Walt Disney Co. recently acquired long-time comic industry giant Marvel Entertainment Inc. for a hefty sum of $4 billion. Other than a slew of superpowers and a closet full of alter-ego costumes, what did Disney get for its money?

You’ve probably seen, or at least heard about the many Marvel comic-to-movie adaptations in recent years, including Iron Man, Spider Man and X-Men, and these blockbusters are undoubtedly a large part or what enticed Disney to buy, but we’ll take a look at what Disney has acquired online.

Marvel.com’s more than 600k Unique Visitors is just under 45% of Disney.com’s total traffic and 180k more than rival DCComics.com. Marvel’s online dominance over its rival carries over to search as well.

Even though the term ‘comic’ is included in the DC Comics brand name, Marvel edges out DC in ranking of search destinations for the term. Disney certainly isn’t paying all that money solely for Marvel’s online presence, but getting an industry-leading site in the deal strengthens Disney online portfolio.

In the summer, nothing beats a trip to the movies. I don’t have air conditioning, so the movie theater provides a welcome relief from the heat and a cheap two hours of entertainment. Not to mention the fact that there is something comforting about a huge blockbuster with a big audience and greasy popcorn.

Alas, the summer blockbuster season is drawing to a close and analysts are saying that the season was something of a bust for the big studios, with ticket sales down from where they were a year ago – I guess G.I. Joe and Funny People just didn’t cut it. Despite the blockbuster flops, it seems that the independent movie industry has been flourishing. Arthouse divisions of the major studios like Fox Searchlight and Focus Features have been rapidly gaining market share over the last few years. Movies from no-name studios have also been gaining broader distribution in the mainstream as social networking and online video have opened up new advertising opportunities.

Given that niche films often attract viewership through online channels/communities you might expect that they would dominate the online space. To find out if this assumption holds, I took a look at searches for movies that were released between May and July of this year. I categorized each movie as either a major studio release (Warner Brothers, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox, and Walt Disney Pictures), a major studio’s arthouse release (Paramount Vantage, Sony Pictures Classics, Focus Features, Fox Searchlight, and Miramax Films), or an independent release. I then tracked the search volume for each category from January through July.

Despite the online buzz around Indie flicks, it looks like the big budget studios still win out by a long shot in terms of search volume, but where do their searchers end up? I took a look at the destinations of movie searchers for that same time period to find out.

The chart above shows destination domains of movie searchers. The “official movie site” category represents the studio’s official site dedicated to the film in the search query. A few points stand out:

• Major studio releases are the only films that attract more searches to their official sites than any other pages – perhaps because they have more money for search optimization or simply that they spend more on overall marketing.
• Regardless of the type of film IMDB is attracting a very large percentage of the searches. Major studio arthouse film searches have many more referrals to IMDB than any other type of film. This could be an intentional marketing decision that the studios have made in an effort to make their films appear more ‘indie.’
• Independent film searchers end up on YouTube more often than either major studio arthouse or major studio searchers but they end up on the other large sites less often than the other two film types. This could be because most of their searches send them to smaller sites that are farther down the tail and there is enough variation in the destinations that none of the sites show up in the top 10.

As long as independent movies continue to gain traction on sites like YouTube and Facebook, odds are good that before too long they may be able to rival the large studio releases as far as online presence goes. For now, we’ll have to suffer through as films like Transformers and G.I. Joe top the list both in ticket sales and search volume.

It is restaurant week here in Boston, a two week promotion to encourage diners to try out someplace new. Offered twice a year, you could say that it has a very ‘seasonal’ trend. This is a good example of how localized events like restaurant week, which happens all across the country, can identify and target a hard to reach segment. I took a closer look at some of the traffic patterns building up to the event by week. The celebration officially started on August 9th and continues through to the 21st (minus Saturdays) and you can see the buildup of anticipation in the chart below. One thing that jumps out is the trend of the official site Boston USA versus resturantweekboston.com – the two sites were about in line until the kick off on the 9th when the Unofficial Site took off, but there is an easy answer for that, there are no menus available on Boston USA!

