Through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we heard a lot about the phenomenal popularity of the Nintendo Wii this holiday season. But are shoppers also showing interest in the smaller cousins of the consoles: portable gaming systems? And who is winning that battle for consumer interest?

Sony PlayStation and Nintendo are the major players in this market - with the PSP and the DS, respectively. To get a read on how online interest in these two brands shaped up in 2008, I looked at portable gaming interest in 2008 on two major consumer electronics retailers’ websites, Best Buy and Circuit City. Specifically, I tracked hardware and software for the PSP and DS and other legacy devices by these companies.

• The Nintendo portable devices have consistently generated more traffic than PlayStation across these two retailers’ sites.
• Interest in the PSP has been slipping on these sites. More than twice as many people looked at the Nintendo portable gaming products than the PSP last month.

Although this data is taken from just two (albeit large) retailers, the relative popularity of the Nintendo products is worth considering. Despite recent updates to the PlayStation product and its ability to play movies as well as games, it can’t seem to edge out the DS in terms of interest or sales. In October, Sony released a new iteration of their product, the PSP 3000, but most of the media interest that month was focused the new Nintendo DSi, despite its 2009 release date. Sales figures tell an even more dramatic story. According to NPD, the Nintendo DS broke U.S. hardware sales records, moving 1.56 million units in November alone. In the same period, the PSP sold 421,000 units.

So why is the DS outperforming the PSP? Available game titles and brand loyalty are probably factors, but that doesn’t completely explain such a large gap in both online interest and sales.

Part of the explanation may be in the appeal of the DS to new audiences of so-called “non-traditional” or “casual” gamers,which seems to be part of Nintendo’s DS marketing strategy. There have been several efforts to expand the market for the device, like adding games like Brain Age for more mature audiences and partnering with with the online handbag rental company From Bags to Riches to appeal to women.

This philosophy is also apparent on Nintendo’s site. When this post was written, the main page for the DS featured pictures of four female celebrities with the text, “See Who’s Playing Nintendo DS! America, Carrie, Liv and Lisa play, do you?”. Clicking on the image takes you to a microsite called iplayforme.com with stories and videos about how women use the device. I couldn’t find anything comparable on the PlayStation site for any particular PSP audience.

Would marketing to “non-traditional” player segments help the PSP in 2009? We’ll wait and see, but no matter how the PSP is marketed, overcoming the popularity and momentum of the DS will be an uphill battle.

It’s hard these days to be a homeowner. The housing-turned-credit crisis has sharply lowered home values across the country, and the proposed solutions have focused more on major industry players than on deed holders. This week, the New York Times reports that Bernanke’s newest innovation is to lower mortgage rates to a level last seen around the time JFK was sworn in – but it would not apply to current residents looking to refinance. Yes, it’s a bleak time for homeowners, and for the businesses that depend on them. As a bellwether of the industry at large, both Home Depot and Lowes are underperforming their annual trend of site traffic from last year.

Even though absolute volume of visitors to each site is greater than last year, a 4-month comparison of month-to-month changes shows negative movement for both home improvement giants when last year that movement was better, if not positive. This trend suggests fewer homeowners are able to shop for home improvement products, let alone spend money toward them. In July, those items were more geared to summer amenities such as dehumidifier, air conditioner and ceiling fans; in October, the products of the season were warmer: insulation, fireplace and heaters.

The site conversion data supports this case. Total transactions on HomeDepot.com and Lowes.com are down from October last year, by 28% and 37% respectively.

An assessment of month-over-month change tells a worse story: last October, each site almost doubled the number of transactions from September; this October, both Home Depot and Lowes saw that number dip. As the housing market declines, it will become increasingly difficult to turn around sales for these home-focused companies. And while they will likely outlast the economic downturn, it is uncertain how much time that will take.

I recently created my first photo book online as a holiday gift. Judging by the slow speed of the site I was on, I wasn’t alone! In fact, traffic to photo service sites Kodak Gallery, Shutterfly, Snapfish and MyPublisher each rose in November. Snapfish experienced the biggest gain with a whopping 40% increase to a record 4.725 million people. And, only Snapfish enjoyed a year-over-year increase in traffic (up 25.7% from last November).

What made Snapfish so popular, particularly against its close rival Shutterfly? A quick look at the top referring sites to Shutterfly and Snapfish provided a big hint.

