About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.

Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America

Analyst Weblog

« Meebo Growth - Web Based IM | Google Reader Slowly Closing on Bloglines »

Gizmodo & Engadget - Rival Gadget Blogs Compared

May 15, 2008

A few weeks ago Wired did a great article on the competition between Gizmodo and Engadget. I've been meaning to do a post on the popular gadget blogs ever since.

Last week, Engadget attracted a 6 times larger share of US Internet visits than Gizmodo. I should point out here that we are tracking website visits. This means we are not reporting on readers that consume content via feed readers (i.e. Bloglines or Netvibes). Engadget ranked 3,645 among All Categories of websites last week and Gizmodo ranked 25,519. Among Blogs and Personal Websites, Engadget ranked 44 and Gizmodo 289.

Both sites have maintained a fairly flat level of traffic in the past year. The average session duration for Engadget last week was 3 minutes 13 seconds. Visitors spent much longer on Gizmodo, at nearly 15 minutes last week.

Interestingly 74% of visits to Engadget were from new visitors last week indicating that the audience is very fresh with fewer repeat visits than I would have expected. Gizmodo doesn't rank in our top 10,000 websites overall so we can't report their rate of new and returning visitors.

Both sites rely heavily on search engines for upstream visits. Engadget received 60% of visits from Search Engines last week and Gizmodo 47%. Other top sources of traffic were Social Networks, News and Media and Blogs.

Things differ much more in where visitors go after the two gadget blogs. Downstream visits from Engadget went to:
- 11% News and Media
- 8% Social Networks and Forums
- 8% Electronics websites
- 4% Blogs and Personal Websites.

Downstream from Gizmodo went to:
- 18% News and Media
- 17% Social Networks and Forums
- 10% Blogs and Personal Websites
- 9% Games
- 6% Movies

While geeks tend to think of the two blogs competing to break news and attract readers, we see surprisingly little cross over between the two sites as illustrated above. Also, neither site appeared in the other's clickstream report. Typically for sites that are competitors we see traffic moving from one to the other - not so with these two blogs. Search terms sending visits to the two websites are also very different. In the past four weeks, the top terms for Gizmodo were "gadget blog" and "gizmodo" and for Engadget, "echostar tr-40", "ps4" and "lg iphone".

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:00 AM | (3) | (0)
In Categories Blogs

TrackBack

TrackBack URL:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/805.

Comments

Subject Line : Beat Long Poll Lines with Absentee Ballots from StateDemocracy.org

Many state and local election officials are encouraging voters to use Absentee Ballots to avoid the long lines and delays expected at the polls on November 4th due to the record-breaking surge in newly registered voters.

Voters in most states still have time to obtain an Absentee Ballot by simply downloading an official application form available through www.StateDemocracy.org, a completely FREE public service from the nonprofit StateDemocracy Foundation.

Posted by timothy moriarty | October 27, 2008 04:55 AM

well, both Gizmodo & Engadget are great blogs to visit.. it is hard to choose on what is the best.. nice post for information!

Posted by pinay | April 5, 2009 03:07 PM

well, both Gizmodo & Engadget are great blogs to visit.. it is hard to choose on what is the best.. nice post for information!

Posted by pinay | April 5, 2009 03:08 PM