How many people are on the site this week? I’ll let you know after I finish booking my forth 3-course meal, but an interesting trend is that unique visitors for the month of July are up 2x over 2007, gearing up for the August promotion. The 2009 March event had an all time high with almost 55,000 hungry visitors but after looking at the counts for last week… It’s safe to say that, using internet interest as a measuring stick, this will be the largest event to date. This may be from increased adoption of reservation booking online or the ever-present and looming economy. Some restaurant owners have already extended the offer to a third week (65 out of the over 200 participating locations) or even the entire month of August hoping to continue to stimulate business.

So go out, eat and enjoy, you still have plenty of time to take advantage of these great deals. I recommend Bacco in the north end, Chicken Florentine and a nice bottle of cabernet sauvignon, (yeah I know it’s supposed to be white, but I like red). Make sure you set up your reservation in advance though; especially for that one restaurant you have been pining over going for the last 3 months. Thank you to the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau, American Express and all the participating restaurants, let’s keep this tradition alive! And marketers take note that quality content, like including menus, can push a site to the top and reach a desirable target segment.

On July 15, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will finally hit theaters. It’s been a two year wait for fans who last saw a film based on J.K. Rowling’s popular book series in July 2007, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

So far, I haven’t seen the same frenzy around all things Potter as I did two years ago, when anticipation around the new movie and the release of the final book in the series was everywhere. Will this movie be as big as the last one, or is the momentum low going into this release?

To gauge this, I looked at two aspects of consumers’ online behavior. First, I used compete.com to find out where people have been going when they search for Harry Potter information online in the last few months. Second, I looked at traffic to a few key sites around the releases of both Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince.

Let’s start with the search data. The chart below shows the top 10 sites that people were directed to after going to a major search engine and looking up a term that included the keywords “harry potter” in the three month period between April 1st and June 30th 2009. The sites are ranked by the percentage of all traffic generated by searches including the keyword “harry potter” that went to a particular site, shown with the blue bars.

Visits to these sites made up about 40% of the search referred traffic. What does this tell us about the audience?

• Many searchers end in a visit to the studio’s site. Warner Brothers, the studio releasing the movie, got the largest share of the search referred traffic, around 11%. Harry Potter searches made up about 17% of WB site’s search traffic in this period.
• After Warner Brothers, social media and user generated content sites show up frequently in the top 10. In this subgroup, we’re also seeing a mix of mainstream sites (Wikipedia, IMDb, YouTube, Facebook), as well as fan sites, like mugglenet, wikia and fanfiction.net.

Given these results, I decided to look at a few of these sites in more detail to get a feel for interest in the new film: the studio sites, Mugglenet (a popular Potter fan site), YouTube searches that included the words “Harry Potter,” and Harry Potter pages on Wikipedia, as shown in the chart below.

*Note: Official studio sites include all of harrypotter.warnerbros.com, which includes all of the movies in the series, and harrypotterorderofthepheonix.com, the microsite advertised with the Order of the Phoenix.

Here we can see that, in terms of overall interest, the marketing around a movie does seem to give all of the sites a lift, with the biggest change in traffic coming around a new theatrical release.

But is Pottermania as strong online now as it was two years ago? If we compare traffic to these sites, in June 2007 (the month before Order of the Phoenix was released) and June 2009 (the month before Half Blood Prince will be released), the indicators are mixed. Aggregate traffic to these four sites is down slightly, but people are also using different sources of information online. The studio site, where we saw most of the searchers visiting, saw a 29% decrease in traffic in June ’09 compared to June ’07. However, the number of people searching for terms including “Harry Potter” on YouTube has jumped up 91%, from about 200K in June 2007 to 400K in June 2009.

So what does this mean for Half Blood Prince? It doesn’t have quite the same online boost that its predecessor did, probably due in part to the fact that there’s no new book launch this year. Still, despite that and delays in the theatrical release date, it looks like it’s poised to draw in a good audience. We’ll find out how well on July 15th.