• Nearly 4% of all traffic referred to Snapfish.com in November came from Oprah.com, a 29,475 percent increase in referral share from the prior month.
• A quick check revealed that Oprah announced a credit for her viewers to receive a free 20 page 8×11 custom photo book through Snapfish.com during November (using an online coupon)
• In all, Snapfish.com had the advantage compared with Shutterfly.com in 9 of the top 15 referring sites

So, what’s next for these rivals in competing for consumers’ attention this holiday season? Consider this:

Snapfish: Focus on retention and greater share of wallet. The Oprah promotion clearly drove viewers to Snapfish. The question now is, will they return to make other paid purchases? And, can Snapfish convert these Oprah viewers into loyal customers? Watch to see if November’s surge in traffic is a one-time windfall or is sustained. If the site’s Daily Reach is a harbinger, it may signal that the hard work is just beginning.

Shutterfly: Evaluate your paid search program. Shutterfly received an average 32% of its search engine referrals from paid ads compared with Snapfish’s 25%. On the one hand, Shutterfly has 9% more overall search referrals than its rival to show for its spending. And non-branded search terms “photo book” and “photo cards” are among the top 10 keywords driving traffic to Shutterfly. But overall traffic still lags Snapfish. And, what do these searchers do when they get to the site? How does this compare with what happens at Snapfish? Are searchers more or less likely to purchase online compared to rivals? Benchmarking against competitors could provide valuable competitive information.

In at least one way, early social networks are like a high school party - when parents get home the fun stops and everybody leaves. But as social elements become the driving force behind many of the web’s most popular sites, an increasing number of consumers young and old are finding casual online conversation crucial in maintaining and expanding business relationships…which helps explain howLinkedin recently closed a round of funding with a $1 billion valuation.

The real story is in how mass migration of professional relationships from the Rolodex to the Friend List has taken place. In June, we took a look at two sites that share the responsibility of powering professional networking, albeit in somewhat different ways. While Linkedin.com was built on a platform of social networking for business, Facebook.com - still far from business focused - grew into the role as many of its early members did the same. So in terms of current users, how do these sites compare?

Age can provide insight into who is using a site and, at least in the case of Linkedin and Facebook, how. The chart above shows how site traffic breaks for both sites, based on unique visitors in June 2008. Unsurprisingly, Facebook’s audience skews younger than Linkedin but it is important to note that both sites receive nearly 90% of their traffic from people under the age of 55.

Facebook - growing up or losing the cool factor?
Age of current site visitors has more meaning in historical context, and both Facebook and Linkedin have changed quite a bit in the course of a year. The chart below shows the year over year change in age breakdown for both sites.

• Facebook visitors are “maturing”: In June of 2007, nearly over 35% of Facebook traffic came the 18-24 year old segment, compared to around 22% in June 2008. With the bulk of this traffic shifting towards the 25-35 year old group, this movement could be a result of the site’s original base of college students.
• Rising stars shine on Linkedin: In a reversal of Facebook’s changing demographics, Linkedin’s audience has shifted younger, with the 18-24, and 25-35 year old segments both growing by nearly 15%. This was also during a period of massive overall site growth - driven at least partially by an influx of younger visitors.

Is there Room a need for both?
The most profound difference between Linkedin and Facebook lies in their focus on professional and personal networking (respectively). Looking at the overlap between the two networks, it appears that many people are either separating these two functions, or simply maintaining an identity on both sites. The chart below shows the percentage of Facebook and Linkedin users, broken out by age group, who used both sites (or one site exclusively) in June. The chart to the bottom right also illustrates the change in each overlap segment from the previous year.

• Between the two sites, Facebook dominates with an average of 80% of the group using Facebook exclusively.
• 25-44 is the sweet spot for Linkedin with the site attracting more than 20% of both groups. These two age groups were also the most likely to be active on both Linkedin and Facebook, with around 12% of both groups showing overlap.
• 1+1=900%: While the dramatic growth of the segment of users visiting both sites (as well as the growth in Linkedin exclusive visitors) is partially due to site growth, the 900% growth in the percentage of users visiting both sites seems to indicate that these sites are more complimentary than competitive.

With online services like Twitter and Friendfeed continuing to blur the line between casual and business, the ability to use a single site as both a personal and professional networking tool becomes more realistic. But whether the “Poke” will ever make it into a sales strategy is still anyone’s guess.

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.

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