In case you happened to be the victim of a day-long coma yesterday, it was a very exciting day for Mark Zuckerberg, Silicon Valley, and that quaint little social network we’ve all come to know, love, and be terrified of. Facebook filed its S-1 on Thursday with the crystal clear intent to go public on a market near you very soon, and will be raising $5 billion ahead of its IPO at an expected valuation of between $75 and $100 billion.
In fact, there was so much excitement and noise around Facebook’s IPO yesterday that the volume of visitors looking to check out Facebook’s filing succeeded in crashing the SEC’s website. Hitwise tells us that SEC.gov apparently saw a 15 percent increase in total visits, compared to the day before and a 42 percent compared to previous Thursday. And guess who was the number two source of traffic for the site? That’s right, TechCrunch.com — less than 3 percent behind the top source, Google.com. Thanks to you, readers, we gave the SEC all the traffic they could handle. And apparently more. → Read More
Guess who seems to be most interested in the plight of the 99%? “Jetset urbanites” according to Experian Hitwise, which used its Experian Mosiac audience profiling system to track traffic to Occupy movement sites from various consumer lifestyles, because hey, why not?
According to Experian Mosaic, which separates people into Starbucks-esque categories like “Gotham Blend,” “Dare to Dream,” “Aging of Aquarius” and “Bohemian Grove” (a little vomit just came up into my mouth), sites like occupywallstreet.org and others in the Occupy category were most visited in the past three months by “Jetset Urbanites,” a segment of the population that was “highly affluent, progressive and tends to live in major metropolitan areas” with a group of people known as “Colleges and Cafes” coming in second with regards to visits. Quelle surprise! → Read More
Hitwise just published a new study examining how much time people living in different countries spend on Facebook. Singaporeans actually spend the longest on the social network, with an average of 38 minutes and 46 seconds per session, while people living in Brazil spend less than half that with an average of 18 minutes and 19 seconds per Facebook session for August 2011.
Singapore is followed by New Zealand (30 mins 31 sec); Australia (26 mins 27 sec); the UK (25 mins 33 sec); and the US (20 mins 46 sec). Brazil actually has the highest percentage of Internet visits going to social sites (18.9% of Internet usage) with 43% of all social networking visits in Brazil going to Google-owned Orkut. In contrast, the UK has the lowest market share of visits going to social networks with 12.2% of visits. → Read More
All signs point to this holiday season being a prosperous one for retailers. Hitwise is reporting that searches around Black Friday are up 31%, and the share of visits to Black Friday websites are up 18% from last year during the same time.
Hitwise’s data also shows that more women than men are visiting the Black Friday websites with visits split 59% female and 41% male and visitors to Black Friday sites tend to be younger with 59% of visitors under the age of 35. → Read More
Hitwise has released another staggering data point in favor of Facebook’s domination today. According to Hitwise’s data, 1 in 4 page views in the US took place on Facebook.com as of last week.
In March, Hitwise reported that Facebook overcame Google to become the largest website in the U.S. with 7.07% of all U.S. visits. Google was second at 7.03% at the time. As of September, comScore reported that Facebook was behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. → Read More
Hitwise, the web analytics firm, has a report out today that claims that social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines.
Which, if the case, would imply that Google should be considerably worried about its future battle with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, as online marketing spend will surely follow Internet foot-through. Or does it?
According to Hitwise, during May, social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%, representing the first ever month that social networks have been more popular than search engines in the UK. → Read More
Hitwise, the web analytics firm, has a report out today that claims that social networks now receive more UK Internet visits than search engines.
Which, if the case, would imply that Google should be considerably worried about its future battle with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, as online marketing spend will surely follow Internet foot-through. Or does it?
According to Hitwise, during May, social networks accounted for 11.88% of UK Internet visits and search engines accounted for 11.33%, representing the first ever month that social networks have been more popular than search engines in the UK. → Read More
Jason Calacanis, our partner over the years on the TechCrunch50 conference, wrote quite a rant yesterday about analytics company Comscore. His argument: that Comscore has vastly undercounted traffic and visitors over the years, and is now formalizing “their extortion ring” by offering to track traffic more directly (and the numbers are generally much higher) via tracking pixels for a $10,000/year fee.
