Hitwise Uk Online Media Round Up September 2008

Hitwise UK Online Media Round-up

Robin Goad Research Director, Hitwise UK Eva Stringleman Research Analyst, Hitwise UK Stephanie Oakes Junior Research Analyst, Hitwise UK

September 2008 Sport websites’ success not quite a bolt from the blue

Introduction

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Table of contents Section 1: Industry overview........................................................................3

UK Internet visits to key media categories....................................................3 Fast moving search terms* (August vs. July 2008) ........................................3

Section 2: Fast movers .................................................................................4

Friendsreunited.co.uk................................................................................4 Nola.com.................................................................................................4 Yougofurther.com.....................................................................................4 National Hurricane Centre ..........................................................................4

Section 3: Top stories...................................................................................5

Facebook overtakes eBay to become third most visited website.......................5 9 in 10 UK searches are navigational / branded.............................................6 Olympics winners: sports sites, bike retailers and sportswear manufacturers.....8 Football: transfers and fantasy ................................................................. 10 Top band / artist searches in August.......................................................... 13

Section 4: Short Cuts..................................................................................15

Sarah Palin more popular than Barack Obama in the UK............................... 15 Oasis number one website in Bands & Artists category................................. 15 ‘I kissed a girl’ top non-branded search for Youtube..................................... 15 Australians more interested in Olympics than British.................................... 15 Dragons Den appearances generate interest in products online ..................... 15

Section 5: Appendix ...................................................................................16

Further Reading ..................................................................................... 16 Managing Your Brand Online (Report) ........................................................ 16 Can You Have a Happy Christmas During an Economic Downturn? (Webinar recording) ............................................................................................. 16 About Hitwise......................................................................................... 16 Terms Used in this Report........................................................................ 17 Disclaimer ............................................................................................. 17

Section 1: Industry overview

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Section 1: Industry overview

UK Internet visits to key media categories Category Aug-08 Jul-08

Monthly change

Aug-07Yearly Change

Social Networking and Forums 9.2% 8.9% 3.5% 7.0% 30.8%News and Media 5.9% 5.7% 2.3% 4.8% 21.0%Online Video 2.5% 2.4% 4.7% 1.1% 129.7%Print 1.7% 1.8% -2.3% 1.4% 21.0%Blogs and Personal Websites 0.8% 0.9% -12.3% 0.6% 21.9%Community Directories and Guides 0.3% 0.3% 1.2% 0.3% -10.4% *Based on market share of UK Internet visits within All Categories.

• Facebook has increased its domination of the Social Networking and Forums market this month, capturing 30% of visits to the category, up from 27% of visits in July. Facebook is now the second most visited site in the UK, recently having overtaken eBay UK and Windows Live Mail.

• The Online Video category continues to grow, with a year-on-year increase in visits of 129.7% since August 2007.

• Within News and Media the top 3 most visited websites in August were all BBC sites (News, Homepage and Weather). Together they account for 37.8% of all visits to the category.

Spotlight on News and Media: Weather websites proved very popular during a wet August, with the BBC Weather website ranking 3rd and the Met Office ranking 4th

within the News and Media category. Interest in the weather normally peaks over summer in the UK, but this August the weather category received more visits than ever before. Search engines were the main source of traffic to weather websites, with Google UK accounting for 23.7% of traffic during the 4 weeks ending 30/08/08. The top weather related search terms driving traffic to the category were ‘bbc weather’ (17.7%) and ‘weather’ (9.5%).

Fast moving search terms* (August vs. July 2008)

Rank News and Media PrintCommunity Directories and Guides

1 beijing 2008 olympic games gcse results tinsley towers2 bbc olympics olympic medal table harry hotspur3 olympics jade goody nottinghill carnival4 jade goody tom daley kilnsey show5 gcse results guardian fantasy football gooya6 morgan freeman gcse results 2008 calcton gazette newspaper7 bernie mac bernie mac tinsley cooling towers8 olympic medal table beijing 2008 olympic games newcastle fc ic9 tom daley morgan freeman beijing 2008 olympic games10 strictly come dancing jade goody cancer thesentinel

Rank Social Networking and Forums Online Video (custom category) Blogs & Personal Websites

1 beijing 2008 olympic games beijing 2008 olympic games akaine2 beijing 2008 usain bolt guillem balague3 usain bolt disturbia beijing 2008 olympic games4 leeds festival beijing 2008 I foods5 olympics when I grow up cheatplanet6 yougofurther olympics egotastic7 ucas brum the perfect vagina8 antivirus xp 2008 camel spider google earth street view9 dubstep bernie mac bbc olympics10 disturbia paddys revenge big foot

Colour key: Sport, Entertainment, Celebrity, News / Current Affairs *Based on the search terms sending traffic to each category that experienced the largest relative increase in market share of searches between the 4 weeks ending 2nd August 2008 and 30th August 2008.

