I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that a) going out to the movies has gotten ridiculously expensive and b) most mainstream movies aren’t terrific. Given these two truths, RottenTomatoes.com is a default stop most Fridays; one critic’s review may not be a good measure of my future satisfaction with a movie, but when multiple reviews are averaged they become a powerful tool.

Rotten tomatoes has been steadily growing for the past 5 years. The chart below shows unique visitors per month, from August 2002 to August 2007. Over that time period the site has grown from just over 1 million visitors to nearly 2.5, peaking in December at over 3 million. Interestingly, while unique visitors has fallen since the December peak, Visitors spend about 25% more time on the site, so monthly attention remains relatively consistent.

The home page of Rottentomatoes.com answers the most immediate question visitors have;“Is the movie I’m about to see not a dive?”. But at around $10 a seat, there are reasons to dig deeper, so what movies were RottenTomatoes.com visitors researching the most? The chart below shows the top 20 movies on RottenTomatoes ranked by the amount of total time spent on each movie, from January 2007 to August 2007, along with each movie’s total budget, opening weekend revenue, and “TomatoMeter” score.

• Its (sort of) all about the ad spend: It appears that the primary influence on consumer interest all comes back to money. Generally, movies with the largest budgets received the most traffic.
• …then our ticket lines will wait in the shade: An internet rock star, 300 was the only site with a sub-$100 million budget to make it into the top five. It’s enormous online presence also helped drived $72 million in opening weekend sales.
• Lipstick on a pig: Bad movies with big budgets (Eragon, Fantastic 4, Ghostrider) tend to attract far less interest on the site than their more positively reviewed peers, but it doesn’t seem to impact opening weekend sales.
• A different kind of action movie: Amazingly, even RottenTomatoes isn’t immune to the adult industry’s massive web presence. WWE Divas Undressed captured more attention on the site than Live Free or Die Hard.

…but I’d still bet on Mclane any day.

Three big events rocked the web 2.0 universe this summer. Internet rock stars Guy Kawasaki (Truemors), Jason Calacanis (Mahalo), and Kevin Rose/Leah Culver (Pownce) launched new companies.

In the chart below, you see how all three have done extremely well thus far. Any startup would kill for these sort of results in their first two months.

Wondering what actually drives traffic to these sites? Take a look at the table below. The table details the top 10 domain level referrals to Pownce, Mahalo, and Truemors for August 2007. This table may give you ideas on how you may want to go about driving traffic to your own startup — perhaps even a launch strategy blueprint.

* % of total domain referrals

Continue reading “How internet rock stars drive traffic. We take a closer look at Mahalo, Pownce and Truemors.” »

Facebook has been impressing more than just Compete over the past few months. As we reported on Tuesday, for the month of August, the social networking rising star is now ranked third in terms of pageviews, and may have started to finally pull users away from MySpace. But if Facebook was a novel, this domain level traffic would be the jacket; to get to the story you have to open it up…so here’s chapter one.

Because of the Facebook’s design, it is essentially impossible to do anything as a non-member. While Facebook received over 26 million visitors in August, a little over 22 million end up signing in. The chart is a visual representation of the Activities that the Facebook community used in August. The size of each circle represents the share of total Facebook visitors who are involved in each activity, and the shade of color represents intensity of use (based on both visits per month and time per visit). For each activity, the number of monthly visitors, total number of visits and time spent during each visit is listed within each activity’s circle.

Of the 22 Million people who logged into Facebook in August, nearly 21 Million go on to check their profile or their friends. Beyond that, activities differ:

• 14 million people interacted with Facebook Applications in August.
• Applications are also highly engaging; capturing more time per session than any other activity on the site.
• Over 16 Million people browsed photos in August. On average, they viewed nearly 150 per month.
• Only 80,000 (or .3% of total active members) “poked” someone in August.

Facebook’s story is far from over. With school back in session how will things change? What sort of implications will search indexing have on site growth, member privacy, and member engagement? We’ll cover all this and more before we close this book.

* Note: the “read discussion boards” activity is defined as opening up a specific group’s discussion board, as opposed to reading the latest comments on a group’s home page.

MySpace has enjoyed a relatively long and successful run as in a red hot sector of the internet, but it may not be long before the site has to defend this title. Facebook, having gone through big changes about every three months for the past year, may have finally started to pull users away from the incumbent. Facebook has grown not only in member base, but also in member engagement, while MySpace has fallen dramatically on these same measures.

