Black Friday marks one of the busiest shopping days of the year. Many retailers open early and offer discounts on popular holiday gifts to attract consumers. Compete conducted a survey of over 900 consumers planning on shopping this holiday season. Nearly half of those surveyed will head to the stores on Black Friday to take advantage of the deals. 57% plan on completing over half of their holiday shopping on that day.

When asked what time they will begin their trek to various retail outlets, 62% plan on getting to the stores before 8 a.m. Over a third of respondents will start their Black Friday shopping at Walmart. The store had already began releasing deals on select products such as Laptop computers ($348) as early as Nov. 1.

Savvy shoppers will be scoping out deals online ahead of time. 75% of those surveyed will research pricing and product information online before heading to the store on Black Friday. Websites such as bfads.net collect ads from various retailers and condense them for the consumer. About 3 million unique visitors went to bfads.net in November of last year.

Nearly 20% of respondents will be shopping for a spouse or significant other on Black Friday. That special someone may be wearing their present, as clothing and jewelry were the most popular products. Of Black Friday shoppers surveyed, 69% will plan on spending less than $500 that day.

It’s that time of the year where many of us load up on candy, carve pumpkins and sport costumes. With Halloween rapidly approaching, we decided it would be fun to get an idea of what people are wearing. Last week, we conducted a survey of 223 people who intend on wearing a costume either for Halloween or a Halloween related event.

Nearly 60% if those we surveyed already had their costume, while the remainder are waiting until the last possible minute - this may be to ensure that they don’t get caught at a party with three other people sporting their Spidey suit.

We found that when it comes to costumes, originality is key. Over half of those who already have their costume opted for a home-made design over a store bought garb. Nearly a quarter of those who chose creativity over cash designed a costume made to frighten, while 12% hope to get a laugh from their attire. Among respondents, the most popular home-made costume was a witch.

For those who chose to buy their costume, 45% had looked for one online, and nearly half of those online shoppers visited an online costume specialty retailer. How were they attracted to these costume retailers? Over 40% responded that a search engine result most influenced their decision to visit an online retail store.

We used the new Compete Search Analytics tool to compile the chart below of the top 10 sites with the most referrals from the keyword “Halloween costume”.

Eight of ten sites on this list had over 30% of search referrals to their site coming from this term (the exceptions being about.com and celebrateexpress.com), showing how dependant this group of sites is on search.

Take our poll and let us know where you fall on the costume shopping list.

Wedding season is in full swing, and I’ve learned first hand that planning a wedding is no easy task. Theknot.com is a social networking website that allows “brides-to-be” to research, shop, plan, and share their stories. As with many wedding websites, seasonality proves to be a limiting factor in terms of traffic. Theknot.com experiences a decline on average of about 22% in unique visitors from October to December each year. Similarly, weddingchannel.com experiences a 29% decline during that holiday season.

Theknot.com and its closest competitor, weddingchannel.com, both peak in traffic during the month of June. However, both sites experienced a y-o-y decline last month by 23% and 11% respectively. Couples preparing to have their wedding on the “luckiest wedding day ever” didn’t seem to have an impact either sites traffic. Last month, weddingchannel.com had over 50k more unique visitors than theknot.com, but couldn’t stack up in terms of attention.

Theknot.com’s sister site, thenest.com, features home and money advice, decorating tips and recipies. By promoting migration over to thenest after the big day, theknot manages to keep couples “engaged” long after the honeymoon is over.

I’m not lazy, but I like convenience. In terms of the internet, putting all of the content I consume daily on one page is as convenient as it gets. The idea of personalized pages isn’t new. My Yahoo! has let users pick and choose what content would be viewed on their personal page for nearly a decade. Although My Yahoo! was once considered revolutionary, the service hasn’t evolved in pace with the market. For instance, with the exception of RSS feeds, the service restricts users to the confines of mostly Yahoo! provided content.

Net Result - My Yahoo! has seen four consecutive years of declining usage.

Enter the rebirth of the personalized start page, starring NetVibes, iGoogle and PageFlakes. These sites adopted the general My Yahoo! concept and took it a step further by allowing easy, effortless customization and a plethora of widgets, feeds, and podcasts. Everything from checking emails from multiple email clients, to surfing through YouTube can be done on one page.

All indications are that people are into the new level of personalization. Over the last year, Google’s personal page has grown substantially faster compared to My Yahoo!.

New services like NetVibes and PageFlakes are growing even faster, experiencing growth rates of over 5000% and 3000%, respectively.

One could argue that NetVibes is the true evangelist of the new personalized page. They have been aggressively promoting and building their “ecosystem” – an open platform to allow any content provider to create widgets accessible from most widget and blog systems – including Google IG, Apple Dashboard and more. Through the NetVibes ecosystem content providers can build one widget, accessible by everyone.

Here at Compete, we like the open approach so much that we decided to build our own widget using NetVibe’s Universal Widget API (UWA). Note the highlighted region of my NetVibes page below. If you are interested in adding the Compete Widget to your NetVibes page click here.

Yet another user-generated video site has popped up in YouTube’s wake, and TheLot.com has big ambitions. Steven Spielberg’s latest venture, “On the Lot,” is a reality TV competition that debuted Tuesday night on Fox . The show created buzz through its website by allowing prospective contestants to submit short films for a chance to compete on the show, and the ultimate chance to win a $1 million development deal with Dreamworks to make their own movie. The idea sounds interesting, but will this endeavor spark the next blockbuster or become a reality TV flop? If traffic to thelot.com is any indicator, the show could get pretty old pretty quickly.

• Initial interest on the site peaked in January at around 105k UV’s and has steadily dropped since then
• Visitors to the site dropped 73% from March to April alone
• Although users can still post videos to be viewed online, 57% of all uploads occurred before the deadline (February 16th) to be considered as a contestant for the show
• Visitors viewed 28% more films after the deadline then at any point prior to it

Which films piqued viewer interest? Visitors showed the most interest in comedy, visiting over 19k pages in from November to April.

Though thelot.com suited its initial purpose in terms of choosing the contestants for the television show, UV traffic indicates that (despite other new content on the site) interest doesn’t seem to extend very much beyond that point. Maybe the exposure from the tv episodes will give the site a jumpstart once again.

Somewhere between Instant Messenger Profiles and Vertical “People” search engines, social networking has become a keystone of the web. And much like the beer bearing the same name, it’s cheap, facilitates conversation, and is consumed primarily by younger people. As social networking continues its rapid adoption, the diversification of the social networking sites makes it an important segment to assess.

Continue reading “Top Social Networks: Who’s losing to MySpace” »