Hitwise UK Online Media Round-Up March 09

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Hitwise UK OnlineMedia Round-up

Robin Goad

Research Director, Hitwise UK

Lindsay OGormanMarketing Executive, Hitwise UK

March 2009How to pick up traffic from social media sites


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Introduction

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Table of contents

Section 1: Industry overview ........................................................................3

UK Internet visits to key media categories....................................................3Fast moving search terms (February vs. January 2009)..................................3

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

MSN Entertainment UK ..............................................................................4Directgov ................................................................................................4Comic Relief and Red Nose Day ..................................................................4

Section 3: Top Stories ..................................................................................5Facebook the most searched-for brand in the UK...........................................5Twitter enters top 100 sites; UK traffic has trebled already in 2009..................6

The Telegraph: how to pick up traffic from Digg............................................ 7The Sun and the Baby Father .....................................................................8

Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis the most searched-for personality .......... 10What are we scared of? ........................................................................... 12

Section 4: Short Cuts ..................................................................................13

Michael Jackson searches increase by 1200% ............................................. 13Spotify traffic up 250% in a month............................................................ 13Cinema traffic increases in lead up to the Oscars......................................... 13

UK Internet searches for Best Picture Nominees.......................................... 13

Section 5: Append ix ...................................................................................14Further Reading .....................................................................................14

Click: What We Do Online and Why it Matters (book)................................... 14Hitwise UK Search Engine Behaviour Webinar (Webinar recording) ................ 14

About Hitwise......................................................................................... 14Terms Used in this Report........................................................................ 15Disclaimer ............................................................................................. 15


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Section 1: Industry overview

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Section 1: Industry overv iew

UK Internet visits to key media categories

Category Feb-09 Jan-09Monthly

changeFeb-08

Yearly

ChangeNews and Media 6.12% 5.63% 8.7% 4.77% 28.3%

Community Directories and Guides 0.30% 0.24% 26.8% 0.30% 0.6%Online Video 2.52% 2.53% -0.4% 1.90% 32.3%Social Networking & Forums 9.80% 9.53% 2.9% 7.97% 23.0%Print 1.82% 1.79% 1.7% 1.45% 25.3%

Blogs and personal websites 0.77% 0.75% 2.1% 0.94% -18.5% *Based on market share of UK Internet visits within All Categories.

The Print category continues to see an increase in traffic both monthly andyear-on-year. Dailymail.co.uk is the largest site in the category, but UK

internet traffic to thesun.co.uk reached an all time high on 13/2/09 followingits Baby Father story, overtaking the Daily Mail for the first time sinceSeptember 08.

Despite seeing the only monthly decrease in visits, the Online Video category

continues to experience the largest annual growth rate (32.3%). Within thecategory, from January to February 09, video.msn.com moved up the

rankings from #10 to #5 with traffic to the site increasing by 62.8%. Community Directories and Guides category experienced the largest monthly

increase in traffic and has also started to increase on an annual basis.Directories were the largest subject area searched for on uk.ask.com,contributing to 15.9% of the top 1,500 generic searches for the 12 weeks

ending 3rd January.

Fast moving search terms (February vs. January 2009)

Rank News and Media PrintCommunity Directories and

Guides

1 rihanna rihanna oscars

2 ade goody wedding jade goody wedding shrovetide3 chris brown chris brown pancake fillings4 bbc hereford and worcester 13 year old dad american idol

5 school closures jade goody latest london weather6 radio leicester oscars tmz rihanna7 tmz alfie patten mardi gras

8 sky weather jade goody cancer ashbourne shrovetide9 oscars gail trimble ellie paskell10 ade goody latest 13 year old father heath ledger

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

1 ade goody fitna chris brown2 bebo mobile christian bale jade goody

3 watchmen christian bale rant ps3 fanboy4 oscars bolt tf25 robert webb love story rihanna

6 spotify valentine's day christian bale

7 pancake recipe robert webb being human8 google money system bolt trailer team fortress 29 kaskus charles darwin scout update10 pancake mix how to make pancakes radio 2

Colour key: Sport, Entertainment, Celebrity, News / Current Affairs, Internet/ Technology

*Based on the search terms sending traffic to each category that experienced the largest relative increasein market share of searches between the 4 weeks ending 31/1/09 and 28/2/09.


