Compete

Update: The WSJ says (via eMarketer) that NBC will only earn $5.75 million from online advertising during the Olympics and that CBS earned 4x more for the NCAA basketball tourney. The NCAA tourney went for 3 weeks while the Olympics went for two but even then, the Olympics didn't earn what analysts expected it to. Also note that NBC apparently is charging $50/cpm for the ads.

Compete is out with their latest analysis report -- this time it's regarding the online Olympics coverage across the Web. NBC spent $900 million for exclusive rights for broadcasting the olympics so an easy assumption would be that they lead the online traffic and engagement race for the Beijing Olympics online viewing but Compete says that assumption would be incorrect.

As you can see in the chart below, Compete measured reach (unique visitors) between the top 5 Olympic coverage sites. Yahoo leads with 1.5 million unique visitors while NBC comes in with 1.2 million. NBC leads in engagement (time on site) by 5% over Yahoo. It will be interesting to see how long the traffic and engagement remains high at NBC and the others once the games have concluded.

From a CenterNetworks perspective, the Olympics have provided a good stream of traffic since the opening ceremonies. The traffic has slowed over the past few days but during the first three days we were doing quite well. In fact, in my traffic and ranking analysis, Techcrunch would win the Gold and we would take the Silver. I will note that we have asked the IOC to take a look to make sure that no "faking" (heightening, lip synching, etc.) went on with that valley blog.

The one question I have after reviewing the Compete analysis is whether it includes views and engagement through the Microsoft Silverlight player which is required to watch the Olympics coverage on NBC.

Compete is out with their latest online video market share report. As anyone with a pulse could guess, YouTube/Google is still dominating the market. YouTube is up 14% from a year ago while half of the top players are down from a year ago. This report from Compete is really about where people are watching online video. What I'd love to see is for Compete to compare the video hosting players in terms of where content producers are placing their media.

What I am seeing with YouTube is that more consumer brands are leveraging the YouTube platform. If YouTube wants to generate real revenue, this is where it is. Sure there's money in pre-roll ads, but partnering with large consumer brands will provide YouTube with a more level revenue stream. We will have to see over time how loyal YouTube users feel about brands invading their cat video sanctuary.

Check out the Compete posting for more detailed analysis about Jokeroo.

Web analytics trend service Compete is out with their latest report today comparing the change in gas prices with the change in Web traffic to sites related to public transportation. To build the report, Compete took the top 50 sites in the "Bus and Train" category and the average gas price for the week and compared the change over time. This report is only based on U.S. Web traffic and gas prices.

It's pretty interesting to watch how directly correlated the two are. Yet as author Connor Caldwell notes, it seems like Americans are getting more comfortable with higher gas prices.

Are people (worldwide) more productive on public transportation than in their cars? The simple answer is yes but what this additional productivity means is that when a person arrives home, they perhaps have more time to spend with family and friends and not working because the normal after-dinner work was completed on the subway, train or bus. With more mobile devices offering real connectivity to the Internet, it could be that people may actually stick to transit if gas prices drop. Ok, I am dreaming I know.

Do you find that you get more done on the train or bus than in the car? For me, even on a short subway ride, I find that I am able to think about ideas rather than worrying about who just cut me off or how that idiot didn't put their blinker on.

Don't forget to check out our public transportation sister site, InsideTransit, which takes a fun and interesting look at trains, buses, and other means of transportation.

Web site tracking service Compete has announced the launch of their "Pro" plan today. They are dropping their previous payment system which basically required you to buy credits and then each report you selected was some amount of credits. Going forward the plans will all be monthly - this should be easier for their current customers but also easier to market to new customers.

They have also added more reports which include: page views, visits per person and daily reach. They are keeping more data as well and you can now go back up to 25 months for report purposes.

The new plans start at $199 a month which includes 50 reports. Compete might lose some customers over this - sometimes you only need one report a month, other times 100, now you are stuck with a minimum of $200 a month. It seems like if you have any credits they are giving you a free month of the basic Pro package. Perfect for the large enterprise customers, not so for small customers, consultants or media outlets. My hope is that they will add a ppv report option as well for say $5-10/report.