Section 2: Fast movers

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Section 2: Fast movers

Friendsreunited.co.uk

Friendsreunited.co.uk relaunched as a free service in May 2008. As a result it has experienced a 140% increase in its market share of visits in the Social Networking and Forums category. Thanks to an effective email marketing campaign, the Email Services category has become one of the main drivers of traffic to friendsreunited.co.uk. Between April and August 2008 traffic from webmail services to the site increased by 218%.

Nola.com

Nola.com, a New Orleans community website, increased its market share of visits in the ‘News and Media-Community Directories and Guides’ category by 184% during August 2008. This is most likely due to interest in Hurricane Gustav, which people initially feared would hit New Orleans in a repeat of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy in August 2005. The second highest driver of traffic to nola.com was the National Hurricane Center.

Yougofurther.com

Yougofurther.co.uk placed 52nd in the Social Networking and Forums category during the week ending 30/08/08. The site enables prospective university students to interact and with current students. Hitwise data shows that visits to the site have increased by 40% since August 2007. The August spike reflects interest from prospective students who are about to start university in the Autumn

National Hurricane Centre

Visits to the National Hurricane Center tripled over August 2008. The clickstream data for the National Hurricane Centre reveals that search was the main driver of traffic to the website. The top ten search terms sending traffic to the site were all terms specific to the National hurricane Center. The only exception was ‘hurricane gustav’, which ranked as the 7th most popular term.

Section 3: Top stories

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Facebook overtakes eBay to become third most visited website Facebook became the third most visited website in the UK during July, overtaking eBay UK on the way. As the chart below illustrates, the social network received 2.75% of all UK Internet visits in July, equivalent to one in every 36. Facebook is also closing the gap with Windows Live Mail (Hotmail), matching visits to Live Mail in August.

There are however a couple of caveats here, the first of which relates to eBay UK. Hitwise categorises both eBay.com and eBay Motors separately, although 26% of people visiting the former end up at the UK site, while the latter currently receives 87% of its traffic from eBay UK. The second caveat relates to Windows Live Mail, which hasn’t suddenly shot up the rankings as the graph implies. In fact, the webmail service changed its URL structure last year and traffic to the new URL only normalized from the start of this year.

Both Facebook and eBay are addictive sites with loyal fans, so we thought it would be interesting to compare the two sites’ demographic profiles. Facebook visitors are more likely to be female, are younger (it receives more visits from people aged between 18 and 34), and are more likely to live in London and the South East. Looking at the Experian Mosaic Lifestyle profiles for the 4 weeks ending 02/08/2008, Facebook experiences a swing in its favour from three groups: Urban Intelligence (E - ‘Young, single and mostly well-educated, these people are cosmopolitan in tastes and liberal in attitudes’), Symbols of Success (A – ‘People with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products’) and Welfare Borderline (F – ‘People who are struggling to achieve rewards and are mostly reliant on the council for accommodation and benefits’).


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9 in 10 UK searches are navigational / branded During May 2008, 88% of searches for the top 2,000 search terms in the UK were navigational branded in nature, up from 81% in 2007 and 66% in 2005.

A quick refresher on the methodology that was used to create the above chart: Hitwise carried out an analysis of the top 2,000 search terms in the UK over the same 12 week period ending in May during 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, categorizing them into branded / navigational terms (e.g. ‘bebo’, ‘ebay’, ‘bbc’ – i.e. searches where there was a clear intention to search for a brand or reach a particular website) and non-navigational terms (e.g. ‘flights to spain’, ‘free games’, etc.). The trend towards more navigational / branded search at the ‘head’ of search terms contrasts with more sophisticated generic search behaviour in the long tail.


