When Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu visited the Daily Show with John Stewart last week, he couldn’t give Stewart an honorary membership to the National Academy of Sciences, so instead Chu gave Steward a “Nerds of America Society” t-shirt. t

Secretary Chu, a Nobel Prize winner who recently joined Facebook, was on Comedy Central boosting the administration’s $60 billion investment in American clean energy and energy efficiency in front of a big, young audience eager for change.

That kind of money is no laughing matter and dozens of technology companies, from GE to Google to a spate of newly incorporated startups, are lining up to compete for their slice of the pie.

Google announced Power Meter in February to help utility companies display electricity consumption data to customers via the web. Studies have shown that when consumers have real-time data (via a smart grid or home rig), they tend to consume less electricity and save money.

Microsoft fired back in June with Hohm, which doesn’t wait for smart grid deployment to begin helping homeowners save money. Give Hohm an exhaustive set of details about your home (pun intended – an Ohm is a unit for measuring electrical current) and it returns a tailored set of energy efficiency improvement recommendations.

Companies haven’t begun marketing all this fancy new smart grid technology and data to consumers yet, but that hasn’t stopped consumers from getting increasingly interested in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Visitors to more than 50 leading energy sites like energysavers.gov and consumerenergycenter.org reached 3.5M in June, 2009, up 68% over the prior twelve months. (Note the spikes just after December and February, when temperatures drop and bills rise the fastest.)

With all of this money and interest flowing toward energy efficiency, I became curious about how people evaluate their energy consumption today. Most people purchase electricity through a utility company (although quite a few generate their own with solar panels and windmills, even selling their surplus back to the grid) and many visit their utility online to pay bills, enroll in services and research renewable and efficiency options.

The ‘green pages’ of utility company websites are one of the most significant channels for consumers to engage in renewable energy and energy efficiency. On green pages, utility customers can elect for 50% or 100% of their electricity to come from clean sources, analyze their home energy efficiency, sign up for free home energy audits and more.

To learn how effectively these green pages are at reaching and engaging energy customers, I looked at visitation to over 100 utility sites, handily listed at UtilityConnection.com. Collectively, this group received 10.7M unique visitors in June and grew 26% versus a year ago. The top 10 utility sites accounted for 57% of the total and grew 30% in June versus a year ago.

Interestingly, though, visitors to green pages at the top 10 utility sites are actually declining.

Only 2.3% of unique visitors to the top 10 utility sites visited green pages in June, down from 4.4% a year ago. In volume terms, that’s only 124K of the 6M visitors that went to PGE.com, NationalGridUS.com and other leading utility sites.

So it would seem that utilities are not doing a great job at capturing their share of rising consumer interest in renewable energy and energy efficiency. This is consistent with a recent study by Gartner, which found that “energy efficiency programs are poorly marketed by utilities.”

To anyone familiar with energy issues, this is not so surprising. That’s because government regulation too often enables utilities to earn greater revenue by selling more electricity and natural gas. Attempts to “decouple” this misaligned incentive through tax credits and legal mandates have been successful in only a few politically progressive states, like California and Massachusetts.

“This is particularly disturbing,” Earth2Tech’s Katie Fehrenbacher has written, “because it reminds me that those billions allocated from the stimulus package would be much more effective if they were being pumped into a market where all utilities had financial incentives to implement them.”

I have hope, however, that broad consumer interest in energy efficiency will continue rising, encouraged by savvy marketing from big tech and edgy startups, until less-than progressive utilities and legislatures answer their call.

Until recently, Alex was a Senior Associate with Compete’s Online Media & Search practice. He just founded EnergyTent.com to advance consumer interest in energy efficiency.

Google’s Spartan white homepage took the top spot among publisher homepages in June, with Yahoo!’s a bit behind and Facebook gaining fast. Jockeying amid major publishers has been intense this year, with MSN and AOL making concerted efforts to break their way in and up the ranks.

A few months ago we took a look at the relationship between domains and homepages, revealing that a big domain absolutely does not guarantee a big homepage.

