As we finish up our first full year of blogging at Compete, we thought we’d take a look back. Using the wealth of Compete data to find trends, the blog has made strides this year, in both Technorati ranking (up almost 10,000 spots to better than 2,300) and readership.

Here are some of the posts that have helped get us there, ranked by page views.

• 10. Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD: Does anyone care?
• 9. Netflix vs. Blockbuster: A heated debate between two extremists
• 8. Facebook now ranked 3rd in Page Views; MySpace down nearly 20%
• 7. Digg Overtakes Facebook; Both cross 20 million unique visitors
• 6. Xbox360 vs. Wii vs. PS3: Demand doesn’t lie
• 5. If Clicks Were Votes – Republican Candidates
• 4. Webkinz: The next Club Penguin?
• 3. Craigslist’s Dirty Little Secret
• 2. Top 20 Websites: Where DO we spend our time online?
• 1. Internet All Stars: Where are they now?

Thank you to all who have contributed and all who have read. Please use the comments section to let us know if there is anything you’d like to see us write about in 2008!!

Key Observations (Winners list):

• The Emergence of Content Sharing: 5 of the top 10 gainers having something to do with sharing content (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg).
• Traffic to Facebook.com has increased by 14.6M, but hold on…traffic to MySpace.com has also increased by 10.2M during the same time period.
• AdultFriendFinder.com continues to thrive with nearly 24M unique visitors (up 8.8M this year), but look out AFF, Fling.com is catching up with you quickly. Fling has gained a whopping 17.4M visitors in the past 12 months to reach 18.7M unique visitors in September.
• Rebranding of Cingular to AT&T helped out ATT.com. All Cingular.com traffic is now channeled to wireless.att.com
• Digg has been growing faster than Facebook!

Key Observations (Losers list):

• Traffic declined to only 8 domains in the Top 50 (Sept ‘07).
• Two Amazon properties on the list - IMDB.com and Amazon.com
• Two Microsoft properties on the list - Passport.net and MSN.com. My guess is that most of their lost traffic went to Live.com, MSN’s new portal. Live.com is up 10.2M unique visitors during the same time period.

Many media buyers are often forced to secure ad inventory based on total impressions…which in turn gives web designers a terrific incentive to inject a website with as many unnecessary pages as visitors will swallow. MySpace has been frequently called out on its bloated structure just for this reason. Because of page view inflation, flash and the increasing use of AJAX, time based metrics provide a much clearer picture of visitor interaction with a site.

But comparing traditional page view-based traffic to time based traffic metrics yields an interesting analytic: page views per minute, calculated as the average number of pages served for each minute a visitor spends on a site. Page views per minute (PPM) is a function of two things: how fast visitors are consuming content and the inefficiency of a sites structure. So who are the worst PPM offenders? Surprise! MySpace isn’t one of them.

The chart below shows the top 20 sites in terms of Page views served per minute in September, along with each sites total number of visits.

Among the list of highest PPM sites, there is an interesting mix of domains that would naturally encourage users to refresh pages frequently, sites that (innocently) could probably be tightened up, and those that are simply trying to serve as many ad impressions as possible without driving visitors away.

Questionable Motives:

• Facebook.com – Facebook serves 3.4 pages per minute of active use. This could be a function of Facebook members digging into all the meaty content, but there’s also something funky going on. Looking at this metric over time, PPMs start to increase dramatically. Back in September 2006, Facebook was serving 2.5 pages per minute. The .9 PPM increase may not seem substantial, but when your site is generating nearly 14 billion page views, that’s nearly $4 million in incremental monthly ad revenue at a $1 CPM.

Impression factories:

• Smashawards.com – Smashawards was by far the worst offender on the list. Part of the Smashits network, this site serves 6 ads on every page. Additionally, it automatically refreshes itself after about a minute of inactivity, effectively forcing new page views, 6 new impressions. I would wager these ads don’t perform well.
• Southasianews.com - this news site has 6 different ad placements on their homepage. With that much content and a new page served every 10 seconds, some of those advertisers are getting ripped off.
• Mygirlyspace.com – While MySpace.com doesn’t make the list, at least two sites devoted to MySpace layouts do. This site actually serves an ad when you click through to another piece of content. Here’s a tip, don’t do this when someone clicks on a link looking to advertise with your site.
• Makeoversolutions.com – Part of the glam network, this site serves a new page every 17 seconds. A word to media buyers, other glam network sites just barely missed making the list.

Content buffets: Sites that should have high PPM

• Smugmug.com - Devoted entirely to photographs, this site allows subscribers to share photos on an ad-free platform. At the pace that people browse photos, (especially wedding photos, the biggest tag on the site) its appearance on this list is no surprise.
• Americansingles.com - While the high PPM at this online dating site may mean members aren’t finding the love they are looking for, it’s logical they would be checking out all their options, so a high PPM is not surprising.
• Davidsbridal.com – Wedding Gowns and Tuxedos? Lots of choices means a lot of (quick) decisions.
• Enterprise.com – Renting a car apparently means inputting a lot of information. Enterprise apparently took the approach of spacing this visitor information process over multiple pages.

This type of analysis is not something that can be applied universally, and it means nothing without considering a site’s design, purpose, and content. But it does help to expose sites that are clearly out to make money or hit traffic goals at the cost of visitor experience… and hopefully help move the needle away from non-performing banner ads.

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.

Being an “undiscovered site” isn’t ideal, but it often isn’t a bad thing (assuming the discovery phase isn’t too far off in the distance). There is even an allure to the undiscovered for many web enthusiasts looking to find the next big thing.

PC Magazine recently released their list of Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites, a list with admittedly varying levels of popularity already, and I was curious to see if any of these were reaching “discovery.”

• The group had a combined total of over 26 million unique visitors in August, roughly the same as Facebook.
• Five sites had over 1 million unique visitors in August; music discovery site imeem.com, job search aggregator indeed.com, IM-from-anywhere site meebo.com, news site topix.net, and real estate site trulia.com.
• Just under 28 billion minutes were spent on these sites in August.

One million sessions per month may not officially classify a site as discovered, but it’s certainly a good start. Four sites were able to break the one million sessions per month mark after starting out the year with under a million sessions in January.

These four sites each made a significant jump, but they were not the only ones; average sessions per site for the list as a whole has more than doubled since January, raising from 360k to over 690k.

Highlights

• About 180k people per month are unhappy enough with their new program to look for the old version at oldversion.com. I wonder how many of those people were using Microsoft Excel, trying to add up to 65,353.
• PC Mag’s description of icanhascheezburger.com includes the comment, “Cats are comical. You either get that or you don’t.” Clearly, I don’t get that, but more than 250k people per month do.
• I have already used several of these sites outside of work, including the online bookshelf of sorts goodreads.com, which is receiving six times the traffic it got in May.

While most of these sites may never get everyday visits from the masses, a few of them are certainly climbing the ranks. But as we saw yesterday, just being discovered and making your way to the top doesn’t mean that you’ll stay there.

“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.