to be young, high income, and in the early adopter segments. For the four weeks ending 4/28/07, 54% of visits to Gmail were from users between 18 and 34, compared to 42% for Yahoo! Mail and 44% for Hotmail. 18% of Gmail's visits were from those with average annual household incomes between $100,000 and $149,999, compared to 15% from Hotmail and 13% for Yahoo! Mail.

Claritas PRIZM NE social group data shows Gmail's strength in what are typically early adopter groups, like Urban Uptown (U1), Elite Suburbs (S1) and the Affluentials (S2).

Gmail users are also more likely to be Facebook users - 3.7% of Gmail's downstream went to Facebook in April 2007, compared to 2.2% for Hotmail and 1.2% for Yahoo! Mail. Expect Gmail's scope to broaden as its users continue to evangelize the product.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:01 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (4)
Posted to Computers and Internet

May 08, 2007

Yahoo! Auctions Closing, Ebay at 94% Share of Category

Yahoo! Auctions is closing as of June 16, 2007. It comes with little surprise given Yahoo's advertising relationship with eBay, and eBay's massive dominance of the Auction category. eBay websites (including eBay, eBay Motors and eBay UK and Canada) accounted for more than 94% of visits the Auctions category for the week ending May 5, 2007. Yahoo! Auctions came in at #10, with only 0.19% of the Auctions category.

EBay is the largest e-commerce site in the downstream for Yahoo! Search, at 1.34% of Yahoo! Search's total downstream for the week ending May 5, 2007. In comparison, Yahoo! Auctions accounted for only 0.01% of the traffic leaving Yahoo! Search in that period.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 12:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (3)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds

May 01, 2007

US News and Media Report: Impact of Video, Google, and Blogs

Today we released the Hitwise US News and Media Report, which examines trends in online news consumption over the past year. One of the most striking trends over the past year has been the increase in traffic from News & Media websites to video websites. The share of traffic leaving News and Media websites and going directly to Entertainment - Multimedia websites increased by 196% from April 2006 to March 2007. Events which involved user-generated video,
such as the death of Steve Irwin and the execution of Saddam Hussein, served to drive the increase in traffic between News and Media and Multimedia websites. The report details the impact of those two events as well as the videotaped incident involving former Senator George Allen.

News aggregators (such as Yahoo! News, Google News and Drudge Report), search engines and portals have long been the leading sources of traffic for news websites. Search engines, particularly Google, have grown in importance as sources of traffic for Broadcast Media and Print category websites. Print news websites received 29.7% more traffic from Google in March 2007 than in March 2006, and Broadcast Media sites received 35.9% more traffic from Google in the same time period. The report further examines other sources of traffic, but does not include this chart, which illustrates Google's growing impact on these categories.

The past year has seen significant growth in traffic to celebrity gossip blogs. PerezHilton.com was one of the most visited gossip blogs, increasing in market share of visits by 621% from March 2006 to March 2007. Traffic to the top 20 gossip blogs, as shown on the chart below, increased significantly due to events involving Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. More information on these sites, including demographics, can be found in the report.

With News and Media sites receiving 17% more traffic from search engines in March 2007 versus March 2006, search engines are now more likely to be the first step for Internet users in their search for information about breaking events. Relevant results from video sites and blogs now appear high in search results, thus exposing new users to these non-traditional sources of news and spurring the growth in online video consumption.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 10:21 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (3)
Posted to News and Media