June 27, 2007

YouTube: 50% More Traffic than Other Video Sites Combined

YouTube's growth has not begun to slow yet this year. Hitwise traffic data shows that the market share of US visits to YouTube has increased by 70% when comparing January 2007 to May 2007 (this only includes site visits, not streams or streams from views on embedded videos). In comparison, the market share of visits to a custom category of 64 other video sites increased by only 8% in that period. As of May 2007, YouTube's market share was 50% greater than those 64 sites combined. Here is a ranking of the top 10 sites in that custom category for May 2007.

Today I will be moderating a panel on video search optimization and marketing at Searchnomics 2007. Search engines are responsible for about 20% of traffic to video sites, including YouTube. Users are increasingly finding links to video pages in search engine results - and going to them. For the four weeks ending June 24, 2006 Hitwise captured 23,696 search terms sending traffic to the custom cateogry of 65 video sites. A year later, for the four weeks ending June 23, 2007, Hitwise captured 110,775 search terms sending traffic to the same category. Not only are more individual searches ending up at video sites, but clickstream data shows that more traffic is leaving search engines for video sites. The chart below shows a 300% increase in the amount of traffic leaving search engines and going to video sites in the past year. Clearly optimizing your videos for search is just as important as getting your videos up on the web. If you can, come to the session and find out what Google and Metacafe have to say about this topic.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 08:22 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (9)
Posted to Video

June 12, 2007

Gossip Blog Traffic Spikes as Paris Hilton Goes to Jail

Paris Hilton entered jail on June 3 for violating her probation in a drunk-driving case. In true Paris fashion, she managed to make headlines even in jail, by going home for supposed medical reasons, re-entering jail, and talking to Barbara Walters about her newfound maturity. The gossip blogs, of course were flooded with commentary, rumors, and speculation about Paris' jail stay, as was the major news media. US traffic to TMZ and Hollywood Tuna was up 60% and 85% respectively, making this the third highest traffic week in celebrity news in the past year, after Anna Nicole Smith's death and Britney Spears' lack of wardrobe malfunctions.

The gossip blogs have truly taken over celebrity news in the past year. The market share of US visits to TMZ and aptly named Perez Hilton increased more than fourfold from May 2006 to May 2007. If Perez Hilton ranked in the News & Media category, it would have been at #23 in May 2007. It's no wonder then, that Yahoo! just launched a blog-style gossip site in partnership with Access Hollywood, called omg!. It will be interesting to see how long it takes a site run by 2 media giants to eclipse a site run by a young man with pink hair. Ah, the beauty of Web 2.0.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 09:45 PM | TrackBack (2)
Posted to News and Media

June 05, 2007

Shopping, Search, and MySpace

How have sources of traffic to Shopping and Classifieds websites changed over the past year? In May 2007, the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category received 24.95% of its upstream visits from search engines. This number increased by only 0.7% since May 2006, but the balance of search engines sending traffic has changed in favor of Google. Google was responsible for 15.55% of Shopping & Classifieds upstream visits in May 2007, an increase of 8.7% since May 2006. Google's traffic, share of search, and impact on e-commerce websites have grown in lockstep over the past year.

MySpace is another growing source of traffic for shopping websites. In May 2007, 3.15% of Shopping & Classifieds site visits originated at MySpace, an increase of 86.1% since May 2006. This increase could be attributable to several factors: 1) the sheer increase in visits to MySpace (up 67.1% from May 06 - May 07, vs. the 6.6% increase in visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category), resulting in more non-referred traffic, 2) increased retailer advertising on MySpace, 3) the Google-MySpace search deal, which may have led to more general web searching on MySpace as well more potential retail contextual ads. The leading Shopping & Classifieds websites in MySpace's downstream for the month of May largely resemble the top overall retail websites - 7 of the websites shown in the table below were also top 10 Shopping & Classifieds sites in May 2007.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 05:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)
Posted to Shopping and Classifieds