In my book club, the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize winners is as eagerly anticipated and followed as the Super Bowl. With this being the literary Super Bowl week, I was interested to see if it was just my club or the general public who was following this so closely.

Not surprisingly, Attention for pulitzer.org peaked during April last year when the announcement was made. What was a bit surprising was that last April’s unique visitor total was just over 46,000. This is a story that many people probably hear about through traditional news outlets (especially if that outlet happens to be one of the winners), but the low visitors totals even for the month of the announcement may mean that it is mostly book clubs and not the general public who is watching this so closely.

Continue reading “Pulitzer Prize: Winnings don’t include Internet popularity” »

Somewhere between Instant Messenger Profiles and Vertical “People” search engines, social networking has become a keystone of the web. And much like the beer bearing the same name, it’s cheap, facilitates conversation, and is consumed primarily by younger people. As social networking continues its rapid adoption, the diversification of the social networking sites makes it an important segment to assess.

Continue reading “Top Social Networks: Who’s losing to MySpace” »

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.

What can I say, I was curious. To satisfy my own curiosity, I set out to answer the big question — Are GigaOm readers any different from those of TechCrunch? You would think they would be similar, right? Not quite. Read on..

How we measured:

We took the Top-20 domains in Jan ‘07 ranked by Attention Share (Attention Share considers all the time we collectively spend online and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on a given site). We then separately calculated Attention Share for GigaOm and TechCrunch readers — which gave us a detailed map of where the two segments choose to spend their time online. We then looked at how GigaOm and TechCrunch readers indexed against the Top-20 domains that average U.S. internet consumers spend most time on.

About the sample data:

GigaOm analysis is based on clickstream data from 190 (anonymous) individuals in Compete’s panel that visited Gigaom.com in January. TechCrunch analysis is based on 431 individuals.

Key Observations:

• MySpace.com: Not a big hit with GigaOm and TechCrunch readers compared to the general U.S. craze.
• Yahoo.com: TechCrunch readers spend more time on Yahoo vs. Google.
• Google.com: GigaOm readers spend more time on Google vs. Yahoo.

• Facebook.com: TechCrunch readers love it!
• YouTube.com: TechCrunch readers spend 170% more time on YouTube than the average user. GigaOm readers also love YouTube, indexing 42% over the U.S. average.

• Wikipedia.org: This one was predicable, TechCrunch and GigaOm both love Wikipedia – TechCrunch loves it more.
• Live.com: GigaOm says…. Yawwwwwwn.

Om/Mike Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

The market currently relies heavily on visitors and page views to measure performance, but we know these metrics can be gamed.

Time, on the other hand, is finite and selfishly managed by the user making it harder to game. Therefore if a site can garner more of an individual’s time it should be considered a good thing, right?

With that said, we know there are exceptions (Search for example), which is why we haven’t presented Attention as the king of all metrics. We see Attention as an additional piece of the puzzle.

For example:

• MySpace attracted 16% of all pageviews on the internet (U.S.) in December
• However, U.S. users only spent 11.9% of their time on MySpace
• MySpace provides a service valued by consumers (11.9% Attention Share), but the site is terribly designed and thus inflates misleading engagement metrics like pageviews

The following are the top 20 domains that captured our Attention in January 2007:

Key observations:

• As expected, shopping/commerce sites captured less Attention in January:
  • Craigslist was the only shopping/classifieds site in the top-20 to gain Attention Share
  • Amazon.com fell 4 positions - its Attention Share decreased from 0.67% to 0.46%
  • Walmart.com dropped off the Top-20 list
  • Ebay.com’s Attention Share decreased as well, but not as much as the other shopping sites on the list. Perhaps people were looking to unload some of the stuff they accumulated over the holiday season. This theory could also explain Craigslist’s gain.
• Bankofamerica.com fell. People checking (and re-checking) their bank balance as they spent their hard earned cash in December?
• Adultfriendfinder.com gained - New Year’s Resolutions related? We know post-Christmas time is a seasonally strong time for online personals.
• Who is new on this list? (compared to Dec ‘06):
  • Runescape.com - #21 in Dec
  • Comcast.net - #22 in Dec
• Who is absent? (compared to Dec ‘06):
  • Neopets.com - #18 in Dec / #22 in Jan
  • Walmart.com - #16 in Dec / #28 in Jan

More and more, our clients and readers have asked us to develop a better metric for measuring the performance of their web channels and planning their online media investments. Although unique visitors and page views are critical pieces of the puzzle that is the web – these metrics often fail to accurately measure engagement on sites using technologies such as online video and AJAX. Unfortunately, defining a universal “engagement metric” is like finding the holy grail – it’s elusive, controversial and many will die in an attempt to take ownership of it. So while we all are trying to crack the code on how to best measure engagement, Compete has created an important sister metric – Attention.

We are excited to announce the creation of the Attention 200™, the two hundred sites that yield the largest share of our attention on the web. The Attention Index is based on the amount of time U.S. internet users spend across the top one million websites. The Compete Attention 200™ represents the best of the best each month.

Attention is an incredibly powerful way to plan and measure the web because it is finite and we manage it selfishly. We grant our attention to people, activities and websites that merit receiving our most precious resource – our time.

Because it is grounded in consumers, tough to game and technology-agnostic, we feel it’s appropriate to begin incorporating Attention as a standard metric when analyzing the web. As such, we’ll be introducing additional views and Attention metrics into our SnapShot tool next month. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback!