July data is live and there are tons of tasty data nuggets ready on compete.com! Healthcare is top of mind and “cash for clunkers” sent droves of people online to research how they could get the most bang for their rusty rides. Plus, the Twitter craze spells success for Twitter tools riding its coat tails.

Top Health Insurance and Physician Websites

On July 28th, Compete released a list of the top Insurance and Physician sites for June 2009. Over the past month, overall unique visitors (UVs) to Insurance and Physician sites increased by 3.5%, and the category saw a 7% traffic increase over June 2008. The top ten destinations in the category include physician rating sites - healthgrades.com and vitals.com - and insurance plan comparison services - ehealthinsurance.com and dentalplans.com.

President Obama’s healthcare reform is definitely helping fuel the fire. In fact, barackobama.com has received over 9% of all search traffic resulting from the keyword “healthcare” over the past 90 days. The buzz about the reform has also spurred an increase in online research of government-sponsored healthcare. As a result, medicare.gov received almost 1MM UVs in July.

Twitter Traffic Flat - Related Sites Going Strong

No doubt people are still tweeting out there and looking for real time news, updates, and information. However, traffic to twitter.com has flattened over the past few months while other Twitter related sites showed major growth.

Aggregator site Tweetmeme crushed it in July, ramping traffic by 85% month over month to 11.8MM UVs, suggesting that there is some real value in combing through the noise and offering consumable information. July traffic to Twitpic (up 9.6% to 4.6MM UVs) and bit.ly (up 20% to 5MM UVs) also grew in July, indicating increased adoption and usage of more Twitter related tools.

Last week’s craze over Twitter and Iran was the height of media buzzdom. Democracy + social media + possible election fraud = PR Gold. The State Department asking Twitter to delay server maintenance? A former National Security Advisor honcho suggesting Twitter should get the Nobel Prize?! That’s so good, even the craziest novelist couldn’t make it up.

But what was really happening in Iran and on Twitter? Some sobering thoughts suggest that Twitter may not have been that widely embraced inside Iran. Other reports suggest that the government has been actively suppressing digital resistance.

Meanwhile, a few terrifying and sad reports have leaked out, like protest violence photos and the Neda video, displaying the immediacy and emotional impact of social media.

Outside Iran, these scant bits have whipped the disenfranchised Diaspora and simpatico millions to take to the streets and social media streams. Starved for the latest and eager to commune, they have pollinated the web with millions of bits of Iran Election information – on leading search engines, news sites, wikis, social networks, sharing services and real time search engines.

Taking a web-wide view, Compete looked at searchers on “Iran+Election” at over 25 sites like Google, the New York Times, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, real-time search startup OneRiot and, of course, Twitter.

It’s no surprise that Twitter claimed 55% of searchers the week after the Election, given all the media hoopla. But note that Google was the leading search property in the days leading up to the event, the day itself and the day after. Searchers used Google to learn more about the event before it happened and Twitter to get the latest on the fallout.

As OneRiot has written about, there’s a bit of an outstanding question among Google, Twitter and others: who will win real time search?

Search doesn’t equate to media consumption. With Iran in the headlines on nytimes.com and streaming down Twitter apps as #IranElection, people don’t need to search for the latest. But many will search nonetheless, especially the highly engaged.

I stumbled upon a new site last month, rockyou.com, while I was perusing the top sites for attention every month. Just in case anyone was confused on what exactly that attention metric we talk about is; let’s use Facebook as an example. In June facebook.com accounted for 6.55% of all seconds spent for every single person online across the entire US! That means for every 2 minutes spent in cyber land, 13 of those seconds were spent online stalking old colleagues on Facebook. Well, rockyou.com is not quite as prevalent but at rank 39 it still accounted for over .1% of all time spent online in April.

So that’s what got this site on my radar which has been operational since mid 2006 and was closely involved with making widgets for Myspace and is the most prevalent widget maker (in terms of downloads) for Facebook since December 2007. (I don’t know what I would do without Wikipedia). Well since then they have teamed up with a bunch of the big time social networks and increased the site traffic year-over-year from 5 million unique visitors in April ’08 to almost 29 million in April ’09, over 5x!

I’m sure there are a ton of great widgets that you can use to pimp up your profile and continue to push Facebook attention off the charts but the hot new offering is their “Best Slideshow Ever!” app. In the name of responsible journalism and morbid curiosity, it was my duty to try out the tool. After careful examination I was pleasantly surprised with the results. As always, our readers have the final say on whether or not it can produce The Best Slideshow Ever but for my test show I think it did the trick. Let us know what you think of RockYou.com.

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!