Compete just revised UP Yahoo’s market share number significantly - by 5.3 percentage points. To put this number in perspective — combined market share of AOL and ASK.com = 4.1%

On Monday we released our May Search Share numbers. As a result of some conversations we were having with Danny Sullivan in parallel we sent over our “rules” we use to mine the search data. Danny threw these up on his post reviewing our data and one savvy reader very quickly identified an issue with our rules. So, long story short, we have fixed our Yahoo! rules (and also reevaluated all the other engine rules in the process). Here’s the updated data based on adjusted rules.

According to the revised market share numbers, a MSFT/Yahoo Search combination would yield:

Yahoo+MSN/Live = 28.5% combined market share (revised)
Yahoo+MSN/Live = 23.9% (old)

However, as Jeremy points out in his post, trend wise not much has changed. Yahoo Search market share is still trending downwards.

I’m sure folks at Microsoft (and Wall Street) have been watching these numbers closely (along with those from comScore, Hitwise, etc). This revision certainly makes Yahoo worth more, but is it enough for Microsoft to change its mind? Only time will tell.

CORRECTED STATS:

OLD STATS:

Tracking service Compete has been acquired by TNS (Taylor Nelson Sofres plc) out of London. Initial acquisition price is $75 million with an additional $75 million paid out over 2008-2010 based on meeting certain revenue targets. Compete had raised $43M since 2000.

From the announcement regarding Compete's revenue, "Compete’s revenue for the year ended 31 December 2007 was $14.9 million, over 50 per cent higher than in the previous year. Gross assets at that date were $11.2 million. The company made a loss of $4.5 million in 2007, as it invested in building its panel and industry expertise."

TNS notes that this acquisition will bring togther their strength in global marketing information with Compete's online research strength which will allow for a stronger suite of tools for TNS clients. TNS finds this acquisition financially sensible based on a Morgan Stanley report which shows the web analytics market moving from $325 million in 2007 to $500 million in 2009.

Compete has continued to grow over the past couple of years in terms of buzz generation. I've witnessed more and more people talk about Compete in general conversations and in a much more positive light than any of the other public benchmarking tools. While none of these tools is 100% accurate, Compete has tried to become the closest to actual reality. (and yes, they are off on CN numbers)

Who knows where these tools (Alexa, Compete and Quantcast) will go as we move away from a pageview world to an attention or engagement metric-driven world. How will these comparison services track attention or engagement?

Last month Compete added distribution with Ask and a new service offering with reports for ad effectiveness.

Ask.com announced this morning that they have partnered with Compete to add a new tab to their "binoculars" service which previews a Web site in search before you jump to it. Frankly I've never understood why anyone would care about a preview in a box of 100x100, but now you not only get the preview, you also get the stats about the site from Compete.

This is a great deal for Compete to gain distribution for their analytics service. In addition, the distribution will also help Compete with reaching a new audience and could create more loyal users over time.

Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz notes on the deal, "Why did Ask.com add this? It helps the searcher not only preview what the site looks like but also tells the user how popular the site is." Why do I care how popular the site is? I will tell you why. It's because I don't. If Ask tells me that x result is the best one for my query, then why does it matter how popular the site is?

ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick gets excited about this deal showing just how open search is in terms of ability to innovate in the space.

At the end of the day, it's a good distribution move for Compete. Ask adds a feature but they really need a lot more innovation if they plan to come back from the "xyz hates the algo" ads from last year.

I've provided Ask with suggestions last year that could easily get them going in terms of market share growth. It sure feels like Ask isn't interested in growth. I've never heard from anyone at Ask regarding my suggestions. I am still open to a discussion CEO Safka, give me a ring.

Back in the old days of the Internet, it was relatively simple to compare site A to site B. Of course most sites fibbed on their numbers, but traffic was traffic. A user would visit a site and record a hit or a pageview. There were no embed options, no video players on multiple sites, no widgets, no Ajax.

Then we received Alexa and later on sites like Compete and Quantcast. Each one has its pros and cons, though most agree that Alexa is the worst of the bunch. Quantcast has the most promise of a real comparison because they let you put the tracking code directly on your site or blog. But the issue with Quantcast is this: why should I put Quantcast on my site, when my competitors don't and they may wind up overreporting because they take Quantcast's default numbers.

