A couple months back I wrote about how McDonalds’ Monopoly game was driving significant traffic to McDonalds’ corporate site and creating great exposure for the McDonalds brand. As a result I have been deemed Compete’s guru of fast food online traffic. Web traffic during the month of December tells another interesting story. In December, Burger King launched an ad campaign known as “Whopper Freak Out” in which they told patrons at a Las Vegas restaurant location that they had discontinued their token menu item, the Whopper. Video of these exchanges became part of a major television ad campaign that showed customers becoming extremely upset or freaking out. To host these videos Burger King created a sister site, whopperfreakout.com.

BurgerKing.com has had pretty steady traffic of over the last few years without a great deal of month to month change. Like McDonald’s promotion/campaign, Burger King’s was successful at generating additional brand exposure and awareness. In December 2007, traffic to burgerking.com and whopperfreakout.com was nearly identical (therefore the sister site doubled Burger King’s online brand exposure). However, unlike the Monopoly game, whopperfreakout.com did not drive much traffic to the corporate site. Only 14,891 people visited both sites in December (only about 8% of burgerking.com’s total traffic).

In addition to brand exposure in the form of traffic, whopperfreakout.com was able to generate exposure by holding the attention of its visitors. The average stay at whopperfreakout.com in December was nearly 5 minutes, more than double that of burgerking.com, and as a result produced more attention for the Burger King brand.

But how does Burger King perform compared to its biggest competitors McDonalds and Wendy’s? Not very well. Traffic to mcdonalds.com is consistently more than double that of Burger King and Wendy’s traffic is consistently greater as well. In fact, traffic to wendys.com in December was greater than the combined traffic of burgerking.com and whopperfreakout.com. While the Whopper Freak Out campaign may have been a success for Burger King in terms of its own online exposure, it has a long way to go to catch that of its competitors.

I was recently asked for some follow up analysis to a previous post I did last December. In a post about Tabloid Fantasy Leagues I provided a graph depicting traffic to ESPN.com, Sportsline.com, and Yahoo.com for traditional fantasy sports content. As a result I did an analysis for the same sites spanning November ‘06 to November ‘07.

I quickly noticed some interesting general market trends. First, traffic to these Fantasy Sports sites is growing pretty rapidly; 14.5% since November ’06. Additionally, as you can pretty obviously see the two most popular fantasy sports are clearly football and college basketball during March Madness.

But in addition to these general trends I also found some more competitive stats. Yahoo! dominates the marketplace and the gap has widened in the past year. 57% of traffic to the three sites over the last year was to Yahoo!, a percentage that was pretty consistent month to month, except for March. Additionally, the difference in traffic between Yahoo! and its biggest competitor grew 7.5% over last year, while Yahoo!’s overall traffic grew 15.6%. Not only does Yahoo! dominate the fantasy sports market in general, but it controls the biggest single sport: football. While I personally am a big fan of Sportsline, I seem to be in the minority on this one, as Sportsline’s traffic actually declined over the last year. Sportsline’s lost its #2 market position as it was overtaken by ESPN, whose fantasy traffic grew 23%.

Clearly the fantasy sports market continues to thrive. Yahoo! is the clear #1 fantasy sports site and it continues to grow and expand its lead. ESPN and Sportsline only total around 1/3 of the market and have a long way to go if they are going to catch Yahoo! any time soon. The fantasy football season is coming to a close and the next big sport is college basketball in March. We’ll see if they are able to close the gap….

McDonald’s used to be an American institution; like Christmas decorations at Thanksgiving and candy on Halloween. It is now and international phenomenon, serving nearly 54 million customers each day in 120 countries and territories. Many of us have memories of when we were younger, begging our parents to take us to get a Happy Meal. Similarly, I remember begging my parents to take me to McDonald’s so I could collect Monopoly game pieces.

This past October, McDonald’s held its Monopoly game as it does every year and I decided to check if it had any impact on McDonalds.com site traffic. Surprisingly, it did, by a whopping 234.4%. Why is that surprising? Well, it’s because there was little mention of the Monopoly game at McDonalds.com and the online game was hosted on a separate domain, monopoly.corsis.com.

Many of you are probably saying, “So what? People went to McDonalds.com assuming the online game was hosted there. They probably went, discovered the game wasn’t there, and then left.” WRONG! In addition to more unique visitors McDonalds.com received a much greater attention share for the month of October; more than double the domain’s normal attention share, meaning during the month of October, visitors to McDonalds.com spent twice as much time as they typically do.

Continue reading “McDonald’s Offline Promotions Drive Online Traffic” »

Wikipedia can be a great source of information on a range of topics. The user generated universe is infinite and the people that contribute and seek information within this exchange have created one of the most vibrant information communities I have seen in my lifetime. But, I wonder, “What specifically do people tend to use Wikipedia for?”

As you would expect many of the top subjects relate to current events and cultural phenomena. For the month of April some of the top subjects included “Don Imus”, “Virginia Tech massacre”, “global warming”, “Naruto” (a Japanese comic and anime TV series) and “Sanjaya Malakar” of American Idol fame.

In addition to these predictable terms, there was a substantial volume of sexual terms. Apparently Bobby’s parents forgot to have the Birds & Bees talk with their son…as did the parents of Billy, Johnny, Julie, Tommy and Susie. Wikipedia is essentially an encyclopedia, so one would assume these searches are for research and learning purposes – a virtual Kama Sutra of sorts.