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Consumers are using search engines to navigate to recognized websites, but what are their favourite online brands? The table below lists the top 10 search terms in the UK for the 4 weeks ending August 9th. Facebook, which continues to increase its market share in the UK, is currently the most searched for brand in Britain. It is joined in the top 10 by four other social networking / web 2.0 related terms: ‘bebo’, ‘youtube’, ‘you tube’ and ‘myspace’. Combining the two YouTube related search terms the video sharing website would place higher than Bebo.

Of the five remaining terms, three belong to retailers – ‘ebay’, ‘argos’ and ‘amazon’ – while the remaining two belong to the BBC. You will notice that the table above includes paid and organic rates for each of these terms, a new feature that is now included in Hitwise’s Search Intelligence tool. The terms ‘ebay’, ‘amazon’, ‘you tube’ (although noticeably not ‘youtube’) are the only three in the top 10 that generate a significant proportion of paid search clicks, with the remaining seven relying almost completely on organic traffic.

The table below lists the top 10 paid search terms (i.e. those that received the largest number of paid clicks from a search engine) over the same period. By stripping out the brands that rely primarily on organic search, this list is quite different from the one above. A combination of high overall search volume and a high paid rate pushes ‘ebay’ and ‘you tube’ to the top of the list, but Facebook, Bebo, the BBC and MySpace all fall out of the top 10.

Whereas there were only 3 retailers in the previous list, this time there are 7 retail related terms, with ‘ebay uk’, ‘currys’, ‘john lewis’, ‘pc world’ and ‘paypal’ entering the paid search top 10. This makes sense when you consider the competitive nature of the retail market. Previous Hitwise analysis showed that retailers increased their rate of paid brand search to protect themselves from competitors and affiliates following the Google trademark changes in May 2008.


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Olympics winners: sports sites, bike retailers and sportswear manufacturers Following the success of Team GB in Beijing, we were curious to see who else benefited from the Olympics hype. As the chart below illustrates, the most clear online winners were sports websites, both news and retail sites. UK Internet traffic to sites within our Sports category shot up to an all time high, and during the week ending 23rd August accounted for one in every 29 visits.

The big winner during the Olympics was BBC Sport, which received one in every five visits to a Sports site over August. During the week ending 13th August, the site ranked as the 14th most visited in the UK, and on Saturday 13th August it entered the top 10 for the first time. The ‘Live Action’ Olympics feed, which included both text updates and video streaming via iPlayer, evidently helped keep people on the BBC Sport site, with the average session time increasing to an all time high of 8 minutes 46 seconds. Finally, the stand alone BBC iPlayer site also reached a new high, ranking as the 28th most visited site overall.

While our Shopping and Classifieds – Sports and Fitness category received less visits than the overall sports category, it still reached a new peak during the Olympics, and for the week ending August 23rd traffic was up 36% year-on-year. Looking at the top sports retail websites during this week, it is perhaps no surprise to see that four of the top 10 were cycling websites, including Halfords at number one. The success of Chris Hoy et al obviously encouraged Brits to get in the saddle. As the chart below illustrates, each of the top 4 cycling sites experienced increases in traffic over the Olympic fortnight.


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Another great example of TV exposure impacting sales was Adidas, the official Team GB kit sponsor. As you can see from the chart below, searches for ‘adidas’ reached their highest level of 2008 during the final week of the Olympics. For the 4 weeks ending August 23rd, almost 80% of this traffic went to Adidas’s own sites. The largest independent recipient of traffic was JD Sports, which received 5.7% of traffic from ‘adidas’ searches, although it paid for almost 90% of that traffic.


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Two other sportswear manufacturers that also benefited by association were Puma and Speedo. Puma sponsor the fastest man in the world, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and traffic to its site shot up thanks to its "Race Bolt” game. As you can see, the peak happened on August 20th, the day he won gold in the 200m sprint, breaking the world record in the process. The other big star of the games was the American swimmer Michael Phelps, who wore a much talked about Speedo swimming suit. However, unlike Puma, which experienced a sudden peak, UK traffic to the Speedo website increased steadily over the Olympic fortnight as Phelps racked up one gold medal after another.

