One of the companies I’ve been following for a long time is Etsy.com.  Etsy.com is a website for folks selling craft items – or as they put it “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade.”  More broadly, they are referred to in the startup world as P2P commerce (person-to-person) – similar to eBay or any other site that enables person-to-person transactions with the website in the middle taking a small cut.

The press around the site has been amazing.  According to Techcrunch, “$100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008. The company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, Kalin told me.”

Continue reading “Startup-Watch: A Closer Look at Etsy.com” »

Football is in full swing as we enter the midpoint of November and are two months into the NFL season.  Many teams are still in the hunt for a playoff berth which makes for numerous exciting and must see games each weekend.  Not only are the fans of these teams enthused by this but also companies that sponsor the league. The start of the NFL season brings excitement to sponsors as this is a key time of the year to reach a vast audience with marketing and promotional materials.  One of the league’s major sponsors on a yearly basis is Visa which is hoping to use this season to further strengthen its brand name in the credit card space.

Continue reading “Visa and the NFL team up for another season” »

The Motorola Droid is here.  And though I’m a little disappointed it didn’t actually arrive via Stealth Bomber, it did come in with a bang.  From all of the buzz online and an aggressive advertising campaign, Verizon Wireless has declared the Droid as the poster child of its new line of phones running Google’s Android OS.

Speaking of Android, remember the T-Mobile G1 from last fall?  There was a ton of anticipation around the release of the G1, which was essentially the poster child of the first generation of Android phones.  How does interest in the Droid compare to interest in the G1 around launch?

Continue reading “Droid Really Does” »

Apparently October brought a lot of costume searchers online.  After several months of declining search query volumes, October query volumes ticked up 4% m-o-m. Total web search activity peaked just shy of 13 billion queries in the US.  Among the major market players nearly every engine benefitted from the lift in activity.  However behind the rising tide only one engine managed to pull ahead of the pack.

Continue reading “October Search Market Share Update: Most gain in volume but only Google gains share” »

Casinos, like many travel industries, have struggled during the recession.  To help gauge the impact, Compete analyzed traffic to its “Casinos” industry category.  Category traffic represents unique traffic across all sites in the category (over 100 in this case), meaning a person that visits more than one category site in a month is counted only once in that month’s category total.

Continue reading “Casinos Need to Continue the Digital Evolution” »

Sometimes, it seems like omniscience.  With our Ad Impact product, we’re able to measure the impact of advertising exposure on online behavior.  Did an ad lead to more visits, searches, sales?  The answer rests comfortably in Compete’s data.  This gives us an enviable perspective on how (and whether!) specific ads and ad strategies work.

But of course, it takes work and experience to turn data and information into intelligence and insights.  (Omniscience would be deadly boring, if you think about it.)  Though we’ve been doing advertising effectiveness analysis for over a year now, we’re continually learning new things about online advertising.  The newest learning?  The time-honored concept of “advertising decay” is a myth.

Continue reading “The Myth of Advertising Decay” »