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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America
Analyst Weblog
News Corp. Google-less?
November 09, 2009
Rupert Murdoch made an interesting statement in a Sky News interview today, when asked about news content available through search engines such as Google, Murdoch says he would consider blocking Google from indexing News Corp.'s news websites such as the Wall Street Journal. Of course it would naturally follow that I would immediately chart the amount of traffic that Google drives to Murdoch's flagship news site.
Here's the same chart from Google News to WSJ.com
In fact, on a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com's traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are "new" users who haven't visited the domain in the last 30 days.
While Mr. Murdoch makes some strong points in his Sky News interview regarding the plight of the news industry and the perils of making all content free, as clickstream data demonstrates - blocking Google could isolate the Journal from potential new online subscribers.
Thanks to Cheyne Winterton for the data hat-tip.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 07:04 PM
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Twitter Revisited - in More than 140 Characters
October 29, 2009
A quick update from my Twitter post from last month. I had the pleasure of speaking at two excellent conferences this week, iMedia Breakthrough and Digital Media West. During the Q&A of my talk at Digital Media, I was asked about my views of Twitter's staying power versus competition from Facebook.
I think this charts sums up the competitive threat that Twitter may pose to Facebook's astounding 6% of all U.S. Internet visits (read: no threat).
Facebook's dominance minimizes the detail and recent decline in visits to Twitter's domain. This chart gives a clearer picture of Twitter's decline over the last few months. As I noted in last months entry, this chart only portrays web visits to Twitter versus application traffic.
At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per twitter user over the life of their twitter account is 1!
I Believe this figure confirms our original hypothesis of Twitter-stall due to a drop in new users. As Facebook continues to grow, its user-base across Mosaic types shows that its user-base is becoming ubiquitous. Twitter by contrast was showing greater coverage amongst types earlier in its growth phase. Since Twitter's decline in July, the number of over-indexing has narrowed significantly, indicating that early growth may have been the result of significant trail behavior leading up to this summer.
That being said, I still plan to tweet this entry.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 12:29 PM
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In Categories Social Networking
Twittered Out?
September 25, 2009
On the heels of yesterday's rumor that Twitter is close to securing an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company's valuation in the $1 billion range, I decided to take a quick look at Twitter's market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic.
It should be noted that the above chart indicates visits to Twitter's website, and does not include application and mobile traffic. That being said, even without application and mobile data, visits to the main Twitter domain should have some correlation to new user adoption.
Another angle on measuring new user adoption is to track the volume of searches on "Twitter." As we can see in both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.
To explore the hypothesis that slowing and now decreasing market share of visits may be attributable to the drop in new users, we can turn to our Experian Hitwise Clickstream report that shows new versus returning users from the top Twitter traffic sources. Here's a table for those traffic sources in April 2009:
You can see the drop-off in new users if we examine the same report as of last week:
Temporary set-back or user-saturation, what are your thoughts?
Posted by Bill Tancer at 11:42 AM
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Free Shipping - Vendor and Consumer Perspectives
September 15, 2009
Our sister company Experian CheetahMail released an insightful white paper on the topic of free shipping email offers (download the paper here). Among several interesting findings, the paper provides some seasonality data on the percentage of clients that sent free shipping offers by quarter. "As expected, the sharpest increase occurred at the end of the year for the holiday shopping season." The paper also notes that free shipping offers were at equal to higher levels when comparing Q1 2008 to Q1 2009.
Leveraging Experian Hitwise data, we can visualize free shipping demand using search terms as a proxy for interest.
A couple of interesting observations:
- "Free shipping" search breadth has been accelerating earlier each year, with 2008 holiday season searches beginning in mid-October (in 2007 "free shipping" searches began ramping early November)
- The actual peak for "free shipping" searches each year is the first week of the New Year, as online buyers look for post-holiday sale items
- "Free shipping" searches have increased 75% comparing the first week of 2008 versus 2009, which given CheetahMail's data might indicate a gap between vendor offers and consumer interest.
By utilizing our Search Intelligence tools, we can also see that during the height of "free shipping" searches, the most common search phrases contain a brand name + "free shipping" as well as the word "code" or "codes".
Posted by Bill Tancer at 05:37 PM
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In Categories Shopping and Classifieds
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