Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

OMG the Gossip Girl finale already?

2008-05-16T22:15:48Z

On Monday night, the CW will air the highly anticipated (or is that just me) season finale for the first season of Gossip Girl, a much talked about show (called the Greatest Teen Drama of All-Time by New York magazine) based upon a series of novels by Cecily von Ziegesar. Since this show is often discussed around the office and with friends, I was curious to see the show’s website traffic. As one would expect, the premiere on Sept 19th caused the traffic to ramp up pretty quickly, resulting in the 2nd highest week for the website in terms of the market share of visits. The actual peak (to date) was the week ending October 20, 2007 as the show grew in popularity.

A lull in new episodes due to the writer’s strike caused traffic to dip sharply mid-February through April. However, when the show returned in mid-April, the network had made the decision to cease streaming full episodes of Gossip Girl for fear of cannibalizing TV viewer ship (the show is also among the most downloaded on iTunes). Despite that decision, traffic has rebounded somewhat after the strike thanks to a racy advertising campaign and promises of an explosive plot line. Although we are heading towards Monday night finale, the market share of visits still remains lower than the peaks during the launch of the show.

Searches on ‘gossip girl’ were highest during the week of the premiere, the week ending Sept 22, 2007, but also mirror much of the website's traffic patterns, increasing as new episodes were aired. The good news is that when searchers are looking for information on Gossip Girl, The CW’s website is receiving the bulk of the traffic from the resulting searches. This is also the case even when ‘gossip girl full episodes’ is the search query, so even without the full episodes, they are still the beneficiary of most of the traffic.

Check out Lily & Bart’s wedding website – clever marketing for the season finale. We’ll all be watching to see if Lily goes through with it!

Stimulus checks – consumers are ready for their money

2008-05-15T20:03:54Z

The first wave of stimulus rebates via direct deposit has curious consumers checking out the IRS website to find out when to expect their checks. The market share of visits to IRS.gov jumped 124% for the week ending May 3, 2008 from the previous week and continued to rise another 15% for the week ending May 10, 2008. Consumers are largely using search to navigate to the IRS website - one-third of the traffic for the past two weeks originated from search engines. Not surprisingly, 4 of the top 10 search terms sending traffic to the IRS website were related to the rebate checks (others were navigational).

Some consumers must be seeing the answer that they want – 11.37% of the traffic from IRS.gov visited the Banks & Financial Institutions category immediately after for the week ending May 10, 2008; most likely confirming if funds have been deposited. Conversely, almost 11% of the traffic to the IRS.gov website was also coming from Banks & Financial Institutions, possibly after not seeing any funds deposited into their accounts.

Now that the rebate checks are starting to appear in wallets, where will they be spent? I have been seeing many emails from retailers with plenty of suggestions!

Gizmodo & Engadget - Rival Gadget Blogs Compared

2008-05-15T13:00:39Z

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".

Freesat proves popular online

2008-05-14T12:00:00Z

The launch of Freesat, the free satellite TV service provided by the BBC and ITV in the UK, proved popular with online consumers during its launch week. UK Internet traffic to www.freesat.co.uk, the service’s online homepage, increased by 627% between the weeks ending May 3rd and May 10th, while UK Internet searches for the term ‘freesat’ increased by 752% over the same period, making it the fastest moving search term in the UK last week.

There were 79% more searches for the term ‘freesat’ than the term ‘sky’ during the week ending May 10th. However, this is to be expected for a new product that has received a lot of media attention – over a fifth of Internet traffic to Freesat’s website came from news and media sites during its launch period. As the chart below illustrates, Sky’s homepage still received 250% more internet visits that www.freesat.co.uk.

However, the types of visitors that each site is attracting are quite different. Two thirds of visitors to www.sky.com are aged 45 or under, whereas for Freesat the comparable figure is 43%. Freesat appeals to an older audience: 43% of visitors to its website last week were aged 55 and over, compared with just 20% for Sky. Freesat also appeals more to people living in rural areas such as the South West, but is less popular than Sky in larger cities, particularly in London and the North West.

The interest in Freesat also helped boost traffic to electronics retailers and manufacturers last week. 35% of people visiting the Freesat website last week chose to visit a retailer afterwards, while a further 10% went to electronics manufacturers’ websites. Argos received the most traffic of any retailer from Freesat, accounting for 16% of all downstream visits from www.freesat.co.uk. The site that received the second largest amount of traffic from www.freesat.co.uk was Humax, the British electronics manufacturer that is producing one of the Freesat set top boxes. Freesat accounted for 44% of Humax’s traffic last week, helping increase visit to the site by 467%.

