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Hitwise Intelligence - James Murray - UK
Analyst Weblog
Wikipedia Blackout sends info junkies to mobile website
January 19, 2012
On Wednesday 18 January visitors to Wikipedia in search of answers were greeted with darkness.
In protest against the two congressional proposals in the States which are intended to halt online piracy, Wikipedia and other sites including Reddit went dark claiming the bills will infringe on freedom of speech. With people unable to easily access Wikipedia through their laptop or PC, info junkies turned to their mobile devices where access to the Wikipedia Mobile site was unhindered. 1 in every 7 visits to Wikipedia came from a smartphone or tablet yesterday, a 14% increase in mobile visits from the previous day.
In total there were 5.8 million visits to Wikipedia on 18 January and an additional million visits to the mobile website. Despite expectations that visits would decrease as a result of the blackout, visits to the main Wikipedia site actually increased by 4.1% compared to 17 January, although they didn’t reach the heights of 2 January when the new episode of Sherlock aired on iPlayer. Among the top search terms driving traffic to Wikipedia on that day were ‘irene adler’, ‘lara pulver’, ‘sherlock’ and ‘benedict cumberbatch’.
One of the negative effects of the blackout is that average visit time to Wikipedia halved from 8 minutes to 4 minutes on 18 January as people went to other websites to retrieve the information they sought. So where did people go without Wikipedia if they didn’t have a mobile device? Using the downstream data n Hitwise we can see those websites which saw the greatest increase in traffic after a visit to Wikipedia between 17 and 18 January.
As the only part of the site to be affected by the blackout was the English verison multi-lingual Internet users went to the French and Spanish versions. News sites including BBC News, Fox, Daily Mail and CNN also increased their downstream clicks from Wikipedia, but the biggest growth was for IMDB. Historically, entertainment has always been one of the biggest drivers of traffic to Wikipedia (as witnessed in the Sherlock example above) so it is not that surprising that without Wikipedia traffic increased to IMDB – one of the biggest online authorities on movies and TV. IMDB saw a 12% increase in visits yesterday with 3.4% of all visits leaving Wikipedia going straight to the website.
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Posted by James Murray at 12:03 PM
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In Categories News and Media
iPad demand creates new market in insurance
January 12, 2012
One of the continuing trends witnessed this Christmas was the demand for Apple products. iPods, iPads and iPhones were sold in their millions in the UK and because the items themselves are highly sought after and quite valuable, a new market has effectively been created in the insurance of Apple gadgets.
Mobile phone insurance is by no means a new thing, but people are certainly more conscious about getting their mobiles insured now than ever before, and in particular it is the Apple iPhones that generate the most mobile insurance search queries online. You can see from the graph below how mobile insurance searches spiked dramatically in the first week of October last year, which coincided with the launch of the iPhone 4S.
No other handset can affect mobile insurance search behaviour as the iPhone can; in the 12 weeks ending 31 December 2011 an astonishing 28% of all mobile phone insurance searches included the word ‘iphone’. This Christmas the iPad was the most searched for Apple product online, which in turn saw demand for iPad insurance increase. In the last week of December searches for iPad insurance doubled, with the majority of clicks coming from organic links.
Over the course of December, the most popular iPad insurance term was ‘ipad insurance’ (which accounted for 35% of searches and attracted a paid rate of 26%). As with lots of niche products, iPad insurance presents plenty of opportunity for aspiring PPC campaigns. For example the term ‘i pad insurance’ (with a space in between the ‘i’ and the ‘pad’) had a much lower search volume than ‘ipad insurance’ but none of the clicks came from paid links, which represents a quick win for companies wanting to bid and rank for that term.
Currently none of the big insurance providers are jumping on this growing trend of insuring gadgets. Just looking at the downstream traffic from all searches for iPad insurance in the four weeks ending 31 December 2011 the biggest recipient was www.ipadinsuranceuk.co.uk, followed by Protect your Bubble, a specialist gadget insurer. This represents a huge opportunity for insurers in a rapidly growing niche market.
Interestingly the iPad’s main market competitor, the Amazon Kindle hasn’t attracted nearly the same kind of demand for insurance search terms. In terms of search volume, iPad insurance receives more than five times as many clicks as Kindle insurance. This may be due to the different price points of the two gadgets – the iPad 2 retails from £399 whereas the cheapest Kindle is now just £89. However, this could equally be a product of the Apple consumer. A lot of people who buy Apple products become huge brand evangelists, and as such it is understandable that they would want to protect their valuable possessions against theft or damage.
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Posted by James Murray at 11:18 AM
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In Categories Appliances and Electronics | Business and Finance
YouTube accounts for 1 in 4 visits to social networks
January 11, 2012
YouTube had its biggest ever month of traffic as 606 million UK Internet visits went to the website in December 2011. YouTube now accounts for 1 in every 4 visits to a social network in the UK and 1 in every 30 visits online.
December was a big month for video sites with over 936 million visits to websites like YouTube and BBC iPlayer. Last week we blogged about the big Christmas hits on catch-up TV but YouTube was very much at the forefront of online video in December accounting for 65% of all visits to video websites that month.
Over the last 12 months YouTube has seen some pretty phenomenal growth. In our Search and Social analysis YouTube was consistently one of the fastest moving websites within the Experian Hitwise Social Networking and Forums category and had six consecutive months as the fastest growing social site in the UK. Total visits to YouTube increased by 45% between December 2010 and December 2011 going up from 417 million visits to 606 million visits.
