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.

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.

Formula. Diapers. Clothing. Nursery Items. Car Seats. Strollers.

When I think of a high value market segments, one that comes to mind is young and expecting mothers. Making new purchase decisions on these items and more, young and expecting mothers are the target consumers of many baby product companies. If I were an online brand marketer for Johnson and Johnson (makers of the always popular Johnson’s Baby Shampoo), I would be interested in knowing where I can advertise to most effectively reach this target group.

The current industry standard approach is a contextual ad campaign. A typical contextual ad campaign matches site content with target group interests. Under this approach, known sites with baby- or mom-focused content would be the appropriate ad placement location. Examples of these locations could be momstoday.com or singlemom.com. Unfortunately, this is speculative and offers a limited scope. After all, young and expecting mothers don’t spend ALL of their online time at these very segmented sites. Behavior Match is Compete’s new approach to this challenge of matching target consumers with effective online media buys among all sites they visit. Using Compete’s Behavior Match product suite, we can drill down to online properties that have a greater than average saturation of young and expecting mothers, not just the contextually relevant sites.

A Behavior Match Buyer report highlights all websites that are visited by young and expecting mothers, indexed against the chance of finding this behavioral segment on the average site across the internet. To run this report, Compete has identified 1,000,000 online consumers in the month of January, 2008 as young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 809,835 young and expecting mothers visited the Yahoo! Domain. Yahoo! Scores a 98, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers, or just under the internet average (100).”

Top 10 Domain Findings:

• The largest internet properties have the highest reach among young and expecting mothers.
• These domains index very close to average; this is oftentimes true because of their sheer size. i.e. Who doesn’t use Yahoo!?
• Among this list, aol.com is the best advertising opportunity for Johnson and Johnson to reach young and expecting mothers (wikipedia.org does not accept advertising).

The focus of this report is the torso sites on the internet (50,000 to 500,000 monthly unique visitors) that have a high concentration of young and expecting mothers.

*Read as “In the month of January, 31,000 young and expecting mothers visited kidprintables.com. Kidprintables scores a 8,895, indexed against the average composition of young and expecting mothers.”

Torso Domain Findings:

• While these internet properties have lower scope, on a per impression basis they much more effectively reach the target segment.
• A campaign focused across many torso domains has the same reach opportunity as a larger internet property.
• A trend among these sites is that they are focused on work from home / internet jobs.

Compete offers another product in the Behavior Match product suite focused on large site segmentation. Behavior Match In-Site segments the larger internet properites to take advantage of their large scope while still effectively targeting young and expecting mothers.

This table takes a comparitive look at the performance of top subdomains on yahoo.com and msn.com during the month of January 2008 at reaching young and expecting mothers.

In-Site Findings (yahoo.com and msn.com):

• On a per impression basis, many MSN channels more effectively reach young and expecting mothers than similar Yahoo! channels.
• Top performing channels for Johnson and Johnson to focus on with their ad campaign include Real Estate, Health, and TV.
• Channels that less effectively reach the young and expecting mother segment are Help, Astrology, and Autos.

Takeaways:

• Contextual placement alone is outdated. Similar properties across two top portals don’t even show the same reach among the target segment.
• Targeted advertising space doesn’t have to be expensive. Matching highly effective advertising opportunities from Behavior Match with those offering low CPM saves $$!
• Bargaining with top portals is possible. Fight for the placement on the health channel.
• This product is EASY. No more wrapping your head around fancy targeting schema.

Apple has a long history of releasing critically acclaimed ads starting back in 1984 with “The Greatest Commercial of All Time.” More recently, one of the coolest aspects of Apple advertising has been the use of relatively unknown musicians, with their music as the (seemingly) most important element of the commercial. Through multi-million dollar ad campaigns, Apple helps bring these lesser-known artists mainstream. With the recent launch of the iPod Nano, iPod Touch and Macbook Air, Compete took a look at how consumers exposure to offline commercials influenced online behavior, and also how artists (and Apple) benefit from a partnership.

What’s incredible is how high quality TV commercials can foster online research. From August 2007 to January 2008, US consumers conducted nearly 1 million queries for iPod related commercials or the underlying music. The table below shows the top 20 search phrases (in terms of query volume), and how these queries were conducted over the period.

Its interesting to note that 15 of the top 20 searches contained the word “song” or “music” and also helps to explain search behavior. With almost no information being given about the music used in Apple commercials, consumers unfamiliar with the artist (and apparently enjoyed the song) naturally search for the song in the commercial.

Additionally, the fact that September was such a huge month in terms of Apple commercial search activity indicates the degree to which consumers enjoyed Feist’s “1-2-3-4,” a song that appeared in Apple iPod Nano commercials. Over 425,000 people were actively searching for the song in this commercial in September.

Apple TV ads are all about branding, but they apparently do a great job at getting people to revisit the advertisements online. They also are an amazing opportunity for an undiscovered musician. For all three artists in recent commercials (Feist, CSS, and Yael Naim), Apple ads resulted in exponentially greater exposure to consumers, even excluding the offline component.

• For Fiest’s “1-2-3-4” YouTube video, traffic grew 1200% from the month prior to the Nano commercial’s launch, and over 45X when views of the actual commercial (on YouTube, or Apple) was included.
• Growth for CSS’s “Music is my hot hot sex,” which was created by an fan, and then used by Apple, showed substantial growth as well.
• It appears that being exposed through Apple commercials also results in loyalty. In fact, 3 months after the Nano commercial launched, traffic to Feist “1-2-3-4” videos on YouTube was receiving 5 times the monthly views it was getting prior to its feature in the Nano commercial.
• It’s not surprising, but people seem to have confused the iPhone with the iPod Touch. Traffic to iPhone commercial videos on YouTube and Apple.com spiked around the same time as the iPod Touch ad was released. (not shown)

What is so significant about Apple’s advertising is that it not only helps to define the company and generate demand for talented musicians, but also helps encourage the music discovery process, which ties directly back to iTunes. By exposing consumers to great music from new (or unknown) artists, they get people interested in the music search. With an artist the company exposed nominated for a Grammy, and millions of people seeking out commercials instead of avoiding them, Apple is doing a few things right.