Football: transfers and fantasy Despite all in the interest in the Olympics over August, Football websites remained the most popular sport sites in the UK, accounting for a third of visits to Hitwise’s Sports category. As you can see from the chart below, by early August traffic had already surpassed the mini summer peak caused by the European Championships. In fact, the category received more visits than at any point last season, and looks like it may soon surpass the highs of the 2006 World Cup / pre-season period.


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The cause of this sudden spike in traffic was the commencement of pre-season activity and all the foreign tours, friendlies and mini-tournaments that entailed. Transfer activity was also a big contributor, and a summer full of rumours, press coverage, announcements and ambiguous agent / player statements helped maintain traffic levels. We took a list of all the major transfer targets this summer and whittled them down to the ten most searched for, which are charted below.

Cristiano Ronaldo was hardly off the back pages all summer, so it’s not surprising to see that he maintained the most consistent search performance over the summer months. Searches for both David Villa and Andrei Arshavin shot up following star performances at the Euros and the inevitable links with Premiership clubs that followed. However, searches for both the Russian and the Spaniard soon dropped off again once it become unlikely that they would be plying their trade in the England this season. There was a peak in searches for Peter Crouch when he transferred from Liverpool to Portsmouth, but it was Anfield new boy Robbie Keane who generated the most searches in a single week following his transfer from Spurs.


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The start of the new season also meant the now traditional surge in traffic to fantasy football sites. As the chart below illustrates, the official Premier League site, the Sun’s Dream Team and the Telegraph’s game are now firmly established as the leaders in this field.


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The fantasy football market is very competitive. However the new Hitwise search tool - which now includes paid and organic search rates at an industry level – shows that just 7.27% of search traffic to our Sports – Fantasy category (which is dominated by football) comes from paid search. Looking at the top 10 search terms it is clear that the newspaper-branded ones, including ‘telegraph fantasy football’, ‘sun dream team’ and ‘dream team’ all have much higher paid rates than their generic counterparts. This is because a successful fantasy football game can drive a significant amount of traffic to a newspaper’s site.

Top band/artist searches in August Here are the top band / artist searches sending traffic to social networks and music blogs during August. Starting with the social networks, Katy Perry, who topped the British and American charts over the summer with her hit “I Kissed a Girl”, is at number one. Biffy Clyro remains at 2, while a new album and successful Glastonbury headline slot helped Kings of Leon enter the chart at number 3. Elsewhere Noah and the Whale, Kid Rock and Slipknot have all moved up the charts.

1. Katy Perry (12)

2. Biffy Clyro (2)

3. Kings of Leon (New)

4. Noah and the Whale (6)

5. High School Musical (3)

6. Slipknot (10)

7. Kid Rock (8)

8. Metallica (New)

9. Rihanna (New)

10. Basshunter (1)

11. Jonas Brothers (7)

12. Jordin Sparks (4)

13. Mcfly (9)

14. You Me At Six (New)

15. Oasis (New)

16. Bloc Party (New)

17. Ting Tings (11)

18. Duffy (New)

19. Elliot Minor (New)

20. Gabriella Cilmi (5)


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Comparing the blog chart with the social networking list, one thing that jumps out is the high number of new entries on the former. Of the top 20 bands in the blog list, 17 are new entries compared with just 8 from the social networking chart. This blog list contains more new bands/ artists, although they generally appear in the bottom half. Looking at the similarities, there were 5 bands / artists that appeared on both lists: Kings of Leon, Jonas Brothers, McFly, You Me At Six and Elliot Minor.

1. Kate Nash (15)

2. Keane (New)

3. Girls Aloud (New)

4. Ladyhawke (New)

5. Bloc Party (3)

6. Burial (New)

7. Doves (New)

8. Fighting with Wire (New)

9. Florence and the Machine (New)

10. Jonas Brothers (13)


12. The Saturdays (New)

13. You Me At Six (New)

14. Bridget Metcalfe (New)

15. Chris Knight (New)

16. Craig Armstrong (New)

17. Elliot Minor (New)

18. Gary Glitter (New)


20. McFly (New)

The blog list also contains two names whose appearance is less to do with their music than their newsworthiness. Gary Glitter everyone knows about, but people may be less familiar with Burial. He is the previously anonymous Mercury Music prize nominated dubstep producer who recently revealed his identity via his MySpace page.