All inclusive holidays popular in a weak economy

2008-05-13T10:30:00Z

The combination of a weakening economy, falling house prices and a rising cost of living thanks to inflation mean that many British consumers are looking for ways to cut their expenditure. Add in the impact of a strong Euro (although not Dollar), and it seems likely that one area facing a cutback in consumer spending will be travel. One interesting trend we have noticed which indicates that this may be the case is an increase in searches for ‘all inclusive holidays’. As you can see from that chart below, the amount of traffic that travel websites are receiving from this price-sensitive / budget-conscious search term has increased by 24% compared with last year.

The table below illustrates the top 10 search terms containing the phrase ‘all inclusive holidays’, and it is noticeable that people searching for such packages are more concerned with the 'all inclusive' element than with where they want to actually go. Six of the top 10 search terms don’t mention a location at all, whereas - by way of comparison - nine of the top 10 searches containing the term ‘cheap flights’ over the same period include a destination. Another thing that jumps out is the low success rate for the term ‘all inclusive family holidays’. Almost two fifths of people searching for this term don’t find a relevant result in a search engine that they a happy to click through to, highlighting a potentially lucrative area for SEO or paid search activity.

As you can see, the people currently looking for location specific all inclusive deals are choosing warmer sunshine destinations around the Mediterranean and Red Sea: Spain, Egypt, and Turkey. This leads me on to another hypothesis: as money is tight and the strong Euro means that European destinations are becoming more expensive, will we see a decline in travel to Europe and bumper year for domestic tourism? Throw in 10 days of lovely sunny weather, and it seems likely that UK holiday bookings will be up this year.

Not so fast. I heard a representative from TUI (which owns Thomson Holidays) on the Today program this morning claiming that overseas bookings from the UK were up - and the company’s financial release bears this out. Back to the Hitwise data and the news also isn’t great. As you can see from the chart below, the amount of traffic that searches for both ‘uk holidays’ and ‘british holidays’ send to travel websites is on the decline. Maybe a few more weeks of good weather and some first hand experience of the strong Euro will help reverse this trend? We’ll keep and eye on this and report back with any changes.

Meebo Growth - Web Based IM

2008-05-13T13:19:44Z

I am a loyal user of Meebo. I never installed MSN Messenger on my Mac so use Meebo to connect to friends and colleagues from different computers and across Messenger and Google Talk. A couple of weeks ago Meebo received a handsome round of VC funding ($25 million) and so I thought it high time I share some stats on how the site is doing.

For those of you not familiar with Meebo, it is a web based instant messaging (IM) service that allows you to log in to all of your IM accounts and chat via their web interface. Last week (week to 10th May), Meebo ranked 13th among websites in the Social Networking and Forums category and 122 among All Categories of websites based on share of US Internet visits. The average session duration for the site was just over 9 minutes.

Meebo has enjoyed strong growth over the past year - with US Internet visits more than doubling year on year (+110%).

I compared Meebo's growth and standing compared with the alternatives listed on Meebo Now (an unaffiliated information site about Meebo) and found that Meebo is indeed the biggest of the web based IM players. The second biggest player is MSN's Web Messenger. Last week, Meebo attracted 19x more traffic than Web Messenger and Web Messenger's visits have declined 56% in the past year compared to Meebo's more than doubling.

Last week, Meebo received most of its traffic from social networks and search engines with MySpace the #1 source of visits. Websites in the Social Networking and Forums category accounted for 54% of upstream visits and Search Engines for 13%.

As many pundits pointed out when Meebo recently received their funding - traffic doesn't equal revenue. The challenge for Meebo is to monetize this traffic.

Lawnmowers and BBQs: UK searchers celebrate the sunshine!

