The summer movie blockbuster season is just about here, with major new releases set to hit theaters in the next couple weeks. Studies show that advertising support can break or make a blockbuster in the lead up to opening night.

On the web, movie advertisers love big, bold banners on popular movie sites like Yahoo! Movies, Fandango and MySpace. Here at Compete, we’ve got an eye on the MySpace homepage and saw some great looking creative in May.

In a recent post, we saw how 72% of MySpace visitors saw the homepage – the crown jewel in MySpace’s strategy to sell advertising like portals. That’s a huge volume of impressions, but how valuable are they really?

To get a better sense, we looked at same day viewthrough or the rate at which ad-exposed unique visitors visited the movie page.

Terminator Salvation clearly kicked MySpace movie ad butt! At 0.80% Viewthrough, Terminator outperformed the average by 2.7x.

Fractions of a percent may not seem like much, but keep in mind that MySpace had nearly 57 million unique visitors last month – that translates to tens of thousands of ad viewthroughs everyday.

Some fans just can’t get enough. We also took a look at those MySpace users who saw a movie ad and decided to do a little research.

Ah, the Trekkies. Of course, geekdom went crazy when Star Trek came to the silver screen last month. MySpace geeks (not an oxymoron) were no exception, with .11% of ad exposed visitors also heading warp speed over to IMDB.

As the biggest movie research site on the net, it’s not exactly, “Going boldy where no man has gone before.” But with at 3.2x the average for other movies on MySpace in May, it certainly got us thinking…

What if both winners joined up for a sequel? “Terminator Trekkers.” Now that’s one movie that MySpacers would pay to see!

Thinking back to my childhood, a week just wasn’t complete in the Bulger house if my grandmother didn’t get her fill of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was a tradition that she looked forward to all week, yet never once did I see an angry mob of people knocking down a KFC’s door demanding free chicken. However, this past month, when Colonel Sanders and Oprah Winfrey cooked up a little free chicken marketing campaign, a fowl uprising took place.

I first learned about the free Grilled Chicken meal offer from Oprah when I saw both “KFC” and “Oprah” were top trends on Twitter. Upon further investigation, I learned that a page on Oprah’s website was re-directing traffic to KFC’s new microsite for their new Grilled Chicken product, unthinkfc.com. Customers were able to receive their free Grilled Chicken meal via a coupon on unthinkfc.com. Lending a hand in guiding online attention to the free Grilled Chicken meal, coupons.com also played a crucial role in referral traffic to unthinkfc.com. In May, coupons.com referred 34.1% of unthinkfc.com referral traffic; oprah.com was slightly less with 30.2% of unthinkfc.com referral traffic.

In just a short period of time, less than 24 hours, the promotion had received a tremendous amount of attention. The chart below is the Daily Reach for the website unthinkfc.com from May 3 through May 9, the week in which the free offer was made available (the offer was available from 9 a.m. CDT on May 5th, to 11:59 p.m. CDT on May 6th). Daily Reach is a metric that shows how many people visit a website as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users online. So, as depicted in the chart below, on May 6th an astounding 3.73% of the U.S. Internet population visited unthinkfc.com.

The big question is whether this free promotion had a lasting effect for KFC throughout the month of May. According to the graph below, the answer to that question is no. Traffic to kfc.com and unthinkfc.com peaked during the week of the promotion - Unique Visitors were 2.85 million and 8.75 million, respectively. However, following that promotion week, traffic quickly dropped off. Unique Visitors to kfc.com decreased 73% W-O-W and Unique Visitors to unthinkfc.com had a decrease of 98% W-O-W.

“The Oprah Effect” is also clearly visible in the graph below, depicted by the orange bar. In the week of the free offer, 7.95 million Unique Visitors went to the Grilled Chicken coupon landing page on oprah.com. Many of these people were seeking out further information following the mention on her show or those who were following her Twitter feed.

In the end, the massive amount of attention left many coupon holders with an empty feeling in their stomachs. It seems the attention that the free offer received was more than KFC was able to handle. As demand for the free Kentucky Grilled Chicken skyrocketed and supply started running low, many restaurants were forced to say, “free chicken… no clucking way!”

It’s amazing to see how popular sites like twitter.com and coupons.com, combined with “The Oprah Effect” and a struggling economy, created a strong marketing campaign for KFC and the Kentucky Grilled Chicken product. Even in the wake of the free chicken coupon fiasco, KFC has seen overall sales increase; a positive outcome for what is some good grilled chicken. I guess my grandmother was way ahead of this trend!

Many of the blockbuster movies this year come with an established fan base from another medium, but Star Trek is unique in that its the sub-culture runs so deep that the Trekkie name has become has become common knowledge. I was curious to see if this strong group of followers was affecting where people are finding information about the movie.

While official channels, social media sites and and major movie online destinations make up the majority of the list, a couple fan-based sites show up in the top ten, something we didn’t see as much of couple months ago for Watchmen. Both memory-alpha.com and trekmovie.com were started by fans and have no official ties to the movie or the series. Movie marketers would be well-served to tap into unofficial but influential sites like these for future releases with a similar following.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, one of the season’s first blockbusters, was released last week and provides a good point for comparison, both because of release date and the established group of fans from the X-Men comics and earlier films.

