New England was a tough place to get funded in the first quarter of 2008. Venture capitalists in the region cut Q1 spending by 27% from a year ago. The retreat by the New Englander investors was much sharper than by their non-New England colleagues who cut their spending just 2%. As a result, New England’s share of venture capital funding declined from 13% of total US funding in Q1 2007 to 10% in the first quarter of this year.

Do the cutbacks anticipate a tougher economic slowdown in the Northeast? Have New England entrepreneurs suddenly become less clever? Or is it just a dose of Yankee conservatism? Whatever the reason, the tighter purse strings won’t help New England innovators catch their rivals elsewhere.

Prof. Ross Gittel has published an article on the subject called “Demographic Demise” in the New England Journal of Higher Education. The University of New Hampshire professor shows that the New England states held six of the bottom ten rankings in young adult population declines (population ages 25-34) over the years 1990 to 2004. Gittel notes that this young cohort shrank by more than one-fifth in each of the New England states. His data show that while more than 6% of US full-time students go to college in New England, a decade later only 4.5% of 25-34 year-olds live here. He cites a 2003 study by the Boston Chamber of Commerce and the Boston Consulting Group which determined that half of the area’s college graduates get their diplomas and then leave the area – believing the attractions and opportunities were greater elsewhere.

The shrinking New England share data become really painful when we look at two high profile examples of lost opportunities. In 1974 amid rising oil prices and the Vietnam War, Bill Gates left New England to start Microsoft. Thirty years later, in 2004, with the Internet struggling with its recession, Mark Zuckerberg left New England, got angel financing for Facebook in California and founded his company in Palo Alto. Today the web sites of these two New England collegians account for 4% of all time spent online in the US, with this share more than doubling in the last year and growing at rate of 7% per month. Now, Microsoft employs more than 47,000 people in the US and Facebook plans to double its number of employees to 700 this year.

Ouch!

Last week, Wall Street and Madison Avenue were abuzz with the news that Google Paid Search Ad clickthroughs had gone flat in terms of volume. But just as traders dumped the stock and caused its share price to plummet, others were questioning that decision. But one factor that everyone seemed to ignore was the little fact that this year contains a full extra day worth of potential business. This got us thinking - what does that extra day really mean in terms of online marketing?

Looking at our data we know that in January in the U.S. there were 600 billion page views which would be a daily average of 20 million page views. In the 4th quarter of 2007 internet ad spending totaled $7.3 billion or about $81 million per day according to the IDC in a recent ClickZ article.

Combining this with published ad revenue numbers, it would appear that US pageviews collectively have a CPM to marketers of about $4.18.

So marketers will be spending $81 million today that they would not have in the previous three years. In the spirit of GoldenPlace.com’s bizarre marketing efforts (hey, they apparently work…here we are creating buzz), we came up with some ways marketers could spend this money when the year is one day shorter, to put this all in perspective.

What Else Could Leap Day Ad Revenue Buy?
	Give 400,000 kids an OLPC with your logo on it
	Buy 17% of all goods for sale on eBay for that day
	Give 550,000 JitterBug phones to seniors in need with your logo on them
	Fund Barack Obama’s campaign for another two months
	Take over Digg’s advertising for 2 years 6 months
	Buy A New Ferrari 599 in every color available in the 8 bit spectrum (256)
	Buy up ALL of Google’s Adword’s inventory for the next 7 days.
	Rent Necker Island from Richard Branson for 5 years and send you favorite customers there ($300,000 per week)
	Buy 40 million Compete.com credits and eat your competitor’s lunch
	Pay 1 hour 40 minutes of the interest on the National Debt.

The Treasury has made it easy for individuals to reduce the debt. You just have to give a “Gift to reduce Debt Held by the Public“…

…it’s just too bad they don’t take paypal.

One of the best perks of working at Compete is the ability to analyze website traffic down to page level detail for any domain — measuring visitor conversion, discovering a website’s referral sources, and getting traffic figures for millions of sites without being restricted to analyzing five domains at a time through Site Analytics.