• In terms of both monthly Attention and Page Views, MySpace has been the highest ranking site on the internet since early 2006.
• What it lacks in unique visitors, MySpace makes up for with intensity: people visit an average of 18 times per month, and stay for over 26 minutes.
• Facebook received 15.7 billion page views in August. This puts the site squarely in third place (across the internet) in terms of page views
• Since launching its application platform, Facebook attention has grown over 50%.
• Visitors to Facebook have been spending more time on the site, and visiting more frequently in August than in any other recent month.

There’s still a substantial gap between traffic to these two social networks, but Facebook’s growth trajectory, seemingly endless supply of 3rd party applications and multiple ways for members to engage one another makes it a serious threat to MySpace. But how does this engagement happen? Later on this week we’ll take an in-depth look at Facebook usage…stay tuned.

Social networking has continued to expand its empire, and music sites have become its latest victims. From January to June of 2007, the sites where listeners are able to listen to music and interact with other listeners for minimal or no cost, such as projectplaylist.com and rhapsody.com, have had a noticeable increase of unique visitors over sites where there is little interaction with other listeners, such as itunes.com and napster.com.

The site with the most traffic in 2007 is projectplaylist.com, which has such features as creating your own profile, creating your own playlist, sharing playlists with friends, blogging. It also offers the option of posting your playlist on several social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, etc. Rhapsody.com, another site that has been gaining significant ground over the year, allows members to personalize updates and features, and visitors can view other listeners’ playlists and watch music videos for free.

In contrast, iTunes.com, musicmatch.com, and napster.com have all dropped in UVs since January. These are all pay sites, except for free.napster.com, which offers only free music. However, the extent to how much listeners can personalize their players and adapt it so others can easily view their music is limited. Will these sites be able to keep up with the growing personalization fad? Stay tuned…

Last week, I was blown away to hear that Disney was acquiring Club Penguin for $350 million dollars with an option for the price to top $700 million over the to next couple years. Sure, I had heard of Club Penguin but $700 million, really?

For those of you without kids at home, Club Penguin is a snow-covered virtual world where tweeners between the ages of 6 and 14 play online games, adopt puffles, interact with each other and trick-out their igloos. The site is an advertising-free zone with a subscription based business model with 12 million activated members and 700,000 paid accounts ranging from $5.95 per month to $57.95 annually.

But come on, $700 million? I had to dig deeper. What I learned was that, by all accounts, Club Penguin is truly a remarkable success with well over $50 million in revenue, a great business model, high member retention, little or no venture money invested and a huge return for shareholders. This kind of success will surely create a flood of interest from entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists in the space. But does that next big hit already exist?

Using a completely un-scientific approach, I looked at a couple of leading leisure gaming sites that appear to focus on social networking and gaming for kids. I poked around on gaiaonline.com, neopets.com, stardoll.com and webkinz.com using People Counts as a proxy for success. What I learned is that webkinz.com is the clear momentum leader with 25% MOM growth and thundering 1424% YOY growth, surpassing clubpenguin.com in March, in terms of the number of kids hitting the site on a monthly basis.

Now, I had heard of Webkinz and truth be told there are a bunch these plush toys around my house and I have watched my own kids show me their virtual pets wearing crazy hats and, of all things, running on a treadmill. Webkinz, however, is not a subscription model like clubpenguin.com but is an interesting twist combining specialty retailing and this virtual community. Each Webkinz plush toy comes with its own secret code that unlocks membership in Webkinz world where kids play games, earn kinzcash and chat with others on their friends list. The secret to this success is that these toys are highly desired and kids collect them. Retail prices for Webkinz start at $12.99 and up and my kids have at least ten each and a wish list that’s even longer. Hot on the list for my son is the Black Lab which is rare find causing my wife to constantly scour the shelves of our local retailers looking for the next addition to our extended family. My daughter proudly declares that her friend Shannon has over two dozen Webkinz and Lil’Kinz in her collection.

Webkinz momentum is even further demonstrated by looking at the daily Velocity between webkinz.com and clubpenguin.com. Velocity quantifies the relative change in daily engagement between these two sites. This means that not only has webkinz.com passed clubpenguin.com in people visiting the site but that, over the last 45 days, kids using webzinz.com are more engaged on webkinz.com.

Will Webkinz be the next acquisition? Can Webkinz model of buying toys create more value than a subscription model? These are certainly tougher questions. One thing is certain, however; tweeners are a highly desirable segment of online consumers and sites that can effectively engage them in a safe and trusted environment will have the opportunity to create a great business and generate significant return for their shareholders.

Got to go, my wife just called and the Paper Store in Acton has both the Black Lab and the Chocolate Lab on the shelves and I cannot come home empty handed, again.