For me, one of the most exciting shows of the winter season (I still can’t believe Nip/Tuck is over, damn you writers strike!) was NBC’s remake of popular game show American Gladiators. This was very exciting for many Americans, who felt like anyone could compete (like bowling) and that it embodied many aspects of the American Dream (work with me here). The media spend for the launch of this show was massive (I think I saw a super bowl ad?) and I believe it was a television success, but it sure did send internet surfers for a loop. At the time of the show (not anymore) I assume that NBC was unable to purchase the domain americangladiators.com and was forced to bury its content deep on the NBC home page. In the months leading up to the launch of the show, (October and November 2007) more than 3x as many search terms lead to that domain where users were greeted with an “American Gladiators 2008 – Coming soon” picture that looked like it was straight out of the Nintendo Entertainment System and no link to the NBC site. On average during the first season just over ¼ of all traffic to the Gladiator content on the NBC website came from search.

Once people find the website, the most popular thing for them to do, of course, is view the photos and bios of the steroid freaks… I mean peak conditioned athletes who call themselves gladiators. (Please don’t hurt me.) The top viewed profiles for the female gladiators were Crush (50%) who seems so sweet and innocent until she hits you upside the head with a pugel stick and Helga (44%) who looks like she should wear the Viking helmet on Flavor of Love season 39. For the male gladiators, the Wolf man ties with Titan both at 41% of profile surfers checking them out. Toa, who mimics New Zealand Haka war dances before events, trails them both with 34%. The interesting part comes when you break down which photo galleries people view. Over the three months of the first season almost 80% of all photo gallery traffic viewed photos of Crush. To be fair, she was the featured gladiator towards the end of the season and we don’t blame you for wanting to get a better look. None of the male gladiators were able to muster up more than about 10% with the exception of Titan (very true to his name) at 17% and Wolf (hands down the most clinically insane gladiator) at 13%.

Of people who checked out the new versions of the arena events, the most popular (71%) was a new event, the Earthquake. This event is basically sumo wrestling on a 12-foot diameter platform suspended from the ceiling with bungee chords and the loser is the one who falls to their death, I mean the mats below. The second highest was the 2008 version of the Eliminator (61%) which has basically turned into an endurance race involving swimming under a fire (why doesn’t anyone dive instead of jumping in?) climbing up cargo nets while soaking wet and losing your front teeth when you smash face-first into the inverted treadmill. While this is the culmination of the show, the best part is watching the winner give a speech in between gasping breaths while the other competitor is still completing the course and promptly falls over behind the winner and rolls into the fetal position.

I’ll admit I was very excited for this show when it first was announced, anticipating the first few episodes. I reconnected with my inner hulk-o-maniac and I wore my PJs like it was Saturday morning eating Captain Crunch. A good time and a few laughs were had, but there is one thing that I cannot ever forgive the new producers of the show for… How could you change assault? That was the best event! It’s hard to describe the new version but it seems to be influenced by the creators of Legends of the Hidden Temple and now you have to load the weapons while dodging 100 mph tennis balls. Well, as Wolf likes to say (in-between howling at the ceiling), “I’m still hungry!” and I’m going to keep getting my American Gladiator updates from E’s “The Soup.”

I recently decided to play around with Compete’s Behavior Match™ online media planning product tool. I took on the fictional persona of a progressive lending company, Halfpipe & Hairband Lending LLC., which is trying to target the disenfranchised younger generations dealing with the shocking realization that you actually have to pay back student loans and that buying/maintaining a house is expensive. ”Bummer dude!”. For those who are not familiar with Behavior Match™, the idea is to watch all the websites your segment visits for a given month and determine the best places to find them. Below is a quick example of one of the reports generated by Behavior Match™.

The question remains; where will H&H Lending find great advertising opportunities online to reach these Gen-Y and Gen-X credit seekers? We will start with seniority and the findings for Generation-X users (defined as age 28 -40). Here are some great sites where credit seeking prospects are over-indexing:

• One of the highest sites to over-index was an Australian gambling site which allows US citizens the ability to ”legally” bet (unless they actually win big and get caught) called lasseters.com.au. This website over-indexed by 950, which can be read as, Gen-X credit seekers are 9.5x more likely to visit this site than the average web surfer.
• It looks like those drug commercials with their vivid imagery of a life made more beautiful has a big effect on the Gen-X’ers. In July, weight loss drug sites like zoeta.com, encouraged large volumes of web traffic to their home page.
• Possibly one of the largest missed opportunities, and my personal favorite, comes from the website western.goldbucklenetwork.com. This may be the perfect time to reconnect with the old west enthusiast inside all of us because 22.5% of the Gen-X segment will never forget the Alamo.