2008-05-12T10:25:29Z

What a difference the weather can make, particularly after last year’s miserable summer! A week of sunshine has lifted the spirits of everyone in the UK, and also had an impact on their internet searching and shopping habits. As the graph below illustrates, searches for summer essentials – in this case BBQs and lawnmowers – shot up last week. In fact, searches for ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ have already reached a higher peak this year than at any point last summer

With these sudden surges in searches for particular terms, it’s always interesting to see who benefits. As you can see from the table below, for the terms ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ it has primarily been smaller niche and specialist sites that picked up traffic, particularly in the in the BBQ market. Traffic from searches for ‘bbq’ was consolidated into fewer hands, although that is primarily a result of aggressive paid search tactics. For example, www.justlawnmowers.co.uk paid for 28% of its traffic from the term ‘lawnmowers’ and 47% from ‘lawn mowers’; whereas Flaming Barbecues paid for 95% of its traffic from ‘bbq’ and 87% from ‘barbeque’.

Another interesting lesson from this surge is the importance of bidding or optimizing for all variations and spellings / misspellings of popular terms. The table below illustrates the top 10 terms currently sending traffic to Flaming Barbecues. As you can see, it is picking up traffic from a variety of terms, including; ‘bbq’, ‘gas bbq’, ‘barbeques’, ‘barbecues’, ‘barbeque’ and ‘bbqs’. And while much of this traffic is paid, Flaming Barbecues is also picking up significant organic traffic from most of these variations.

Burma / Myanmar Google charity donations

2008-05-09T10:00:00Z

The humanitarian crisis caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma / Myanmar.has elicited a huge amount of public sympathy and support. Yesterday we noticed that Google had taken the unprecedented step of placing a link to a special Cyclone donation service set up in conjunction with UNICEF and Direct Relief International on its main start page.

People clicking on the ‘Support victims’ link (illustrated in the screenshot above) were taken to page that enabled them to donate to either of the two charities / NGOs. Interestingly, these donations were not collected via the organizations’ own websites. Instead, people were sent directly to a Google Checkout page that allowed them to donate the gift of their choice. This appeal has obviously been successful in the UK – as the chart below illustrates, Google Checkout experienced its busiest day in months yesterday, with 33% of this traffic coming from Google’s UK and US search properties (where the donation link resides), up for 28% last week.

Coldplay Compared to NIN and Radiohead

2008-05-09T13:00:58Z

Last week we issued a news release titled Coldplay's Free Single Propels Website to #1 Online Among Bands and Artists. We found that U.S. visits to Coldplay.com increased 19 fold on the back of the band's new single, Violet Hill, being released for free online. On April 29, 2008, the day the single was released on Coldplay.com, the website ranked as the most visited website among the Bands and Artists category. A little more than 1 out of every 40 visits to Bands and Artists category went to Coldplay's website that day.

My colleague, Ben Kelly, pointed out that Coldplay is just one of many bands testing the waters with free online downloads. The record industry is at a point of major change and several established artists are experimenting with creative means of distributing and making money from music.

Last fall Radiohead released their album In Rainbows online with consumers given the opportunity to download the album at whatever price they were willing to pay. Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor produced an album for Saul Williams which was made available as a free download or a high quality version was available for $5. Nine Inch Nails have since released two albums online, Group I-IV in March and The Slip this week. Fans were able to download the first nine songs of Group IV-V for free and the new album is entirely free.

Radiohead's release was much more popular than either Coldplay's or either of the Nine Inch Nails releases, as measured by share of US Internet visits.

The other really interesting thing I noticed is that Radiohead's website traffic has maintained a much higher average ranking since the release of their album than before. This indicates that the promotion worked to bring fans to the website and that they keep coming back. Radiohead.com has maintained a position among the top 100 Bands and Artists websites each month since the release of In Rainbows (with the exception of January when the site ranked 106). Compare that with the site's ranking before the release - as illustrated in the chart below. In the past two years, the site never cracked the top 100, reaching highs of 147 in April 2007 and 106 in May 2006 and lows of 352 in October 2006, 360 in July 2007 and 359 in August 2007.

One of the key questions facing record labels and bands is how to make money in the face of peer to peer filesharing. Bands that build a direct relationship with fans may be better placed to make money from special offers such as limited edition albums and concert tickets. We'll continue to watch Coldplay's website to see if website visits remain higher after the release of the single than before.

Mobile broadband searches increasing

2008-05-08T13:01:31Z

It’s hard to open a newspaper at the moment without seeing an advert for mobile broadband services - from both carriers, such as Three, Vodafone and T-Mobile, and independent retailers such as Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U. The advertising seems to have worked at increasing awareness: as you can see from the chart below, searches for the term ‘mobile broadband’ have increased significantly over the last six months.

