Well The day has finally arrived, while I am only months away from my 10 year high school reunion. My latest accomplishment pales in comparison. Today marks the 10 year anniversary of my active relationship with Hotmail.com (please hold your applause to the end). Flying the face of a time where email was based on POP3 and ISPs, before exchange servers brought email dangerously close to the finger tips of my smart phone. There was Hotmail, maybe not the only free company around, but certainly the coolest politically correct named web based email service. I remember the day clearly, I signed up sitting in my high school computer lab surrounded by 6 out of 10 working IBMs, in between my peers avidly engaged in LAN games of Descent 3, Starcraft and Duke Nukem 3D.

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It is restaurant week here in Boston, a two week promotion to encourage diners to try out someplace new. Offered twice a year, you could say that it has a very ‘seasonal’ trend. This is a good example of how localized events like restaurant week, which happens all across the country, can identify and target a hard to reach segment. I took a closer look at some of the traffic patterns building up to the event by week. The celebration officially started on August 9th and continues through to the 21st (minus Saturdays) and you can see the buildup of anticipation in the chart below. One thing that jumps out is the trend of the official site Boston USA versus resturantweekboston.com – the two sites were about in line until the kick off on the 9th when the Unofficial Site took off, but there is an easy answer for that, there are no menus available on Boston USA!

How many people are on the site this week? I’ll let you know after I finish booking my forth 3-course meal, but an interesting trend is that unique visitors for the month of July are up 2x over 2007, gearing up for the August promotion. The 2009 March event had an all time high with almost 55,000 hungry visitors but after looking at the counts for last week… It’s safe to say that, using internet interest as a measuring stick, this will be the largest event to date. This may be from increased adoption of reservation booking online or the ever-present and looming economy. Some restaurant owners have already extended the offer to a third week (65 out of the over 200 participating locations) or even the entire month of August hoping to continue to stimulate business.

So go out, eat and enjoy, you still have plenty of time to take advantage of these great deals. I recommend Bacco in the north end, Chicken Florentine and a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon, (yeah I know it’s supposed to be white, but I like red). Make sure you set up your reservation in advance though; especially for that one restaurant you have been pining over going for the last 3 months. Thank you to the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, American Express and all the participating restaurants, let’s keep this tradition alive! And marketers take note that quality content, like including menus, can push a site to the top and reach a desirable target segment.

I stumbled upon a new site last month, rockyou.com, while I was perusing the top sites for attention every month. Just in case anyone was confused on what exactly that attention metric we talk about is; let’s use Facebook as an example. In June facebook.com accounted for 6.55% of all seconds spent for every single person online across the entire US! That means for every 2 minutes spent in cyber land, 13 of those seconds were spent online stalking old colleagues on Facebook. Well, rockyou.com is not quite as prevalent but at rank 39 it still accounted for over .1% of all time spent online in April.

So that’s what got this site on my radar which has been operational since mid 2006 and was closely involved with making widgets for Myspace and is the most prevalent widget maker (in terms of downloads) for Facebook since December 2007. (I don’t know what I would do without Wikipedia). Well since then they have teamed up with a bunch of the big time social networks and increased the site traffic year-over-year from 5 million unique visitors in April ’08 to almost 29 million in April ’09, over 5x!

I’m sure there are a ton of great widgets that you can use to pimp up your profile and continue to push Facebook attention off the charts but the hot new offering is their “Best Slideshow Ever!” app. In the name of responsible journalism and morbid curiosity, it was my duty to try out the tool. After careful examination I was pleasantly surprised with the results. As always, our readers have the final say on whether or not it can produce The Best Slideshow Ever but for my test show I think it did the trick. Let us know what you think of RockYou.com.

With summer starting to wind down my dreams of being on safari in South America are starting to occupy my mind more and more. This reminded me of a remarkable video I saw on YouTube several months ago; in traditional viral fashion (Hey did you see this video yet?? Spam spam spam!). The video showcases an epic battle of nature caught on tape (perfect for a show on Fox) of the daily struggles of a socially outgoing buffalo calf.

The Battle at Kruger was so popular that it actually was made into a National Geographic special, which first aired on May 11th, 2008. This can certainly explain the third spike in web surfers looking for the video online but I am personally chalking the first two up to internet fascination at its finest. Here is a breakout showing the number of people who viewed the video since it was first posted. You will also notice a line that shows how much time the average person watched the video but we’ll get to that soon.

As the story goes, a cute buffalo calf, on a clear sunny day and without a care in the world, wandered away from its herd and down a seemingly harmless dirt path seconds before it was ambushed by… Actually, I think it is more of an adolescent buffalo who is struggling to find its identity through rebellion. Anyway, it gets attacked by a pride of lionesses. Helpless and without any facial or other body piercings for the lionesses the choke on, the buffalo looks like it’s in pretty bad shape but it won’t go down without a fight…

I realize I just left you hanging and you are probably saying, “Wait wait wait, what happened next??” But in actuality over 60% of the people who watched the video already tuned out by this point. Over the observed period the average person stopped watching somewhere around the massive tug of war, 3 minutes before the day was saved and a full 5 minutes before the end of the video, where if you actually made it that far you were nearing the exciting part of the ‘slow clap.’ Yes it’s a long video, 8 minutes and 23 seconds, which is well above the average American attention span, but come on people this video is one of a kind. Below is the breakout in minutes of how long people spent actually watching the video.

Realizing the success of this video and the buzz (of Serengeti mosquitoes) surrounding it, minds quickly went work trying to tap this potential cash “buffalo” and the domain battleatkruger.com was born. There you could be, among the tens of thousands who have gone to learn more about the video’s back-story, buy high quality pictures of the event and most importantly get your hands on some very swanky merchandise. I am personally rocking the pink “Team Buffalo” shirt in my daily rotation and I encourage you all to buy soon though, Christmas is coming and these are limited production!

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.