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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