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Section 2: Fast movers

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Section 2: Fast movers

Twitpic

Twitpic.com allows users to upload pictures totheir Twitter profiles, and is the number onedownstream website from the micro-blogging

service. The site ranked 7th in thePhotography category for the week ending07/02/09, up from 26th the previous month.Twitpic is still small in comparison to Flickr and

Photobucket, but is growing rapidly. UKInternet traffic to the site has alreadyincreased more than 5-fold during 2009.

MSN Entertainment UK

Over the last 12 months traffic to MSNEntertainment UK has almost doubled. In

February it was the 57th most visited websiteoverall and ranked 10th in the Entertainmentcategory (compared to Feb 08 when it was

21st). 40.4% of its traffic comes from MSNUK, with Windows Live Mail (Hotmail)contributing 16.5%.

Directgov

UK Internet traffic to direct.gov.uk, the officialUK government portal, has increased 32.8%

over the last month. The top 5 governmentsites receiving traffic from Directgov duringFebruary 09 were Jobcentre Plus, HM Revenue

& Customs, the DWP, the Department forTransport and the DVLA.

Comic Relief and Red Nose Day

In the lead up to Comic Relief's Red Nose Day09, UK traffic to its two sites has increased.

For the week ending 28/02/09, Red Nose Day- Shop contributed the 3rd largest amount oftraffic (5.4%) to TK Maxx, the exclusive sellerof Stella McCartney's Red Nose Day t-shirt

range.


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Section 3: Top Stories

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Section 3: Top Stories

Facebook the most searched-for brand in the UK

Britains favourite social network and the second most visited website in the UK afterGoogle, Facebook is also the most searched-for brand by UK Internet users. Duringthe 12 weeks ending 3 January 2009, 1 in every 42 Internet searches in the UKincluded the term facebook. Facebook received 52% more searches than the second

most popular brand, YouTube. The third most searched-for brand was the auction siteeBay, while social networking site Bebo ranked fourth. The BBC rounded out the top5, and was also the most searched-for offline brand during the 12 weeks ending3/1/09.

10 most searched-for brands by UK I nternet users (ranked by market shareof UK Internet searches, 12 weeks ending 3/ 1/ 09):

1. Facebook (2.39%)2. YouTube (1.57%)

3. eBay (1.25%)4. Bebo (0.96%)5. BBC (0.86%)

6. Amazon (0.47%)7. Argos (0.44%)8. Sky (0.27%)9. Tesco (0.26%)

10. Yahoo! (o.26%)

Facebooks UK Internet traffic has more than doubled over the last year and it is nowthe second most visited website in the UK after google.co.uk. The social networkaccounted for 1 in every 24 UK Internet visits during the month of February andtraffic to the site has already increased by 18.6% during 2009.

Social networks now account for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits and 1 in every 5

page views. Only search engines receive more UK Internet visits than socialnetworks. During February 2009, social networks received 13.1% more UK Internetvisits than online retail websites, and 27.9% more than Adult websites, which theyovertook in September 2008.

Of the top five most searched-for brands in the UK, the BBC is the only brand not to

be Internet specific, and conducts the majority of its activities offline. Overall thereare 4 offline brands in the top 10, with Argos ranking 7th, Sky 8th and Tesco 9th.Six of the top 10 brands (Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, BBC, Sky, Yahoo!) are media

companies of one shape or another, and most of these rely primarily on advertisingto generate revenue. The list also reveals the importance of online video: YouTube isthe second most searched-for brand in the UK, while iPlayer is now the BBCs third

most popular sub-brand online after News and Sport.

The remaining four brands are all online retailers: eBay, Amazon, Argos and Tesco.eBay and Amazon remain the most popular online retail brands, but the moretraditional high street players are gaining on them all the time. During the key monthof December, the top 100 high street retailers received 68% more UK Internet visitsthan their online-only rivals.


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Section 3: Top stories

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Tw itter enters top 100 sites; UK traffic has trebled already in 2009

For the week ending 07/02/09 Twitter became one of the 100 most visited websitesin the UK for the first time. It ranked 91st within All Categories, placing above online

heavyweights such as Expedia UK (96), Gumtree (100), easyJet (101), Digital Spy

(103) and MoneySupermarket (105). As the chart below illustrates, Twitter nowranks as 7th within the Social Networking and Forums category, up from 23rd just 3weeks ago.

