One of the companies I’ve been following for a long time is Etsy.com.  Etsy.com is a website for folks selling craft items – or as they put it “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade.”  More broadly, they are referred to in the startup world as P2P commerce (person-to-person) – similar to eBay or any other site that enables person-to-person transactions with the website in the middle taking a small cut.

The press around the site has been amazing.  According to Techcrunch, “$100 million worth of goods were sold on Etsy in 2008. The company is generating over $1 million/month in revenue, Kalin told me.”

Continue reading “Startup-Watch: A Closer Look at Etsy.com” »

The Motorola Droid is here.  And though I’m a little disappointed it didn’t actually arrive via Stealth Bomber, it did come in with a bang.  From all of the buzz online and an aggressive advertising campaign, Verizon Wireless has declared the Droid as the poster child of its new line of phones running Google’s Android OS.

Speaking of Android, remember the T-Mobile G1 from last fall?  There was a ton of anticipation around the release of the G1, which was essentially the poster child of the first generation of Android phones.  How does interest in the Droid compare to interest in the G1 around launch?

Continue reading “Droid Really Does” »

Apparently October brought a lot of costume searchers online.  After several months of declining search query volumes, October query volumes ticked up 4% m-o-m. Total web search activity peaked just shy of 13 billion queries in the US.  Among the major market players nearly every engine benefitted from the lift in activity.  However behind the rising tide only one engine managed to pull ahead of the pack.

Continue reading “October Search Market Share Update: Most gain in volume but only Google gains share” »

Sometimes, it seems like omniscience.  With our Ad Impact product, we’re able to measure the impact of advertising exposure on online behavior.  Did an ad lead to more visits, searches, sales?  The answer rests comfortably in Compete’s data.  This gives us an enviable perspective on how (and whether!) specific ads and ad strategies work.

But of course, it takes work and experience to turn data and information into intelligence and insights.  (Omniscience would be deadly boring, if you think about it.)  Though we’ve been doing advertising effectiveness analysis for over a year now, we’re continually learning new things about online advertising.  The newest learning?  The time-honored concept of “advertising decay” is a myth.

Continue reading “The Myth of Advertising Decay” »

When I look back on my education, I can fondly remember the hours spent reading through the classic novels for English classes.  However, I would be lying if I said my classmates and I didn’t turn to Cliffs Notes for more interpretation as we read.  We were always curious about the analysis of things like Piggy’s glasses in “Lord of the Flies”, and the depth of the available information for how much they represented science and intellect in society.  Now, students flock to both sparknotes.com and cliffsnotes.com for their “deep dive” into they novels they are reading.

Continue reading “The “Easy to Read” Secret of Students” »

If the Retail world sees the end of the year as the Triple Crown, Halloween would be the Kentucky Derby. It is the initial measure of shoppers’ purchasing power leading into the holidays, and companies are quick to be the first out of the gate with sales of costumes, candy, and decorations. Search behavior offers a unique perspective on how consumers use the online channel for Halloween shopping; being relevant one month out of the year, Halloween shoppers do not have an obvious go-to place to find the necessities, and thus they turn to search as a discovery tool.

Continue reading “Halloween: An Experiment in Retail Blitzing” »