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Yahoo's OMG!, a new celebrity gossip site featuring windows into Hollywood's glamour grapevine, has surpassed an A-list of online gossip sites in a record rise to fame. The site, which was launched on the Yahoo's Homepage earlier this summer, exceeded 4M visitors for the month ended August 31st, beating out E! Online and TMZ.com, and bumping elbows with ultra hot People.com. On June 11, the new OMG logo appeared on a sidebar on Yahoo's Homepage, alongside an all-star lineup of Yahoo services. The prime placement on the world's most popular webpage garnered millions of visitors and cast OMG into a leading role for Tanzilla sightings and other paparazzi potshots. Last week, however, the OMG logo disappeared faster than you can say "secret pregnancy". An icon for Bix, the user-generated contest site which Yahoo acquired in September, 2006, now takes the prized spot. Yahoo previously announced plans to accessorize OMG with Bix, suggesting a scheduled transition, but how long can OMG last out of the white hot spotlight? Compete dug behind the scenes and found some very intriguing details. First, we discovered that 63% of OMG visitors didn't visit any other gossip sites, including less trafficked sites like perezhilton.com and thesuperficial.com, in the days since OMG launched. Compete also uncovered that the average OMG visitor returns less often and devotes far less Attention, about 3 – 4X less, to Brangelina and the gang then do visitors to incumbents like People, TMZ and E! Online. Unlike in the Spring of 2006, when TMZ ignited competition in online gossip after years of E! Online's flat-line growth, OMG's late entrance appears not to have grown America's overall Engagement with celebrities online. So while OMG has had a blockbuster summer, the curtain may be falling on its 15 minutes of fame…
 Source: Blog compete
MySpace has enjoyed a relatively long and successful run as in a red hot sector of the internet, but it may not be long before the site has to defend this title. Facebook, having gone through big changes about every three months for the past year, may have finally started to pull users away from the incumbent. Facebook has grown not only in member base, but also in member engagement, while MySpace has fallen dramatically on these same measures. 
- In terms of both monthly Attention and Page Views, MySpace has been the highest ranking site on the internet since early 2006.
- What it lacks in unique visitors, MySpace makes up for with intensity: people visit an average of 18 times per month, and stay for over 26 minutes.
- Facebook received 15.7 billion page views in August. This puts the site squarely in third place (across the internet) in terms of page views
- Since launching its application platform, Facebook attention has grown over 50%.
- Visitors to Facebook have been spending more time on the site, and visiting more frequently in August than in any other recent month.
There's still a substantial gap between traffic to these two social networks, but Facebook's growth trajectory, seemingly endless supply of 3rd party applications and multiple ways for members to engage one another makes it a serious threat to MySpace. But how does this engagement happen? Later on this week we'll take an in-depth look at Facebook usage…stay tuned. 
 Source: Blog compete
Just when you think the search market share game is getting exciting, in creeps the status quo. You may recall from June and July that MSN/Live was starting to shake things up quite a bit. MSN's Club.Live campaign actually seemed to be moving the needle for Live search market share even when you excluded Club.Live searches. Well I'm a little disappointed to say that in August it appears that Club.Live may have begun to wear on the fickle internet crowds. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not playing favorites here. I just happen to like change.  After two strong months of gains MSN/Live search market share lost nearly a point in August. The silver lining for Live Search is that despite market share losses, the actual number of queries being performed on Live increased nearly 3% from July to August. Google on the other hand gained nearly a point and for the first time garnering 2/3rds of internet web search queries in August. Google's query volumes ticked up over 3.5% month-over-month. Both Yahoo! and Ask remained essentially flat month-over-month despite both increasing query volumes slightly. So where do we stand …
- Google market share increased (I have a macro programmed for this text now) to its highest level yet with year-over-year gains in web search queries near 50%
- Yahoo! market share was flat despite a small increase in query volume
- MSN/Live market share ticked down but remained near year ago levels
- Ask market share held steady month-over-month but was down from August 2006
* Search market share includes web search only and is calculated based on unique queries within each session during the given month.
