Remember when calling someone a “tree hugger” was supposed to be an insult? Now with global warming becoming a prominent issue, it seems to be worn like a badge of honor and I’m sure there are people who would hug a lot worse than trees to get a traffic trend like treehugger.com has.

The one-stop-shopping site for everything green has seen substantial growth over the past two years with unique visitors in April of this year up 281% over the same month last year, and more than 8 times bigger than April 2006.

The depth of the site has also led to increased engagement – just under 7 page views per visit. Treehugger is an impressive example of the new environmentally conscious wave and it’s indicative of an overall trend.

We took a look back at our ’07 resolution to see how far the environmental category as a whole (ranging from the old school - sierraclub.org and greenpeace.org, to the newer wave - motherearthnews.com and treehugger.com, and more) has done since then. After moderate growth from April ’06 to ’07 (14%), unique visitor traffic growth accelerated over the past year, growing 33% since last April.

From the perspective of the sites and the state of the environment, this graph shows that the trend is going in the right direction and as the general public becomes more aware of the issues it will only increase. Someday maybe we’ll all be tree huggers.

How green are you? My personal answer to that question is, not very. I took the “Green IQ” test on greeniq.com and scored 23 out of 100. I guess simply changing to energy efficient light bulbs and appliances are considered baby steps. I really need to start leaving my V8 in the garage and start walking or pedaling to the grocery story with my eco-friendly reusable grocery bags in tow…or….perhaps I could consider one of the many new hybrids several manufacturers have made available to ease my “not-so-green” mind.

Import manufacturers made it possible for consumers to purchase their green auto as early as 2000 – it has taken a bit longer for the domestics to catch up, but they are here and they include Large Pickups and Full-Size SUV’s. The question is, are they succeeding at drawing environmentally conscious consumers to their websites? We took a look at the 7.6 million visitors in the month of January that we categorize as “Environmentally Conscious” to see which brand websites they were most likely to visit and here is what we found.

On average (among brands shown below), each of the brand sites only had 97,000 consumers among the 7.6 million actually visit in January. If you are looking for a rich concentration of these environmentally conscious consumers among those brands, Saturn wins. You are 2.5 times more likely to see a green consumer on Saturn.com as you are the internet in general. However, if you measure success based on the “number” of unique green consumers that visit a brand website – Honda takes the prize. In January, among the 7.6 million consumers, 238,000 of them also visited Honda.com. Falling short among the competition was Chrysler, Nissan and Dodge – coincidentally newcomers to the hybrid arena.

So what does the reverse look like? Which environmentally conscious websites are automotive prospects most likely to visit?

One site stands out among all brand browsers: fueleconomy.gov, where consumers can coincidentally get the entire list of available hybrid vehicles by manufacturer and determine if there is a tax credit available should you make the investment.

Browsers from the majority of brands visit hybridcars.com – Toyota leads the pack for this particular website. GMC browsers are more likely to be found visiting treehugger.com; Chrysler browsers, though few in number that actually visit an environmentally conscious website, will more likely be found on motherearthnews.com.

Overall, automotive browsers do not generally visit Environmentally Conscious websites – out of the 106 tracked by Compete, browsers of the brands shown above visit an average of only 7 sites. I, with my poor Green IQ score of 23, have visited none of these sites… until now. As car manufacturers offer more choices among vehicles that have a hybrid option beyond that of compact or mid-size cars, perhaps more consumers will jump on the green bandwagon. Time will certainly tell.

We all know the story. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama causing extensive loss of life and tremendous property damage. Nearly two thousand people died. Two years later, the region, particularly New Orleans, still hasn’t fully recovered.

We wanted to see how a major storm like Katrina affected people’s use of the Internet. Compete analyzed use of weather related web sites by inhabitants of the affected states during the interval before Katrina hit. We extended this analysis with a study of the main government reconstruction and recovery web sites over the month after the disaster.

Before the Hurricane Hit

It was a big storm and people knew it was coming. Weather sites were a major source of information about the approaching storm. We took a deeper look at traffic to weather.com, wunderground.com, and similar sites over the days before Katrina’s landfall on August 29. We looked at the browsing behavior of inhabitants of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Florida.

Anxiety and web visitation heightened as the storm approached the coast. The number of people visiting web sites and the intensity of their use tripled in the week before the storm. Traffic fell off after the initial wind and flood destruction was complete.