Alright, enough about the people pushing to be king of the hill; it’s now time to tap into the vigorous youth of Generation Y (defined as ages 18-27):

• From shopping, entertainment, celebrity gossip and social networking, it is not surprising to see a huge over-index for online dating sites. The top domain for September was dateroad.com, and the Gen-Y segment were 15x more likely to visit this website than the average internet surfer.
• Mid-twenties is about the time you realize that all those frivolous charges you jammed on your credit card in college are starting to catch up with you. Many Gen-Y surfers concerned with their credit over-indexed on sites such as requestcredit.com and mycredittoday.com.
• For the Gen-Y guys, it clearly showed that no one is immune to a ”too good to be true” deal on the internet with 16.5% of the segment heading to footballjersey4free.com. Similarly, August marked the highest over-index for victoriassecret.com. Does anyone remember the promotion that month? My copy of the catalog always goes missing… At any rate, there is no doubt that Gen-Y is trying to look good for their internet dates.

There were also some interesting high-level findings to take away from the study.

All the sites mentioned in this blog are within the top 50 over-indexed domains, you really don’t have to look hard to find good sites you may not have heard of or considered.

• Gen-Y credit seekers are more in line with their 20-something syndrome and are spending the bulk of their time online looking for dates, worrying about their credit score and getting fresh new threads (honestly, who shops in person these days?).
• The other big takeaway was some troubling insight into the minds of the Gen-X’ers. When it comes to credit seekers, Gen-X is about three steps away from their midlife crisis. They are visiting sites that cater to the use of gambling, quick fix health pills, 10-gallon hats, home improvements and the desperate need for quick money right now!

From all of us here at Halfpipe and Hairband Lending LLC., we are proud to announce that integrating some of these websites into our marking mix helped Q4 close with the biggest gains for personal lending accounts in the 6-month history of our fictitious company! We would like to wish all Gen-X and Gen-Y credit seekers a speedy getaway from student loans, home improvement projects that don’t result in home destruction and plenty of time to watch old western films in the center console of their brand new Corvette.

Believe it or not, based on the top 100 domains (unique visitors) FanFiction.net has the fourth highest average time spent per user. That’s right, they beat out Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Only three sites rank higher; the almighty time wasting gaming site, Pogo.com (number one), and the two hottest dating sites (so I hear) on the net; manhunt.net and adam4adam.com. Coming in at a close number five is another gaming site, runescape.com and then finally, Myspace. I’d like to once again send my condolences to Tom on his big loss for the coveted ‘most devoted internet junkie website of the year award.’

What is FanFiction.net? I had honestly never heard of it until it broke the top 30 for attention recently (now at number 28) and I did a little digging. Founded in 1988 by computer programmer Xing Li this website allows users to post their fiction on a myriad of topics ranging from anime to movies and if that’s not enough, “Misc.” It’s not hard to see why people spend so much time on this website, once you read one post about the highly anticipated Edward Scissorhands II (Johnny Depp declined comment) you will be hooked. When I say hooked, I mean it: The average user spends over seven and a half hours on this website a month and logs in more than 34 times.

Following a decade of “Blockbuster: Part II,” we have FanFiction.net - a site that finally allows fanatics of beloved media classes to live out their ultimate fantasy of having Han Solo navigate the Starship Enterprise through the Twilight Zone. That’s not to say that there is free reign on this site to post anything your heart desires; on September 12, 2002 all material rated NC-17 was banned from the website. This did not seem to have much effect on traffic to the website as almost 2,000 people posted their opinions on South Park. Although, it may not seem like a big deal to many people, I take comfort in knowing that playing games, looking for love and stalking your old acquaintances can sometimes be less enticing then letting your true feelings about Dirty Dancing finally come out. Cheers to you, Fanfiction.net, your clean site design with only one banner add and unadulterated freedom of expression has catapulted your users into a class almost of their own.

