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Don’t Count Out Facebook as a Competitor to Google

In case you were wondering, Facebook is pretty popular. Google is of course the undisputed king of search market share, but Facebook has the edge in some areas. Social media is the obvious area.  While Google is hoping to make some serious headway here with Buzz, Facebook is far and away the dominant being in the world of social networks. Compete shared some data with us that emphasizes just...

Search Engines Impact Perception Of Brands

The search engine consumers use to find a brand’s website impacts both their perception of that brand and the decisions they make while on the site, according to new research by Wunderman, ZAAZ, and Compete. "Search begins with the choice of search engine," said David Sable, vice chairman and COO of Wunderman. "What this means if you are managing a brand is this: you need to know...

Travel And Weather Websites See Big Gains In December

During December 2009, winter weather hit the country driving holiday travelers online, according to Compete’s latest top 50 website rankings. Six of the top 20 highest growth website categories in December were travel and weather related.  The airport travel category attracted 40 percent more unique visitors in December (2.1 million) than the previous month.  News sites related to weather...

Compete Documents Hotmail Dominance

If you ever set out to collect personal email addresses at a tech gathering, here’s a tip: generally speaking, you can save time by typing or writing out the "@gmail" part before approaching people.  But Compete provided a bit of a reality check today by showing that Hotmail remains in the top spot overall. Andrew Pearlman – who is himself a satisfied Hotmail user –...

Smartphone Owners Frustrated By Poor Mobile Site Functionality

Smartphone owners are more comfortable making purchases from their handsets, but poor mobile site functionality is still a frustration for many, according to a new survey by Compete.  While m-commerce is set for strong growth in 2010, consumers are still more likely to abandon mobile purchasing on sites that are not optimized for the on-the-go experience, similar to shopping cart abandonment...

The Top 50 Sites in the US (as of November)

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. The firm is sharing the top 50. "Despite continued concerns surrounding the economic recovery, holiday shoppers flocked to the Web in November," says Compete. "Of the 20 fastest growing Web categories last month,...

Online Shoppers Have Bigger Holiday Budgets Than Offline Shoppers

Compete has shared some findings from a new study on consumer holiday shopping behavior. According to the firm, active online buyers (consumers who intend to spend over 30% of their holiday budgets online) have bigger budgets than other shoppers. Furthermore, they are more likely to spend that money on Black Friday. The study shows that "active online buyers" plan to spend twice as much...

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...

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. After this,...

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. This isn’t quite an apples-to-apples...

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...

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: - NFL.com ranked among the month’s biggest gainers, growing 123 percent month-over-month...

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. Just as with eBay, Bonanzle’s users appear quite passionate in their opinions about...

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: - iPhone owners are the most likely to spend money...

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. But blogging is so five years ago right? It’s all about microblogging and status updates now isn’t it? If you think that’s...