While looking at Boston.com the other day it was impossible not to notice the main headlines — gold has reached record highs, the dollar continues to fall against foreign currencies, the market is down big-time and of course, gas prices continue to climb to record levels with some analyst speculating $4/gallon by this summer. Every day we read different articles about how to save at the pump. From fuel saving due to what some call “hypermiling,” meaning to drive your vehicle in such a way to achieve as much as 100 miles/gallon or more, to becoming more thrifty at the supermarket in order to retain more money for the growing gas prices, one can’t help but be affected.

This got me thinking… With all the focus on fuel savings and more and more car companies launching hybrid models, the top tier luxury/supercar brands must be taking a bath. Well in fact, the opposite is true. Lamborghini, Bentley and Rolls-Royce have not only shown significant increases in online activity but also achieved record sales last year. Bentley sales were just over 10 thousand units, up 7% year-over-year. Lamborghini was up 15% year-over-year with slightly more than 2,400 units sold. And Rolls-Royce showed the most improvement year-over-year, up 25% with 1,010 units sold.

Apparently the demand for these vehicles is only increasing. In the U.S., Lamborghini’s largest market, they have more than doubled their number of dealerships in less than two years from 14 to 30. At the same time Rolls-Royce and Bentley continue to break into new markets with great success. 2007 marked Bentley’s first year in the Korean market selling 100 cars.

So while most of us are worried about the possibility of a recession or even depression and constantly complaining while experiencing the much overused phrase “Pain at the Pump,” there is obviously a select group willing to shell out large sums of money for one of these high end, gas guzzling automobiles. With sales at record highs and website traffic increasing dramatically monthly and annually it’s nice to see at least some of us get to drive a supercar!

For those of us who spend our careers immersed in digital marketing and all things “online,” a live webcast doesn’t seem like big news. So when Oprah announced a live web event as part of her book club it didn’t seem like a huge deal to me (admittedly, I’m not one of her regular fans). What happened may surprise you. It surprised me!

The number of visitors to Oprah.com topped five million in February, making her site one of the top 225 ranked sites in the United States. To put this in perspective, more people went to check out Oprah.com in February than the popular NASCAR, eHarmony, Fidelity, Barnes and Noble or Walgreens sites.

Even for Oprah, more than five million monthly visitors represented large month-over-month and year-over-year growth. The site traffic jumped 69 percent from January 2008 and was more than 50% above its February 2007 level. So what contributed to these gains? Was the live web event featuring the bestselling author Eckhart Tolle a factor? The answer to that question is YES.

• Visitors to Oprah.com held steady between 800,000 and 1,000,000 per week in January. Then on January 30, “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle was named to Oprah’s Book Club selection. In February traffic to the site increased dramatically following the selection and announcement of a live web event, topping 2 million per week more than once.
• Buoyed by the publicity, traffic to Eckhart’s site surged in February to more than 70,000 the week prior to the first class. Quite a jump from a scant 2,000 people per week at the beginning of the year!
• From February 24 through March 1, additional data reveals that approximately 50% of the 1.7 million Oprah.com visitors went to the Live Web Event Registration page.

After the first class, more than 300,000 people showed interest in (re)watching the webcast. Reportedly, demand was so high for the initial event however, that some people had difficulty logging in. This trouble may have influenced post-event interest.

The appeal of the live web event becomes even more evident when we take a daily view. The total time people spent on Oprah.com as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users more than doubled on the night of the first live event.

Oprah’s live event with author Eckhart Tolle is a series of 10 weekly classes. Stay tuned to see if Oprah’s “students” remain interested or if they become drop-outs as the class wears on. A sneak peak at Compete’s daily Attention metric through March 10 (the date of the second class) reveals that interest may have waned quickly, and then bumped up again slight for the second session.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

We all know this person: constantly showing up in your Facebook news feed with status updates, added friends and wall comments. The “stickiness” of most social sites is unrivaled by any other type of site, a point that the behavior of hardcore members really drive home. These “Social Addicts” check their beloved site constantly and have helped encourage similar behavior from other users.

Knowing how different Facebook and MySpace are in terms of design, functionality and usage, how much do “addicts” of these social networks differ? You may have read some of our posts on BehaviorMatch before, but this analysis essentially highlights the online behavior that is specific to a particular group of users. This analysis is designed to help with media buying, but in the case of social networks it can also help define the psychographic makeup of the group, and how “addicts” generally use their favorite social site.

The table below shows the sites that MySpace and Facebook Addicts* visited substantially more than the average internet user. So what do these users do when they aren’t getting their social network fix?

• To be fair, the MySpace list is filtered. An untouched list of the top twenty most popular websites among MySpace addicts would consist entirely of sites focused on modifying personal profile pages.
• After scrubbing out a majority of the sites focused on MySpace layouts, it seems that the hardcore users of this MySpace are still primarily teens, as sites focused on proms (meprom.com), shoes (kicksaholic.com), and Alternative music (warpedtour.com) bubble to the top of the list.
• It’s no surprise that hardcore Facebook users have a high affinity to some sites supporting Facebook applications, but the applications they interact with the most is telling of their online interests. It appears gaming (socialgn.com), dating (sexappealhq.com), music (garageband.com), and interacting with friends (quizapps.com) are all a core online activity to Facebook addicts.

