There’s been a lot of discussion out there about the spike seen from Live this month. As I said in the original post, this only matters if Microsoft can turn this traffic into actual search users. I was curious to see what the numbers would look like if I eliminated the searches originating from the Live Search Club, and this is what I got for the market share:

And the market share trends:

As you can see, Live still had a strong month and still (barely) has positive year-over-year growth.

If you haven’t already seen it, check out the full June Search Share post.

Our readers have had several questions regarding the June Search Share, specifically MSN/Live’s increase and we have posted an update, showing the numbers without the ClubLive traffic. Check it out!

Google finally has a competitor join it in the (until now) exclusive, positive-year-over-year-growth club. MSN/Live increased their query volume by 67% from May, and 48% from a year ago. Search volume was up all across the board in June and took most everyone else in the same direction.

A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live. It looks like Chicktionary is leading the charge (by the way, “chicktionary”… not as cool as it sounds).

We didn’t see any traffic to club.live.com at all in April. About a third of a million unique visitors went to the club in May, and in June, this shot up to over 3 million unique visitors.

While that sharp spike from MSN looks impressive, it’s only relative to their own current standing. In terms of market share, it represents just 5 percentage points that Live took away from other engines (mostly Google). If Microsoft can actually leverage this traffic to club.live.com into actual search users and string together a few more months like this, they could really threaten Google’s top spot.

I’ll admit it, I’m a fan of Jericho, the post apocalyptic serial drama from CBS. The acting was bad, the dialog was marginal, and the plotlines required your disbelief to be more than simply suspended… you had to take it out back and shoot it. But the idea was great; that was enough to get me watching in the beginning. That initial curiosity combined with interesting characters and compelling drama turned me into a never-miss-an-episode viewer. So, in the last moments of the season finale, when Jericho is facing its darkest hour and Jake Green echos General Anthony C. McAuliffe’s response to a request for surrender with “Nuts,” I wanted more. Unfortunately, CBS didn’t.

CBS officially announced Jericho’s cancellation on May 16th. Almost immediately (as if the Internet was built for just these circumstances) the orders for nuts started rolling in. A small, 78 year old, family-owned, nut business based in New Jersey called NutsOnline started noticing a bunch of orders coming in to their website to be delivered to CBS headquarters in New York. (By the way, NutsOnline founded in 1929? It must have been a slow 2/3rds of a century for them just waiting around for the interwebs to start up). Within just a few days, this scrappy team of nut roasters and fruit dryers was able to set up a special section of their site for Jericho fans to pool their money for mass shipments of peanuts to CBS.

Their quick action was key in eventually getting over 20 tons of peanuts sent to CBS. The following graph shows an index of the unique visitors to nutsonline.com from May 6th to June 6th.

The purple bar represents those who visited at least one of the special pages created for the Jericho campaign, the orange is anyone who visited NutsOnline but no Jericho page. The average number of daily visitors to NutsOnline during the last 11 days in May was more than triple that for the first 20. During this period, the campaign was almost completely online; run from Jericho Lives, chronicled on blogs like SyFy Portal, and discussed on Jericho Rally Point and the CBS Jericho Message Boards.

Thanks to the Google news alert I had created for the word “jericho” I can tell you that the mounting traffic upto June 5th was from increased mainstream press coverage of the campaign, and rumors that CBS had decided to bring Jericho back (thanks to the same Google alert I can also tell you that: Chris Jericho might return to the WWE, Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas had planned to meet in Jericho on Thursday, and Mark Ricciuto is returning as forward to the Adelaide Football Club replacing Luke Jericho).

After 3 weeks and 20 tons of peanut deliveries, CBS has finally gotten sick of peanuts seen just how truly great Jericho is and decided to bring it back for at least 7 more episodes mid-season next year. Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment wrote a nice letter to the Jericho fans on June 6th informing them of CBS’s decision; adding, “P.S. Please stop sending us nuts :-)”. NutsOnline happily complied and shut down all nut shipments to CBS (visitors to NutsOnline are still increasing with more than half of all visitors going to the Jericho section).

P.S. I wouldn’t mind if someone started sending me nuts… Compete Inc. / c/o Steven Willis / 4 Copley Place / Suite 700 / Boston, MA 02116