Probably the most interesting is the Fiat 500, apparently over 65% of the product searches happened after the game was over (not shown on the infograph). Perhaps it just stuck in consumers heads. Hyundai seemed to spark interest pretty consistently. The searches were across several models throughout the entire game. The heaviest hitter appears to be the Chevy Sonic, followed by Toyota with the Camry.

This is real-time information on what consumers were doing in reaction to the advertising. It would be interesting to hear what about the ads provoked watchers to leave the game momentarily, to go search a product.

SC Magazine is reporting that cyber criminals have opened an online store selling Web traffic by hijacking other Web site’s traffic. The shop injects hidden integrated frames into pages of legitimate Web sites to redirect visitors to the buyer’s URL.

Integrated frames split pages into parts that are used to embed windows from another Web site. When an iframe’s height and width is set to zero, it becomes invisible.

Customers can purchase 1000 visitors through the online store for an average of $4.

Regional traffic prices do vary with 1000 Dutch visitors costing $18 while 1000 visitors from Australia is only $8. One thousand visitors from the U.S. is only $12.

The shop will also purchase redirected traffic from others. Sellers can inject their own iframes and sell the resulting traffic to the shop.

The operator said that the service does not record any IPs, no one will ban your account and they don’t care what you’re promoting.

The shop can adjust prices automatically based on supply and demand.

The site was originally created for personal use but was opened for public use after the realisation that money could be had.

There are “legal” options to buy Web traffic, but what this shop offers is definitely illegal. If you want to increase your Web traffic, use the old fashioned method of promoting via social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Just ask the Center for Disease Control, aka, the CDC.

A few hours ago, the CDC tweeted about a blog post on their site, called “Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse” Considering the unending popularity of zombies, strongly perpetuated by the web culture, the CDC’s web server was subsequently blitzed by page requests. In fact, it’s tempting to compare the CDC’s careless disregard for their site’s bandwidth along the same lines as throwing a server into a pit of molten lava.

Zombies are just that popular with the Internet crowd (over 12 million Google results for the keyphrase, “zombie t-shirts“), and because of their popularity, people are just waiting for an official institution to suggest the dead rising from the grave is a possibility. Consider the Boston Police’s flirtation with a potential zombie outbreak on Twitter and the follow-up reaction for further evidence. Granted, the CDC’s tweet and post was likely in jest — and an attempt to generate pageviews — the reaction still brought their web server to its knees, at least the one that hosts the blog post in question. While the CDC’s blog post eventually loads, the site is definitely struggling.

Even Google Cache is having a hard time loading its snapshot.

Clearly, the lessons about fortifying your web server, bracing it for a potential Digg social media/immediate viral popularity effect is still an applicable guideline to adhere to — especially when zombies are the subject matter. As for the post itself, here’s a screenshot snippet:

The rise of zombies in pop culture has given credence to the idea that a zombie apocalypse could happen. In such a scenario zombies would take over entire countries, roaming city streets eating anything living that got in their way. The proliferation of this idea has led many people to wonder “How do I prepare for a zombie apocalypse?”

The question I can’t help but ask is, if the CDC can’t handle an increase in web traffic, how in the world will they handle an unrelenting zombie outbreak? The early returns are not promising.

Outbrain is the top content recommendation service on the web. You can see their related link widgets on popular sites like USA Today, Slate, Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Their study is an analysis of Q1 2011 statistics of traffic patterns from publishers that are using their platform. They analyzed over 100 million sessions, which they define as a series of page views with no more than 30 minutes between one and the next.

They found that among traffic to content pages (articles and video), one-third of the sessions start from external sites. The other two-thirds come from directly accessing the site through type-ins, bookmarks and in-site links. So the data they analyzed comes from the 33% of sessions starting from external sites.

What they found was that the top three sources of traffic to content pages were Google, AOL and Yahoo respectively.  Social networking sites Facebook and Twitter came in 4th and 8th, respectively.  Digg rounded out the top 20.

In their breakdown of external sources for traffic, they found that search stills holds the largest chunk of the pie, at 41%.  Content sites linking to other content sites made up 31%.  Portal homepages accounted for 17% of directed traffic and social media sites hold 11%.

Search leading the way in content discovery should come as no surprise.  The more interesting part of Outbrain’s study regards the types of information accessed via specific sources and “reader engagement” by category.