Last night I had dinner with a great group of people, mostly fashion bloggers, and we discussed widgets for a bit. The big issue with widgets and widget advertising is how will reporting and analytics work. Without a strong reporting engine, sell-in to agencies will be very difficult. It's easy to look at traditional Web ads on site A and site B and see which one performs better. But what about with widgets? How do you compare effectiveness?

Last night, Mike Arrington posted an article about white-label social networking company Flux and their apparent huge increase in traffic. A chart from comScore shows an enormous increase in traffic for Flux from November 2007 forward. Arrington suggests that the traffic increase is due to, "Flux ... had the benefit of not only Viacom’s money but also their brands - at launch hundreds of Viacom properties launched Flux social networks, including their MTV brands."

I wanted to post a reply straight away but had to leave for dinner. The question about the traffic increase is whether it comes from a Viacom push or whether it comes from Flux's widget strategy? Back in November, TechCrunch wrote about Flux opening up their platform. At that time, they installed the widget displayed below. Not sure if it was a paid widget like the HP printing one, but in any event, did loads on that widget help to boost Flux's traffic? The widget loads a Javascript on flux.com along with what looks like a customized image for TC for the Flux share. Did either of these hits register to comScore? Now take this share widget, and place it on 200 other sites. If the hit counted, now you get an idea on how quickly traffic can build for Flux. Unlike a normal widget, the issue with these loads (if counted) is that very few (if any) ever visited Flux via clicking the share button.

While I can't give you 100% proof that this is what's happening and I certainly hope that it isn't, this discussion is the most recent example of why we need a real comparison engine. One that can properly handle today's technologies.

When I met with KickApps to discuss their latest release we discussed comparisons to Ning. It's not easy to compare KickApps to Ning in that KA isn't hosted on kickapps.com whereas Ning hosts all of their social networks on ning.com.

The real issue is when advertisers, public relations teams, writers, journalists, etc., make decisions based on numbers they read on one of the current comparison engines alone. I've seen it hundreds of times over the past decade, especially with agencies pitching a site to advertise on. Of course, the site in the lead is happy to point you to one of the current comparison engines to show off how great they are. Perhaps there is a startup opportunity here. Not as sexy as a Facebook poke app, but could be very valuable to the industry at large.

Compete has a blog post today showing some of the fastest moving sites from December 2006 to December 2007. Many of the sites we've covered in the past are listed. On the positive side, sites include TechCrunch, CafeMom, Wordpress, LinkedIn, and Reddit. On the downside are sites including Vonage, Netscape and American Singles.

As an analytics freak, when I saw the report on TechCrunch, I immediately wondered how they got the percentage increases - for example, iamfreetonight, a startup covered on CN, is up 32,000%. They are a new site in 2007 so a large increase is probably more reasonable than say CafeMom which apparently grew 2,320%? My guess is that the percentages are missing a decimal place perhaps? In any event, the ranking is most likely correct so congrats to those listed!

They note, "The chart above shows the top twenty sites that gained or lost the most amount of traffic from December 2006 to December 2007, as a percentage of visits in December 2006."

I've got an email into Compete and will report back once I get an update.

Compete has announced two new services to their current lineup; an ad effectiveness tool and a top site lists tool.

The ad effectiveness tool is named Ad Analyzer, Compete believes this is the industry’s first service to track online advertising performance beyond simple impressions and click-through metrics. From their product overview, "lets marketers measure the impact of ads on consumer behavior within target customer segments and across channels to maximize online advertising ROI. Marketers are shifting an increasing portion of their advertising budget online, and they need precise and detailed information about how their campaigns impact engagement, loyalty and online and offline retail sales."

I tried to login to the tool, but it doesn't appear to be live as of yet. Once I get a chance to play with the tool, I will provide a review. My first question is whether their "impact metrics" will go past the pageview and will provide more insight. If so, perhaps it could help publishers like myself sell more ads. We still need to move the buy-side away from the default pageview bundle buy.

The top sites tool lets you purchase a report of the top 15,000 web sites for $1,000 for any term(s) you desire. The reports are ready in 24 hours and can be ranked on any metric that Compete reports on. If Compete was smart, they would include an hour of expert analysis via phone when you purchase one of these reports. Then they could grow an analytics consulting practice as well build on top of the Compete platform. I will take 10% of first year profits for the idea :)

It's interesting to watch Compete continue to expand while Alexa just is stagnant. Alexa could have been something.