Considering that Wolverine opened with over $85 million in its first weekend and was only able to slightly overtake Star Trek in Reach for the official websites during the week of its launch (and still a week before Star Trek’s), it looks like the Trekkies and other movie-goers could make this upcoming opening weekend an epic one.

Negotiations between the Boston Globe and the unions over cost-cutting have come to a successful conclusion, and it seems that the Globe will continue publishing. This is just one of many major newspapers to struggle recently, and yet another sign that traditional channels are losing ground to the internet.

While the newspaper isn’t as widely circulated as it once was, the Boston Globe name still holds some weight and readers are seeking it out in different form.

Boston.com hosts the online version of the Boston Globe as well as content from other sources, including job search powered by Monster and car search powered by Cars.com. Six of the top ten terms driving traffic to Boston.com included mention of the Globe. The site had nearly five and a half million unique visitors last month, which is up 74% from March of last year and 120% from two years ago.

The physical version of the paper is going through tough times, but demand for the reporting remains high. Hopefully this agreement between the paper and the unions marks the beginnings of finding a solution so that readers can continue to get their news in whatever form they please.

For the past few years, I have not only been a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber, but also one of its biggest fans. Sirius replaced the unmanageable amount of mix CD’s that littered my car and put all the music and entertainment in one small piece of equipment. Sirius has also changed the way I listen to music at work. On in the background all day, Sirius Internet Radio provides me with the soundtrack to my daily life. While some days call for an upbeat tempo with Sirius Hits 1 and some days require a more mellow choice like Cinemagic, my channel of choice is Howard 100. And who can blame me - the home of chaotic entertainment that is amusing day after day, providing everything from the ‘Wack Pack’ to Robin’s News. I wanted to know if others shared in my loyalty to Howard 100 when listening to Sirius Internet Radio, and if not, what are the subscribers listening to?

To do this, I looked at the population of Sirius Internet Radio listeners and then analyzed what channels they are tuning into during a month. Keep in mind that one listener can fall into multiple buckets throughout the month. Here’s what I found:

• Howard is King: 28.4% and 16.1% of Sirius Internet Listeners tune in to Howard 100 and Howard 101, respectively. Just like in his days of old on terrestrial radio, Howard Stern continues to be the most listened to channel.
• Rock and Pop lead in the music categories: Sirius Hits 1 commands the top music channel with 10% of Listeners heading to this channel. However, while people are tuning in to hear the latest pop hits, just as many people are tuning in to listen to the two classic rock channels (Classic Rewind and Classic Vinyl).
• While not on the list here, Sirius NFL Radio does break into the Top 10 listened to channels during the NFL season. 9.3% of Sirius Internet Unique Listeners listened to Sirius NFL Radio in September ‘08. This was #4 overall!
• Online listeners love their caroling: Sirius XM Pops and Cinemagic, two channel dedicated to Holiday music, were in the Top 10 listened to channels in December ‘08. Cinemagic was the 2nd most listened to channel in December ‘08 with 14.2% of Sirius Internet Listeners listening to Holiday music. The top channel was still Howard 100.

With a large percentage of listeners tuning into Howard 100 and Howard 101 on SIRIUS Internet Radio, what will happen to Sirius XM Radio if Stern were to leave at the end of his contract in 2010? Howard Stern commands a large audience, many of which might cancel their service if Stern were to leave at the end of his contract. As Internet Radio continues to grow, Stern’s next move could be to bring his own channel to the World Wide Web. I can see it now, the Stern Internet Radio iPhone app being the biggest app of 2011.

Why would McDonald’s not use filetofish.com to capitalize on its most ignored sandwich the one time of year 23.9% of the US population is compelled to consume it at least once a week (lent)? Where is the website counterpart to the viral Arnold phenom that is “Gimme-that-filet-o-fish”? Where is the follow-through?

First, some history. According to USA Today, the filet-o-fish (one “L”) was “invented” in 1962 in Cincinnati by McDonald’s owner Lou Groen for the sole purpose of satisfying the demands of his predominately Catholic clientele on Fridays. Comprised of fried fish, half a slice of cheese, and tarter sauce, it has since gone on to sell, amazingly, at a rate of 300 million patties per year.

So given the history and the Canonical rules, it seems like McDonalds would want to seriously chase the Catholic dollar online; however, filetofish.com has been left suspiciously derelict. If you look at Unique Visitors during Lent for the past three years, you can smell the scent of demand. With no memorable substantial web-presence or campaign tie in (that I know of, or that the Wayback Machine could show me) there are still organic spikes in UVs to filetofish.com during the pre-Easter season. Admittedly, the data is a little thin here (low sample), but the seasonal variance is obviously undeniable.

There is a unique opportunity for McDonald’s to execute a campaign once a year AND to follow through with a related “filet” inspired web presence. By matching Catholic consumers weekly demands for fish with the often forgotten, often maligned, filet-o-fish, McDonald’s could briefly capture some fish sandwich market share.