The past week has been a big one for Compete! In addition to June data going live, we launched some exciting enhancements to Compete PRO Enterprise, our most powerful Compete PRO offering. Enterprise subscribers now have access to 220 industry category profiles and 45 behavioral segments to make it easier to discover, take action, and measure online marketing performance.

Top 250 Website List Now Available!

All Compete PRO customers now have a chance to experience Compete Categories for yourself with the Compete 250, a rolling index of the top 250 sites on the web, updated monthly.

June is Big for Bing

Traffic to Bing.com continues to skyrocket. The site garnered 50 million unique visitors (UVs) in June, its first full month live. As a result, more and more people are gaining interest and taking the time to learn more about what Bing has to offer - Microsoft’s Bing info site, discoverbing.com, and club site, clubbing.com, received 1.3 million UVs and 759,000 UVs respectively.

Circuit City is Back

Systemax, behemoth multi-channel computer and consumer electronics retailer and owner of popular online properties like Tigerdirect.com and CompUSA.com, purchased Circuit City’s remaining assets after it declared bankruptcy in November of last year. On May 23, Systemax brought CircuitCity.com back to life and June’s data shows that the site is off to a good start. While the 1.4 million UVs may only be around 13% of the traffic the site experienced when it had national brick and mortar presence (close to 8 million people per month), it represents almost 50% of TigerDirect.com’s traffic (3.3 million UVs) and 40% more than CompUSA.com received in June (997,000 UVs).

With 12.4 million total combined visits in June to their three big Electronics properties, Systemax managed to attract 5% of all visits to the Electronics Shopping Sites category, more traffic than newegg.com and up in the ranks with bestbuy.com (3rd), apple.com (2nd), and dell.com (1st). The graph below from Compete’s new Categories interface shows Systemax’s market share of visitors within the Electronics Shopping Sites category for the three online properties over the last year.

MLB Attracts More Online Fans in May, despite NBA and NHL Playoffs

On June 30, 2009, Compete released the rankings of the top 10 sports fan sites in May 2009. Even with the NBA and NHL playoffs underway in May, Major League Baseball fans outnumbered NBA fans online more than two to one and NHL fans more than four to one. MLB.com reached more than 12,227,000 sports enthusiasts in May 2009 (up 35% since May 2008), followed by NBA.com with 5,624,776 unique visitors (UVs), Nascar.com with 3,716,636 UVs and NHL.com with 2,899,406 UVs.

Sports fan interest among the big leagues (MLB, NBA, NHL and NFL) is also up year over year with significant increases for MLB.com (35 percent) and NBA.com (32 percent). Meanwhile, wwe.com and nascar.com visits dropped while pgatour.com and minorleaguebaseball.com cracked the top ten in May 2009.

They say things come in threes, but I don’t think anyone expected the final glove to fall with such shocking news. Last week’s trio of celebrity death’s started with TV Icon, Ed McMahon (86), Super Model, Farrah Fawcett (62), and ended with the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson (51). Sure, the passing of Mr. McMahon and Ms. Fawcett was given main stream media attention. However, MJ’s death caused an online traffic frenzy of record breaking proportions.

How many people hit the web to get the skinny on MJ? Millions would be a conservative estimate. In fact, Yahoo! News set an all time record of 16.4 million UVs (unique visitors) on Thursday. Celebrity gossip site, tmz.com, received so much traffic that their servers reportedly crashed multiple times. Google was also a victim as the New York Post reported that Google News had to actually block the term “Michael Jackson” to prevent their site from crashing.

Using Compete’s daily online traffic metrics, reach and attention, we’re able to get a real sense of just how many online users in the US were surfing celebrity gossip sites to get their MJ updates.

Reach lets us to see what percentage of U.S. Internet users online visited a particular website on a particular day. Tmz.com, who broke the story of MJ’s death, reached 1.9% of the total US online population on 6/25. That’s a 438% increase from 6/24 and a 527% increase year over year. Other celebrity news sites experienced the same trend – eonline.com (up 213% to 1.3% of total US traffic), people.com (up 70% to .54% of total US traffic), perezhilton.com (up 28% to .45% of total US traffic), and ew.com (up 49% to .21% of total US traffic). These five sites alone reached 4.42% of all U.S. Internet users online.

Attention is a metric that considers the collective time all U.S. Internet users spend online and calculates what percentage of that time was spent on a given website on a particular day. Once again, tmz.com showed the greatest increase on 6/25, up 478% over the day before and 272% year over year to .037% of all time spent online. However, people.com garnered the most attention of all the celebrity sites on that day with .053% of total time spent online (up 71% from 6/24 and 50% year over year). The other celebrity sites also showed increases - eonline.com (up 175% to .032% of total US traffic), perezhilton.com (up 28% to .45% of total US traffic), and ew.com (up 49% to .21% of total US traffic).

Although some may credit MJ’s never-ending fame to his character flaws ridden with tabloid headlines, his musical career was undoubtedly flooded with accomplishments – 2 time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 13 time Grammy Award winner, and over 750 million records sold worldwide to name a few. The polarizing effect of his personal life’s blunders and undeniable talent obviously kept audiences captivated and will continue to captivate them for years to come. His passing even added another notch to his belt – “king of the Internet”… for a day.