On the surface, this appears to be a story of an internet old-timer versus a web 2.0 darling, but this story isn’t all that it seems. The new age side of the battle started before the term ‘web 2.0’ was on everyone’s tongues. And when it comes down to it, this is far from traditional competition, seeing as how both properties are owned by the same company.

GettyImages.com, the long-time gold standard in online photo, and iStockphoto.com, the up-and-comer now in the limelight, have emerged as symbols of two methods of running a site. GettyImages provides very high quality photos from an exclusive list of photographers, but they’re hardly giving them away. iStockphoto has much less strict standards and has tens of thousands of photographers contributing hundreds of thousands pictures, all for as little as the just $1 for the customer. So is the “crowdsourcing” working?

iStockphoto now has more than seven and a half times the unique visitors per month that GettyImages does. The site was started with a sense of community for photographers in mind, and that community has taken off over the past year.

A comparison of page views per visit shows a tighter race.

A deeper look into the engagement metrics for the two sites shows that GettyImages still has a leg to stand on, with almost a 4-minute-per-session advantage in average time per session.

This could be a function of price – if you’re going to pay a lot for an image, you better take your time and make sure you get the right one. Regardless, even this advantage for GettyImages has been nearly cut in half over the past year. These numbers certainly indicate that iStockphoto is on the rise while GettyImages is holding relatively constant, but there may be room for both at the top of the stock photo industry. We’ll just have to wait and see.

About one year ago, those lucky enough to purchase a Wii in November were enjoying it, about to make someone’s Christmas, or cleaning house on Ebay. Those who braved the lines or shelled out a premium for a PS3 were kicking themselves as retailers maintained an abundant supply of the console for most of December. Xbox 360 owners were too busy playing Gears of War to notice either situation. So with all three consoles surviving their first (or second) year out of the gate, what’s changed?

The chart below shows Compete’s estimate of monthly in-market video console demand based on the number of U.S. consumers observed shopping online for each console.* The biggest takeaway: Wii domination.

• Wii Demand skyrockets: nearly 3 million people shopped for the console online in November. In fact, demand for the Wii was nearly 40% higher than in the month that the Wii LAUNCHED in back in 2006.
• Halo 3 does what it’s told: The most anticipated game of 2007 helped Xbox 360 gain the title of most shopped console in September, besting the Wii for the first time since launch.
• Xbox experiences “launch 3.0?”; Xbox 360 consoles also experienced a huge lift in November, beating demand levels of the previous November (which we dubbed “launch 2.0”) by about 5%.
• Not in trouble, but not out of the woods either: PS3, despite having its best month since December of 2006 and a more affordable price, failed to compete with either the 360 or the Wii in terms of demand, attracting about 1.1 million shoppers.

Continue reading “Xbox 360 vs. Wii vs. PS3: Wii more in demand now than at launch” »

The Facebook application platform took the social networking scene by storm for the past few months. But with MySpace (the largest social network in the US by a magnitude of 3) now on board with OpenSocial, it’s essentially everyone against Facebook. How will this impact the social networking sector overall? We took a look at the heavy users of Facebook, Myspace, and the top 5 OpenSocial partners (as of last night), to see how each site’s core users compare, and what sort of applications may have the most success in the context open social.

Across all social networking domains, heavy users tend to use the web as an extension of their profile. However, where and how they use the web outside of their network varies greatly. The chart below shows what heavy social network users do outside of their respective network, based on affinity*.

Heavy Facebook users have a strong affinity for sites at the edge of Web 2.0, as well as those that power its more popular applications.

• This group has a very strong affinity for Twitter.com, which is both a new platform for communication and a Facebook application.
• Heavy Facebook users tend to shop at trendy online retailers, and are seven times more likely than the average internet user to visit apparel sites like AmericanApparel.net and “social” t-shirt site threadless.com
• These users also tend to keep tabs on the Silicon Valley scene and geeky humor, visiting xkcd.com, and valleywag.com at more than 8 times the average internet user.
• Unlike their Open Social peers, Facebook users tend to use applications (and their respective sites) to do everything from image editing to dating.
• Outside of Facebook, power users have an extremely high affinity for the Greek9.com social network, but relatively little interest in others.

While Heavy MySpace users perform many of the same actions as Facebook users, they do so in dramatically different ways.

