For me, one of the most exciting shows of the winter season (I still can’t believe Nip/Tuck is over, damn you writers strike!) was NBC’s remake of popular game show American Gladiators. This was very exciting for many Americans, who felt like anyone could compete (like bowling) and that it embodied many aspects of the American Dream (work with me here). The media spend for the launch of this show was massive (I think I saw a super bowl ad?) and I believe it was a television success, but it sure did send internet surfers for a loop. At the time of the show (not anymore) I assume that NBC was unable to purchase the domain americangladiators.com and was forced to bury its content deep on the NBC home page. In the months leading up to the launch of the show, (October and November 2007) more than 3x as many search terms lead to that domain where users were greeted with an “American Gladiators 2008 – Coming soon” picture that looked like it was straight out of the Nintendo Entertainment System and no link to the NBC site. On average during the first season just over ¼ of all traffic to the Gladiator content on the NBC website came from search.

Once people find the website, the most popular thing for them to do, of course, is view the photos and bios of the steroid freaks… I mean peak conditioned athletes who call themselves gladiators. (Please don’t hurt me.) The top viewed profiles for the female gladiators were Crush (50%) who seems so sweet and innocent until she hits you upside the head with a pugel stick and Helga (44%) who looks like she should wear the Viking helmet on Flavor of Love season 39. For the male gladiators, the Wolf man ties with Titan both at 41% of profile surfers checking them out. Toa, who mimics New Zealand Haka war dances before events, trails them both with 34%. The interesting part comes when you break down which photo galleries people view. Over the three months of the first season almost 80% of all photo gallery traffic viewed photos of Crush. To be fair, she was the featured gladiator towards the end of the season and we don’t blame you for wanting to get a better look. None of the male gladiators were able to muster up more than about 10% with the exception of Titan (very true to his name) at 17% and Wolf (hands down the most clinically insane gladiator) at 13%.

Of people who checked out the new versions of the arena events, the most popular (71%) was a new event, the Earthquake. This event is basically sumo wrestling on a 12-foot diameter platform suspended from the ceiling with bungee chords and the loser is the one who falls to their death, I mean the mats below. The second highest was the 2008 version of the Eliminator (61%) which has basically turned into an endurance race involving swimming under a fire (why doesn’t anyone dive instead of jumping in?) climbing up cargo nets while soaking wet and losing your front teeth when you smash face-first into the inverted treadmill. While this is the culmination of the show, the best part is watching the winner give a speech in between gasping breaths while the other competitor is still completing the course and promptly falls over behind the winner and rolls into the fetal position.

I’ll admit I was very excited for this show when it first was announced, anticipating the first few episodes. I reconnected with my inner hulk-o-maniac and I wore my PJs like it was Saturday morning eating Captain Crunch. A good time and a few laughs were had, but there is one thing that I cannot ever forgive the new producers of the show for… How could you change assault? That was the best event! It’s hard to describe the new version but it seems to be influenced by the creators of Legends of the Hidden Temple and now you have to load the weapons while dodging 100 mph tennis balls. Well, as Wolf likes to say (in-between howling at the ceiling), “I’m still hungry!” and I’m going to keep getting my American Gladiator updates from E’s “The Soup.”

For those of us who spend our careers immersed in digital marketing and all things “online,” a live webcast doesn’t seem like big news. So when Oprah announced a live web event as part of her book club it didn’t seem like a huge deal to me (admittedly, I’m not one of her regular fans). What happened may surprise you. It surprised me!

The number of visitors to Oprah.com topped five million in February, making her site one of the top 225 ranked sites in the United States. To put this in perspective, more people went to check out Oprah.com in February than the popular NASCAR, eHarmony, Fidelity, Barnes and Noble or Walgreens sites.

Even for Oprah, more than five million monthly visitors represented large month-over-month and year-over-year growth. The site traffic jumped 69 percent from January 2008 and was more than 50% above its February 2007 level. So what contributed to these gains? Was the live web event featuring the bestselling author Eckhart Tolle a factor? The answer to that question is YES.

• Visitors to Oprah.com held steady between 800,000 and 1,000,000 per week in January. Then on January 30, “A New Earth” by Eckhart Tolle was named to Oprah’s Book Club selection. In February traffic to the site increased dramatically following the selection and announcement of a live web event, topping 2 million per week more than once.
• Buoyed by the publicity, traffic to Eckhart’s site surged in February to more than 70,000 the week prior to the first class. Quite a jump from a scant 2,000 people per week at the beginning of the year!
• From February 24 through March 1, additional data reveals that approximately 50% of the 1.7 million Oprah.com visitors went to the Live Web Event Registration page.