Today we’re considering Average Page Views, which are important to publishers for a variety of reasons. For Google and Facebook, the homepage is designed to efficiently prompt the visitor to search, register or login. For Yahoo! and MySpace, homepages feature advertising, which translates directly to revenue.

The triumvirate of conventional portals (Yahoo!, MSN and AOL) had the highest Average Page Views in June. Compared to last year, MSN and AOL were up a staggering 15 and 10 views, respectively, confirming their efforts to enhance homepage engagement.

Just last week Yahoo! unveiled a new homepage with similar intent – no small undertaking, as can be seen from this great video which shows off all the smart, hard-working people at Yahoo!

The new Yahoo! Homepage has a bunch of enhanced features, including an expandable sidebar that pipes in live updates from Facebook, YouTube and many other web services. It’s early days yet, but if the new sidebar attracts users, it should boost Yahoo!’s homepage engagement. Why go to another site when a user can get all their data at Yahoo!?

Of course, this strategy has been tried before by many others like Netvibes, AOL and even Yahoo! itself with their last homepage redesign in 2007… but never has a homepage incorporated so many web services or so much from each of them.

About 8 million curious folk, or 18% of Yahoo! Homepage visitors, checked out a preview of the new homepage last week.

Last week, Compete launched Ad Impact, a new offering that measures the effectiveness of online advertising. We decided to take Ad Impact for a test drive and what better place to start than with an online ad for auto insurance.

You may recognize the character above from Progressive’s peppy TV commercials. The character’s name is Flo and it turns out she has something of a cult following.

Flo has her own unofficial fan site and Wikipedia entry. “The strange allure of the Progressive insurance girl”, as Austin360.com put it, even has Ad Age’s Bob Garfield saying she “is a weirdly sincere, post-modern Josephine the Plumber who just really wants to help.”

On June 15, Flo received premier placement on the MSN homepage, generating significant insurance shopper interest for Progressive.

Using Compete’s Ad Impact, we know that MSN homepage visitors who saw Flo’s banner ad were twice as likely to visit Progressive.com and 2.4X as likely to search using the term “Progressive” in the week after seeing her ad.

As one would expect, Ad Impact often shows lifts in viewthrough to the advertiser’s site and in brand searches from ad exposed individuals. But who are these individuals responding to Progressive Flo and what can we learn about advertising from them?

Ad Impact shows that females, ages 25 – 44 that earn $30– 60k were more likely than other demographic buckets to visit Progressive.com after seeing Flo’s ad.

A bit of internet sleuthing suggests that Flo herself fits this profile. Her MySpace page says she is 39 and I’d bet that blisteringly well-lit abstraction, the Progressive store, pays her a retail salary between $30 – 60k.

So while blogger Tim Nudd at AdFreak admits that “Dudes have a thing for Flo”, it’s really women that are demographically similar to Flo that respond to her ads, at least on MSN.

I’m not sure if Progressive was targeting women like Flo when their ad agency created her, but I’d suspect they are pleased with the results – a broadly appealing character that has won cult-like attention from men and women alike and a core constituency of women that identify with her persona.

What does $100 million advertising budget and mountains of PR get you? If you’re Microsoft launching a new search engine, the answer is becoming clearer. In its first month on the job, Bing has raised Microsoft’s search market share by 0.3pts to 6.5%. That might not seem like much, but keep in mind two key points.

First, Bing’s major gains came in the last week of June. Microsoft started TV advertising for Bing earlier in the month, but ad viewers may have taken a few exposures to get the message.

Second, June was a down month for search engines across the board. The overall search market fell by 1.7% and Google lost 0.9% query volume. The Live/Bing tag team, unlike every other search engine, served up more queries last month than it did in May – 19 million more to be exact.

In other words, Bing was the only bright spot in an otherwise rough June for search.

Bing also raised Microsoft’s rate of Sponsored Referrals to 5.6%, as expected. In June, Bing yielded 80% more “paid clicks” than MSN/Live did in May.

Let me repeat that: Bing yielded 80% more “paid clicks” last month than MSN/Live did in May. Given this fact, it’s highly likely that Bing will raise Microsoft’s overall search revenue, even though revenue per paid click may go down.