There was a noticeable increase in visits to Twitter following the media attentiongenerated by the likes of Stephen Fry (owner of the worlds second favourite Twitterfeed after Barack Obama) and Jonathan Ross.


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Over the last 12 months traffic to Twitter.com has increased 27-fold. As Hitwise isonly measuring traffic to the Twitter website, if people accessing their Twitteraccounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterrific,

Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers may even be higher.

The Telegraph: how to pick up traffic from Digg

The Telegraphs Digg widget, located on the newspapers homepage, lists the mostdugg Telegraph stories, with links to their Digg entries.

Many (arguably most) news and media websites now include social bookmarkingbuttons, which allow users to add their favourite stories to sites like Digg, Delicious,Reddit, StumbleUpon and Facebook, but the Telegraphs widget takes things a littlefurther. Given the high profile it has on the site, the Telegraph has become one of

Diggs largest sources of traffic in the UK.

However, the real test of how successful the widget has been is to look at the amountof traffic that Digg sends to the Telegraph. In addition to providing a version of the

most read stories section included on most news sites, the Digg widget alsoencourages Telegraph readers to digg their favourite stories. This in turn helps

Telegraph stories to move up the Digg rankings, meaning that more should reach thefront page. Looking at the Hitwise data, the strategy seems to have worked. As thechart below illustrates, the amount of downstream traffic that Digg sends to the

Telegraph has increased significantly over the last 12 months.

The Telegraph has now overtaken the Daily Mail and BBC News to become the largestUK recipient of traffic from Digg.


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The experience of the Telegraph shows that Diggs US-bias can be overcome, butcontent sites need to actively encourage their readers to use the service in order toachieve this. This strategy can also have an impact on international traffic too: for

the week ending 7/2/09, the Telegraph was also the second most visited News andMedia site after Digg in the US as well as the UK.

The Sun and the Baby Father

According to Journalism.co.uk, the Suns February 13th story about the 13 year oldbaby father Alfie Patten became the newspapers most popular online article of all

time. As the chart below illustrates, the Suns market share of UK Internet visits tothe News and Media - Print category reached an all time high of 8.48% on 13/2/09,overtaking the Daily Mail for the first time since September.


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After the story broke, people heard about it in other media and began to search formore information. 13 year old dad was the sixth biggest search term sending traffic

to the Sun for the week ending 14/02/09, and the highest ranked non-branded term.As the chart below illustrates, two more of the newspapers top 10 search terms lastweek - dad at 13 and 13 year old father were also related to the story. The Sunalso backed this up with a paid search campaign, although most of the traffic came

from organic sources.


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The Sun experienced a significant increase in the amount of traffic it received as aresult of the story. As the chart below illustrates, on February 13th 1 in every 6 of

the newspapers visits came from a social networking site. The Sun received morethan twice as many visits from social network sites as any of its rivals. Facebookaccounted for almost half of these, while the social network site sending the fifthlargest amount of traffic to the Sun was Bounty, which describes itself as the UKs

favourite parenting club.

Money Saving Expert Martin Lew is the most searched-for personality inthe UK

Martin Lewis, creator of the consumer revenge website Money Saving Expert wasthe most searched-for personality by UK Internet users during the 12 weeks ending3/1/09. There were 11% more searches for Martin Lewis than US President Barack

Obama, the second most searched-for personality over the period.

10 most searched-for personalities in the UK, 12 weeks ending 03/ 01/ 09

1. Martin Lewis2. Barack Obama3. Diana Vickers4. Britney Spears

5. Leona Lewis6. Cheryl Cole7. Georgina Baillie8. Miley Cyrus

9. Nicola Mclean10. Katy Perry


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The combination of practical money saving advice, a popular website and frequentappearances in the media made Martin Lewis the most searched-for personality in the

UK during the final three months of last year. During January 2009www.moneysavingexpert.com was the 100th most visited website in the UK, whilethe sites forums (forums.moneysavingexpert.com) ranked as the 10th most popular

social networking site.

The then President-elect Barack Obama was the second most searched-for

personality by UK Internet users during the 12 weeks ending 3/1/09. However,female celebrities from the worlds of TV and music account for most of the top 10.One in seven non-branded UK Internet searches is for a TV program or personality,while one in every 16 is music related.

