In less than two weeks, crime will run rampant in the streets. Crime bosses will come to power, assaults will be made with deadly weapons, and thousands of autos will undoubtedly be stolen. Luckily the only thing harmed will be pixels. On April 29th, Rockstar’s newest episode in the Grand Theft Auto series hits shelves. The hype around Grand Theft Auto 4 has been immense, but the real question is: does hype translate into sales?

One indicator of future sales is pre-launch demand – not people watching trailers or investigating rumors about the game, but those actually exhibiting shopping activity. Despite being available on both the PS3 and Xbox 360, demand is nowhere near that of 2007’s most anticipated game, Halo 3.

The chart above compares pre-launch demand of these two blockbuster games for the 15 weeks leading up to each game’s respective launch:

• During this crucial demand-building period, Halo 3 attracted an average of 4x the shoppers of Grand Theft Auto 4.
• As each game’s launch grew closer, demand for both game ramped up. In fact, in the last two weeks, GTA 4 has closed the demand gap…but not fully. Halo 3’s launch demand, in the same week was only 140% higher.

Has the Wii felt the burn by not offering the Grand Theft Auto Title?
Hardly. Sales for the Wii console have been reported on at length, and demand tells a similar story. The chart below shows Compete’s estimate of monthly in-market video console demand based on the number of U.S. consumers observed shopping online for each console* to console sales as reported by NDP group.

But there’s an interesting relationship between sales and online shopping activity: sales are capped at the total number of available units. Especially during this holiday season, a lot of demand for the Wii went unfulfilled.

• Demand for the Wii spiked to nearly 3.5 million shoppers in December of 2007, a growth of 62% year over year.
• Despite just barely edging Xbox 360 out in terms of December sales, the Wii crushed it rival in terms of demand. During both November and December Nintendo’s console attracted 2x more shoppers than the 360 (or the PS3).
• As the holiday season ended, the large gap between Wii demand and sales as shopping activity subsides, and more consoles become available for purchase.

It’s significant that the Wii is experiencing substantially higher demand than it did during it’s launch period, typically the case and indicative of a more significant trend. The escalating number of shoppers implies that many people are still “discovering” the Wii, and the massive volumes of traffic seem to reach beyond the “gamer” demographic. As gaming is clearly going mainstream, the intuitive design and social elements of the platform have consumers turning to the Wii in droves.

We all know this person: constantly showing up in your Facebook news feed with status updates, added friends and wall comments. The “stickiness” of most social sites is unrivaled by any other type of site, a point that the behavior of hardcore members really drive home. These “Social Addicts” check their beloved site constantly and have helped encourage similar behavior from other users.

Knowing how different Facebook and MySpace are in terms of design, functionality and usage, how much do “addicts” of these social networks differ? You may have read some of our posts on BehaviorMatch before, but this analysis essentially highlights the online behavior that is specific to a particular group of users. This analysis is designed to help with media buying, but in the case of social networks it can also help define the psychographic makeup of the group, and how “addicts” generally use their favorite social site.

The table below shows the sites that MySpace and Facebook Addicts* visited substantially more than the average internet user. So what do these users do when they aren’t getting their social network fix?

• To be fair, the MySpace list is filtered. An untouched list of the top twenty most popular websites among MySpace addicts would consist entirely of sites focused on modifying personal profile pages.
• After scrubbing out a majority of the sites focused on MySpace layouts, it seems that the hardcore users of this MySpace are still primarily teens, as sites focused on proms (meprom.com), shoes (kicksaholic.com), and Alternative music (warpedtour.com) bubble to the top of the list.
• It’s no surprise that hardcore Facebook users have a high affinity to some sites supporting Facebook applications, but the applications they interact with the most is telling of their online interests. It appears gaming (socialgn.com), dating (sexappealhq.com), music (garageband.com), and interacting with friends (quizapps.com) are all a core online activity to Facebook addicts.

MySpace and Facebook are two well established sites with massive audiences. Twitter, on the other hand, is a much smaller, growing site devoted to communication. In some ways it could be seen as the direction the social web is heading…and it’s also highly addicting. So what do the sites that Twitter addicts visit say about the future of the web, and how does this compare to the two more traditional social web players?

Comparing the three, some really compelling trends are visible. While it’s not shocking that sites like twhirl.org (a site that offers “tweet” enabling software) rise to the top of the list, some of the others show that these users are most interested in socializing.