It’s interesting to compare the volume of searches for ‘mobile broadband’ with those for the more generic term ‘broadband’. Searches for the latter have been declining since January, while searches for the former have been increasing. Of course, the broader term ‘broadband’ remains more popular, particularly when you look at the breadth of terms. For example, for the 4 weeks ending May 3rd, there were 10, 736 searches containing the term ‘broadband’, whereas there were only 923 containing ‘mobile broadband’. There is some double counting here - all of those 923 ‘mobile broadband’ terms are also included in the ‘broadband’ number. But, even after they are taken out, there are still 9.813 non-mobile ‘broadband’ terms, over 10 times the number of ‘mobile broadband’ terms.

Search term breadth is also a good way of measuring the maturity of a term. The more familiar people are with a word or phrase, the wider the variety of terms they use to search for it - at least until the popularity decrease. Comparing the breadth of searches for ‘mobile broadband’ now with 6 months ago, it’s clear that the phrase is becoming more familiar and people are searching on a wider variety of ‘mobile broadband’ terms. For the 4 weeks ending November 3rd 2007 there were 427 searches containing ‘mobile broadband’, but this figure has now more than doubled to 923. Another sign of maturity for a popular generic term such as ‘mobile broadband’ is that affiliates and comparison sites are picking up a significant amount of traffic from the term. As you can see from the table below, almost half of traffic from people searching for ‘mobile broadband’ for the 4 weeks ending May 3rd went to these types of sites.

It’s also interesting to see how these affiliates are picking up traffic from the term. Broadband Store, currently top of the rankings, is a generalist broadband site and is currently bidding heavily on the term: 96.9% of its ‘mobile boradband’ traffic came from paid search over the last 4 weeks. On the other hand, specialist site Mobile Broadband Genie – currently second in the rankings – has clearly optimized itself for the term. Just 0.7% of its ‘mobile broadband’ traffic came from paid search over the last 4 weeks. The site's overall paid search rate is just 3%, and its top 10 searches include key terms such as ‘compare mobile broadband’ and ‘best mobile broadband’, as well a number of branded terms.

Branded search is currently very important in the mobile broadband market, especially considering Google’s recent trademark changes in the UK. We looked at the top 100 search terms for the last 4 weeks containing the phrase ‘mobile broadband’, and categorized them into 5 categories. The chart below illustrates the volume of searches for each of these 5 categories and, as you can see, just over a third of search volume for these top 100 terms was branded in nature. Just under a half were for generic terms such as ‘mobile broadband’, ‘3g mobile broadband’ and ‘mobile broadband uk’.

The other categories are also interesting. The most popular price / comparison searches related to ‘pay as you go’, ‘compare’ and ‘review(s)’, and these are generally increasing. On the other hand, the number of technical terms - which include terms such as ‘coverage’, ‘laptop’ and ‘usb’ - is on the decline, perhaps a reflection of the maturity of the market. The smallest category relates to overseas usage, but again these are new terms that have emerged over the last few months. There were 5 such terms within the top 100, including ‘mobile broadband france’, ‘mobile broadband abroad’ and ‘mobile broadband spain’.

Price conscious consumers seeking deals online

2008-05-08T16:35:22Z

On Sunday I presented at the eMetrics Industry Insights Day on high-level Internet behavioral trends. One trend that I discussed is the rise of consumers using the Internet to save money (even more so than usual!) through searches for coupons, visitation of coupon websites, and usage of price-comparison tools.

The market share of visits for a custom category of 11 printable coupon websites is up 85% for the week ending May 3, 2008 as compared to the same week last year. While these websites represent a small percentage when compared to all Internet activities, they offer a good opportunity to influence offline sales for purchases – particularly for companies that sell consumer packaged goods. Visitors to the websites are also spending more time looking for coupons - the average visit time to the category was 6 minutes and 14 seconds (for the week ending May 3, 2008), up from 4 minutes and 29 seconds one year ago.

Searches for the generic term ‘coupons’ are up 45% for the week ending May 3, 2008, compared to the same timeframe in 2007. Not surprisingly, 45% of the searches for coupons referred the traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Among the top ten searches for ‘coupons’, the most popular words included in the queries were ‘grocery’, ‘printable’ and ‘free’ during the same timeframe. The top branded coupons being searched are Pizza Hut, Target, and Dell.