What type of content is being accessed through social media sites?  Surprising or not, mostly news – 42% in fact.  The next two top areas are entertainment stories with 30% and articles about lifestyle at 13%.

Reader engagement is highest when content is accessed through search or other content sites.  Engagement is lowest when people come from social media sites – and inversely, the bounce rate (only one page view) is highest from social sites.  Content sites have the lowest bounce rate, as Outbrain points out presumably because people accessing content via other content sites are already in content devouring mode.

Hyper-engaged readers, or what they call reader who access 5 or more pages per session, is also highest from content sites and search.  As would be expected, readers coming in from social sites are not particularly hyper-engaged.

One last little tidbit that I found interesting:

Given the popularity of both Facebook and Twitter, we thought it was worth comparing their relative traffic quality to see what differences exist. Surprisingly, the two sites drive similarly engaged audiences in terms of page views per session, bounce rates and hyper-engaged reader sessions. The one key difference is in their relative reach, which we define as the number of unique visitors per 1,000 sessions. Specifically, we found about 72% of sessions originating from Facebook were from a unique visitor, versus only 52% in the case of Twitter, suggesting that Twitter’s audience is more likely to be made up of repeat visitors.

So, social site referrals are growing, but it looks like the challenge moving forward will be how to engage those readers past one page view.  Obviously, a person jumping from content site to content site is in the mood to cram their brains with info – but people linked to a funny story via Facebook might not be in consumption mode.  They are probably just curious.  If these findings prove accurate, it will be especially important for news and entertainment companies to integrate fully into the social media sphere, as those are the types of stories most shared in that manner.

As you probably remember, The New York Times rolled out a semi-permeable paywall on March 28th.  The paywall allows up to 20 pages views for readers who access the site through direct means.  After that, readers are prompted to pay for a subscription service.  The paywall also includes social media and search exceptions, allowing articles accessed via sites like Google and Facebook to not count towards the “20.”

Hitwise crunched the numbers and compared traffic for a 12 day period before the paywall with traffic 12 days after the paywall was erected.  Both total visits to the site and page views have dropped dramatically.  Below is the chart for percent change in total visits between the two 12-day periods.  Note the only increase is Saturday, April 9th which Hitwise suggests was “likely due to visitors seeking news around the potential government shutdown and ongoing budget discussions.”

The paywall’s negative effect is even more prominent when looked at in terms of page views.  The same 12-day period shows negative changes of between 11% and 30%:

Hitwise also notes that the social media and search loophole discussed earlier hasn’t done much to increase traffic to the New York Times website from those sources:

“While using these sources could be a clever workaround for a reader hoping not to pay, to date there has not been a significant difference in the share of upstream traffic from both search and social networks to NYTimes.com before and after the launch of the paywall.”

Traditional journalism is struggling to compete with the rise of internet reporting.  Information is plentiful, and mostly free.  While these statistics aren’t a comprehensive comment on the success or failure of paywalls, they do suggest the New York Times’ system might not be optimal.  It will be interesting to see if they are simply slow out of the gates or whether it will become a much larger failure for the news organization.

But web traffic would not reflect scratch-off tickets since winnings are known automatically and are instantly redeemable at the point of purchase. The seven percent year-over-year increase Hitwise is seeing is likely due to an increase in drawings for larger jackpots.

While it might not be surprising that bad economic times spur increased economic risk, but the demographic visiting lottery websites may be counterintuitive. The greatest gains are among households making between $60,000 and $99,999 and households making over $150,000. Among those making less than $30,000 annually, visits to lottery websites are significantly down.

Hopkins theorizes the wealthier segment is seeking low cost/high reward risk with discretionary income to offset losses in their investment portfolios. While that might explain the burst of activity, as the chart shows, it would not account for a decrease in lottery traffic among the $100,000-$149,000 income bracket.

Perhaps this demo is more likely to be a dual-income with kids household? This could why discretionary gambling is less important than squaring away nest eggs for, say, teens preparing to enter college. 
 

- Yahoo! News: 7.6 million unique users, 259,244,751 total page views

– MSNBC: 6.8 million unique users, 232,076,565 total page views

– CNN.com: 6.3 million unique users, 134,573,839 total page views

– AOL News: 2.5 million unique users, 45,122,501 total page views

– FoxNews.com:1.9 million unique users, 31,856,733 total page views

So what made so many people turn to Yahoo News on Election day over other sources? Well, Yahoo provides a list of the things they were doing, so you can get a better picture if you were not one of the visitors to the site that day.