• MySpace addicts are somewhat vain – focusing heavily on establishing and fine tuning their online personas by customization of their personal profiles
• Facebook addicts focus more on engagement – interacting with applications, music and people both on and off the platform
• Twitter addicts are most interested in fostering communication and exploration – sites that allow a user to understand what their contacts are doing, provide a platform for content discovery and encourage users to actively participate are the most likely places to find hardcore twitterers.

* In this analysis Facebook and MySpace addicts were defined as any user who logged into either site at least 21 days in February. Twitter addicts were defined as anyone who went to their twitter home page at least 10 times in a month. The less stringent qualifications for Twitter addicts was necessary because of the multiple channels used to access the site (mobile, desktop applications).

Earlier this week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg made Forbes list of the World’s Richest Men. Facebook certainly had more ups than downs in 2007, but can the site continue its rapid growth into 2008? Where’s MySpace and what else is going in the social web? It appears that the real movers in and shakers in 2008 weren’t moving much in early 2007.

For the big players in the space, February represented a slight decrease in traffic, but the year- over-year growth rates seem to indicate that social networking (as an industry) has yet to peak. The table below shows the top social networks in February 2008, ranked by monthly visits. This ranking factors in both total audience size, and also intensity of use.

UPDATED - 3/13

• Myspace was down slightly from February 2007 in terms of total US visits. However, the networking giant still holds a commanding traffic lead over all other Social sites.
• Facebook visits fell slightly from January 2008 to February 2008, but over the year the site has grown by over 75%. In terms of US visitors, it is now about one half the size of Myspace, but receives about 1/3rd as many visits.
• Niche markets are still attractive in terms of Social networking: Cafemom (a social network geared towards mothers), Linkedin (a networking site for professionals) and Fubar (“the first online bar”) all grew by 5X or more from February 2007 through February 2008. Fubar, in fact, exploded into the top 20 networks from relative obscurity one year ago.
• Innovative business models also had success in 2007: Communication platform Twitter, and white label social network Ning, both found a dramatically larger audience in the past year.

While fairly flat trend lines in MySpace traffic may provide an indication of the market reaching its peak, the rapid growth of some very new players in the space speaks to the opportunities in social networking that still exist… but only time will tell if Zuckerburg makes Forbe’s list next year.

Update: At the request of several of our readers, we’ve updated the table to include several prominent social networks that were left off the original post:

• imeem.com
• livejournal.com
• 360.yahoo.com

With the massive amount of search activity taking place across the web, the highest traffic search terms can provide a glimpse into the issues currently important to internet users, and consumers as a whole. With our online search tools, you can start to get at this data on a site level, but what we find even more interesting is how this plays out for the web as a whole, and how these terms change over time.

Taking a look at the most popular search terms from December 2007 through the better half of February 2008, some interesting trends develop. For this analysis we stripped out all branded, navigational and adult terms, to get at the meaty center of search behavior. The chart below shows the most popular search terms for January 2008, ranked by search referrals. The spark charts to the right of each term represent how referral volume has changed over time. We used referrals (as opposed to queries) in order to strip out terms that don’t result in fulfilled searches.

• Pop culture related spikes: Heath Ledger’s tragic death caused an explosion in searches on his name in January, resulting in nearly 2 million referrals from this term. Because of the timing of his untimely passing, some of this traffic spilled over into February. Search referrals from “Britney Spears” show a similar story.
• Seasonal trends: With tax season upon us, and students renewing their financial aid, search referrals from government terms “IRS” and “FAFSA” grew dramatically in January and then stabilize in February.
• Political Momentum: Just as Barack Obama’s campaign has gained increasing momentum, more online consumers are searching on his name. There was a dramatic increase from December to January (last month searches for his name drove over 500,000 referrals), and it appears that this term will nearly double again in February. Search volume for “Hillary Clinton” and “John McCain” grew substantially in the same time period, but with considerably less traffic.
• Technically branded, but too cool to leave out: Trailers and advertising for Cloverfield avoided showing the movie’s underlying monster. This ambiguity encouraged over 900,000 referrals for the term “Cloverfield.” The term “cloverfield monster” just barely missed making the top twenty-five list as well.

All terms listed above are exact match terms. For instance, for the term “dictionary” searches for a term like “online dictionary” would not be counted.

Apple has a long history of releasing critically acclaimed ads starting back in 1984 with “The Greatest Commercial of All Time.” More recently, one of the coolest aspects of Apple advertising has been the use of relatively unknown musicians, with their music as the (seemingly) most important element of the commercial. Through multi-million dollar ad campaigns, Apple helps bring these lesser-known artists mainstream. With the recent launch of the iPod Nano, iPod Touch and Macbook Air, Compete took a look at how consumers exposure to offline commercials influenced online behavior, and also how artists (and Apple) benefit from a partnership.