Today, we’re pleased to make available Compete Top Lists. This new product provides ranking lists for up to 500,000 domains on the basis of any metric available on Compete.com:

• Unique Visitors
• Total Visits
• Pageviews
• Time Spent On Site
• Monthly Attention

Whether you’re a site owner wondering where you fall in the context of your peers, a domain buyer looking for the next great undervalued site, a venture capitalist looking for the next big as-yet discovered hit, or a stat-head interested in analyzing the web on a macro level, Compete Top Lists offers a new level of insight into the ever changing web.

Interested? Contact membersupport@compete.com or follow the link below for more information.

Believe it or not, based on the top 100 domains (unique visitors) FanFiction.net has the fourth highest average time spent per user. That’s right, they beat out Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Only three sites rank higher; the almighty time wasting gaming site, Pogo.com (number one), and the two hottest dating sites (so I hear) on the net; manhunt.net and adam4adam.com. Coming in at a close number five is another gaming site, runescape.com and then finally, Myspace. I’d like to once again send my condolences to Tom on his big loss for the coveted ‘most devoted internet junkie website of the year award.’

What is FanFiction.net? I had honestly never heard of it until it broke the top 30 for attention recently (now at number 28) and I did a little digging. Founded in 1988 by computer programmer Xing Li this website allows users to post their fiction on a myriad of topics ranging from anime to movies and if that’s not enough, “Misc.” It’s not hard to see why people spend so much time on this website, once you read one post about the highly anticipated Edward Scissorhands II (Johnny Depp declined comment) you will be hooked. When I say hooked, I mean it: The average user spends over seven and a half hours on this website a month and logs in more than 34 times.

Following a decade of “Blockbuster: Part II,” we have FanFiction.net - a site that finally allows fanatics of beloved media classes to live out their ultimate fantasy of having Han Solo navigate the Starship Enterprise through the Twilight Zone. That’s not to say that there is free reign on this site to post anything your heart desires; on September 12, 2002 all material rated NC-17 was banned from the website. This did not seem to have much effect on traffic to the website as almost 2,000 people posted their opinions on South Park. Although, it may not seem like a big deal to many people, I take comfort in knowing that playing games, looking for love and stalking your old acquaintances can sometimes be less enticing then letting your true feelings about Dirty Dancing finally come out. Cheers to you, Fanfiction.net, your clean site design with only one banner add and unadulterated freedom of expression has catapulted your users into a class almost of their own.

Is it a good time to be long-term bullish on the Internet? Take a look at the chart below -

We are spending more and more time consuming information online. Logically, since time is finite online advertising spend should follow a similar trajectory with marketers allocating their ad budgets in proportion to where people are spending their time.

Needless to say, this is a time of considerable opportunity for online media properties and online marketers!

It’s time to stick a fork in the notion of “Cyber Monday.” In terms of traffic, there’s no doubt that the holiday season represents a period of peak activity for retailers of all shapes, sizes and online penetration, but the idea that a bevy of internet users will start frantically clicking the “add to cart” button on the Monday after Thanksgiving is just wrong. However, the weeks leading up to cyber Monday gives a really interesting perspective on how people use the web to shop.

The chart below shows the retail sector’s daily reach* and daily attention** from the 15th to the 26th of November, for a set of the top 50 online retailers in the U.S.

By considering both total visitors (Daily Reach) and total time (Daily Attention), it’s possible to expose any high-level changes in actual shopping behavior.

• There is a significant ramp up in both Attention and Reach from the period of November 15th through the 23rd, before both begin to trail off. On Thanksgiving, nearly 30% of every U.S internet browser visited one of the top 50 online retailers.
• A widening gap begins to develop between the two metrics on the 18th, indicating that visitors are spending less time per visit at retailers. A major factor in this could be related to research (more on this later).
• Interestingly, while Daily Reach peaks on the 22rd, Attention remains stable through the 25th indicating a trend of more involved site visitors on the 25 and 26th. Strangely, on “the biggest online shopping day of the year” Attention falls dramatically.

Continue reading “The Myth of Cyber Monday: Busted.” »