July data is now live on Compete.com! What sort of changes did a new month bring? We took a look at the sites that grew the most from June to July to get a better idea of where online traffic is flowing.

Whether it’s the heat of summer, gas prices trapping people at home or something else entirely, several rich media sites saw a huge jump in traffic in July. In fact, of the top 20 fastest moving sites in July, 10 sites’ primary focus is rich media content delivery.

Additional findings include:

• Looking for love in all the free places: Two of the sites making the top movers list - webdate.com and mingle2.com - both offer free online dating services with a “web 2.0″ feel.
• Apple succeeds…even when it fails: Despite “not being up to Apple’s Standards“, it’s new syncing service MobileMe (at me.com) shot up over 700% in July.
• Politics + comedy = Traffic: Jibjab.com released a satirical video highlighting the 2008 election “Time for some campaignin” in July. Traffic, and laughing visitors ensued.
• A traffic surge that no one can celebrate: One of the more concerning trends in July was FDIC.gov making the top movers list, which seems to highlight just how concerned consumers are with the state of the U.S. economy.

Find out how a new month of traffic has impacted your industry in terms of site traffic, the search space, and the overall internet landscape with all of Compete.com’s tools.

In at least one way, early social networks are like a high school party - when parents get home the fun stops and everybody leaves. But as social elements become the driving force behind many of the web’s most popular sites, an increasing number of consumers young and old are finding casual online conversation crucial in maintaining and expanding business relationships…which helps explain howLinkedin recently closed a round of funding with a $1 billion valuation.

The real story is in how mass migration of professional relationships from the Rolodex to the Friend List has taken place. In June, we took a look at two sites that share the responsibility of powering professional networking, albeit in somewhat different ways. While Linkedin.com was built on a platform of social networking for business, Facebook.com - still far from business focused - grew into the role as many of its early members did the same. So in terms of current users, how do these sites compare?

Age can provide insight into who is using a site and, at least in the case of Linkedin and Facebook, how. The chart above shows how site traffic breaks for both sites, based on unique visitors in June 2008. Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s audience skews younger than Linkedin but it is important to note that both sites receive nearly 90% of their traffic from people under the age of 55.

Facebook - growing up or losing the cool factor?
Age of current site visitors has more meaning in historical context, and both Facebook and Linkedin have changed quite a bit in the course of a year. The chart below shows the year over year change in age breakdown for both sites.

• Facebook visitors are “maturing”: In June of 2007, nearly over 35% of Facebook traffic came the 18-24 year old segment, compared to around 22% in June 2008. With the bulk of this traffic shifting towards the 25-35 year old group, this movement could be a result of the site’s original base of college students.
• Rising stars shine on Linkedin: In a reversal of Facebook’s changing demographics, Linkedin’s audience has shifted younger, with the 18-24, and 25-35 year old segments both growing by nearly 15%. This was also during a period of massive overall site growth - driven at least partially by an influx of younger visitors.

Is there Room a need for both?
The most profound difference between Linkedin and Facebook lies in their focus on professional and personal networking (respectively). Looking at the overlap between the two networks, it appears that many people are either separating these two functions, or simply maintaining an identity on both sites. The chart below shows the percentage of Facebook and Linkedin users, broken out by age group, who used both sites (or one site exclusively) in June. The chart to the bottom right also illustrates the change in each overlap segment from the previous year.

• Between the two sites, Facebook dominates with an average of 80% of the group using Facebook exclusively.
• 25-44 is the sweet spot for Linkedin with the site attracting more than 20% of both groups. These two age groups were also the most likely to be active on both Linkedin and Facebook, with around 12% of both groups showing overlap.
• 1+1=900%: While the dramatic growth of the segment of users visiting both sites (as well as the growth in Linkedin exclusive visitors) is partially due to site growth, the 900% growth in the percentage of users visiting both sites seems to indicate that these sites are more complimentary than competitive.

With online services like Twitter and Friendfeed continuing to blur the line between casual and business, the ability to use a single site as both a personal and professional networking tool becomes more realistic. But whether the “Poke” will ever make it into a sales strategy is still anyone’s guess.

On the web, visitor traffic can ebb and flow more than the the Bay of Fundy tides and looking at how this traffic shifts over time provides a great snapshot of what is top-of-mind among consumers at any given point in time.

With the June data we released earlier this week, now is a great time to look reflect on the sites that experienced a tsunami of incoming traffic in our latest month of data. And while sites related to sports seem to dominate the list, other top movers demonstrate consumer interest in Mozilla’s download day, summer blockbusters, celebrity gossip and the U.S energy crisis. The table below shows the top 20 fastest moving sites in June based on total monthly visits.

• Tiger Pounces: With the US Open heading into a sudden death round in the middle of a work day, many tuned in online…much to the dismay of managers coast to coast.
• Fail-Whale makes waves: Plurk.com, a new microblogging site that compete’s with Twitter, may have seen a large boost in traffic due to near constant downtime Twitter experienced in June.
• Firefox rocks: “The home of Firefox Community Marketing”, spreadfirefox.com saw a huge lift in traffic with the release of Firefox 3, and Mozilla’s record breaking “Download day” initiative.

It’s interesting to drill down on whether these surges of visits came from gradually growing interest over the month, or some sort of event driven spike. The chart chart below shows the last 90 daily traffic for several of the sites in the top movers list. This traffic is measured by daily reach: the share of all US internet users who visited each site on a given day.