You can read the whole post over at Calacanis.com. He doesn’t pull any punches (in fact he goes on a tangent about punching bullies in the face as a kid) He suggests that companies refuse to pay Comscore for the service, and that investors short the stock.
Comscore investor Fred Wilson laid into Jason with a couple of comments on a copy of the post on Posterous. He also randomly dragged me into the argument (I think he’s still mad about the Zynga stuff): → Read More
Experian Hitwise just released its Cyber Monday stats, with Amazon reportedly topping the list as the most visited retail website yesterday, seeing a 44% increase in visits compared to 2008. Amazon received 15.53% of the visits among the top 500 online retail sites. Hitwise says Amazon has been the top visited site on Cyber Monday since 2006.
Hitwise reports that among the top 500 retail websites, the percentage of U.S. online visits were down 9%o n Cyber Monday in 2009 compared to Cyber Monday 2008. Wal-Mart was the second most visited with 9.54% of visits followed by Target with 5.16%. BestBuy was the fourth most visited with 3.56% followed by JC Penney with 2.58 %. Walmart took the top spot for the most visited online site on Thanksgiving Day this year, according to Hitwise but Amazon edged out Walmart on Black Friday. This is the fifth year in a row that Wal-Mart was the top visited site on Thanksgiving Day. → Read More
Last March, Hitwise highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news, ensuring that the news search engine largely remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. Now Hitwise has released some stats that clearly depict this trend, with thanks to the uptick of news related to a variety of celebrities that took the Internet by storm the past week.
According to Hitwise, Google News UK was the second biggest recipient of searches by UK-based Internet users for ‘patrick swayze’ and ‘kanye west’ (picking up 8.25% and 8.26% of traffic respectively), third for ‘katie price’ (9.29%) and fourth for ‘keith floyd’ (5.28%). As a result, visits to the regional news search engine increased a whopping 71% last week, with the site’s ranking reaching the one of 28th most popular overall (up from 46th the previous week). In other words: last week was Google News UK’s busiest ever. → Read More
Last March, Hitwise highlighted how Google News UK picks up more traffic from searches for celebrities than any other type of news, ensuring that the news search engine largely remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. Now Hitwise has released some stats that clearly depict this trend, with thanks to the uptick of news related to a variety of celebrities that took the Internet by storm the past week.
According to Hitwise, Google News UK was the second biggest recipient of searches by UK-based Internet users for ‘patrick swayze’ and ‘kanye west’ (picking up 8.25% and 8.26% of traffic respectively), third for ‘katie price’ (9.29%) and fourth for ‘keith floyd’ (5.28%). As a result, visits to the regional news search engine increased a whopping 71% last week, with the site’s ranking reaching the one of 28th most popular overall (up from 46th the previous week).
In other words: last week was Google News UK’s busiest ever, and they have celebrities to thank for it. → Read More
It’s no secret how bad most of the analytics firms are at gathering statistically relevant data about Internet traffic. All of them, Quantcast, Comscore, Hitwise, Compete, Alexa, etc., are flawed in various ways and to various degrees.
But today’s blog post by Hitwise shows just how bad their data really is. They say that Craigslist is now the top searched term on the Internet, taking that honor from MySpace. Facebook is third.
But the real data is out there for the taking. Google Trends shows Google search data, and since Google commands such a large lead in search in most countries, presumably the data is accurate. Google trends shows exactly the opposite data as Hitwise – Facebook is by far the most queried term, followed by MySpace and then Craigslist.
I’m putting my money on Google when it comes to accurate search trends. And if I were Hitwise, I’d make very sure my search data conformed to whatever Google was saying. → Read More
Hitwise has just released a brief report examining the spending habits for web users over the holiday season. Using traffic data from its Retail 500 index, the site found that traffic in 2008 was lower than it was last year, but was (perhaps surprisingly) higher than it was back in 2006.
