Sitting at home over the holidays, working a bit, and watching television, I was inundated with New Hampshire presidential candidate ads. Already? With the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd and New Hampshire 5 days later on the 8th, my immediate question was, “What does our panel data say about these two events and what predictions can I make?”

I looked at 5 consecutive days of consumer internet behavior, immediately prior to the Iowa caucus, to analyze user visits to the presidential candidate sites. As expected, nationwide, Iowa users were the most politically active, with one out of five Iowans actively looking at campaign websites followed by 6.5% of people from all of New Hampshire.

Based on the traffic that each candidate site received, Compete definitely had the inside scoop on user clicks, and would have accurately predicted the results in Iowa. The percentage of visits across the sites for all candidate sites show:

As New Hampshire prepares to go to the polls tomorrow, the results of the Iowa Caucus appear to have had a direct impact on New Hampshire users’ interest in the candidates’ websites. This interest could be curiosity or it could be an indicator of tides turning, as shown in the chart below. Data was aggregated at 3 different period intervals for the last 10 days.

If we base votes on site visits alone, then we predict Obama and McCain as the New Hampshire primary winners.

And one more fun fact, early indicators show Obama winning the Michigan primary on January 15th for the Democrats, and Huckabee and Paul too close to call for the Republicans. But then again, the tide can turn, as shown above.

Remember how your best friend went out to buy a dog just so he could get more attention and more dates? What better way to meet people? Forget walking the dog 10 times just to see the hot blond down the street - instead, create a profile for your dog on dogster.com!

One of the fastest growing pet sites and… who knew?.. a competitor (albeit small) in the cluttered social networking space, dogster.com boasts close to 200K users per month, keeping pace with dog.com, a canine merchandise site and surpassing i-love-dogs.com and chazhound.com, general dog portals.

Dogster web promotions have been successful in driving people traffic to dogster.com as seen above, but the increases have yet to persist. Their sister site, catster.com, has not seen the same spikes, but is still popular due to all the meow lovers out there. And really, you can’t herd cats, but you can post for them!

Dogster traffic spikes were a result from the 24-hour Dogster & Catster video playlist challenge in December 2006 and the 2007 Next Web Awards which took place over April and May. Dogster.com’s inclusion in The Next Web Awards 2007 social category for ‘most promising and upcoming services’ was not a stretch. Although dogster did not win, it certainly held its ears high in the average stay category, competing against ‘up and coming’ twitter.com, entrenched friendster.com, and dark horse bebo.com!

Maybe average stay is competitive for dogster.com (and catster.com) because it is just so hard to type with a paw, its takes longer? Um, ok … it’s those darn photos? The networking? Let’s see …

It is your turn to check out dogster.com or catster.com! Don’t do it for me, do it for Mistral, Charlie, Cassius, Coco Bean, Turks, Caicos, Sasha and Bubbles!

A colleague of mine asked ‘what is the gayest site on the web?’ With June being Gay Pride month throughout the US and the World, I thought it was a valid question. Apparently I have the street cred to answer this question without being a poser, but I didn’t know a lot about the top LGBT sites, so I jumped into the Compete data to explore. The sites I reviewed include global portals, social networks, entertainment, news, politics and more. So, what is the gayest site?

Surprise! (not). Gay.com, a global portal, is the ‘gayest’ site based on people (i.e. unique visitors), pageviews, visits, and attention. Although gay.com has stayed on top for the last year, it has lost people share as the volume of LGBT sites has expanded within this segment. In fact, if you include gay personals sites, outpersonals.com is the largest site within the LGBT segment, attracting nearly 1M visitors/month, and topping gay.com since Pride 2006.

I found that the volume of visitors doesn’t tell the whole story about the most influential LGBT sites. For instance, Connexion.org, a site for social networking, not even listed in the top 10 above, jumps to number 2 for the amount of attention (a blended metric of visitors and time spent on the site) users pay to the site. What does that mean? It means if you want to market to people in the LGBT segment, your best dollars are spent on connexion.org in addition to gay.com. In fact, connexion.org users have an average stay on site which competes with gay.com.