In the latest December statistics YouTube accounted for 25% of all visits to social networks, up from 23.61% in November. Year-on-year YouTube’s growth of total visits has meant that its market share of visits to social networks has increased by 7 percentage points from nearly 18% to 25%.
In the search market Google was dominant again with nearly 92% of all UK Internet searches conducted in December. This year retailers were relying more on search traffic than last December, with 43% of all visits going to retail websites coming from a search engine.
You can find out more about the latest Search and Social data by reading our press release. We will also be publishing our Christmas 2011 Review later this week so look out for that. In the meantime you can follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.
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Posted by James Murray at 12:16 PM
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In Categories Search | Social Networks
2011 Online: the year in review
December 30, 2011
Another year has flown by and in time-honoured Hitwise tradition it falls to me to review the highlights of 2011. This year we have seen an astonishing 228 billion UK Internet visits to websites and 28 billion hours spent online. So, here’s my pick of the blog posts from 2011.
January
After the gorging excesses of Christmas the UK made its resolutions to get fit and give up smoking. We started the year with a look at visits to dieting websites as well as the changing search behaviours around quitting smoking. Online fashion retailer ASOS announced it was going to launch a Facebook store, one of the first of its kind and Amazon revealed that it sells more ebooks than paperbacks, prompting us to look at the most popular ebooks searched for online.
February
February was the month of revolution and we looked at how the protests in Egypt were affecting the Egyptian tourism industry. In sport Fernando Torres made his ill-fated move to Chelsea and the Super Bowl became bigger than the Six Nations online. Sky launched Sky Atlantic and we also wrote a blog about leveraging the marketing power of Facebook.
March
2011 was a big year for rewards websites and in particular social shopping sites like Groupon and Living Social. Social media continued to grow online and became the most visited online category whilst Rebecca Black’s song Friday went viral on YouTube. March also saw the first budget announcements from new Chancellor George Osborne as well as the 2011 Census.
April
April saw the launch of the Angry Birds shop online which rocketed to the top of the toy retailers list. We wrote a follow up blog on the changing facets of social shopping and in travel First Choice switched its strategy to only sell all-inclusive holidays. The Royal Wedding prompted a flurry of searches for wedding cakes and tickets went on sale for the London 2012 Olympics which caused Ticketmaster to go into meltdown.
May
In May the online population voted YES to AV although the actual vote resulted in a resounding rejection of the alternative vote system. Twitter had its biggest ever day of traffic as rumours started spreading around the celebrities involved with super-injunctions and we launched the first issue of our Automotive Quarterly report. Fresh eruptions from Icelandic volcanoes also sent the Aviation industry in to panic as flights were grounded.
June
In June we celebrated Father’s Day with a look at how people were increasingly turning to personalised homemade gifts. Wimbledon served up an opportunity for retailers to sell 3D TVs as the BBC decided to broadcast the final from SW19 in 3D for the first time. We also did some analysis on the value of a Facebook fan coming to the conclusion that 1 fan = 20 additional visits to a typical retailer’s website over the course of a year.
July
July spelled the end of the road for the News of the World after the revelations of the phone hacking scandal were unearthed. This didn’t stop the British population cooing over pictures of Harper Seven Beckham however, as the new Beckham baby become the most searched for celebrity online and surprisingly also causing a spike in searches for ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from which the name Harper originated. We correctly predicted that Tom would win series 7 of The Apprentice and Google+ was launched so we did some top line analysis on Google’s latest social project.
August
In August YouTube firmly established itself as the third biggest website in the UK after Google and Facebook accounting for 1 in every 35 visits online. The London riots caused another massive spike in visits to Twitter as well as sending people online searching for home insurance. We also made our first predictions for Christmas retail including a look at the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle.
September
As summer began to fade into September we took a look at Back to School searches and we created some pretty travel infographics inspired by the great David McCandless and his book Information is Beautiful. We ran some analysis on how the UK spends its time online with social media emerging as the UK’s favourite online pastime. We also did some demographics analysis on attracting the right kind of fans on Facebook.
October
October brought the sad news of Steve Jobs’ death as the Apple co-founder succumbed to pancreatic cancer. We produced a white paper on online video and utilised our new YouTube Channel with a video that highlighted the top 10 online video facts. In property, Zoopla and Digital Property Group merged to tackle market leader Rightmove.
November
In November we started making our predictions for the top toys for Christmas which included the LeapPad Explorer. We added the Dashboards 2.0 function to our Competitive Intelligence tool and Apple became the second biggest retailer online. Delia Smith also emerged as the top celebrity chef for Christmas recipe searches.
December
December was very retail focused as we looked to Christmas shopping online. We kick-started the month with our 12 Insights of Christmas which proved very popular as we predicted what was going to happen over the festive period. Most importantly we correctly predicted that Cyber Monday would be the biggest pre-Christmas shopping day online, and that Boxing Day would be the biggest post-Christmas shopping day online. Outside of retail, MySpace dropped out of the top 10 social networks rankings for the first time ever and we made our predictions for what would happen in 2012.
Thanks for reading the blog this year and please keep coming back for the latest data updates. To all our Twitter followers thank you for your comments and sharing our content online. Have a cracking New Year and here’s to a great 2012!
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Posted by James Murray at 01:00 PM
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In Categories Appliances and Electronics | Automotive | Business and Finance | Celebrity | Charity | Christmas | Entertainment | Google | News and Media | Property | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social Networks | Sports | Travel | Twitter