There is no denying the fact that the social networking site Twitter has exploded into popular culture this year. Unique visitors to this popular domain has grown over 225% since January (19,443,286 unique visitors in April 2009). While wading through the different applications for this type of information sharing, one offering in particular really caught my eye, StockTwits. StockTwits is an open community of investors that share advice and information about real time trends in the market. Many members of the community go so far as to give details on trades they are executing as they happen. At this point, it is good to point out that I dabble a bit in the investment arena so you can imagine why this would be so intriguing. In the investment arena, information is a valuable commodity so getting free advice from professionals synchronized with market conditions is an attractive proposition.

This sort of information sharing service seems a perfect fit for the Twitter model as both thrive on real-time data distributed on a massive scale. From the graph below it is apparent that StockTwits is still in its infancy stage but even through a short amount of time has experienced tremendous growth.

As StockTwits grows it will be interesting to see if other companies within the investment community try to capitalize on its success. Through Twitter, StockTwits already has over 70,000 followers, a number that is likely to increase quickly in the coming months. A site like this that fosters a large community of active investors would be difficult to ignore. Looking at the destination data for April 2009 it looks as though one investment firm, Scottrade, is already gaining traction from the success of this emerging social media site. Even though the volume may seem low, it is still very early in the game for StockTwits and there are plenty of opportunities for a company to target this growing community.

The level of growth StockTwits is experiencing is not surprising given the fact that people are always looking for advice on how to grow their money. Therefore, a service that provides up to the second market information for free is most appealing. The one caveat is that this information can be given by virtually anyone so the value of the data can be called into question. One way StockTwits alleviates this concern is through its Recommended List which highlights key contributors with a track record of success. For those serious about getting the best advice, StockTwits allows members to upgrade their service to include exclusive feeds for a monthly or yearly membership charge. By catering to both the savvy investor and casual traders (myself included) StockTwits has set itself up for continued growth and success using the Twitter platform.

Another month has come and gone, leaving behind a trail of data and some interesting stories around springtime, sports, and social media. What changes did April bring? We dug into the numbers to look at fast moving sites, traffic trends, and some of the biggest stories of 2009 that we’ve been covering.

Everybody’s asking about it, so we’ll kick it off with Twitter, an ever-growing presence in the social arena. Aided by Ashton, Oprah, and significant media buzz, Unique Visitors to twitter.com increased to 19.4 Million in April, surpassing the New York Times for the first time. Oprah’s first tweet on April 17th delivered the highest Daily Reach ever to the site, with nearly 2% of all Americans online visiting Twitter.

Feeding off Twitter: Sure, Twitter is growing, but so are the many sites that rely on it. Fast movers in April included tweetmeme.com (up 338% to 1.68 Million Unique Visitors), tweetdeck.com (up 69% to 915,000 UVs), twittergadget.com (up 56% to 100,000 UVs), twitpic.com (up 37% to 3.33 Million UVs), and bit.ly (up 53% to 1.81 Million UVs).

Spring Fever: We know that spring is in the air when traffic flow to certain sites pick up. Pet lovers flocked to 1800petmeds.com in April (up 33% to 1.68 Million UVs), green thumbs and lawn caregivers went to scotts.com (up 46% to 710,000 UVs), and traffic to baseball sites were up sharply month over month. Mlb.com was up 62% to 12.25 Million Unique Visitors, and minorleaguebaseball.com also saw a nice bump (up 136% to 1.22 Million UVs). Red Sox Nation will be pleased to know that in addition to kicking off 2009 with 5 straight wins against the hated Yankees, the Sox also won the online traffic battle in April (367,000 UVs to redsox.com vs. 346,000 to yankees.com).

Micro-site Mania: Big upticks to some CPG and food retail micro-sites this month – who said these guys don’t spend online? Between content, contests, and coupons for consumers, some of these branders drove some serious traffic in April. The biggest food related movers included reynoldsrecycled.com (1.64 UVs) Taco Bell’s bajablast.com (up exponentially to 562,000 UVs), cicispizza.com (up 436% to 1.07 Million UVs), Hellmann’s buildtheperfectsandwich.com (up 417% to 441,000 UVs), and kfc.com (up 69% to 1.17 Million UVs).

The Easter Effect: Flower and gift sites saw a nice bump thanks to marketing around the Easter holiday. Ftd.com led the charge (up 282% to 2.73 Million UVs), with proflowers.com (up 59% to 750,000 UVs), and 1800flowers.com (up 26% to 774,000 UVs) also rising in the ranks. Godiva.com also showed a big lift (up 303% to 698,000 UVs).

We’ll keep an eye on all of these stories going forward to see what changes May will bring. In the meantime, find out how a new month of traffic has impacted site traffic, Search, and the overall internet landscape in your industry with all of Compete’s powerful tools on compete.com.

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