While applounge.com saw an immediate lift in traffic seems to be related to MySpace applications, large spikes in traffic at spreadfirefox.com and usopen.com surround the two underlying events that drove traffic. While it didn’t peak as high as traffic on usopen.com, Wimbledon.org saw consistent growth leading up to the finals, before a substantial drop in the first week of July.

Shameless pitch: All of this analysis (and more) can be done using Compete Pro metrics. Sign up for an account here.

Back in February, we reported on the highest volume search terms across the web, and found that some terms drove consistently larger volumes of traffic, while more dynamic terms helped shed light on consumer mindset during a period. With that in mind, we recently took another look at high volume search terms. However, this time around, we focused specifically on those terms that experienced the most growth from April to May.

While it appears that sporting events, celebrity gossip and big-budget marketing pushes caused spikes in various search term referrals, gloomy search phrases top the list. The chart below shows the 25 high volume search terms that grew the most from April 2008 to May 2008.

• The most common theme among the top 25 searches is death (indicated by black bars). While this may help to explain why the news tend to focus on morbid events, it also speaks to the fact that people turn (heavily) to search engines when trying to find more info on contemporary events.
• Gossip and entertainment related searches also bubble to the top (purple bars), highlighted by both Kimberly Caldwell and David Cook (American Idol contestants and alleged lovebirds) shown making the list.
• Seasonal trends can be pretty dynamic (blue bars), with Mother’s day Idea’s and economic stylus related terms peppering the top 25 growers.
• Large product and movie launches caused spikes in movie and video game related terms (green bars) as The Strangers, The Happening, Sex in The City, GTA4 and Wii Fit all made the list. What’s interesting here is that movie terms seem to coincide with advertising while game related search terms are (apparently) related to usage.

Search query behavior will continue to provide an indicator of consumer’s thoughts and concerns, which is why tools like Google’s Hot Trendslist are so addicting. What’s really incredible? The waves that large sites can make themselves. Hotel Carter showed up in the list because of its number one ranking on Trip Advisor’s “Dirtiest Hotels” list. And Walter Gropius? Google honored him with their logo. Now that is serious influence.

Twitter has made headlines for some amazingly powerful stuff lately; breaking the news of recent China’s earthquake; partnering with MySpace for it’s “data availability” project; even helping a student get out of jail! All of these speak to the growing popularity of Twitter, and also help to explain it’s recent scaling issues. But how big is twitter, who uses it and how?

Growth a tween would be proud of.

In the past few months, Twitter has grown rapidly. In terms of U.S. visitors, Compete has seen Twitter traffic nearly double from February to April, currently attracting nearly 1.2 million people per month. Looking at Twitter’s Attention share helps to further illustrate how fast the service has grown.

The chart above shows Twitter’s share of daily attention for the past 180 days, and reveals some interesting patterns.

• In terms of time spent on site as a share of all time spent online, Twitter has grown dramatically - more than quadrupling over the period.
• Twitter is a weekday event – While its difficult to tell in the chart above, the valleys in the chart below coincide with the weekend, while the peaks represent weekdays. On any typical weekday, Twitter is receiving more than twice the attention as a weekend day.
• The weekday skewed tweet activity makes sense in the context of Lee Odden’s Twitter usage poll - which highlighted twitter users affinity for networking and sharing content through twitter.

Its fun to hang with the Y.M.T.A

Who are these 1.2 million visitors, and how intensely do they use the site? We segmented visitors by intensity of use, gender and age for the month of April to get a better idea. Generally, users skew young, male, and addicted to twitter.

The data above shows that nearly one quarter of all twitter visitors to the site are heavy users (6+ visits/month), and another 25% are light users (2-5 visits/month). It should be noted that the somewhat lenient definition of a “heavy” user was a result of the many ways user can connect to Twitter.

The gender and age breakdowns indicate that users skew young and male. These two charts are indexed to the U.S internet average, where “100” is the average.

• Twitter users are 10% more likely to be male than the average internet user. This skew is nearly identical across all three Usage groups.
• Twitter skews heavily towards the college/twenty-something crowd. Twitter attracts 18-24 year-olds at nearly twice the rate of an average U.S website.
• Splitting age demographics based on usage intensity shows that heavy users tend to skew older than visitors who only hit the site once a month. This could indicate that while the younger segments are more exploratory, the 25-44 year old segments have found more value in Twitter and started to ramp up usage.

Twitter may be growing like crazy but it’s yet to go mainstream. Interestingly, Twitter’s strategy of letting developers re-purpose its data may help the service reach the tipping point by making Twitter’s value more accessible. Check back next week to see how these twitter based sites (like twitterlocal and summize) are building a loyal base.

Yesterday, over 20,000 runners competed in the Boston Marathon, finishing up just a stone’s throw from Compete’s offices. This got us thinking about the similarities between Search strategy and long distance running: the race begins way before the starting gun; there’s no specific winning formula; everyone involved is in peak physical condition.

Given Compete’s physical location at the end of a famous offline marathon, and at the start of high performance search campaigns, it’s only natural that we provide an extra “carb load” in celebration of yesterday’s event. From now until 11:59 PM EST on Wednesday, April 23rd, Compete.com is doubling the total number of credits in our standard, plus, and premium credit packages. By purchasing credits during this promotion, you can run reports for less than $1.

Use your enhanced access to get more out of Compete Search Analytics:

• Get extended lists of up to 100,000 keywords driving traffic to a domain.
• Run reports on a wider set of your competitors.
• Gain a better understanding of how people search within your industry
• Find out who you are competing against for all of your keywords .