In terms of user experience, Bing has also won some high praise. Yesterday, David Pogue from the New York Times said, “In a lot of ways, Bing is better than Google.”

But praise has stopped short of handing Bing the gold in user experience, with reviewers pointing out that Bing borrows many features from Google and Ask. In a head-to-head matchup, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land wrote, “Bing isn’t 50% better than Google.”

Now everyone knows the true test of Bing begins after Microsoft’s ad campaign wraps up.

And observers are right to be skeptical. A couple of years ago, IAC also spent $100 million on advertising Ask. Today, Ask holds on to its meager market share for dear life, having slipped 13.3% over the past year.

To grossly misquote the Talking Heads, “after the money’s gone” will it be “same as it ever was”?

TMZ, which first broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death, continued to out-reach celebrity gossip rags in covering the superstar’s funereal final curtain yesterday.

TMZ was developed in-house at AOL in December, 2005, a few months after AOL acquired Jason Calcanis’ Weblogs, Inc. for $25M. The deal brought several notable blogs like Engadget, Joystiq, TV Squad and Autoblog to the massive audience at AOL.com, which had 55M UV in June and ranked as the 11th largest domain in the US.

Since 2005, TMZ and the Weblogs, Inc. properties have done fairly well in AOL’s care – all have experienced 3X growth or greater, but TMZ has been the only runaway hit.

More recently, AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong (formerly Google’s Chief of Sales) is rumored to be set to announce a renewed focus on original content like that produced by TMZ and its blog brethren.

AOL consolidated its publisher properties back in January with MediaGlow, gearing up to streamline the sales process for AOL-owned sites like PopEater.com, WalletPop.com, Fanhouse.com and AOL portal subdomains like News, Television and Shopping. MediaGlow properties (as listed on their website) reached 35M UV in June, up 30% over the past year.

Now look for Armstrong and his deal-making lieutenants to be on the lookout for other blogs and original content properties to add some wattage to the MediaGlow portfolio.

Silicon Alley Insider has already speculated on some potential acquisition targets like video producers Next New Networks and Revision3. Next New Network shows, as listed on their website, hit 175k aggregate unique visitors in June, while Revision3.com had 125K. Nearly half of both audiences also visited AOL.com in the same period.

While these numbers place them in the potential mid-ranks of MediaGlow, both could grow wildly if promoted on AOL’s homepage. Strategically, both also offer demographically-targeted shows that would appeal to wide swaths of AOL’s audience and advertisers alike.

Applying this targeting criteria to the long tail of sites in Compete’s vertical publisher categories yields some very interesting ideas that I’ll share in a future post.

An earlier version of this post was corrected to reflect TMZ’s founding status.

We saw how media attention drove Twitter’s share of searchers on the Iran Election to record heights two weeks ago. A barrage of mainstream media and blogosphere chatter swarmed the digerati’s collective consciousness, fusing their favorite techno-democratic phenom with Iranian political discontent.

Then the white glove dropped. MJ’s passing sent a megaton shock through the worldwide pop firmament of Planet Earth, rousing memories of Thriller from billions, even the Haters.

The web was not spared. Visitors shattered records Yahoo! News. Tweets swarmed across Twitter. Video streams flooded the online channels CNN and MTV. And updates exploded at Facebook. As CNN reported, “Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him.”

Michael told the Iran Election to Beat It. Over 24 times more searchers hit top search engines, news sites like CNN and the New York Times and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter on Jackson’s death than on the Iranian election shenanigans.

Where did MJ searchers go? Google. The King of Pop gave back the King of Search its crown.

But the royal succession was not without a few princely hiccups. Twitter disabled the search box and Trending Topics sidebar on profile pages for 4 hours following the “avalanche” of tweets after MJ’s death. And Google blocked MJ searches for 25 minutes, mistaking the incoming torrent as an internationally coordinated cyber-attack of zombie bots.

Fans surged to music, video and retail sites to rekindle memories of his hit songs and music videos to bid farewell to the King of Pop. Yahoo! Music led the way with 45% share of visitors, and YouTube delivered a respectable 23% share.

Meanwhile Michael was still shattering music sales records mors immatura.