Hitwise Intelligence - US

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".

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.

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.

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.

Twitter Gaining Momentum But Still Niche

2008-04-29T13:42:52Z

Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding and rescuing a US blogger). This has helped drive US Internet visits up further to the increasingly popular service. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.

As the following chart illustrates, the growth has been slow and steady with an acceleration in the past few weeks.

The chart makes the growth look impressive - and it is. However, to put things into context, the site ranked #439 among Social Networks and Forums last week and #4309 among All Categories of websites. Twitter's size is notoriously difficult to measure as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular). However, the website traffic data does give some idea of the rate of growth and also reveals that the service still hasn't reached mainstream adoption. We blogged about this last year, reaching a similar conclusion.

I looked at Hitwise clickstream data and it appears that Twitter is building on a loyal user base. The site's top sources of traffic last week were Social Networks and Forums, Email Services and Search Engines. The importance of search engine traffic has been declining over the past year. Using our new and returning visitor filter, I was able to see that 71% of visits from Search Engines are from new users compared to 33% and 38% respectively for Social Networks and Email Services. By and large, new users come from search engines whereas repeat users come from other sources. The decrease in visits from search indicates that the site is maturing - but still growing. As more and more of the user-base is made up of repeat users less and less of the traffic will come from search.

Whilst Twitter continues to be a niche website, it also continues to enjoy strong growth. Clickstream data helps us to understand that this growth is both from new users and repeat visitors. This is good news for Twitter and we'll continue to watch this site.

Internet Searches Match Decline in Existing Home Sales - Revised

2008-04-25T13:57:56Z

Legend has it that Bill Tancer (my boss) bought and sold his last house using Hitwise search data. After reading yesterday's Wall Street Journal article about the continued decline in home sales and the stabilizing of housing prices, I checked Hitwise data to see what our data says about demand for homes for sale.

The following chart compares the share of US Internet searches for "homes for sale" (the highest volume non-branded search term relating to real estate) compared with the existing home sales (based on an seasonally adjusted rate published by the National Association of Realtors. (Note the search data is based on a rolling four week average of the share of US Internet searches for the final week of each month).

I ran a correlation analysis and found a very strong (.92) correlation between existing home sales and the monthly share of US Internet searches. This is about as close to a perfect correlation as I've seen and it got me pretty excited. (Yes, I am a geek.) The correlation is unlikely to be as tight over a longer stretch and I would like to extend the analysis back 24 or 36 months. (If you know of a source for the rate of home sales going back further than 12 months, let me know.)

Even if this is over only one year, it is interesting to see how closely online demand (as measured by searches for "homes for sale") and actual sales correlate in the past year.

This tells us that internet searches for "homes for sale" match the decrease in offline demand for homes for sale . We've done some work in the past looking at how internet usage data can be used as an economic indicator. This is a one small piece of that pie.

So, how do things look for April? I looked at the weekly share of searches for "homes for sale" for March and so far in April. Things are flat. The downward slide in demand may have ended but we are unlikely to see a recovery just yet.

NOTE: I made an error when I originally posted this entry. I copied and pasted the wrong column and so confused rate of sale with price. Thank you to Matt at Inman for gently pointing out my error. My bad... I did not find the same strong correlation between housing prices and internet searches. The correlation was .68 between searches for "homes for sale" and the median housing price and .69 for average housing prices.

Going green for Earth Day

2008-04-22T21:00:06Z

Today is Earth Day, so it seems appropriate to look at the consumer sentiment around one of the most popular marketing trends right now - 'going green'. I started with some of the basics to see what are the most common search queries including the word green. When narrowing this down to the relevant terms, I noticed that searches on the term ‘go green’ spiked 12x higher for the week ending April 12, 2008. Much of this traffic spike originated with specific programs: one is called the ‘Go Green Initiative’, a website for a group promoting environmentally-friendly schools and another is ‘Go Green’, a website dedicated to a commuter challenge. For ‘going green’, the top recipient of traffic is a website called ‘The Green Guide’ from National Geographic which provides content for environmentally-aware consumers.

The majority of consumers performing ‘green searches’ are seeking information about how and why they should go green.

While to some the benefits may be obvious, not everyone is entirely convinced – especially when the cost may be higher and budgets are tightening. Content that can explain and provide a logical rationale for purchasing the products or backing a cause will become increasingly important as consumers make purchasing decisions based upon environmental issues. Based upon our search data, we see that there is plenty of interest in green initiatives (houses/homes, cars/vehicles and products – even dating websites and ‘green singles’), but make sure to communicate why they would want to ‘go green’.

Content Aggregation is King?

2008-04-18T12:58:53Z

A colleague forwarded me a fantastic article from Ad Age "It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content is King". The article is worth a read for anyone in the content business. The author, Matthew Creamer, suggests that Web 3.0 will be about monetizing the web's openness and points to examples in the news business of websites aggregating other people's content for profit. Are content aggregators in fact growing in popularity? The author cites Michael Wolff of Newser: "The space is heating up". According to internet usage data, is it?

To continue with the example of the News and Media sector, I looked at the top websites in that category based on share of US Internet visits last week. Yahoo! News was the #1 News and Media website last week and Google News ranked #5. The fact that these two websites rank so highly indicate that there is demand for news aggregators. (Yes, I know that Yahoo! employs a journalist so it is not only a news aggregator but most of the content of the website is taken from other sources so I am counting it as a news aggregator here). Among the top 100 News and Media websites, I found 8 news aggregators, including Yahoo! News, Google News, AOL News and Topix

Visits to these 8 news aggregators grew 11% year on year last week. So yes, content aggregation is increasing in popularity, using website visits as the gauge of popularity. But, the News and Media category as a whole also grew last year - up 10% year on year last week. Looking back two years, visits to the 8 News Aggregators is up 23% and visits to the News and Media category are up 11%.