Section 4: Short cuts

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Section 4: Short Cuts

Sarah Palin more popular than Barack Obama in the UK

UK searches for Sarah Palin were 45% higher during the week of her appointment announcement as Republican vice-presidential candidate than those for the Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama. The top website capturing visits from searches for Palin was Wikipedia (38% of searches), followed by Google News (4.5%).

Oasis number one website in Bands & Artists category Visits to the official website for British band Oasis, www.oasisinet.com, increased four-fold, over the two weeks from the 9th August to the 23rd August, as tickets sold out for the band's recently announced tour. The website was number one in the Bands & Artists category during the week ending 23rd August, followed by Metallica's official website, www.metallica.com, as the metal band released the first song from their upcoming album.

‘I kissed a girl’ top non-branded search for Youtube. The top non-branded searches sending traffic to YouTube during August were 'i kissed a girl', ‘usain bolt’, ‘katy perry’, ‘beijing 2008 olympic games’ and ‘uk top 40’. Internet visits to the official website for Katy Perry, singer of the hit song “I Kissed a Girl”, increased eight-fold. The website ranked at #20 within the Bands & Artists category, up from #56 for the week ending 9th August. As well as traffic from Google, the main drivers of visits to Perry's website were BBC Radio 1, Youtube and MySpace.

Australians more interested in Olympics than British Using visits to the official Beijing Olympics site (en.beijing2008.com) as a measure of online interest, Australians were more interested in the Olympics than people in the UK. During the month of August the site - which was the largest recipient of searches for ‘olympics’ in both countries - ranked 203rd in the UK vs. 63rd in Australia, where its market share was 3 times higher than in the UK.

Dragons Den appearances generate interest in products online Following its Dragons’ Den appearance, UK Internet visits to ifoods.tv pushed the website to #24 in the Food and Beverage category, while visits to www.diamondgeezer.com increased 28-fold. Websites for The Rapstrap and Buggy Boot also gained a lot of interest online following their victorious Dragons' Den appearances. Of the four sites, ifoods.tv has garnered the most interest following the show.

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Section 5: Appendix

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Section 5: Appendix

Further Reading To receive a copy of these or any other Hitwise research reports, please contact your account manager or email [email protected].

Managing Your Brand Online (Report) Consumers look for brands they can identify with and trust online, whether they are extensions of their favourite offline brands or new online players. This brand new report from Hitwise and Experian Integrated Marketing analyses the role of online brands in the UK from a number of perspectives, looking at the growth of branded search, the relationship between online and offline branding, and the role of paid and organic search marketing.

Can You Have a Happy Christmas During an Economic Downturn? (Webinar recording) Presented in partnership with Experian FootFall, this webinar covers the following topics:

• A look back at what happened during Christmas 2007;

• What retailers can expect this Christmas in the face of an economic slowdown;

• Analysis on how pure-play online retailers are performing against multi-channel retailers;

• FootFall insight into offline retail trends;

• Recommendations for Christmas 2008.

About Hitwise Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,500 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise’s patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.

Section 5: Appendix

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Terms Used in this Report Hitwise provides clients with various metrics for analyzing competitive activity. The definitions of metrics used by Hitwise are: User Visit: A series of one or more page requests by a visitor without 30 consecutive minutes of inactivity. Market Share: The percentage of all visits or page requests to a particular online market sector that is received by the individual website. Clickstream: Provides an indication of the upstream and downstream traffic to and from a website. Upstream sites are those sites visited immediately prior to visiting the current site. Downstream sites are those visited immediately after leaving the current site.

Fast Moving Search Terms: Search terms which are sending traffic to a category that experienced the largest relative increase in market share of searches between two periods of time.

Mosaic UK: Mosaic UK is a socio-cultural classification of the UK population that has been developed by Experian to describe and group the population on the basis of the proven principle that individuals with similar interests, lifestyles, profiles and behaviour cluster closely together. Mosaic UK™ classifies all UK households and neighbourhoods into 11 Mosaic Groups and 61 Mosaic Types. The classification specifies both a Mosaic Group and Type for each of the 1.7 million postcodes in the UK. The type assigned is the one that most closely describes the characteristics of those households and the individuals living there.

Disclaimer

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