The study also found that the biggest drop off in traffic was among shoppers that fell under the ‘high-income’ demographic, which is classified as households earning more than $150,000 per year. Traffic from these upper-class buyers dropped 12.33% comparing December 2007 to December 2008, versus a drop of around 1% for those making less than $30,000 a year and an increase in traffic from everyone else. The report doesn’t make any guesses as to why this happened (perhaps the more wealthy users were losing more money in the stock market?), but it’s an interesting trend nonetheless. → Read More
After a tepid start, online holiday sales seem to be picking up a bit. Online sales on Cyber Monday as measured by comScore were a healthy $846 million, up 15 percent from last year’s Cyber Monday. Online sales since Thanksgiving are up 12 percent to $2.4 billion. But overall online sales in November of $12 billion are still down 2 percent.
Can sales make up the difference over the next five weeks? As the chart above shows, holiday sales so far in 2008 (the red bars) are struggling to keep up with the levels we saw in 2007 (the dark blue bars). Maybe consumers have just been postponing purchases longer than usual, but now that the U.S. is officially in a recession that knowledge will likely have a psychological impact on people’s willingness to splurge. (I love how the recession news didn’t come out until after the Thanksgiving holiday shopping weekend).
Hitwise also offers some insight into what happened on Cyber Monday in terms of Website traffic to retail sites. → Read More
According to Hitwise, U.S. visit numbers across all tracked retail categories declined for Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday 2008, with the exception of online-only shopping websites. Among the top 500 Retail sites, Walmart was the top visited on Thanksgiving Day, but Amazon.com took over as top visited Retail site on Black Friday.
Overall, the numbers showed an expected but sharp decline: the percentage of U.S. visits was down 11% on Thanksgiving Day in 2008 compared to last year, and U.S. traffic on Black Friday was down 5%. But online-only (not brick-and-mortar) stores, of which there are 100 in the list of 500 top retail websites, had a pretty good run: the percentage of U.S visits to those shot up 11% on Thanksgiving Day, and went up 10% on Black Friday compared to 2007. → Read More
One of the top stories in the blogosphere today is a new Hitwise chart finding that Photobucket has a 46% leading market share in online photosharing and that Flickr is in 6th place with only 6%. This was a big surprise for parts of the blogosphere where Flickr is a hot topic. I looked up these two sites on Alexaholic and found traffic results quite different from the Hitwise graph. Many people have long alleged that Alexa produces low-quality results, is easy to game and is worthy of lots of other criticism. If that’s is the case, is Yahoo! really the most visited site on the web? Is MySpace really number 5? Many of us talk about those numbers, from Alexa, often. (Though Hitwise seems to find similar numbers.) Graph below: Flickr traffic in blue, Photobucket in red. Webshots.com in green. Speaking of graphs, here’s some interesting ones that quantify what many people in today’s discussion are saying: the loudest voices in the blogosphere are missing the boat by talking about Flickr all the time. Flickr may be worthy of blog coverage for its innovation or it’s participation in innovative communities or its role in controversy – but among most of the bloggers online Photobucket is a much hotter topic! Check out these graphs, measuring the times that the words Flickr or Photobucket appear in blogs with many inbound links (“high authority”) according to Technorati vs. in blogs without many inbound links. I think the results are remarkable. Here’s some imprecise but telling math: high-authority bloggers appear to write about Flickr about 3 times as often as they (we) write about Photobucket. The blogosphere as a whole uses the word Photobucket 3 or more times as often as we use the word Flickr. (TechCrunch has used the word Flickr 11 times more often than the word Photobucket.) Does that mean high-authority bloggers are out of touch with the bulk of users? It may; it may also mean that being interesting doesn’t equate with mass adoption. In the graphs below, “high authority” on top, all blogs on bottom, Flickr mentions on left, Photobucket mentions on right. → Read More
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