Growth in visits to the top news aggregators and the top content creators varies widely. Yahoo! News and Google News, the top two News Aggregators grew 8% and 21% respectively year on year last week. Visits to CNN and MSNBC both declined year on year last week, while visits to New York Times, Fox News and Drudge all increased.

Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create.

Search & Social Networks neck & neck for video referrals

2008-04-16T20:56:02Z

Online video is a hot topic these days with new entrants coming online (e.g. PluggedIn) and out of beta (e.g. Hulu) every day. We are seeing users spend a bit more more time with the video websites, spending an average of 16 minutes and 12 seconds for the week ending April 12, 2008 as compared to 15 minutes and 14 seconds during the same week last year. One interesting trend that I have noticed is that search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic. Last week (ending April 12, 2008) the share of upstream traffic from search increased 35% over the same week the previous year, while the referred traffic from social networks declined 20%.

So who accounts for the majority of traffic sent to video websites? MySpace, Google, and Yahoo! - each of which own & operate video properties. The share of traffic referred by Google (up 44%) and Yahoo! (up 13%) to the video category increased for the week ending April 12, 2008 when compared to the same week last year. While MySpace accounted for the largest share of referred traffic, there was a 25% decline when compared to the same week during the previous year.

Universal and blended search providing more prominent video results may be one of the reasons for the growth in search-referred traffic. Another driver for this change in referral behavior may be the shifting demographics as video websites attract a more mainstream audience. The traffic to YouTube demonstrates a good example - for the 4 weeks ending April 14, 2007, 30% of their traffic was aged 18-24. This has declined to 21% for the 4 weeks ending April 12, 2008, with the share of traffic being more evenly represented across all age groups. While social networks are no longer only the playground of the young, the majority of the audience (47%) is under the age of 35.

Any other thoughts or theories? i am sure specific content could also play a significant role in the referral sources and demogrphics as well.

And, Happy Birthday to FunnyorDie.com who turned 1 year old today!

UPDATE:

Agreed - the space is difficult to classify because there is significant overlap between the video destinations and the search engines and/or social networks. The broad distribution of video across various websites such as blogs, etc. also muddies the waters.

I would also absolutely agree that YouTube itself also serves as a vertical search engine, but it is still worth noting that there is an increasing amount of traffic that is coming to online video websites from search. For example, while YouTube is a well known brand and video destination - there is still a significant amount of traffic coming to YouTube via search engines - 30% in March 2008, up from 19% in March 2007.

American Airlines Cancelled Flights and Social Networks

2008-04-15T14:07:07Z

Last week, American Airlines was forced to cancel thousands of flights for maintenance to comply with FAA safety inspections. As a result, visits to www.aa.com reached their highest peak of the past twelve months, up 9% week on week and up 25% compared with a year earlier.

Yesterday, I looked at Hitwise clickstream data to see where people were going after visiting AA.com. My hunch was that people would visit other airline websites to look for alternate flights. My hunch proved wrong. We actually saw a decrease in traffic from AA.com to Commercial Airlines, Travel Agencies and Destinations & Accommodation websites. Instead, consumers were going from AA.com to websites for Email Services, Social Networks and News and Media.

While we saw a 12% decrease in downstream visits from AA.com to Travel websites, we saw a 19% increase in visits to News and Media websites, 13% increase to Email Services and a 74% in visits to Social Networking and Forums.

The American Airlines website asked customers who were inconvenienced by the canceled flights to send an email to request compensation. This likely accounts for the increase in visits to Email Services.

The increase to social networks is most interesting. MySpace was the #15 website visited after AA.com last week, up from #30 the week before. Last week 1 in 30 visits to AA.com left to go to a social network. This serves as a good reminder that customers broadcast their experience to friends. How American handled the cancellations and how they continue to handle claims is sure to be broadcast online - and affect their brand.

Coachella traffic turning to Ticketmaster as festival draws near

2008-04-11T20:56:59Z

On Wednesday, everyone that is heading out to the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in two weeks received the news of a surprise addition to the line-up – Prince. Coachella is always surrounded by rumors about the line-up and potential to almost impossible reunions, such as The Smiths, before the official announcements are made in January. Every year, fans debate and dispel rumors regarding which bands & artists will play the festival out in Indio, CA on blogs, message boards, and MySpace. The promoters also always fuel the fire by waiting to add a big name or two in the weeks leading up to the event. I figured that the Prince announcement, which is fairly big news for the show, might drive a large spike in traffic to the official Coachella website, but the biggest jump still happens during the initial announcement for the majority of the lineup. The news has been covered by many blogs & news outlets, so that may have been enough confirmation for many planning or contemplating attending.

Interest in tickets is high as the festival draws close & fans get closer to making a final decision about attending – 29% of the traffic from the Coachella website visited Ticketmaster immediately after for the week ending April 5th, 2008 and 36% visited for the week prior ending March 29th. Also receiving a significant share of traffic from the Coachella site was roger-waters.com, a website with details on tour dates for Roger Waters who is also performing at Coachella.

Anyone else headed out to Indio? I have decided to prioritize my love for music (especially Portishead) over the oppressive heat and attend again this year. I am trying to forget an amusing but true quote overheard during the 2004 festival – “I wish The Pixies would just play, I hate this hot place”. Let’s hope the temperature stays under 100 degrees!