Does privacy matter to most Facebook users? Take a look at the chart below, and judge for yourself (weekly unique visitors to facebook’s privacy settings pages):

Even after all the recent mainstream media coverage and debate surrounding Facebook’s controversial beacon program, online privacy in general, and Facebook making available universal beacon opt-out — traffic to Facebook’s privacy settings pages has essentially been flat. NOT A GOOD SIGN!

It’s likely that the average Facebook user DOES care about their privacy, and know they should do something about it, but are mostly unaware or don’t know what they can or should do. Should Facebook be doing more around online privacy education? There is a lot of unintended sharing going on, and I think it is in Facebook’s long term best interest to do so.

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.

As the strike among the Writer’s Guild of America may be driving viewers away from prime-time TV favorites, automotive marketers are suggesting they are seeking alternative channels to reach prospective customers. Personal social networking sites on the internet are one channel marketers are anxious to better use to their advantage.

Since consumers are already spending time on these sites it is natural for marketers to try to place their product based on target audience for the networking site. We used the Compete Behavior Match product to take a closer look at the other sites visited by automotive brand shoppers in December. Behavior Match indexes overlap of a targeted segment with domains against the general internet population to the same sites. We found some interesting overlap occurring between these sites and brand shoppers:

• Iyomu.com indexed high for Ford, Chrysler and Chevrolet. This site is targeted at young adults touting itself as the “social networking site for grownups”.
• Imports, Toyota and Honda index very low with blackplanet.com – a social network directed specifically at African-Americans. Chevrolet shared the most visitors with this site.
• Toyota and Honda indexed highest with mashable.com and friendster.com – sites that target a younger demographic
• Chrysler shoppers were more likely to visit yuku.com; a site that has grown traffic significantly since June 2007.
• Female targeted site teamsugar.com indexed high for all the brands but particularly for Chrysler shoppers.
• Social networking leader myspace.com indexed close to average for all brands with only Chevrolet enjoying a slightly higher share of shoppers in the visitor pool.

By understanding where they currently index high, brands can see what natural associations are occurring or if current advertising is driving shopping behavior. But is volume of overlap the whole story? Are these sites generating engaged referrals?

Looking at December referrals from myspace.com to the automotive brand sites shows a broad range in the engagement of referrals:

• Toyota, the manufacturer that indexed the lowest with myspace.com had the most engaged referrals, averaging stays of over 8 minutes per visitor. They also had a much lower bounce rate, meaning fewer of their referrals left the site immediately after being referred.
• Chevrolet had the most referrals from myspace.com but the highest bounce rate at 88%.
• Chrysler has an interesting position with myspace.com indexing right on average with shared visitors and being middle of the pack for engaging referrals and bounce rate. Perhaps Chrysler is striking the best balance between quantity and quality.

Perhaps this is a fair alternative to prime time television advertising as marketers can target an audience that aligns with their brand and reach consumers shopping for vehicles that utilize social network sites to get “connected.”

In the space of a month, Facebook has gone from media darling to devil. However, all the bad PR didn’t hold back Facebook.com traffic in November. Unique visitors jumped 20%:

The big question — Are Facebook users even aware of their worsening privacy situation? Take a look at the chart below. Looks like regular Facebook users are mostly unaware of their worsening situation, or more likely don’t know what to do about it - not good.

According to one Facebook poll, 67% of all respondents had not even heard of the Facebook Beacon.

It’s generally a good idea to put users first, then investors. I hope the good people at Facebook HQ wake up quickly.

Believe it or not, based on the top 100 domains (unique visitors) FanFiction.net has the fourth highest average time spent per user. That’s right, they beat out Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Only three sites rank higher; the almighty time wasting gaming site, Pogo.com (number one), and the two hottest dating sites (so I hear) on the net; manhunt.net and adam4adam.com. Coming in at a close number five is another gaming site, runescape.com and then finally, Myspace. I’d like to once again send my condolences to Tom on his big loss for the coveted ‘most devoted internet junkie website of the year award.’

What is FanFiction.net? I had honestly never heard of it until it broke the top 30 for attention recently (now at number 28) and I did a little digging. Founded in 1988 by computer programmer Xing Li this website allows users to post their fiction on a myriad of topics ranging from anime to movies and if that’s not enough, “Misc.” It’s not hard to see why people spend so much time on this website, once you read one post about the highly anticipated Edward Scissorhands II (Johnny Depp declined comment) you will be hooked. When I say hooked, I mean it: The average user spends over seven and a half hours on this website a month and logs in more than 34 times.