The Aftermath

My wife went to New Orleans in February 2007 with a group of volunteers to help recovery efforts. She described mile after mile after mile of total destruction – eighteen months after the storm. This damage was personal as well as financial. In ruined houses, she found books of ruined photographs, children’s toys, and other reminders of lives left behind.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was immediately put in charge of disaster recovery and reconstruction. Other government agencies involved were the state-level analogues of FEMA in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. These web sites would serve as an important source of information for disaster victims to find and apply for the help they desperately needed. We looked at traffic from residents of the affected areas to the FEMA site as well as the three state-level EMA sites:

Daily numbers are highly volatile but the overall message is clear: FEMA and state EMAs were rarely visited before the storm. Afterwards, they were a vital point of contact for the affected citizens.

After the hurricane, a large fraction of the web traffic to these sites came from Katrina-affected areas. Over the month after Katrina, almost half the visits to these sites came from the states hit by the storm. Much of the other traffic, we believe, came from families and by the people displaced and scattered across the US.

We are now two months into the new year, right about the time when many people see their new gym membership cards starting to collect dust and many others forget what their New Year’s resolutions actually were. But not here at Compete.

Our New Year’s Day post saw that traffic to a few major environmental sites has doubled in the past five years, but the climb was not a steady one. After that post, we received requests to look beyond the “old school” sites, and that’s exactly what we did.

With the help of The Earth Blog, we compiled a list of 125 relevant environmental sites and tracked their traffic as a whole over the past thirteen months. What we found was more of the same unsteady growth.

A 15% growth in aggregate unique visitors over last January is certainly a marked improvement, but with UV totals for this January just over 3 million for 125 sites, these aren’t Earth-saving numbers. Spurred on by the release of An Inconvenient Truth and now its Oscar win, the topic of global warming has been a popular one this past year, but with an increase of less than 400,000 unique visitors, all the fanfare doesn’t seem to be producing a proportional move to action.

There is reason for optimism though:

• These sites appear to be getting stickier: this January saw a 25% growth in sessions and a 59% growth in page views as compared to the same time last year
• Treehugger, a site I have been seeing everywhere recently, had 70% growth in unique visitors over last January
• I have replaced all the light bulbs in my apartment with energy-saving bulbs - every little bit helps

These growth rates aren’t breaking records, but it is encouraging to see the environmentally conscious movement gaining some momentum. We’ll continue to stick with our resolution here at Compete, doing our part to drive awareness. Now if only I could find my gym card.

Today is the day we all decide to become better people. It’s the day we take inventory of our lives and decide on one thing we can change to improve our health/happiness/career/etc. Today is when we declare our New Year’s resolution.

At Compete we have decided to help Mother Earth. After watching An Inconvenient Truth – a film by Al Gore explaining the dangers of the rising planetary climate - the picture became very clear – as a society we need to change.

The film affected many of us and many of us have begun altering aspects of our lives to help protect the planet, but we all need to make small adjustments. The problem is that not enough people are being reached with the right information.

Over the last five years traffic to leading green sites have doubled, yet still attract less than 250K people a month. This penetration translates to a mere 0.08% of the U.S. population checking in on our core environmental issues each month.

The release of An Inconvenient Truth lead to a surge in traffic to its site (climatecrisis.net), but after peaking at 340,566 visitors in June, the site attracted just 71K visitors in November. There simply are not enough people learning about the core issues and discovering ways to adjust their lifestyles to help save our planet.

So what’s the solution? If the former Vice President can’t reach enough people, who can? Lime.com?

Lime.com strives to help people live healthier lives. The site focuses on diet, exercise, personal care products and, of course, the planet. The chart above illustrates that Lime is growing quickly and surpassed the half million visitor mark in November. By focusing on the individual Lime indirectly promotes what is also healthy for the planet. Lime.com is more yuppie than hippie, but anything that helps people participate in the preservation of our planet is a good thing.

I invite our readers to find one thing they can adjust in their life to help preserve the planet. You might be surprised how easy this can be. Click here to see 10 Things You Can Do.

Get SnapShots of sites mentioned in this post:

• climatecrisis.net
• greenpeace.org
• sierraclub.org
• lime.com

Deron Beal, a Tucson, Arizona resident, was sick and tired of seeing perfectly good items taking up environmentally valuable space at the dump. His solution, freecycle.org, has one simple rule — everything must be free. No money exchanges hands, ever. From old computers to kitchen sinks to a five-person hot tub; this site facilitates the exchange of just about everything.

Traffic to freecycle.org has increase to over 75,000 people per week. There are currently 3,500 communities and over 2.2 million members. Check it out, but remember, it is better to give than receive.