What’s incredible is how high quality TV commercials can foster online research. From August 2007 to January 2008, US consumers conducted nearly 1 million queries for iPod related commercials or the underlying music. The table below shows the top 20 search phrases (in terms of query volume), and how these queries were conducted over the period.

Its interesting to note that 15 of the top 20 searches contained the word “song” or “music” and also helps to explain search behavior. With almost no information being given about the music used in Apple commercials, consumers unfamiliar with the artist (and apparently enjoyed the song) naturally search for the song in the commercial.

Additionally, the fact that September was such a huge month in terms of Apple commercial search activity indicates the degree to which consumers enjoyed Feist’s “1-2-3-4,” a song that appeared in Apple iPod Nano commercials. Over 425,000 people were actively searching for the song in this commercial in September.

Apple TV ads are all about branding, but they apparently do a great job at getting people to revisit the advertisements online. They also are an amazing opportunity for an undiscovered musician. For all three artists in recent commercials (Feist, CSS, and Yael Naim), Apple ads resulted in exponentially greater exposure to consumers, even excluding the offline component.

• For Fiest’s “1-2-3-4” YouTube video, traffic grew 1200% from the month prior to the Nano commercial’s launch, and over 45X when views of the actual commercial (on YouTube, or Apple) was included.
• Growth for CSS’s “Music is my hot hot sex,” which was created by an fan, and then used by Apple, showed substantial growth as well.
• It appears that being exposed through Apple commercials also results in loyalty. In fact, 3 months after the Nano commercial launched, traffic to Feist “1-2-3-4” videos on YouTube was receiving 5 times the monthly views it was getting prior to its feature in the Nano commercial.
• It’s not surprising, but people seem to have confused the iPhone with the iPod Touch. Traffic to iPhone commercial videos on YouTube and Apple.com spiked around the same time as the iPod Touch ad was released. (not shown)

What is so significant about Apple’s advertising is that it not only helps to define the company and generate demand for talented musicians, but also helps encourage the music discovery process, which ties directly back to iTunes. By exposing consumers to great music from new (or unknown) artists, they get people interested in the music search. With an artist the company exposed nominated for a Grammy, and millions of people seeking out commercials instead of avoiding them, Apple is doing a few things right.

The big news of the day is Microsoft’s $45 billion dollar bid for Yahoo. While the blogosphere will be abuzz with predictions of how this will shake up the online landscape, there’s a very real impact on pure “traffic ownership.” We took a really brief look at what the potential merger means for Microsoft in terms of net new traffic, and how this will impact the big players in the space.

Microsoft currently owns three of the top ten most trafficked domains (as ranked by UVs). Yahoo.com currently ranks first across the entire web on this metric. What’s interesting is that, because of both Yahoo and Microsoft’s massive audiences, the overall pool of Unique Visitors grows by a surprisingly small amount. Looking at the chart below, Microsoft Properties* and Yahoo.com share 96 Million Visitors. In fact, the net new traffic, in terms of US Unique Visitors, only grows by 31% (37 million people). To throw the transaction value into the mix, that translates to $1,186 for each net new visitor.

But Unique Visitors are only one component of traffic measurement. In terms of total page views and Attention, a Yahoo acquisition would nearly double Microsoft’s numbers. The chart below shows the net new Unique Visitors, Pageviews and Attention that would result from the potential merger.

How would this potential merger shake up the overall internet landscape? Two-fold.

• Microsoft would dominate the web in terms of display ads. In addition to the billions of page views on various Microsoft domains, their ad network will grow exponentially.
• Microsoft would become a much bigger competitor in the search market.
  The chart below shows how the combined search, and site traffic will reshape the top performers on the net.

Google would still take the lions share of online search traffic but the combination of Yahoo and MSN/Live would grab about 25% of all search market share. However, the size of these two online giants would simply dominate any domain level traffic ranking, no matter how you slice the data. In terms of page views, the merged company would get over double the page views of second ranked MySpace.

There are many, many implications of a merger between Yahoo and Microsoft. As we dig deeper into this exciting development, we’ll be sure to keep you posted.

*In this analysis, Compete did not consider Yahoo Inc’s offsite traffic (at sites such as flickr or del.icio.us) and considered Microsoft traffic on Microsoft.com, MSN.com and Live.com