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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

Analyst Weblog

SOPA and PIPA: 10 Key Stats to Consider

January 18, 2012

According to Politico, approximately 7,000 sites are taking part in today’s protest against the House of Representatives' Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Sites including Wikipedia and Craigslist have “gone black” in protest and to raise awareness of these acts. Rather than a traditional “Google Doodle” for the Google logo, Google covered its logo in black and clicking on the image redirects users to a page where they can learn about SOPA and PIPA, and choose to contact Congress or disseminate information through social networks.

Ten statistics worth noting:

1. Wikipedia is the 15th largest website in the US, capturing 14 million visits a day.

2. There are some jokes about “kids today” using Wikipedia for research rather than physical books. With that in mind, it may surprise people to know that the 18-24 age group actually under-indexes for visits to Wikipedia. The site’s traffic share by income group aligns with the distribution of online population.

3. Craigslist’s parent site captures 4 million visits a day. All told, Craigslist properties combined capture 47 million visits a day – meaning almost 50 million visits will be impacted by Craigslist going dark, although there is a link on the page to continue to the normal website.

4. In fact, the search term “Craigslist” produces the third most traffic in the US.

5. Wikipedia is a top recipient of searches for presidential candidates’ names.

6. The audience for Change.org, a site which encourages social enterprise site which allows users to create petitions, skews towards the least and one of the most affluent income groups.

7. Entertainment and Media categories are some of the top recipients of Wikipedia traffic; the Federal Government category comes in 12th.

8. Wikipedia ranks as the 4th largest recipient of Search traffic.

9. Reddit, a news aggregator which has gone dark today, drives much of its traffic to Entertainment and Media categories, impacting websites that rely on Reddit's referrals.

10. Searches for variations of SOPA and PIPA were (day of 1/16/12) driving about half as much search traffic as searches for variations of “Kim Kardashian”. To put that into perspective, searches for Ms. Kardashian drive 6 times more traffic than searches for President Obama.

The impact of today’s protests on web behaviors promises to be considerable. We will follow-up with information about today’s traffic to petitions and government sites, along with search trends.

Thanks to Margot Bonner, Analyst with the Strategic Services group for today's analysis.

Tweet Posted by Heather Dougherty at 05:30 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Google | Government | SOPA

Post Holiday Traffic Boom

December 29, 2011

After a strong start over the Thanksgiving weekend, the traffic to the top 500 retail websites continue to increase every week throughout the 2011 holiday season as compared to last year.

The highest increases year-over-year for daily traffic took place on the day after Christmas where traffic was up 31% over last year and Cyber Monday where traffic was up 29%. Total visits reached the highest level of the holiday season on Cyber Monday this year, displacing Black Friday.

One driver of post Christmas traffic is always shoppers seeking out after Christmas sales & discounts, especially among those that received gift cards. If search behavior is any indicator, there were plenty of gift card buyers out there and along with recipients looking for ways to spend them. Early predictions from the NRF’s 2011 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions survey, expected holiday shoppers to spend an average of $155.43 on gift cards, the highest amount since 2007 and up from $145.61 last year. Search queries that included variations of ‘gift card’ started to increase the week before Thanksgiving and continued to grow each week. Last week, the share of search clicks that included ‘gift card’ increased 32% over the same week last year.

Last week the top search query to include ‘gift card’ was ‘kindle gift card’, most likely a companion gift to the many Kindles given as gifts this holiday season. Versatile, broad usage gift cards like the American Express gift card and Visa gift card were also among the top variations along with iTunes, another holiday favorite. Shoppers may have also been using their gift cards to purchase holiday gifts with two appearances of ‘balance’ in the top 10 variations.

Tweet Posted by Heather Dougherty at 12:02 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Black Friday | Cyber Monday | Holiday | Retail

Pinteresting Trend in Social Media

December 22, 2011

The social media space continues to evolve. Pinterest, a site launched in March 2010 that describes itself as an online pinboard to organize and share things you love, recently emerged as one of the top 10 websites within the Hitwise Social Networking & Forums category. The invitation only site received nearly 11 million total visits during the week ending December 17, 2011, almost 40 times the number of total visits versus just six months ago (week ending June 18, 2011).

Pinterest content has something for everyone, but the site is dominated by images featuring home décor, crafts, fashion, and food. Not surprisingly, visitors to the site in the 12 rolling weeks ending December 17th skewed female (58%) and between the ages of 25 and 44 (59%). Pinterest and the Social Networking & Forums category both receive their highest share of visits from California and Texas. However, the Social Networking category as a whole over-indexes on share of visits from Northeastern states while Pinterest over-indexes on visits from the states in the Northwest and Southeast. This data indicates that Pinterest visitors have a different profile versus their counterparts visiting other social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube.

In fact, nine of the top ten over-indexed states for Pinterest visitors also over-index for the Hobbies and Crafts category (versus the online population) which is expected given the abundance of crafts content on the website. When comparing the Mosaic USA 2011 types that visit both Pinterest.com and Hobbies and Crafts websites during the 12 weeks ending December 17, 2011, the data shows that Boomers and Boomerangs are the group most likely to visit, particularly the Pinterest website (comprising over 10% of visits). This group of consumers is characterized as baby boomers and young adults who are heavy web users who spend time on house and garden, sports and fitness, and family-oriented websites. This information is useful to companies who wish to target their content to be “pinned” by Pinterest users.

Thanks to Lauren Rice, an Analyst with the Strategic Services team at Experian Hitwise for today's analysis.

Tweet Posted by Hitwise Research at 10:42 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Social Networking

Napster’s Final Days Drive Visits to the Website

December 16, 2011

Napster, the free peer-to-peer file sharing service which launched in 1999 and largely created the peer-to-peer music file sharing craze of the last decade, was recently acquired by online music subscription service Rhapsody. The acquisition was announced in early October and became official on November 30th, 2011.

The result of the acquisition is the end of Napster. Weekly market share data shows that Napster, when compared with the Music (Shopping & Classifieds) category, received a 66% smaller market share of traffic during the same week last year and the site consistently received a smaller share of traffic throughout the year as compared with the Music category. However, the data from the week ending December 10, 2011 shows that visits to Napster nearly tripled from the previous week and slightly surpassed market share for the Music category. Whether driven by nostalgia or curiosity, Hitwise data seems to show that Rhapsody is seeing a short term boost in traffic from a new-to-Rhapsody demographic as a result of the integration. Data from the 12 rolling weeks ending December 10, 2011 shows that visitors to Rhapsody skew younger (18-34) and less affluent (60% of visits from household incomes less than $60k) as compared with visitors to Napster. These data insights show that the Napster acquisition was well-publicized and brought about renewed interest in the brand among older, more affluent online users; an attractive customer for the Rhapsody service.

With the week ending November 19th, 2011 “Napster” emerged as a popular search term driving traffic to Rhapsody.com, and peaked the week ending December 3rd which coincided with the official website merger. The most recent week of data (12/10/2011) shows that Rhapsody paid for 92% of the “Napster” search term traffic.

Online users who visit the Napster.com homepage are currently informed about the merger and are shown a link for a free 14 day trial of Rhapsody. Daily data shows that traffic from Napster.com to Rhapsody.com nearly tripled on November 30th, the day the merger took effect, as compared with the previous day. In terms of the websites visited before Rhapsody.com that are bringing new visitors to the site, Napster.com and Music.Napster.com emerged as the third and tenth most popular websites referring new visitor traffic the week ending December 10, 2011. This represents a drastic increase in new referred traffic when compared to the week ending October 8, 2011, the week the acquisition was made public.

Tweet Posted by Hitwise Research at 03:47 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Music