After the first class, more than 300,000 people showed interest in (re)watching the webcast. Reportedly, demand was so high for the initial event however, that some people had difficulty logging in. This trouble may have influenced post-event interest.

The appeal of the live web event becomes even more evident when we take a daily view. The total time people spent on Oprah.com as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users more than doubled on the night of the first live event.

Oprah’s live event with author Eckhart Tolle is a series of 10 weekly classes. Stay tuned to see if Oprah’s “students” remain interested or if they become drop-outs as the class wears on. A sneak peak at Compete’s daily Attention metric through March 10 (the date of the second class) reveals that interest may have waned quickly, and then bumped up again slight for the second session.

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

We all know this person: constantly showing up in your Facebook news feed with status updates, added friends and wall comments. The “stickiness” of most social sites is unrivaled by any other type of site, a point that the behavior of hardcore members really drive home. These “Social Addicts” check their beloved site constantly and have helped encourage similar behavior from other users.

Knowing how different Facebook and MySpace are in terms of design, functionality and usage, how much do “addicts” of these social networks differ? You may have read some of our posts on BehaviorMatch before, but this analysis essentially highlights the online behavior that is specific to a particular group of users. This analysis is designed to help with media buying, but in the case of social networks it can also help define the psychographic makeup of the group, and how “addicts” generally use their favorite social site.

The table below shows the sites that MySpace and Facebook Addicts* visited substantially more than the average internet user. So what do these users do when they aren’t getting their social network fix?

• To be fair, the MySpace list is filtered. An untouched list of the top twenty most popular websites among MySpace addicts would consist entirely of sites focused on modifying personal profile pages.
• After scrubbing out a majority of the sites focused on MySpace layouts, it seems that the hardcore users of this MySpace are still primarily teens, as sites focused on proms (meprom.com), shoes (kicksaholic.com), and Alternative music (warpedtour.com) bubble to the top of the list.
• It’s no surprise that hardcore Facebook users have a high affinity to some sites supporting Facebook applications, but the applications they interact with the most is telling of their online interests. It appears gaming (socialgn.com), dating (sexappealhq.com), music (garageband.com), and interacting with friends (quizapps.com) are all a core online activity to Facebook addicts.

MySpace and Facebook are two well established sites with massive audiences. Twitter, on the other hand, is a much smaller, growing site devoted to communication. In some ways it could be seen as the direction the social web is heading…and it’s also highly addicting. So what do the sites that Twitter addicts visit say about the future of the web, and how does this compare to the two more traditional social web players?

Comparing the three, some really compelling trends are visible. While it’s not shocking that sites like twhirl.org (a site that offers “tweet” enabling software) rise to the top of the list, some of the others show that these users are most interested in socializing.

• MySpace addicts are somewhat vain – focusing heavily on establishing and fine tuning their online personas by customization of their personal profiles
• Facebook addicts focus more on engagement – interacting with applications, music and people both on and off the platform
• Twitter addicts are most interested in fostering communication and exploration – sites that allow a user to understand what their contacts are doing, provide a platform for content discovery and encourage users to actively participate are the most likely places to find hardcore twitterers.

* In this analysis Facebook and MySpace addicts were defined as any user who logged into either site at least 21 days in February. Twitter addicts were defined as anyone who went to their twitter home page at least 10 times in a month. The less stringent qualifications for Twitter addicts was necessary because of the multiple channels used to access the site (mobile, desktop applications).

“The show must go on!” …This is precisely what the 80th Annual Academy Awards are doing, despite the preceding months filled with writer strikes and naysayers. The Oscars are one of the most important nights for the Motion Picture industry and generate a lot of media buzz around the nominated films and actors. So what are the hottest spots on the net to find the scoop on this year’s Oscars?

Top 10 Destination Domains Findings:

• Oscars.org (the home of The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and oscar.com (the home of the Annual Academy Awards) are not surprisingly the top two sites for anything and everything Oscars.
• The specialized Oscar sections of yahoo.com and aol.com catapulted these portals into the Top 10 list; MSN’s Academy Awards sections failed to attract the same attention falling to number 28 on the list.
• The specialist imdb.com fell behind the generalist wikipedia.org. Imdb lost this battle despite the fact that it is devoted exclusively to films and television and even has a link to its Oscars section on the homepage.
• Filmsite.org, a small film appreciation site which typically attracts between 200-250 thousand unique visitors is up there playing with the big leaguers. Never underestimate the focused and determined little guy.
• Entertainment Weekly is dominating the pre-awards traffic. Notable competitors include variety.com at number 20 and people.com all the way at 101. I am interested in seeing if this trend continues after the show airs.
• With the home field advantage and a prominent link to the Oscars section on it’s homepage, the LA Times catapulted into the Top 10 list, leaving behind The New York Times (49), CNN (62), ABC (71), and USAToday (72).