Love her or hate her, like most celebrities, America has a morbid fascination with the trials and tribulations of Britney Spears. Through the good times and the bad, while PR firms go mad, without seatbelts or hair, entering rehab or needing an au pair, Britney is still here. Now, say what you will about the Mousekateer gone… well, wild. The fact remains, the people want to know what exactly Britney is up to (or what she could possibly be thinking). So let’s take a trip down memory lane in the shoes of Britney Spears, as we look at her web traffic over the last year.

The quick take away from this graph is that a few big events managed to drive explosive search activity. I started to wonder - Was her VMA performance scandalous enough to get more “curiosity seekers” searching for pictures of her than the droves that came out to do so during her “no underwear” phase in December? Turns out that it was a really close battle but once again, celebrity nudity beats out even the worst performance.

I also dug deeper into the actual terms driving these searches to examine the peaks and let’s just say there were a lot of reoccurring themes. But where are these 2 million people going after they search? I took 4 of the top 10 Britney terms over the last three months and used Search Analytics to find the top 5 domains visited after searching on these terms.

That is a lot of searchers about just one person, and - this may seem shocking - not many people were looking for her music. The term ‘Britney Spears Lyrics’ is the 19th most searched term and the word ‘music’ doesn’t show up until about the 208th. In fact out of the top 50 Britney Spears related search terms, only 8 are G-rated (2 of which are misspellings), 4 include ‘VMA,’ 4 are about her shaved head, 3 include Paris Hilton and the rest are… well, dirty. And that’s just the top 50.

All in all, we have seen 13,534 unique queries, of these 7% misspelled “Britney” or “Spears” or both and 26% of all queries include one of these words: nude, pictures, topless, crotch, or sex. I was going to include other words in this analysis, such as “underwear,” but I figured someone could legitimately be looking up the news story (yeah right). It’s been a long hard road for the star but I think everyone waits with great trepidation, wondering what she could possibly do next.

So I’m minding my own business one day on the subway and I noticed that all the iPod/iPhone/iWorld ads had been taken down (temporarily) and replaced by this weird multi color looking banner asking me if I had windorphins. Well the combination of thinking about endorphins and seeing weird colorful Dr.Mario-esque figures was compelling enough for me. I had to go visit the site just to figure out what the heck windorphins were. What I found was not immediately apparent… some pretend doctor telling me about something, but before I could hear what he had to say I had already scrolled down and clicked on a video clip. I came to find out that this was all a cleverly disguised eBay micro site that was trying to capture ‘the feeling of winning’.

I also noticed they had a contest at the bottom that you could play every day, and I knew I was a shoe in for that, so for 3 days straight I tried to pick the correct windorphin but I had no luck. Seems like a lot of other users were also trying to feel those windorpins in action; the first two weeks the average user came back and interacted more than once to try to win the contest. In week three they changed the interactive portion of the website from the contest to allow you to create your own Mr.Potato Head like windorphin and the interaction per visitor plummeted.

Judging by the amount of advertisements that bombarded Boston public transportation, I had a theory that other major cities might be experiencing the same campaign. I broke the data down by state and sure enough, the top 5 states all had major public transportation. Not surprisingly, Boston did not break the top 3 but at least we beat out Philly.

While doing my research, I stumbled upon a funny story about the site. Apparently one of the writers for the Motley Fool, Rick Aristotle Munarriz, attended a conference held by Ebay where they announced their windorphins campaign. Rich actually went home and registered windorphins.com before Ebay! He wrote a full story about it on the Fool’s website. I remember when eBay was the premier site on the web to sell your clever domain names. I wonder what price would have had eBay feverishly clicking the “Buy It Now button.”

So, I finally did it… Heavily influenced by a close friend, I broke down and made a MySpace account. This is most definitely not an uncommon occurrence as there are about elevendy-billion profiles on the site today, but for me it is a big deal. I’ve never been a fan of social networks and their ability to let your distant acquaintances get a SnapShot ™ version of your personal life. So what is the first thing I see when I make my profile? Half of some dude’s back turned to look at me with a smile. You may know him as Tom.

After the initial wave of euphoria of having a new friend so early on in my MySpace experience had passed, I began to wonder: If Tom will be my friend, and your friend and everyone’s friend, how is that special? Not to mention that he is the one who supposedly created MySpace, the epitome of online stalking and bite-sized gossip. Immediately, I knew what I had to do… remove Tom as my friend.

That got me thinking, how many people delete Tom and how long do they wait? I took a sample of users who signed up in January and watched them through the end of March to see if and when they removed Tom from their friends list.

Continue reading “Tom Is Not My Friend” »