As March search stats were published by the other major third party measurement companies over the past few weeks I started to get a little worried about our post from a couple of weeks ago. So we decided to go a little deeper into our data and as a result we did an extensive page level look at our search counts. Low and behold, it turns out we got bitten again by the Club Live bug. You would think that after the hubbub raised over Club Live last July we would have learned our lesson. Ever since that post last July we have been filtering out Club Live generated searches. It turns out that in February, MSN launched some new Club Live games that generated a solid amount of interest and skewed our March search market share report. So here I am a couple weeks later, after umpteen blogs have reposted our numbers and any number of bloggers have contrasted our results with the other third party measurement folks. I was hoping to get this out before Danny put together this great analysis, but alas it did not happen.

The new, updated, better than ever overview …

• Google market share increased 0.6ppts on 6% m-o-m volume growth reaching a new record market share
• Yahoo! continued the slide with market share dropping another ½ point to a new record low
• Windows Live Search market share inched up slightly as volume gains moved just slightly more than the market
• Ask also moved one step ahead of the market with market share inching forward
• AOL was the only major engine to post a decline with volume off 4% m-o-m
• It’s still not easy being in the third party reporting game

*Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

Things were ticking along nicely in the search world with not so much as a speed bump to be seen (set aside the market panic about Google’s paid click decline). Then along came March. Overall volume of search in March exploded, with total queries increasing over 6% and surpassing the 9 billion mark. That’s the biggest month-over-month increase in total search volume since July of last year. Interestingly enough this growth was not driven by our perennial search leader Google. In fact Google actually underperformed the market for the first time in 9 months and saw market share decline more than ½ a point. So where were the big gains?

Windows Live search kicked into high gear in March. Month-over-month Windows Live search queries increased 28.8%, pushing market share up almost 2ppts to just over 10%. Year-over-year, Windows Live search queries were up nearly 52%. Wow! My guess is that there are some dollars flowing out of Redmond that may be driving this. Maybe this April fool’s joke wasn’t a joke.

Then there was Google. Normally 5% month-over-month gains in search volumes would be stellar considering the average for the past year has been about 3%. Unfortunately in March that 5% growth meant Google lagged the market by about 1% and saw market share dip back under the 70% threshold to 69.4%. That’s the first time Google has lost market share in nine months. Oh boy … what will the markets do now?

In other news Yahoo! just can’t seem to self arrest the precipitous seven month slide they are on. Query volumes remained essentially flat with market share dipping again to a new record low of less than 15%. Yahoo! holds the dubious distinction amongst the top 5 search engines of being the only one to post a year-over-year decline in market share. Ask managed to ride the market wave holding share steady while AOL continued to slip into oblivion.

The overview …

• Google market share declined 0.6ppts despite 5% volume growth … the first decline in nine months
• Yahoo! continued the slide with market share dropping another point to a new record low and was the only engine with year-over-year share losses
• There’s something going down up in Redmond with Windows Live Search queries increasing nearly 30% month-over-month to push market share up almost 2ppts
• Ask moved with the market with volume increasing a little over 6% and no change to market share
• AOL was the only major engine to post a decline with volume off 10% month-over-month
• March madness apparently goes well beyond the b-ball court

*Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

The April Fools hoaxes by Google have become widely known in some circles, but judging by the email I got from a friend this morning asking if I’d seen the new Gmail feature of Custom Time, not everyone has caught on. The pages are well done and it’s easy to see how someone not really paying attention could be fooled by some of the “new offers” at first glance.

The hoaxes started back in 2000 but last year was the biggest yet for Google with two fake offers. There were more than one million visits to the combination of Gmail Paper and Google TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) pages in April last year.

Anyway, I wonder if I’ve got a shot at living on Mars…

Gone are the days when the Internet was for checking email or searching for the meaning of the word “doppelganger”. Now booking vacations, paying bills and shopping are every day online activities for most people. With such an abundance of things to do on the Internet, many companies find themselves challenged to keep their customers interested and engaged.

One of the new and cool things you can do online that’s near and dear to me personally is watch videos. And I don’t just mean YouTube. More and more people (me being one of them) are developing an appetite for watching full-length movies and/or TV shows online. Advertisers are interested in online video too, hoping that these users will provide an engaged audience for their marketing messages.

Online video sites have delivered promising stats recently. For example, Netflix’s WatchNow, which allows subscribers to any Netflix plan to watch full-length movies and TV episodes online from their collection, had 69% more people using the service this quarter as compared to last quarter. Veoh.com, which allows users to view and share short YouTube-like videos as well as stream full-length TV show episodes, has grown from just under 1.5M Unique Visitors one year ago to over 6M in February (although their traffic has likely declined due to the recent writers’ strike). Barely out of its beta phase, the new kid on the block, Hulu.com, offers both full-length movies and TV shows including the most recent in-season episodes. Despite its newness it has already started gaining traction.

With video becoming an interesting and engaging activity online, everyone is trying to capitalize. Take telecommunications providers for example. Most of them were in business long before the Internet existed and many of us rely on them for such necessary services as our home phone line, cable TV and broadband Internet. Our neighborhood Telcos have since gone beyond mere service providers by building and maintaining customer-centric portals (e.g. myembarq.com or comcast.net). Driving engagement on these portals by offering video viewing (as well as news, email and other activities) also brings Telcos a piece of the ad revenue pie – as long as they can get their customers there.