We get an entirely different picture of top LGBT sites if we look at monthly velocity of attention over the last year. I noticed that towleroad.com has some spectacular spikes in velocity compared to other sites. Tracking the relative change in attention on these sites since June 2006, it becomes apparent why towleroad.com was the winner of the 2006 Weblog of the Year at the Gay Bloggies. Showing a 300% attention growth since June 2006 or even crazier, 4,600% attention growth since March 2006, towleroad.com dominates the velocity statistics compared to other sites.

Congratulations to these web pioneers. We wish everyone a happy Pride Month.

A few weeks ago, my kids and I were talking about Webkinz, one of the latest kid crazes that take collecting beanie babies up a level, and it sparked my curiousity about how they are performing online. Webkinz are brought to us by Ganz, a privately held company started in 1950. Like beanie babies before them, Webkinz are limited, hard to find and quickly becoming the toy to give and receive for the 6-12 age cohort. With Webkinz, you also collect ‘plush pets’ BUT purchase of these pets gives you access to your own secret code, which unlocks membership to the web-based Webkinz world.

At webkinz.com, your plush pet comes to life with its needs for food, activity and of course, merchandise. Online, you earn kinzcash to buy food, clothing and toys for your pet and your pet’s customized room. The two top activities for Webkinz users are kinzpost, where you can send notes with stickers to others in the webkinz world, and games in which you win the kinzcash that gives you purchasing power.

The first Webkinz came out in 2005, but Ganz only recently experienced the tipping point with their Webkinz plush pets. The Webkinz site broke into the top 1000 sites in January 2007 and just this month, reached neopets.com volume. Neopets.com has been a top domain in user traffic for the last 6 years, and like webkinz.com, it allows you to care for ‘pets’ in the Neopia world. Unlike Webkinz, neopets is free and revenues are based on advertising, not merchandise sales. clubpenguin.com, another free virtual pet world (albeit penguin-only), also vies for attention from the pre-teen set.

Continue reading “Kids Toy Crazes Go Virtual” »

It’s that time of year again. Halloween! One of the most popular commercial holidays in the United States. Americans spend over $7B on Halloween per year, buying decorations, food, tricks, treats and of course, costumes!

We all have memories of our most favorite costume we ever wore for Halloween (even if it wasn’t wearing a costume…)! My favorite that someone else wore once was a fuzzy orange monster. I was 12. My most favorite costume for myself was wearing my Dad’s Navy orange pilot suit and walking around with the crash helmet. Hmmm….there must be something about orange…

The top costume site, buycostumes.com, indicates that purchasing Halloween apparel online is extremely popular. In fact, the traffic for all Halloween sites typically exhibits an extreme seasonal trend as shown below:

So take advantage of the downturn, buy your Halloween costume after the spike, you’ll save a lot of money.

I read about it. I went to the site. But I still didn’t get it. Even after clicking on a few links! Duh. I didn’t have my sound on or my earphones in my ears. You cannot appreciate ytmnd.com unless you have sound and a good video card!

Check out the content. With over 600K people visiting the site in July, ranked in the top 3000 sites, many others have ‘been there- done that’. According to Max, the owner of ytmnd.com, the best definition of the site comes from wikipedia:

YTMND, an acronym for “You’re The Man Now, Dog!”, is a website community that centers around the creation of YTMNDs, which are pages featuring a juxtaposition of a single image, optionally animated or tiled, along with large zooming text and a looping sound file. YTMND is also the general term used to describe any such site.

Some of the content may be heavy but it just as easy to find the fun. Check out the Up and Coming YTMNDs or the Moderator Favorites. I personally liked the ‘PLEASE INSERT WINDOWS XP CD…’ under Top Viewed YTMNDs. And definitely check out ‘Max REALLY sold out, this time…’ under Today’s Most Voted On (Thursday, August 24th).

Oh yeah…if you are an advertiser or have money to burn…talk to Max! He needs money. (See ‘money has no artistic value…’ under Sponsored YTMNDs). And remember, You’re the Man Now Dog! Word.