The boost that the UK entertainment industry has received during the awards season

has also been reflected in the volume of US Internet searches for British musicians,actors and films. All five of the nominees for Record of the Year at the Grammys wereBritish, and the award was eventually won by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss for their

song Please Read the Letter. Last week there was a 15-fold increase in the volumeof US searches for robert plant, while there were 7-fold increases for fellow

nominees M.I.A. and Adele (who won awards for Best New Artist and Best FemalePop Vocal Performance). There was also a 3-fold increase in searches for coldplay,

winners of two Grammies for Viva La Vida.

American Internet users have also been searching for recent exports from the Britishfilm industry. After winning a Golden Globe, US Internet searches for Oscar nominee

Winslet (who went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress) increased 8-fold. SlumdogMillionaire - which also became a multi-Oscar winner - experienced a 3-fold increasein US searches after it won the Golden Globe for best film.


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What are we scared of?

In the book Click, one of the topics that Bill Tancer discusses is using search data toget an understanding of what people really think about a topic as opposed to what

they tell researchers or friends. One example cited in the book is peoples fears.

According to a US study, the most frequently expressed fear is of bugs, mice, snakesor bats. But looking at our search data, Bill found that the most searched for fear was

fear of flying which did not appear in the survey top 10. Similarly, the highestranking animal fear according to the Hitwise data was fear of snakes at number 8,which appeared below the likes of heights, clowns, intimacy, death, rejection andpeople.

For the 12 weeks ending 14/02/09, UK Internet users searched for over 8,500

distinct terms containing the phrase fear of. Below are the top 10:

1. fear of flying (2.27% of all fear of searches)2. fear of cats (1.72%)

3. irrational fear of cats (1.34%)4. fear of clowns (1.10%)

5. fear of long words (1.01%)6. fear of heights (0.86%)7. fear of the dark (0.62%)8. fear of death (0.61%)

9. fear of spiders (0.43%)10. fear of crime (0.36%)

The most popular phrase is fear of flying - as it was in the US - but the combinedvolume for fear of cats and irrational fear of cats was higher. However, there areover 500 variations on the term fear of flying, and once these are added together

they beat the 90 or so variations on the cat theme.

While looking into the fear of searches, variations of scared of were alsoresearched. Over the same 12 week period there were fewer variations on scared of(3,000) than fear of (8,500), but the results were similar. The top variation on

scared of was scared of lonely lyrics, which is a Beyonce song, while scared offlying was the second most popular.

One interesting term in the scared of list was Im not scared of becky taylor, whichranked 10th out of over 3,000 variations on the term for the 12 weeks ending14/02/09. This is a line from a current anti-smoking TV ad, and nicely illustrates how

search behaviour is influenced by other media. Interestingly none of that searchtraffic is going to government of health related sites, implying that the campaign hasmissed an opportunity in terms of paid search / SEO.


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Section 4: Short cuts

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Section 4: Short Cuts

Michael Jackson searches increase by 1200%

Following Michael Jackson's recent announcement that he is to play 10 dates at theO2 this summer, searches for the King of Pop increased by 1200%. With fans able to

register for presale tickets, traffic to www.michaeljackson.com increased 3-fold forthe week ending 07/03/09, while michael Jackson tickets was the top search termsending traffic to Ticket Exchange websites. With his comeback show predicted bymany to make show business history, it comes as no surprise that 'michael jackson'

was the 3rd fastest moving search term in the UK last week, behind 'v festival' (#1)and 'dr seuss' (#2 after featuring in a Google Doodle) for the same period.

Spotify traffic up 250% in a month

UK Internet traffic to Spotify.com, the streaming music player offering legal and free

access to a huge library of music, has grown 250% in the 4 weeks ending 21/02/09.Searches for 'spotify' are also on the rise, increasing 4-fold over the same period.Looking at Experian Mosaic data, the type of people most likely to visit Spotify are

from the Urban Intelligence group - defined as young, single and mostly well-educated people who are cosmopolitan in tastes and liberal in attitudes.

Cinema traffic increases in lead up to the Oscars

UK internet traffic to cinemas increased by 30% the week before the Oscars. Out ofall cinemas in the custom category, Apollo Cinemas experienced the largest spike intraffic (53.57%) as the pre-Oscars buzz encouraged people to view the nominated

films.

