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″ »

In this video, Jeremiah and Eric Peterson take us (and Charlene Li) to task on Attention and Engagement.

We are glad that Compete.com made it into their conversation about Attention and Engagement; looks like our Scoble interviews increased awareness of Compete.com’s usefulness for online competitive intelligence and measurement! We’re hell-bent on using our clickstream and survey capabilities to come up with universal metrics in these two areas (frameworks are key, but our view is that marketers need universal measures in order to put their own performance into context - relative to rivals, peers, or anyone else they want to compare themselves to).

Earlier this year, we introduced our Attention metric, and we disagree with the conclusions that Jeremiah and Eric have come to. Attention is a time-based measure, so logically the more time we spend on a site, the more attention we give it. We think of Attention as a pie-chart - its finite - so the sites that are increasing in Attention over time are performing well along this metric. Sure people can cite the issues of multiple browser tabs, etc, but the point is that marketers need an effective way to first identify and then see why sites like www.millsberry.com are so incredibly cool. This General Mills site ranks in the top 1,500 in visitors but leaps into the top 100 in Attention because its members spend over 30 minutes on the site each time they visit it (more than Myspace):

Ask the folks at MillsOnline if they think that total time spent on site is a great way to understand whether they are increasing/sustaining Attention in the marketplace - we bet they’ll say yes.

Here’s another great application of our Attention metric:

Don’t you think this will be a great predictor for which candidates are generating the most momentum between now and Fall 2008?!

Engagement is a different story altogether - and we agree with Jeremiah and Eric. Unlike Attention (a pie-chart), we see Engagement as a spectrum. Worse yet, it is tough to place companies/sites on the same spectrum because of the important “emotional layer” of metrics that need to be considered and that are company/situation specific. Our view is that you necessarily need to use attitudinal inputs gathered via surveys to crack the code on a universal Engagement metric (and we think that Reicheld’s work around advocacy and net promoter scores is a fertile place to begin).

We appreciate Jeremiah and Eric including us in their conversation and would love to advance our approaches with further feedback from them and their collective fans!

About 6 weeks ago, David (Compete’s CTO) spoke with Robert Scoble about Compete’s services, trends he’s seeing in Web traffic and Compete’s new Attention metric.

Robert is one of the most influential bloggers on the planet — the Shaquille O’Neal of the blogosphere. Thank you, Robert, for these awesome videos! Needless to say, we’re huge fans of Robert and the rest of the Podtech crew.

The videos:

A demo of Compete’s Attention metric:

If you have ideas or feedback for Compete.com, please drop us a note!