MySpace and Facebook are two well established sites with massive audiences. Twitter, on the other hand, is a much smaller, growing site devoted to communication. In some ways it could be seen as the direction the social web is heading…and it’s also highly addicting. So what do the sites that Twitter addicts visit say about the future of the web, and how does this compare to the two more traditional social web players?

Comparing the three, some really compelling trends are visible. While it’s not shocking that sites like twhirl.org (a site that offers “tweet” enabling software) rise to the top of the list, some of the others show that these users are most interested in socializing.

• MySpace addicts are somewhat vain – focusing heavily on establishing and fine tuning their online personas by customization of their personal profiles
• Facebook addicts focus more on engagement – interacting with applications, music and people both on and off the platform
• Twitter addicts are most interested in fostering communication and exploration – sites that allow a user to understand what their contacts are doing, provide a platform for content discovery and encourage users to actively participate are the most likely places to find hardcore twitterers.

* In this analysis Facebook and MySpace addicts were defined as any user who logged into either site at least 21 days in February. Twitter addicts were defined as anyone who went to their twitter home page at least 10 times in a month. The less stringent qualifications for Twitter addicts was necessary because of the multiple channels used to access the site (mobile, desktop applications).

The rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees is certainly one of the oldest and most heated in all of sports. Not only do the two teams fiercely compete on the field, but they also frequently engage in a war of words off the field. The latest illustration that there is no love lost between these two teams were the comments made by Hank Steinbrenner, Senior Vice President of the Yankees and son of the team’s principal owner George Steinbrenner, in a recent interview with the New York Times Play Magazine.

When asked about the Red Sox, Steinbrenner stated: “Red Sox nation? What a bunch of (expletive) that is. That was a creation of the Red Sox and ESPN, which is filled with Red Sox fans. Go anywhere in America and you won’t see Red Sox hats and jackets, you’ll see Yankees hats and jackets. This is a Yankee country. We’re going to put the Yankees back on top and restore the universe to order.” John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, responded by sending Steinbrenner an official membership card for Red Sox Nation.

After reading Steinbrenner’s comments I wondered whether he was right that Yankee nation was larger than Red Sox nation. It didn’t seem efficient to go around the country counting the number of Yankee and Red Sox hats and jackets, so I decided to analyze online consumer behavior to uncover which “nation” is truly dominant. The chart below illustrates the number of monthly unique visitors to each team’s website from March 2007 through February 2008.

A couple of things jump out from this chart.

• First, the unique visitors to each team’s home page are remarkably similar with an average monthly difference in traffic of only 89,000 people.
• Second, the Yankees generated more unique visitors than the Red Sox in nine of the last twelve months (as a Red Sox fan this pains me to admit).
• Third, the post-season results of each team had a direct impact on site traffic. The Red Sox site steadily garnered increased monthly traffic from August to October, as the team went deep into the playoffs culminating with a World Series championship. The Yankees site, in contrast, experienced a downward trend in visitors during the same period, as the NY squad lost in the first round of post season play (much to the despair of all of us up here in Boston).

So what does this all mean to our original question of which “nation” is bigger? It looks to me that the “nations” are approximately the same size, with potentially a slight edge to the Yankees in a world where both teams are performing equally on the field. However, given that the Red Sox have won two World Series rings in the past four years and the Yankees have not won a championship since 2000, we are in the golden age of Red Sox baseball. Thus, at least during the post-season, Red Sox nation is BIGGER than Yankee nation. For better or worse, those pink hats will not go away until the Sox stop winning championships.

Every single year that I have prepared my own tax return (yes, I still do my own taxes), I’ve prepared them the weekend before they have been due. Examining traffic to IRS.gov for the past few years, it looks like my tax filing behavior may not be the norm!! –

My observations:

• Traffic to IRS.gov peaks in February each year (and not in April :)
• After several, mostly flat years, more people are visiting IRS.gov this year. However, my guess is that some of this increase was likely driven by people curious about the Economic Stimulus Payments. Compared to February ‘07, traffic is up 27% this year. According to Compete data, the 24.4 million unique visitors in Feb ‘08 was also the biggest month ever for IRS.gov (data goes back to 2001).

With our headquarters sitting in the middle of Boston, it’s hard to wander the city today without catching the aroma of corn beef, the sound of distant bag pipes or the sight of greens ranging from forest to lime. While we can’t share the entire experience with our site visitors, we can celebrate with a little green: money.

In celebration of St. Patrick’s day, Compete is bringing back it’s Two-for-One credit sale, driving our prices down to less than $1 per report. From now until 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday March 20th, Compete.com is doubling the total number of credits in our standard, plus, and premium credit packages. If you missed the sale last time, make sure to take advantage of this great promotion.

Use your enhanced access to get more out of Compete Search Analytics:

• Get extend lists of up to 100,000 keywords driving traffic to a domain.
• Run reports on a wider set of your competitors.
• Gain a better understanding of how people search within your industry
• Find out who you are competing against for all of your keywords .

Please note, this deal will be available until 11:59 PM EST, March 20th. If you have any questions, please contact searchanalytics.compete.com