 Richard Vega, the Senior Editor for Yahoo News has spoken a little bit about the night on the Yodel Anecdotal blog:

At Yahoo! News, our editors’ roles are to program headlines from dozens of national and international newspapers, wires, and broadcast networks. But on Election Night, we took on a more pronounced mandate as news filter. For example, if a network called a critical swing state, we would wait until at least another network called the state before announcing the news in our breaking news blog and breaking news bar. After all, we were serving what turned out to a record-breaking audience — today, comScore confirmed that we attracted 7.5 million people, the largest single day of traffic in online news history, surpassing CNN.com, MSNBC.com, AOL.com and FoxNews.com. We couldn’t afford to be wrong.

Journalists are known cynics. But when Barack Obama surpassed 270 electoral votes, we all knew it was a huge moment. The newsroom suddenly got very quiet. The sense of history was palpable. I think we all felt honored to be standing there, passing that word along to our readers.

Vega says that he had just one rule for the Yahoo News team on Election night, and that was "get it right!" He recalled a certain previous election where news sources were reporting conflicting outcomes. He did not want his team to be part of such a flub. No such flub was in the cards for anyone that night though, as Obam obviously won by a landslide.

The following AOL sites reached all-time high page view numbers in October:

- AOL Webmail (.com and AIM Mail)
– AOL Tech Network
– Latino
– Lemondrop
– Television
– TheBoot
– TMZ

On top of that, when it comes to unique visitors, 12 AOL properties rank in the top three in their categories for unique visitors:

- #1 Men: Asylum
– #1 African American: BlackVoices
– #1 Maps: MapQuest
– #1 Music: Music
– #1 Style: StyleList
– #1 Television: Television
– #2 Horoscopes: Horoscopes
– #2 Latino: Latino
– #2 Business- News/Research: Money & Finance
– #2 Celebrity: TMZ
– #3 Health: Health
– #3 Movies: Moviefone

Perhaps AOL doesn’t get enough credit as it deserves sometimes, considering that it is still managing to top Google in some categories (like Maps).

“AOL has completely rebuilt each of our vertical websites as well as launched over 30 new sites over the past 24 months, and we’re seeing the results in the unprecedented growth of our audience and engagement,” said Bill Wilson, Executive Vice President, AOL Programming. “We’re making our sites more relevant to today’s online users and advertisers, both by opening them up to third-party applications content and by creating sites that target people’s passion points. As the first big portal to allow access to third-party social networks, e-mail, RSS feeds and more, we are leaning into the fragmentation of the Web and reaching and growing key audiences by creating original content and engaging online experiences.”

Third parties seem to be where it is at these days. Just ask Yahoo and Microsoft. Even Google is touting Friend Connect today.

Spurred by national pride and massive growth in Internet adoption in China, CCTV.com, the site run by national broadcaster China Central TV, drew more than 100 million unique visitors during the 2008 Olympic Games. WebTrends Analytics documented an average of more than 6 million unique visitors each day. In comparison, NBC, which maintained broadcast rights to the Games in the United States, reported an average of 4.3 million unique users a day on its Olympics web site. Yahoo!, which also featured extensive online video from the Olympics, averaged 4.7 million, according to media accounts.

“The Beijing Olympics marked the coming of age for the Internet in China,” said Alex Yoder, CEO of WebTrends, a leading provider of web analytics and online marketing solutions. “CCTV.com attracted more than 100 million online visitors for the Olympic Games by providing the right content at the right time for a large and ever-growing online audience.”

• An increase of more than 2.5 minutes in the average time each visitor remained on CCTV.com, to nearly 11.5 minutes during the Olympics.
• The opening ceremonies and other activities on Aug. 8 generated the most traffic on any single day, nearly 8.5 million visits. Aug. 9 and Aug. 18, the day Chinese athlete Liu Xiang was scheduled to race in the 110 meter hurdles, attracted the second and third highest visitor counts, respectively.
• The busiest hour of online traffic was from 11 a.m. to noon on Aug. 18. Nearly 900,000 visits were tallied during the hour in which Xiang was scheduled to race. The second busiest hour was during the opening ceremonies.

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