Today is like my birthday, but only a thousand times better. It’s Flag Day!!!! A day where we celebrate the day the American Flag was formally adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1777.

I know… I have goose bumps too.

I’m finding many of my Compete colleagues mocking my enthusiasm… in fact, many have challenged me to a Flag Day duel of sorts:

Team: “If you can find one interesting thing to write about Flag Day we will invest in a full blown report on Arbor Day and the internet’s impact on trees.”

TJ: “Done-ski.”

Flag Day Findings:

• There are over a 200K people per month looking for flags online.
• Events of war and national emergency dramatically increase the demand for flags. The demand for flags has increased by ~75% every September since the events of 9/11.
• Flags are to Memorial Day as flowers are to Valentines Day… Visitor traffic to flag sites tends to increase by 20-30% in May.

Case closed… Flag Day can be interesting.

There has been a lot of talk about the “long tail” of the internet. In December we decided to investigate various attributes of the size of the internet and walked away with two primary conclusions:

• The internet is constantly expanding. In 2006 Compete’s panel visited over 5M unique websites, representing an increase of 77% since 2001.
• The expansion of the internet is not compromising the growth of larger sites – in fact, the larger sites are getting bigger, attracting more visitors and interaction than ever before.

But what about the middle? What we refer to as “The Torso” or sites attracting over a million visitors a month. How many sites are breaking this threshold and how fast is The Torso growing?

In Q1 of 2007, there were 1,718 sites attracting over 1M visitors (U.S.). This represents a 458% increase since 2001. This sets the five year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of “The Torso” at 18.6%. By this time next year The Torso will be comprised of ~2,050 sites!

So who broke the million visitor threshold between Q1 ’06 – Q1 ’07?

Noteworthy additions to The Torso:

• Digg.com: broke the million visitor barrier in April ’06. Digg’s growth continues to impress and as of April ’07 is attracting over 15M visitors each month.
• eMusic.com: EMusic is the I-Tunes of the indie-music labels. I have been a member for years. The songs are considerably cheaper than I-Tunes, no DRM and the community is great at finding talented, but undiscovered artists.
• Foreclosure.com: A natural side effect of the recent real estate boom. Lets hope the growing popularity of the site is not indicative of a real estate crash.
• Gather.com: The social network with a brain is beginning catch on among the adult populous.
• “My” sites: There were “17” sites that broke the million visitor threshold whose domain name began with “my”. Example: mybloglog.com, mygirlyspace.com, myspacestop.com, myview.com, myhotquiz.com… (I’ll stop now).

TicketMaster is the website you love to hate. It has nearly monopolized the event ticket industry and makes a nice chunk of change on every ticket it sells by charging a delivery fee, a convenience fee, a save the unicorns fee and a fee for charging the fees.

TicketMaster has enjoyed its market dominance, but has recently seen StubHub nipping at its heels. (To accurately represent the situation this is like a poodle nipping at the heals of a grizzly bear).

Continue reading “TicketMaster and StubHub” »

Several weeks ago a new “social network for the family” called Geni, made the headlines with a big time valuation of $100M. Pundits are going back and forth on whether Geni’s valuation is reasonable or gonzo.

I could not help but investigate so I jumped into Geni and began playing around.

I found Geni to be like a piece of gum. It tasted great at first, but quickly wore off. I successfully got about 50% of my immediate family to join Geni. Working together we quickly built out our family tree, but now what?

Continue reading “Geni.com: A really expensive piece of gum” »

For the last few months we have made several posts using a new metric we refer to as Attention. We created our Attention metric because all of us in online marketing need a better way to gauge the influence of a site beyond unique visitors, page views and “visits”. While these are all critical pieces of the puzzle that is the web, they all also have their short comings.

Today we announce that you can use Compete.com to measure a site’s Attention. Attention fuses engagement (measured by time) and traffic (measured by unique visitors) into a single, more complete picture of a web site’s value.

Today’s Enhancements:

• Attention: Introduction of the only attention-based web metrics
• Daily Data: Monitor site performance on a daily basis
• Velocity: Compare the relative growth of your site to another property
• Visits: Analyze the popularity of a site not only by how many people access it, but also how often they “visit”
• Embeddable Graphs: Easily embed Compete graphs on your web site

Why is Attention Important?

• A site’s influence can be under/over stated by traditional metrics.
• There are only 24 hours in a day – our time is finite. Where we spend our time is where we find the most value.

Notice in the chart above how runescape.com only ranks 436th in unique visitors, yet based on Attention is the 15th most prominent site on the web. If we relied solely on traditional metrics we would overlook the real value and prominence of Runescape.

Above is a Velocity graph of Yelp compared to Yahoo. Although Yahoo saw a 3.8% increase in unique visitor traffic in February the percent of our Attention (e.g. time) we spend on Yahoo has decreased over the last 45 days. Yelp, on the other hand, is attracting more of our Attention every day. Being able to gauge where people’s Attention is migrating is extremely valuable in determining where we can effectively reach and engage an audience.

We wanted to thank all of our users and members for providing us the feedback and encouragement that led us to today’s release. There are over 400,000 people using Compete.com who have requested over 3,000,000 site SnapShots. We receive 10 emails a day suggesting new features/enhancements and we read every one… Thanks for helping make Compete.com the smartest site on the web!

To see the full press release of this announcement click here.

DomainTools published an interesting blog post identifying the various domains Google has registered over the last six years. After a careful read and a less careful analysis I determined it could be possible to predict Google’s future by:

1. Monitoring Google’s domain registrations on a “whois” service such as DomainTools.
2. Playing around with SearchMash a few times a month, noting any experience adjustments, and assessing their economic impacts.

The majority of the above domains are dormant, but note how DomainTools is capable of revealing Google’s plans. Google Checkout, Wi-Fi, Scholar, etc. were all predicated with fairly obvious domain purchases.

So what’s next for Google? I think it’s clear they are going right after Chipotle with BayAreaBurritos.com. You could argue Mexican cuisine is not a core competency of Google, but somewhere in those data farms lies the ultimate salsa verde recipe.

It’s also interesting to see Google get into the link farming business with Guxiang.com. I heard the misspelling of GuxiangCom.com is expected to push Google earnings up by $0.02/share…. Very impressive.

Last, is SearchMash.com which is a real domain with real traffic. If you are not familiar with SearchMash, it’s the sandbox that Google releases experiments in. The site has only been available to the public since October ’06, but quickly attracted 191K U.S. visitors by December ‘06.

Traffic has fallen off by 36% over the last two months, but the site features a handful of cool widgets that clues you into what might be coming next from Google.

Will it be burritos? Or will it be comparative analytical tools via Bench-Index.com? I’m willing to bet the former.