UK Internet searches for Best Picture Nominees

In anticipation of the Oscar results for best picture of 2009, the most searched-fornominee in the UK the week before the ceremony was Slumdog Millionaire. 'slumdog

millionaire' was also the top non-branded search term driving traffic to the popularfilm directory website Internet Movie Database. During the same period IMDB wasthe biggest recipient of traffic from all the nominee search terms, except 'benjaminbutton', which sent 26% of its traffic to www.benjaminbutton.com.

For more in-depth analysis, subscribe to the Hitw ise UK blog at:http:/ / weblogs.hitwise.com/ robin-goad/

Keep up to date w ith real time data by following Hitw ise on Tw itter:http:/ / twitter.com/Hitwise_UK

For further information, please contact your Hitwise account manager oremail: [email protected]


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Section 5: Appendix

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Section 5: Appendix

Further ReadingTo receive a copy of these or any other Hitwise research reports, please contact youraccount manager or email [email protected].

Click: What W e Do Online and Why it Matters (book)

Written by Bill Tancer, the General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise, Clickprovides a behind-the-scenes view of the daily analysis the Hitwise Research team

conducts into online behaviour. With a sample of over 25 million worldwide, insightscan be gleaned on the sites that we collectively visit, what we search for and whatthat tells us about ourselves.

Click has just been published in the UK: http://hitwise.co.uk/other/click.php

Hitwise UK Search Engine Behaviour Webinar (W ebinar recording)

Do UK consumers search differently depending on the search engine? Join Richard

Seymour, our Client Intelligence Analyst, as he looks at the top 5 UK search enginesand how consumers are using them.

Key topics covered in this online seminar include:

How consumers search across the top 5 UK search engines, both in terms ofnavigational and branded search;

The most popular brands and subject areas for each search engine;

Industries that benefit most from search and how they differ across the top 5UK search engines;

How paid rates differ across engine and subject areas.

View a recording of this webinar by visiting: http://hitwise.acrobat.com/p48934088/

About Hitw iseHitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its

1,500 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interactwith a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use differenttactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internetmeasurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwises patented

methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversionbehavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage

data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed tohelp 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 andSingapore. 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 atwww.hitwise.com/datacenter.


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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 consecutiveminutes of inactivity.

Market Share: The percentage of all visits or page requests to a particular onlinemarket sector that is received by the individual website.

Clickstream: Provides an indication of the upstream and downstream traffic to andfrom a website. Upstream sites are those sites visited immediately prior to visiting

the current site. Downstream sites are those visited immediately after leaving thecurrent site.

Fast Moving Search Terms: Search terms which are sending traffic to a categorythat 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 hasbeen developed by Experian to describe and group the population on the basis of theproven principle that individuals with similar interests, lifestyles, profiles and

behaviour cluster closely together. Mosaic UK classifies all UK households andneighbourhoods into 11 Mosaic Groups and 61 Mosaic Types. The classificationspecifies 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 ofthose households and the individuals living there.DisclaimerSome of the data presented in this report is based on custom data sets built for the

purpose of this report and not available in the syndicated Hitwise service. Thisresearch report may contain names, information, data, links to third party websiteaddresses, and other materials belonging to third parties; including textual referencesto such items. Any and all such uses are for illustrative purposes only and do not

necessarily indicate an endorsement of the opinions, products or services provided bythose third parties. Hitwise does not claim any proprietary right in, or to, any suchitems as may qualify as copyrights, trademarks or other proprietary marks of third

parties.

Hitwise is not responsible for the content of third party websites, or the manner inwhich information may be collected on that website and used by the third party.

Hitwise disclaims any responsibility towards the visitor of a third party website or anythird party for any direct, indirect or incidental reliance, consequential or punitivedamages, including without limitation lost profits, expenses or revenue; regardless of

whether Hitwise knew, or ought to have known, of the possibility of any loss ordamage arising from the use of, or visit to, a third partys website.

Use of this research report is at your own and sole risk. Hitwise disclaims any and all

warranties or representations in respect of the accuracy or usefulness of information,or any observations that may be derived from such information, obtained fromHitwise.

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Hitwise UK Online Media Round-Up March 09