We categorized the top 100 Wikipedia terms for April into six general categories to figure out what the major search themes are on Wikipedia. As you would expect the greatest number of searches (28%) are within the research category. This includes terms like “Columbine High School massacre” and “American Civil War.”

The two surprising categories are Anime and Sex:

Anime (26%)
There is a tremendous amount of interest in learning about Pokemon and Naruto. Perhaps these are parents who want to know what their kids are going crazy over. My Mom didn’t know what “He-Man” was until I was a grown man reflecting on how silly Castle Grayskull was. My mom could have used Wikipedia in the 80’s.

Sex (16%)
What’s interesting about the top sex related terms on Wikipedia is that they do not appear to have gratuitous intent. The top terms include very straightforward inquiries on human reproductive ‘parts’ and basic concepts of what sex is and how it is performed. It appears many people are learning about what sex is and how to have it by referencing Wikipedia.

In the past months we have written blogs about both fantasy football sites and celebrity popularity based on search engine queries. Initially you might think these topics are completely unrelated, but sadly, you would be quite wrong. Last May, Bill Simmons from ESPN wrote a hilarious article describing his attempts to explain the allure and excitement of fantasy sports to his wife. In the weeks following its publication, it became a topic of discussion amongst friends and coworkers.

Then in September, it was brought to my attention that someone took this funny idea and actually created a fantasy league for women. My initial thoughts were that this was a little ridiculous, but upon further consideration, I decided it might be an interesting business venture. The fantasy sports industry is booming right now, generating $1-2 billion in revenue from more than 15 million U.S. adults (mostly men) each year according the Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA). But what about the huge untapped female population that is left out of this booming industry?

I just recently stumbled upon TabFL.com or Tabloid Fantasy League. Upon further review of the site the similarities to fantasy football were striking. They hosted two games called “FaceFecta” and “TabFecta” both of which are similar to popular fantasy football games. “FaceFecta” is similar to a Pick ‘Em or Survivor League in which you predict what celebrities will grace the cover of the “Big 4” magazines (People, Star, US Weekly, InTouch) the following week. “TabFecta” is like your traditional fantasy league as you draft a celebrity cast and score points as cast members appear in the “Big 4”. The last major similarity is their “News/Gossip” section which works just like athlete news/updates in traditional fantasy sports leagues.

While researching TabFL I came across two similar “competitor” sites: FantasyFashionLeague.com and Fafarazzi.com. The rules at FantasyFashionLeague.com are slightly different, but the premise is the same, an owner drafts designers, celebrities, clothing and accessories and receives points for mentions and photos of their team members on popular websites and fashion magazines. Fafarrazi.com is also similar in that you draft celebrities and you get points when your celebs are in the gossip blogs.

So how do these sites compare? All three sites are fairly new with the TabFL.com entering the Compete top million in October, FantasyFashionLeague.com as it is today re-entering the top million in July, and Fafarazzi.com entering the top million in August. In November all three sites user base grew relative to the previous month but it was TabFL.com that on the real upswing growing 80% from October compared to 58.4% growth from Fafarazzi.com and 6% growth from FantasyFashionLeague.com. The data in the table shown above indicates TabFL.com is the most engaging of the three with more Pages/Visit and Time/Session, but Fafarrzi.com is dominating the niche thus far with 6,000+ visitors in November.

So do I expect these sites to achieve the fantasy success of Sportsline, ESPN and Yahoo? No. Are they creative business ventures with potential to capitalize on the huge fantasy sports industry? Yes. And so, with the first selection in the Compete Celebrity Fantasy Draft, I select…… LaDainian Tomlinson of the San Diego Chargers. (What did you expect? I’m a guy.)

Get SnapShots of sites mentioned in this post:

• fantasyfashionleague.com
• fafarazzi.com
• tabfl.com

In the last few weeks we have written a few times about the popularity of social networking sites. Membership at both Facebook and MySpace continues to grow rapidly. As a Facebook member since its inception, I have always heard the argument from a number of skeptical peers that it is “stalkerish.” I never felt this way and vehemently defended Facebook as a good way to keep track of friends. No real private information has ever been divulged and you only give out what information you want.

On Tuesday, Facebook released two new tools called News Feed and Mini Feed. At first look I thought “I’m done, get me off this thing” much like a little kid on an amusement ride. These new tools essentially tell you exactly what every one of your friends has done on Facebook recently. A stalker’s heaven right? I don’t need to know what an ex-girlfriend posted on a friend’s wall at 3:20AM last night, nor do I want all of my female acquaintances to know that I am suddenly “In a Relationship.” These were my first reactions, and many of Facebook’s users have a similar opinion. In the last day or so membership in groups like “The New Facebook Sucks” and “Facebook or Stalker Paradise” has skyrocketed to well over 200,000 in a little more than a day.

However, my opinion has changed. What information does Facebook provide that wasn’t already there? None. What privacy settings have been changed? None. Facebook has just provided a way for its users to find the information they are already looking for quickly. That’s what Facebook is used for: keeping track of friends and seeing how their lives change. The tools just make it easier. And if you don’t want certain information to be sent to your friends via the news feed, you can easily change your privacy settings so that it isn’t. I do feel that Facebook should integrate some settings to make the tool optional but the root of what Facebook is hasn’t changed at all. I expect Facebook usage and membership to continue to grow. Some people may like the new features, others may not, only one thing is certain: once a Facebook stalker, always a Facebook stalker….