Comparison shopping engines also benefit from tightening budgets as consumers compare prices and availability. The market share of visits to the CSEs increased 75% for the week ending May 3, 2008 as compared to the same timeframe last year. Last month, April 2008, the top product categories to receive referrals from the CSEs were House & Garden, Apparel and Appliances & Electronics.

Miley Cyrus Vanity Fair Photos Drive Huge Traffic Spike

2008-05-01T13:54:30Z

The controversial photo spread of 15 year old Miley Cyrus (aka Hannah Montana) in Vanity Fair has been causing quite a commotion in the media since last weekend. The market share of visits to Vanityfair.com increased over 20x on Monday (April 28, 2008) as critics and fans flocked to the website to see the photos for themselves. The spike for the Annie Leibovitz photos of Miley Cyrus was nearly 2x higher than the traffic for the Lindsay Lohan photos in New York magazine in February.

Searches for 'miley cyrus' also surged for the week ending April 26, 2008, jumping 2.6x the volume of the previous week. The increase in searches are also the result of racy photos of Miley that had been leaked earlier in the week in addition to the Vanity Fair photos.

The vast majority of the traffic on Monday was new to the Vanity Fair website, 98% of the visitors had not visited in the past 30 days. Google was the leading driver of traffic to VanityFair.com, followed by Yahoo! OMG & Yahoo! News. The News & Media category was a major referral source on Monday, sending 37% of the traffic stemming from the extensive coverage in all of the major news outlets over the weekend.

Grand Theft Auto 4 Set to Beat Halo 3

2008-05-01T12:49:28Z

Whatever you think about the Grand Theft Auto franchise, the latest version (Grand Theft Auto 4) of the sex, guns and crime riddled video game is set to break all sorts of industry records. It is expected that Grand Theft Auto 4 will handily beat last year's record for sales, held by Microsoft's Halo 3 - and internet search data bears that out.

We've already seen searches for Grand Theft Auto 4 overtake those for Halo 3 by 22% comparing the week before the release of both games. Comparing the share of US Internet searches for the combined "grand theft auto 4" and "grand theft auto iv" last week (week to 26th April 2007) to the share of US Internet searches for "halo 3" the week prior to that game's release (22 September 2007), searches for Grand Theft Auto 4 were 22% higher than for Halo 3.

Last week, searches for "grand theft auto 4" and "grand theft auto iv" were sending visits to gaming sites and social networks. Retailers were not among the top websites receiving traffic from searches for the game. It is interesting that the so-called "game of the year" has attracted so little attention from the big retailers. This is likely a result of the controversy surrounding the game.

The top website receiving traffic for searches for the game was Rockstar Games (the studio that produced the game). Rockstar Games saw its website traffic soar on 29th April, the day of the release. Comparing the day of release (29th April) to a week prior, visits jumped more than 4-times. The top source of traffic that day was MySpace.com. This is likely a result of fans discussing the new game on the social network in one of the many forums on the topic.

Coldplay’s website traffic surges thanks to free single download

2008-04-30T16:00:00Z

The BBC is reporting that there has been “massive demand” for Coldplay’s new single, Violet Hill, which has been made available as a free download from the band’s website. Our Internet usage data backs this up - as you can see from the chart below, UK Internet visits to Coldplay’s official homepage soared yesterday. The website was the most visited in our Music – Bands and Artists category, receiving almost 1 in 5 visits.

Last year Radiohead released their album In Rainbows via a free download and experienced a similar peak in traffic to Coldplay. However, for a band that are sometimes derided as Radiohead-lite by critics, it’s interesting to see that Coldplay’s launch seems to have been slightly more successful in terms of driving traffic to their website. Fans requesting the free single are emailed a link for download and, as a result, the most popular downstream site from www.coldplay.com yesterday was Windows Live Mail. In fact, 22.8% of people visited a webmail service after visiting Coldplay’s site yesterday.

London Mayoral elections update

2008-04-30T11:00:00Z

Last week we analyzed UK Internet traffic relating to the London Mayoral elections. With only one day of campaigning left, I wanted to provide the latest data. The chart below illustrates the daily Internet traffic to the three main candidates’ official homepages up until yesterday.

Visits to websites do not equal votes but, as you can see, visits to all three candidates’ websites have increased over the past week. Conservative Boris Johnson’s page was the most popular yesterday, followed by the incumbent Mayor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone, and then the Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick. As the chart below illustrates, Paddick remains ahead in terms of the amount of traffic received from social networks, but both Boris and Ken closed the gap last week.