We saw how media attention drove Twitter’s share of searchers on the Iran Election to record heights two weeks ago. A barrage of mainstream media and blogosphere chatter swarmed the digerati’s collective consciousness, fusing their favorite techno-democratic phenom with Iranian political discontent.

Then the white glove dropped. MJ’s passing sent a megaton shock through the worldwide pop firmament of Planet Earth, rousing memories of Thriller from billions, even the Haters.

The web was not spared. Visitors shattered records Yahoo! News. Tweets swarmed across Twitter. Video streams flooded the online channels CNN and MTV. And updates exploded at Facebook. As CNN reported, “Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him.”

Michael told the Iran Election to Beat It. Over 24 times more searchers hit top search engines, news sites like CNN and the New York Times and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter on Jackson’s death than on the Iranian election shenanigans.

Where did MJ searchers go? Google. The King of Pop gave back the King of Search its crown.

But the royal succession was not without a few princely hiccups. Twitter disabled the search box and Trending Topics sidebar on profile pages for 4 hours following the “avalanche” of tweets after MJ’s death. And Google blocked MJ searches for 25 minutes, mistaking the incoming torrent as an internationally coordinated cyber-attack of zombie bots.

Fans surged to music, video and retail sites to rekindle memories of his hit songs and music videos to bid farewell to the King of Pop. Yahoo! Music led the way with 45% share of visitors, and YouTube delivered a respectable 23% share.

Meanwhile Michael was still shattering music sales records mors immatura.

They say things come in threes, but I don’t think anyone expected the final glove to fall with such shocking news. Last week’s trio of celebrity death’s started with TV Icon, Ed McMahon (86), Super Model, Farrah Fawcett (62), and ended with the “King of Pop,” Michael Jackson (51). Sure, the passing of Mr. McMahon and Ms. Fawcett was given main stream media attention. However, MJ’s death caused an online traffic frenzy of record breaking proportions.

How many people hit the web to get the skinny on MJ? Millions would be a conservative estimate. In fact, Yahoo! News set an all time record of 16.4 million UVs (unique visitors) on Thursday. Celebrity gossip site, tmz.com, received so much traffic that their servers reportedly crashed multiple times. Google was also a victim as the New York Post reported that Google News had to actually block the term “Michael Jackson” to prevent their site from crashing.

Using Compete’s daily online traffic metrics, reach and attention, we’re able to get a real sense of just how many online users in the US were surfing celebrity gossip sites to get their MJ updates.

Reach lets us to see what percentage of U.S. Internet users online visited a particular website on a particular day. Tmz.com, who broke the story of MJ’s death, reached 1.9% of the total US online population on 6/25. That’s a 438% increase from 6/24 and a 527% increase year over year. Other celebrity news sites experienced the same trend – eonline.com (up 213% to 1.3% of total US traffic), people.com (up 70% to .54% of total US traffic), perezhilton.com (up 28% to .45% of total US traffic), and ew.com (up 49% to .21% of total US traffic). These five sites alone reached 4.42% of all U.S. Internet users online.

Attention is a metric that considers the collective time all U.S. Internet users spend online and calculates what percentage of that time was spent on a given website on a particular day. Once again, tmz.com showed the greatest increase on 6/25, up 478% over the day before and 272% year over year to .037% of all time spent online. However, people.com garnered the most attention of all the celebrity sites on that day with .053% of total time spent online (up 71% from 6/24 and 50% year over year). The other celebrity sites also showed increases - eonline.com (up 175% to .032% of total US traffic), perezhilton.com (up 28% to .45% of total US traffic), and ew.com (up 49% to .21% of total US traffic).

Although some may credit MJ’s never-ending fame to his character flaws ridden with tabloid headlines, his musical career was undoubtedly flooded with accomplishments – 2 time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 13 time Grammy Award winner, and over 750 million records sold worldwide to name a few. The polarizing effect of his personal life’s blunders and undeniable talent obviously kept audiences captivated and will continue to captivate them for years to come. His passing even added another notch to his belt – “king of the Internet”… for a day.