Following a decade of “Blockbuster: Part II,” we have FanFiction.net - a site that finally allows fanatics of beloved media classes to live out their ultimate fantasy of having Han Solo navigate the Starship Enterprise through the Twilight Zone. That’s not to say that there is free reign on this site to post anything your heart desires; on September 12, 2002 all material rated NC-17 was banned from the website. This did not seem to have much effect on traffic to the website as almost 2,000 people posted their opinions on South Park. Although, it may not seem like a big deal to many people, I take comfort in knowing that playing games, looking for love and stalking your old acquaintances can sometimes be less enticing then letting your true feelings about Dirty Dancing finally come out. Cheers to you, Fanfiction.net, your clean site design with only one banner add and unadulterated freedom of expression has catapulted your users into a class almost of their own.

The rise in popularity of social networking and video sharing websites in the years since the last US presidential election has created a myriad of new ways for candidates to reach and engage voters. The leading candidates all have, for example, MySpace and facebook profiles, flickr pages, and their own YouTube channels. Combined, the candidates have posted over 2,500 videos to their YouTube channels since January.

As candidates’ move beyond the walls of their official websites, traditional metrics used in past elections to track the effectiveness of their online efforts (e.g. page views and unique visitors to a campaign’s website) have been rendered largely obsolete as they report on only a slice of an ever-expanding pie. There has yet to be a single, simple means for comparing the candidates across all of these leading sites.

That changes today. Compete is proud to unveil Candidate FaceTime^TM, offering a holistic, web wide means of measuring how well the candidates are using all of these channels to get “face time” with voters. Harnessing the depth and breadth of Compete’s 2 million member US panel, the metric quantifies the total amount of time voters spend online with candidates each month. Every minute counts in this race as every minute spent with a candidate is one less minute that might have been spent with a rival.

The table below shows each candidate’s FaceTime in October, their share of their party’s FaceTime, and the percentage of all hours spent with a candidate that occurred on his or her official website. Below the table are trended charts comparing each candidate’s share of monthly FaceTime since January.

Findings:

• While long claimed by his supporters, the extent of Ron Paul’s online support is finally and clearly evident with this data. In total, voters spent nearly 170,000 hours learning about, connecting with and supporting Paul in October. While that was more the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton combined, more striking during the looming primary contests is that Paul’s total was more than all of the other GOP candidates combined. Over a quarter of Paul’s FaceTime occurred on meetup.com, a testament to his supporters’ determination to marshal their online momentum into off-line action.
• Aside from Ron Paul, Mitt Romney was the only other leading candidate from either party to get more than 40% of his total FaceTime on sites other than his official website in October. One area where Romney is leading all candidates is in the number of videos posted on Youtube; 452 at last count.
• Fred Thompson missed his opportunity to capitalize on the momentum he had early in the summer, when his FaceTime was growing, when he delayed entering the race. After announcing his candidacy in September, Thompson’s FaceTime careened 73% in October when his campaign stumbled out of blocks and GOP voters, in search of a conservative favorite, kicked Thompson’s tires and apparently moved on.
• Mike Huckabee was the GOP flavor-of-the-month in October and benefited the most from Thompson’s struggles. Huckabee’s FaceTime surged 92% in October, pulling from Thompson, Romney and Rudy Giuliani who all saw drops in their time with voters.
• Compared with the fluid GOP race, the Democratic contest has been very consistent in terms of FaceTime, with little movement among the candidates. Barack Obama leads all rivals and has steadily drawn roughly 38% of all Democratic FaceTime since March. It will be interesting to see next month whether Obama or John Edwards can capitalize on Hillary Clinton’s recent stumbles and get voters to spend more time considering them as viable alternatives.
• Candidates who are struggling to get FaceTime with voters are also having difficulty raising enough money to compete in the race. Sam Brownback dropped out of the contest last month after drawing the least FaceTime among the GOP rivals for months. Could candidates such as Ton Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson be next? Dodd and Hunter, like Brownback, have been largely unsuccessful at reaching voters beyond their own websites.