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” »