And although I failed miserably at correctly predicting the winners last year, I will give it another shot this year. If searches were used as votes by the AMPAS, George Clooney will win Best Actor, Ellen Page will win Best Actress, and Juno will take home the statue for Best Picture. Be sure to tune into ABC at 5PT/8ET for the live telecast to see who really walks away with Oscars.

With the massive amount of search activity taking place across the web, the highest traffic search terms can provide a glimpse into the issues currently important to internet users, and consumers as a whole. With our online search tools, you can start to get at this data on a site level, but what we find even more interesting is how this plays out for the web as a whole, and how these terms change over time.

Taking a look at the most popular search terms from December 2007 through the better half of February 2008, some interesting trends develop. For this analysis we stripped out all branded, navigational and adult terms, to get at the meaty center of search behavior. The chart below shows the most popular search terms for January 2008, ranked by search referrals. The spark charts to the right of each term represent how referral volume has changed over time. We used referrals (as opposed to queries) in order to strip out terms that don’t result in fulfilled searches.

• Pop culture related spikes: Heath Ledger’s tragic death caused an explosion in searches on his name in January, resulting in nearly 2 million referrals from this term. Because of the timing of his untimely passing, some of this traffic spilled over into February. Search referrals from “Britney Spears” show a similar story.
• Seasonal trends: With tax season upon us, and students renewing their financial aid, search referrals from government terms “IRS” and “FAFSA” grew dramatically in January and then stabilize in February.
• Political Momentum: Just as Barack Obama’s campaign has gained increasing momentum, more online consumers are searching on his name. There was a dramatic increase from December to January (last month searches for his name drove over 500,000 referrals), and it appears that this term will nearly double again in February. Search volume for “Hillary Clinton” and “John McCain” grew substantially in the same time period, but with considerably less traffic.
• Technically branded, but too cool to leave out: Trailers and advertising for Cloverfield avoided showing the movie’s underlying monster. This ambiguity encouraged over 900,000 referrals for the term “Cloverfield.” The term “cloverfield monster” just barely missed making the top twenty-five list as well.

All terms listed above are exact match terms. For instance, for the term “dictionary” searches for a term like “online dictionary” would not be counted.

For those of you who have been unaware of the Anonymous vs. Church of Scientology story, here’s a quick recap.

When videos of Tom Cruise speaking at a Church of Scientology function leaked onto the Internet in January they quickly became the viral topic du jour, showing up on celebrity sites and mainstream news sites alike. The tapes gave outsiders an unprecedented glimpse inside the typically private organization, and showed a fascinating side of Cruise and the Church that few have been privy to.

Church of Scientology attorneys acted quickly to have the videos removed from YouTube and other top video-sharing sites, claiming that the files had been acquired illegally and that sharing them was tantamount to distributing stolen property.

That action in turn angered some fervent critics of Scientology who claimed the Church was attempting to censor the Internet. One group of critics, calling itself “Anonymous,” issued a declaration of war on Scientology and, claiming the banner of “freedom of speech,” launched denial of service attacks on several Scientology websites (ironically trampling the Church’s freedom of speech in the process).

To get a sense of online reaction to the situation I took a look at traffic to two sites that represent the respective sides of the conflict: Scientology.org, the Church of Scientology’s homepage, and Xenu.net, the URL for Operation Clambake, a site which, though not officially linked to Anonymous, has been one of the most prominent critics of the religion. So how did the controversy affect visitation trends in January?

Visits to Scientology.org more than quadrupled in the month of January, with over 200,000 individuals visiting the site. Xenu.net also saw a bump in visitors, ending the month with a significant percentage increase, but still only managing less than half the traffic to the Scientology site.

This made me wonder if the Anonymous attacks may have backfired by generating new interest in the religion. Looking strictly at searches for the term “Scientology,” it’s possible that this is exactly what has happened.

I don’t want to get into taking sides in this debate, there’s enough of that already taking place in chat rooms and on message boards all over the web. I just wanted to see what trends are in the data surrounding the issue. I’ll leave it to you to decide what it all means.