As we all head off from work to enjoy the long weekend, whether we’re escaping the city or sticking around, chances are, friends will be around. The 4th of July is one of the most social holidays of the year (all of the red, white and blue around must inspire just the right kind of [...]
Copyright The Pontiflex CPL Blog - independence day
Immediately after Michael Jackson’s death, sales surged as fans purchased music and DVDs from the King of Pop in both physical and digital formats. Jackson’s music quickly topped the sales charts on retailers like iTunes and Amazon. Last week, the search term ‘michael jackson albums’ ranked 16th among the search terms driving traffic to Amazon. Not only topping the charts, Michael Jackson was also the top of search term variations for ’songs’ last week where ‘michael jackson songs’ ranked 1st and ‘michael jackson’s top songs’ ranked 5th.
For retailers and publishers looking to prioritize merchandise and content, one measure to predict demand among consumers is through search data. When looking at the variations of searches that included the search term ‘michael jackson’, we classified the top 1000 terms from the week ending June 27, 2009, to find the most popular song & album and lyric searches. Many searches were very broad, looking for the ‘best’ and ‘top’ michael jackson songs, but the specific songs & albums that were searched most were Thriller and Off The Wall. Searches for lyrics were also common, with the most popular being “Beat It” and “Billie Jean”.
The top 5 songs & albums based on the top 1000 search terms including ‘michael jackson’ for the week ending June 27, 2009.
Top 5 Songs & Albums
1. Thriller
2. Off The Wall
3. You Are Not Alone
4. Bad
5. Ben
Top 5 Lyrics
1. Beat It
2. Billie Jean
3. You Are Not Alone
4. Bad
5. Ben
Copyright Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs - Top Michael Jackson Song Searches
As we’ve reported a number of times, online vouchers have been one of the recent online success stories. Voucher searches shot up massively in the run up to Christmas as savvy shoppers looked to find a bargain during the recession. But recently we’ve heard some talk that the boom times for discount vouchers may be coming to an end. This begs the question: are consumers and retailers tiring of discount vouchers? To test this hypothesis, I charted searches for the term ‘vouchers’ over the last two years.
As you would expect, there has been a significant decline since Christmas; but last week (w/e 27/06/09) searches for ‘vouchers’ were also down 28.6% on the equivalent week last year (28/06/08). So voucher searches are down? Not so fast – the above chart only includes searches for the single term ‘vouchers’. Over 96% of UK searches containing the word ‘vouchers’ are for a longer term (e.g. ‘discount vouchers’, ‘tesco vouchers’, etc.) rather than just the single word ‘vouchers’, so it important to consider the broader picture. The chart below tracks the breadth of searches for the term ‘vouchers’ – i.e. the number of search terms in the UK that contained the term ‘voucher’.
The breadth of searches for ‘voucher’ has also declined since Christmas, but in this case it is still up year-on-year. This data points to an increasingly sophisticated voucher-searching audience. Now that people are used to looking for vouchers online, they are searching for specific discounts rather than more generic terms. Certainly, the rate of increase in voucher searches has flattened – it is now starting to look more like a mature than a growing market.
The final piece of the puzzle is to look at traffic to voucher specific websites (such as Hot UK Deals, Money Saving Expert and My Voucher Codes). As the chart below illustrates, this has flattened since Christmas and is actually down 12.1% on last year. However, from the retailers’ perspective, voucher sites are sending more traffic now than a year ago. During May 2009 the top voucher websites accounted 0.53% of all upstream traffic to the Shopping and Classifieds industry. This was down from the peak of 0.82% during December, but up from 0.43% in May 2008.
So, in conclusion: the online voucher market is still huge and voucher sites are sending a significant amount of traffic to retailers. But the market is maturing fast and is no longer growing at the rate it once was.
Copyright Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs - Are online discount vouchers on the decline?
We saw how media attention drove Twitter’s share of searchers on the Iran Election to record heights two weeks ago. A barrage of mainstream media and blogosphere chatter swarmed the digerati’s collective consciousness, fusing their favorite techno-democratic phenom with Iranian political discontent.
Then the white glove dropped. MJ’s passing sent a megaton shock through the worldwide pop firmament of Planet Earth, rousing memories of Thriller from billions, even the Haters.
The web was not spared. Visitors shattered records Yahoo! News. Tweets swarmed across Twitter. Video streams flooded the online channels CNN and MTV. And updates exploded at Facebook. As CNN reported, “Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him.”
Michael told the Iran Election to Beat It. Over 24 times more searchers hit top search engines, news sites like CNN and the New York Times and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter on Jackson’s death than on the Iranian election shenanigans.
Where did MJ searchers go? Google. The King of Pop gave back the King of Search its crown.
But the royal succession was not without a few princely hiccups. Twitter disabled the search box and Trending Topics sidebar on profile pages for 4 hours following the “avalanche” of tweets after MJ’s death. And Google blocked MJ searches for 25 minutes, mistaking the incoming torrent as an internationally coordinated cyber-attack of zombie bots.
Fans surged to music, video and retail sites to rekindle memories of his hit songs and music videos to bid farewell to the King of Pop. Yahoo! Music led the way with 45% share of visitors, and YouTube delivered a respectable 23% share.
Meanwhile Michael was still shattering music sales records mors immatura.
Copyright Compete Blog - White Gloves & Thrown Elections: Michael Jackson vs. Iran Election
I must admit, I am quite taken with the Palm Pre. The hype, predictably, has been enormous. And the handset itself is very well put together. Online reviews rave about it. After playing with my friend’s new Pre, I have to agree with them: it is one cool handset.
But before the Pre could bask in the media spotlight for long, Apple whooshed in two days later to announce its newest iPhone, the 3G S, and that the 3G would sell for as little as $99.
So how has this move affected overall interest in the Pre?
This chart shows the percentage of people viewing the Palm Pre who also looked at the Apple iPhone 3G S online in the same week. Interest in the Pre is defined here as anyone who looked at a Pre-related webpage hosted by Palm or Sprint (or both). Similarly, interest in the iPhone 3G S includes anyone who viewed iPhone 3G S-related web pages at Apple or AT&T (or both). Before the announcement of the iPhone 3G S, interest traffic for the iPhone represents the iPhone 3G.
Here we see that:
While the decrease in cross shopping seems to suggest that the iPhone 3G S will not continue to distract Pre shoppers, handset interest data shines a different light on the situation. Interest in the Pre predictably shot up during the week of its launch and the week after as marketing efforts and press coverage reached a fever pitch. However in the second week after launch, Pre interest dropped sharply to levels it had prior to launch, as shown in the chart below.
This suggests that the Pre may indeed have lost its thunder online, though it is unclear at this point if interest has transferred to the iPhone 3G S or simply faded away. Certainly, consideration of both models decreased after the initial excitement of the Palm Pre’s launch and the iPhone 3G S announcement passed, which could indicate that distinct fan bases have emerged for each phone.
Still, much remains to be seen over the next few weeks, as each phone works to establish and sustain its fan base. There are also more opportunities to drive online interest in the Palm Pre to counter the iPhone. Selling the device online is one possibility. Encouraging development of more applications to rival the iTunes App Store by releasing the software development kit more broadly (which Palm says they will do “by the end of this summer”) could also entice consumers.
Challenging the iPhone’s dominance is no small task, but we’ll be watching over the next few months to see if the Palm Pre is the device that will rise to the occasion.
Copyright Compete Blog - Did the iPhone 3G S Steal the Palm Pre’s Thunder?
