WebProNews

Compete Builds "Twitter Down" Case

According to the latest stats from Compete, Twitter didn't fare too well in October.  In fact, rather than pull in more unique visitors compared to the previous month, Twitter may have lost some and turned a one-time anomaly into a two-time streak. As the below graph shows, Twitter's growth rate slowed quite a bit starting in June.  Compete then recorded that its unique visitor count peaked in August.  September didn't play out at all in the site's favor, and in October, both visits and unique visitors dropped by about 2.1 percent.

Amazon and Walmart Engage in Price War Over Holiday Book Shoppers

Amazon and Walmart have been engaged in an online price war over holiday sales of bargain books. The whole thing began when Walmart announced that it would let customers preorder 10 of the most highly anticipated upcoming books for as little as $10 each. In a matter of hours, Amazon matched the price for all of the same books. Walmart then dropped the price to $9. Then Amazon did the same.

Facebook Receives 1/4 Of US Page Views?

More often than not, when something is successful overseas, it's even more successful in its home market.  And this led one person to wonder: if Facebook receives one-seventh of all page views in the UK (as Hitwise suggested last week), how's it doing in the US?  He found that it might receive as many as one-fourth of all page views.

Compete: Yahoo Stumbled In September

Sorry, Yahoo fans - September wasn't kind to your search engine of choice.  According to Compete's stats about market share and query volume, newcomer Bing did more than all right, though, which would seem to say some interesting things about the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal. Yahoo's share dropped from 15.8 percent in August to 14.7 percent in September, which equals a month-over-month fall of 7.0 percent.  Meanwhile, query volume plummeted by a not-at-all-good 8.0 percent.

Football, News, and School Drew Big Web Traffic in August

Compete has released the Compete 250 for the month of August. This is the firm's monthly ranking of the top 250 trafficked Web sites. The categories that stood out the most during the month were Back to School shopping, Football and news searches for pubs like TheStreet.com and Businessweek. Key Findings include:

Bonanzle Surpasses Milestone User Number

eBay competitor Bonanzle recently told us the company was approaching several milestones, one of these being welcoming its 100,000th registered user. The company announced today that they have surpassed that one. In fact, they did it earlier this week on September 14, just barely a year after the site launched.

Survey Finds Many Smartphone Owners Open to Targeted Ads

Compete has shared some data from its Smartphone Intelligence survey. The findings indicate that smartphone owners prefer personal and social apps, and that they're open to targeted ads. According to Compete, entertainment, games, music, social networking, and weather are the most popular app categories across all platforms. Findings include:

Blogs Can Still Drive Big Traffic

You would almost think blogging was dead, the way headlines are dominated by Twitter, Facebook, and social media in general. I've always considered blogging to be a part of social media anyway, as the commenting factor lends to engagement between author and user.

Search as Navigation On the Rise

Compete has shared some interesting data indicating that web users are increasingly using search engines to simply navigate to the sites they want to visit. For example, they are typing "facebook" in Google rather than just going to facebook.com from their address bar. Following is a look at the fastest growing search terms according to Compete, for the top five search engines. You'll notice that this list is largely dominated by brand names.

The Top 50 Websites in the US

Compete puts together a monthly ranking of the top 250 Web sites in the US, based on unique visitors, and breaks up the data by relevant categories and behavioral segments. In its latest report, Compete found that the top performers for July fell into four main categories: auto manufacturers that were part of the "Cash for Clunkers" deal, summer blockbuster movie sites, back-to-school shopping sites and social media news aggregates (like Digg or Tweetmeme).