• Beyond the use of AOL instant messenger (assumed by the high affinity for AIM pages) MySpace users prefer Meebo.com for instant communication.
• This group tends to shop at Youth oriented retailers, being more than 4 times as likely to visit Journeys.com and Hottopic.com as the average internet user.
• The lack of applications forces MySpace users to look outside for some things that Facebook provides within it’s application platform. Projectplaylist projects music, imageshack hosts their images, flirty youth sites allows them to date, and imikimi.com gets their photos to sparkle.
• MySpace users also rely heavily on third party layouts sites to customize their profile pages. There are literally hundreds of layout resources, many of which receive visitor counts in the hundreds of thousands.

There is an obvious international skew among the other OpenSocial partners, a function of Orkut and Hi5’s large international presence.

• US members of these sites seem to have a strong connection to India and Latin America (showing strong affinity to sites like Shaadi.com). Interestingly, this group is also 9 times more likely to visit USCIS.gov, which deals with the immigration process (not shown).
• In general, heavy users of smaller OpenSocial partners behave much more like MySpace users than Facebook Users. In fact, the users of these smaller networks often show strong affinity for some of the same layout template sites that appeal to Myspace users.

New App Opportunities?

So given OpenSocial partner’s (including MySpace’s) user preferences, what should application developers tackle first? There are plenty of way’s to build on the successful Facebook applications, but deeper in the affinity data, there are some needs that earlier developers have failed to meet.

• GOOD quote generation: Across all social networks, members can help define their persona through favorite sayings…usually (and ironically) created by someone else. As a result, across all three groups of users, there is a strong affinity to sites that provide large quote databases such as thinkexist.com.
• Lyrics search / lyrics integrated music players / lyric tagging: Similar to Quotations, members across all networks use lyric related sites heavily. The ability to search (or simply see) lyrics within a standard format, and then tag lyrics that help define one’s online self would be – according to affinity data – a very valuable tool for the social web.
• Social shopping: Kaboodle (sort of) already does this, but most users won’t join another network specifically to shop. Given diverse personal preferences, ease of communication, an affinity for ecommerce among social networks, and the ability to “crowd buy” due to a massive number of users, this sort of application could be a hit.

Facebook may be in the clear regardless of whether they join the OpenSocial party or not, at least for the short term. The site attracts a very different group of core users than its competitors, and a large part of this group is now heavily entrenched in Facebook. It will be difficult for this group to leave, and questionable as to whether they would even want to. Either way, the Facebook staff has a tough decision (and possibly road) ahead.

For this post, “Smaller OpenSocial Partners” included Orkut.com, Friendster.com, Hi5.com, Plaxo.com, and and Ning.

“Heavy Users” were defined as a user visiting the social network more than 15 days in the month of September

The first time I wrote about YouTube, it had just crossed 20 million visitors in the U.S. Just 4 days after my post, YouTube was scooped up by Google for $1.65B in Google stock. At today’s stock price, the deal is worth over $2B.

There is certainly something magical about reaching 20 million. Web 2.0 darlings, also prime acquisition targets – Digg and Facebook both crossed this milestone last month.

• Digg edged out Facebook, with 2.3 million additional unique visitors
• Facebook is growing 3x faster than MySpace (on a percentage basis)

To size up the quality of these visitors, let’s go beyond unique visitors. Let’s look at some key site engagement metrics:

• MySpace is #1 across all metrics
• Facebook is #2 for all metrics except UVs
• Average stay on MySpace is 2x more time than on Facebook

Now take a look at the chart below. After a relatively slow start, Digg is now outpacing everyone else. Facebook is beginning to look up again after spending most of 2006 in flat territory. Both Digg’s and Facebook’s growth and expansion strategies seem to be paying off in a big way.

Let’s see how things look in six months. My Facebook invites are up 2x over the last month. Something big is indeed happening. Microsoft and Yahoo should take a long deep look at this as well.

TicketMaster is the website you love to hate. It has nearly monopolized the event ticket industry and makes a nice chunk of change on every ticket it sells by charging a delivery fee, a convenience fee, a save the unicorns fee and a fee for charging the fees.

TicketMaster has enjoyed its market dominance, but has recently seen StubHub nipping at its heels. (To accurately represent the situation this is like a poodle nipping at the heals of a grizzly bear).

Continue reading “TicketMaster and StubHub” »

Yes, Technorati is still very much the most visited blog search engine.

Earlier this week Technorati self reported Q1 numbers – they grew page views by 150% and unique visitors 141%. The bigger question however — how does this growth compare to the #2 player in this space - Google Blog Search?

As you can see, according to Compete data, Technorati grew monthly unique visitors 91% and pageviews 138% in Q1. During the same time period, Google grew unique visitors by only 39% and pageviews by 47%. In both absolute and relative terms, Technorati is dominating Google.

Continue reading “Technorati breaking away, leaving Google behind in the dust” »