So are their attempts working? Virtually all customer portals currently offer short news videos and movie trailers but that hasn’t been enough to generate interest yet.

Only 10% of Comcast.net visitors also go to its videos section, and the numbers are even lower for other Telco providers. User-generated content has proven difficult to achieve as well. Comcast tried it with Ziddio.com which only attracted 0.2% of Comcast.net traffic in February.

On the other hand, an emerging success story that has effectively leveraged increased interest in watching TV online is Comcast’s Fancast service. Fancast.com successfully integrates content like OnDemand listings and movie trailers with the ability to watch free full-length episodes of popular TV shows.

Judging by recent traffic this approach appears to be working. The number of fancast.com Unique Visitors has nearly quadrupled since November.

Online video is clearly attracting consumer attention. However the question remains as to which providers will capitalize on the trend before watching TV & movies online becomes as common as checking email. Can portal sites become “the place to watch online video”? This story should be one to watch in the future. Stay tuned.

February is a critical time of the year for me personally. I have a lot on the line. Not only is February the month when Saint Valentine, the patron saint of Hallmark comes around, but it also happens to be the month of my wife’s birthday, and my mother’s birthday. Ouch! That is a lot of opportunity for trips to the dog house to come my way. Fortunately, I made it through the gauntlet relatively unscathed this year. In contrast to my own luck (read as: recurring annual reminders on cell phone), February was not too kind to the majority of the big search players. Of course February was kind once again to the biggest fish in the pond despite plenty of less than stellar market buzz.

Google officially crossed the 70% mark for the first time in February, according to Compete search market share numbers. 7 out of 10 web search queries performed in the US were performed on Google! The march up and to the right just doesn’t stop. Google’s search volumes have grown on average 3% per month since February last year, resulting in total year-over-year gains of over 50%. Obviously the story isn’t so rosy for the other players in the space.

The pain at Yahoo! is not limited to Jerry Yang coming to grips with potentially being the Silicon Valley subsidiary of the mighty Microsoft. February was another tough month for Yahoo! search as volumes declined nearly 7% from January and market share fell another point. MSN/Live search in turn dropped nearly 4% on the volume side resulting in a market share loss of about 0.3ppts. That’s a combined Microhoo market share loss of 1.3ppts since January 2008 and 7.1ppts since February 2007.

In other news Ask has thrown in the towel and decided to focus on working women. Then again maybe they aren’t … or are they? We’ll have to wait and see on that one, but one thing is for sure, despite February’s slight volume declines, Ask has been on the upswing over the past year. Ask query volumes were up nearly 56% since February 2007.

The overview …

• Google hits the big 70 for market share as the march goes on
• Yahoo! just can’t seem to escape the slippery slope dropping another point of market share
• MSN/Live seems to have caught some of the Yahoo! blues with market share off month-over-month and year-over-year
• Ask may or may not be for the overworked working woman, but they seem to be holding steady at large
• AOL ticked up in February on small gains and remains up year-over-year
• Is it any surprise that Saint Patrick comes to town with green beverages in tow right after Saint Valentine marches through?

* Search market share includes web search only for the Adult US Online Population and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.

Last week, Wall Street and Madison Avenue were abuzz with the news that Google Paid Search Ad clickthroughs had gone flat in terms of volume. But just as traders dumped the stock and caused its share price to plummet, others were questioning that decision. But one factor that everyone seemed to ignore was the little fact that this year contains a full extra day worth of potential business. This got us thinking - what does that extra day really mean in terms of online marketing?

Looking at our data we know that in January in the U.S. there were 600 billion page views which would be a daily average of 20 million page views. In the 4th quarter of 2007 internet ad spending totaled $7.3 billion or about $81 million per day according to the IDC in a recent ClickZ article.

Combining this with published ad revenue numbers, it would appear that US pageviews collectively have a CPM to marketers of about $4.18.

So marketers will be spending $81 million today that they would not have in the previous three years. In the spirit of GoldenPlace.com’s bizarre marketing efforts (hey, they apparently work…here we are creating buzz), we came up with some ways marketers could spend this money when the year is one day shorter, to put this all in perspective.

What Else Could Leap Day Ad Revenue Buy?
	Give 400,000 kids an OLPC with your logo on it
	Buy 17% of all goods for sale on eBay for that day
	Give 550,000 JitterBug phones to seniors in need with your logo on them
	Fund Barack Obama’s campaign for another two months
	Take over Digg’s advertising for 2 years 6 months
	Buy A New Ferrari 599 in every color available in the 8 bit spectrum (256)
	Buy up ALL of Google’s Adword’s inventory for the next 7 days.
	Rent Necker Island from Richard Branson for 5 years and send you favorite customers there ($300,000 per week)
	Buy 40 million Compete.com credits and eat your competitor’s lunch
	Pay 1 hour 40 minutes of the interest on the National Debt.

The Treasury has made it easy for individuals to reduce the debt. You just have to give a “Gift to reduce Debt Held by the Public“…

…it’s just too bad they don’t take paypal.