Walt Disney Co. recently acquired long-time comic industry giant Marvel Entertainment Inc. for a hefty sum of $4 billion. Other than a slew of superpowers and a closet full of alter-ego costumes, what did Disney get for its money?

You’ve probably seen, or at least heard about the many Marvel comic-to-movie adaptations in recent years, including Iron Man, Spider Man and X-Men, and these blockbusters are undoubtedly a large part or what enticed Disney to buy, but we’ll take a look at what Disney has acquired online.

Marvel.com’s more than 600k Unique Visitors is just under 45% of Disney.com’s total traffic and 180k more than rival DCComics.com. Marvel’s online dominance over its rival carries over to search as well.

Even though the term ‘comic’ is included in the DC Comics brand name, Marvel edges out DC in ranking of search destinations for the term. Disney certainly isn’t paying all that money solely for Marvel’s online presence, but getting an industry-leading site in the deal strengthens Disney online portfolio.

I’m a Manchester United fan and my coworker, Marko, is a Liverpool supporter. The debate about which team is better is pretty simple (especially because United won the league this season) because it’s settled on the field. FIFA passes out a Player of the Year award every year, but that argument is a bit more subjective. Popularity isn’t necessarily proportional to talent, but they are closely related and although we may not be able to crown the best player in the world here, we can take a look at who is the most popular in the U.S. (based on visitors to popular soccer retailers online).

Andy Says: Although Man Utd. can’t officially claim Ronaldo anymore, a lot of his popularity was built while playing for the Red Devils, so I’ll count it as a win, adding Most Popular Player to the list of trophies he has brought to the team (many would argue that he brought “Most Hated Player” too).

Marko Says: It should be noted that Ronaldo was never part of Man U F.C. but rather the Manchester diving team that trains across the street. If you want to talk about proper footballers who have command of their weak side as well as respect the game, just trim that diva of an outlier off the top.

Andy Says: Now that he has officially left Manchester United anyway, I’ll refrain from defending Ronaldo (as it looked like so many opposing defenses did last season). Speaking of defending… when the U.S. defense was gift-wrapping goals in the Confederations Cup, how did Liverpool golden boy, and 6th on this list, Fernando Torres manage to get shut down?

Marko Says: I have to give it to the U.S. national team on this one. They shut down the Spanish team which had not lost a game in their previous 35 matches! Well done gents, well done Tim Howard. Although the Confederations Cup is not the most prestigious of all competitions, America and the world took notice.

It will be interesting to see if that strong showing and the interest in the big match against Mexico today will push U.S. players higher on this list than Landon Donovan at 13th and Jozy Altidore at 20th. We’ll keep an eye on the rankings leading up to next summer’s World Cup. Good luck to the U.S. today!

Similar to the fast food burger rivalries, seemingly everyone has an opinion about which pizza is the best (Papa John’s). Many take pride in finding the little mom and pop shops that have the best sauce (Fortunato’s, Baltimore), but when it comes to the national level, three establishments have outpaced the rest; Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Papa John’s.

Monthly unique visitor traffic to these three sites remains relatively close, but aside from a short fluctuation late last year the pecking order has been set. So we look to where sites often turn to when trying to make up ground on the competition - search.

Papa John’s falls back to the pack when it comes to search, with sites like Yahoo! and Facebook ranking ahead of them. It’s not from lack of trying (a.k.a. paid search) though - 30% of Papa John’s search referrals in June came from paid clickthroughs, as opposed to 21% for Pizza Hut’s and 11% for Domino’s. Maybe people just don’t agree with me that better ingredients mean better pizza, or maybe convenience is king and the 2,600-plus Papa John’s locations in the U.S. just can’t compete with Pizza Hut’s more than 6,200.

I’ve am a long-time member of Blockbuster’s online rental program and have been shouting from my soapbox that its in-store exchange policy makes the Blockbuster program a better alternative than Netflix. My argument took a hit recently when I was welcomed by a sign on the door of my local Blockbuster store that read, “50% off all movies. No rentals at this location.” This is the second time in the past year that I’ve gone to exchange a movie at a Blockbuster brick-and-mortar and found it closed or closing.

Without stores at which to do in-store exchanges, it doesn’t seem like there is much incentive to choose Blockbuster over Netflix. There has always been a loyal Netflix following online, but just how dominant are they now?

In the last two years, Netflix has gone from just over double Blockbuster’s traffic to almost eight and a half times as much. In fact, nearly as many unique visitors went to the member’s section to manage their Netflix Watch Now online viewing queue as went to the entire Blockbuster site last month. Unique Visitor traffic numbers are only part of overall site performance, but engagement metrics tell the same story.

In the past Blockbuster had kept pace with Netflix in terms of user engagement, but it seems that Netfix has pulled away recently in these categories as well. Over the past two years Visits per Person has gone from a back and forth battle between the two sites to yet another run-away victory, with Netflix users going to the site one and a half times more than Blockbuster users. Blockbuster still held the advantage in Average Stay as recently as March, but the sites have gone in opposite directions since then, with Netflix users staying nearly 3 minutes more per visit than Blockbuster.

Netflix completes the overall head-to-head dominance by grabbing over 33% of search referrals for the term ‘movie rental,’ compared to Blockbuster’s 19%. Redbox.com also enters the conversation here, with a solid 13% despite not actually renting movies online.

Now with no convenient place to exchange my movies in person, I may have to finally give in and join the nearly 20 million strong at Neflix.

When an extra minute or two checking around for a coupon code could save you money on an online purchase, it certainly seems worth the time. I can’t remember the last time I bought something online without checking for a coupon code first, and I’m just one of 32 million consumers in the U.S. that visited a coupon site last month (up from 28 million a year ago).

Compete’s recently released list of the top 10 Coupon and Deal sites shows a changing landscape over the past year as economic woes have weighed on consumers’ willingness to make purchases.

Among the top sites, Coupons.com is still the clear-cut leader, however the gap has closed since last year and the big mover on the list is RetailMeNot.com. RetailMeNot’s collaborative approach to coupon and deal hunting has helped it stand out in a crowded field of coupon sites and made it top-of-mind for shoppers. Consumers not only find deals on the site, but rate each deal code and share what they find, driving the best deals to the head of the list. Over 50,000 consumers share coupon codes on the site each month. In addition, the site jumped from sixth to third in our rankings over the past year, with nearly 200% growth in visitors. RetailMeNot captured 18% of all searches for the term ‘coupon code’ over the past three months, 4X higher than its closest competitor (couponcabin.com).

Many of the blockbuster movies this year come with an established fan base from another medium, but Star Trek is unique in that its the sub-culture runs so deep that the Trekkie name has become has become common knowledge. I was curious to see if this strong group of followers was affecting where people are finding information about the movie.

While official channels, social media sites and and major movie online destinations make up the majority of the list, a couple fan-based sites show up in the top ten, something we didn’t see as much of couple months ago for Watchmen. Both memory-alpha.com and trekmovie.com were started by fans and have no official ties to the movie or the series. Movie marketers would be well-served to tap into unofficial but influential sites like these for future releases with a similar following.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, one of the season’s first blockbusters, was released last week and provides a good point for comparison, both because of release date and the established group of fans from the X-Men comics and earlier films.

Considering that Wolverine opened with over $85 million in its first weekend and was only able to slightly overtake Star Trek in Reach for the official websites during the week of its launch (and still a week before Star Trek’s), it looks like the Trekkies and other movie-goers could make this upcoming opening weekend an epic one.