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.” »

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that a) going out to the movies has gotten ridiculously expensive and b) most mainstream movies aren’t terrific. Given these two truths, RottenTomatoes.com is a default stop most Fridays; one critic’s review may not be a good measure of my future satisfaction with a movie, but when multiple reviews are averaged they become a powerful tool.

Rotten tomatoes has been steadily growing for the past 5 years. The chart below shows unique visitors per month, from August 2002 to August 2007. Over that time period the site has grown from just over 1 million visitors to nearly 2.5, peaking in December at over 3 million. Interestingly, while unique visitors has fallen since the December peak, Visitors spend about 25% more time on the site, so monthly attention remains relatively consistent.

The home page of Rottentomatoes.com answers the most immediate question visitors have;“Is the movie I’m about to see not a dive?”. But at around $10 a seat, there are reasons to dig deeper, so what movies were RottenTomatoes.com visitors researching the most? The chart below shows the top 20 movies on RottenTomatoes ranked by the amount of total time spent on each movie, from January 2007 to August 2007, along with each movie’s total budget, opening weekend revenue, and “TomatoMeter” score.

• Its (sort of) all about the ad spend: It appears that the primary influence on consumer interest all comes back to money. Generally, movies with the largest budgets received the most traffic.
• …then our ticket lines will wait in the shade: An internet rock star, 300 was the only site with a sub-$100 million budget to make it into the top five. It’s enormous online presence also helped drived $72 million in opening weekend sales.
• Lipstick on a pig: Bad movies with big budgets (Eragon, Fantastic 4, Ghostrider) tend to attract far less interest on the site than their more positively reviewed peers, but it doesn’t seem to impact opening weekend sales.
• A different kind of action movie: Amazingly, even RottenTomatoes isn’t immune to the adult industry’s massive web presence. WWE Divas Undressed captured more attention on the site than Live Free or Die Hard.

…but I’d still bet on Mclane any day.

“Bootylicious” was dominating the airwaves , Rush Hour 2 was battling American Pie 2 for box office (if not artistic) greatness and the US was more concerned about stem cells than homeland security. It was August in 2001, and just because the Internet bubble had already burst, the internet itself was still going strong. With a full six years of technological growth and consumer adoption, how has the internet changed?

A lot.

We’ve been tracking internet activity for a while. Long enough, in fact, to look back now and find some really cool stuff. The table below shows the largest 50 sites circa August 2001, based on monthly attention. More importantly, it also shows how that attention share has shifted since.

Biggest Losers

• AudioGalaxy.com:A filesharing site falls completely off the radar? Who’da thunk it?
• Flowgo.com: Kids have short attention spans. Despite being more colorful than radioactive skittles, Flowgo’s “cute” media could not compete with Myspace’s glitter templates
• Iwin.com: Downloadable games? Sure…but not when the same thing can be played in a browser, and for free.
• Netscape.com: You can’t spell AWOL without AOL.
• Sina.com: Apparently the biggest website in China lost presence in the US
• Geocities.com, angelfire.com, tripod.com: Precursors to social networks are still precursors. It was fun while it lasted.
• Altavista.com: Babblefish successfully got me a D in French Class. Pouvez-vous dire vos résultats de recherche êtes-vous mauvais aussi?
• Excite.com: Victim of the bust and an unremarkable portal, the site still looks stuck in 2002.
• Lycos.com: Another unremarkable portal, another huge loser.
• Dogpile.com: With a name that implies that they aggregate crap, it’s no surprise that this site fell to the wayside as search improved.

Biggest Winners

• Google.com: While every other search engine/portal/search aggregator declined (or even completely fell off the map) Google.com now captures 381% more consumer attention than it did in August 2001.
• Pogo.com: The online gaming site has grown from a respectable attention share of .34% in 2001, it now grabs nearly 1.69% of all time spent online.
• CNN.com: The news giant captures about 48% more of consumers online attention than it did in 2001.
• Mapquest.com: Despite GPS being in just about every device but the toaster, the map and directions provider has grown more than 32% in terms of attention since 2001.

General Trends

• Consolidation of Search: In 2001, people apparently had a really hard time finding stuff. In the top 25 sites, 10 were some form of search engine or portal. With the exception of the MSN, Yahoo and Google, the rest have fallen out of the picture.
• Shift toward socialization: The top sites in 2001 were predominately focused on delivering one-way information, whether it be through search, professional produced media, or ecommerce. In 2007, the top 50 are skewed heavily towards social sites, so much so, in fact, that MySpace, Youtube, and Facebook account for a collective 14% of all time spent online.
• Increasing entertainment: With broadband speed comes broadband media and games. Pogo.com, runescape.com, and neopets.com all live in the top 25 sites on the web.

It’s interesting to note that almost all of these sites capture less online attention than in 2001. While this (in some cases) is a function of waning interests, an overall decrease in attention devoted to the top 50 sites speaks to the diversity of the current internet as it compares to 2001. More sites mean more places to spend time, and a naturally wider distribution of attention. But this hasn’t stopped the web from evolving dramatically, and for some really great sites to grow like crazy and some really poor ones to die off completely.

Wedding season is in full swing, and I’ve learned first hand that planning a wedding is no easy task. Theknot.com is a social networking website that allows “brides-to-be” to research, shop, plan, and share their stories. As with many wedding websites, seasonality proves to be a limiting factor in terms of traffic. Theknot.com experiences a decline on average of about 22% in unique visitors from October to December each year. Similarly, weddingchannel.com experiences a 29% decline during that holiday season.

Theknot.com and its closest competitor, weddingchannel.com, both peak in traffic during the month of June. However, both sites experienced a y-o-y decline last month by 23% and 11% respectively. Couples preparing to have their wedding on the “luckiest wedding day ever” didn’t seem to have an impact either sites traffic. Last month, weddingchannel.com had over 50k more unique visitors than theknot.com, but couldn’t stack up in terms of attention.

Theknot.com’s sister site, thenest.com, features home and money advice, decorating tips and recipies. By promoting migration over to thenest after the big day, theknot manages to keep couples “engaged” long after the honeymoon is over.

With imitation being the highest form of flattery, Compete’s been getting quite a few compliments from the competition lately. In late March, comScore introduced “visits” to their stable of analytics and Nielsen//NetRatings just announced a “total minutes” metric. As the internet has evolved, technologies like online video, and AJAX have made these new types of metrics a necessity in measuring online behavior. And that’s exactly why Compete has been offering both of these, for free, months before anyone else.

In February we introduced the Compete Attention 200™, the two hundred sites that received the largest share of online Attention among US internet users, in the month of December 2006. Based on the share of total time of time U.S internet users spend across the top one million websites, Attention adds a layer of context, by accounting for monthly fluctuations in the amount time people spend online. Half a year later, a lot has changed!

At a high level, several trends emerge.

• There is some evidence of seasonal shopping trends (retail related sites plummeted in attention)
• The web continues to socialize: media and networking sites gain attention across the board
• The NFL passes the ball to NASCAR in terms of sports attention, as it falls completely off the list

Continue reading “Where DO we spend our time online? — The Compete Attention 200™ for June 2007″ »