 Source: Blog compete
Obopay is the new way to send money… over your phone! This online company has designed a system for sending money via text message, your mobile phone's internet browser, or an application downloaded on your phone. Just sign up for your free account, wire some cash into your new "cell phone wallet" (i.e. an Obopay account), and you're good to go! So who's interested in Obopay? AT&T customers are 20% more likely to show interest in Obopay than total wireless customers at all four major carriers, whereas T-Mobile customers are 24% less likely to be interested in Obopay's services. We were surprised, though, that Verizon Wireless customers aren't showing as much interest in Obopay as customers of other carriers. Verizon Wireless is the only carrier that offers an Obopay application for their customers' phones (rather than requiring consumers to go through a web browser). The partnership between Obopay and Verizon Wireless began in mid-June, so perhaps a month isn't enough time to tip the scales of interest between wireless customers. It will be interesting to see if, in future months, Verizon Wireless customers are grabbing a larger share of cellular customer interest at Obopay's site.  It turns out that females are very interested in Obopay. When compared to the make-up of wireless customers at the four major carriers, females are 33% more likely to have visited the Obopay site. What makes Obopay so appealing for female cell phone users? One of the reasons Obopay gives for using their service is to send money to your kids at college. Perhaps Moms are picking up on this and helping to tip the scales female? Or maybe females are suddenly showing men up with their technical savviness? Obopay seems like a cool new way to make money more versatile, and certainly creates yet another way to incorporate your cell phone into your daily life. But will it take off, or remain just another cell phone fad? Obopay currently requires both the sender and receiver of wired money to have an Obopay account. The sender obviously can't send money without the account, but the receiver can't get the money without signing up for an account as well. Consider this: According to Wikipedia, the first fax machine was sold by one Giovanni Caselli in 1861. That's fantastic for Signore Caselli, but to where or to whom would the purchaser send a fax? Obopay's current account holders can send all the money they want, but will there be receiving accounts ready to access the money sent? 
 Source: Blog compete
In February, Citibank announced a partnership with Obopay to pilot the company's eponymous peer-to-peer mobile phone payment service. The two companies launched a pilot in Boston and Chicago this summer with some fanfare (free ice cream sandwiches!) We thought it would be interesting to see how well the partnership is performing in terms of driving new checking and savings account openings for Citi. The Citi website gets a lot of traffic, but the majority of that volume is from existing customers who are managing their accounts online. We wanted to look exclusively at those who did not log in – visitors to Citi who represented new checking and saving account opportunities. We segmented these Citi prospects into two mutually exclusive groups; the first group consisted of those prospects who visited only Citi and the second group was composed of prospects who visited both Obopay and Citi. The chart below shows the "engagement rate" for each segment, that is, what percent of prospects in each segment start an online checking or savings account application at Citi. What is clear is that prospects visiting both Obopay and Citi are engaging with online checking and savings account applications at Citi at a much higher rate. In fact, Citi prospects who have also visited Obopay are 2.7 times more likely to start an online application – a considerable lift over other prospects. Hoping to take advantage of some viral marketing, Obopay.com encourages current users to send invites to their friends and pays $5 for every outgoing invite. Compete observed that about 25% of Obopay's current users send out referrals each month. You may recall that PayPal gave new customers $10 back in its early days (later reduced to $5) and attracted 1 million sign-ups a month. So assuming each Obopay customer sends 2 referrals a month and half of invitees actually enroll, how long will I t take Obopay to cross the "1 million customers" threshold? About 18 months. Although the engagement numbers are encouraging, impact of the Citi partnership with Obopay has been limited so far because it has only been available in two cities. It will be interesting to see if the viral nature of mobile payments drives additional volume in the months to come. Should Citi decide to roll the service out to other areas, Compete will monitor the demographic make-up of these new prospects and determine whether the offering helps Citi attract a younger checking and savings account customer. Obopay just might be the right partnership for Citi, but we won't know for sure until the numbers tell us so. 
 Source: Blog compete
Facebook has been impressing more than just Compete over the past few months. As we reported on Tuesday, for the month of August, the social networking rising star is now ranked third in terms of pageviews, and may have started to finally pull users away from MySpace. But if Facebook was a novel, this domain level traffic would be the jacket; to get to the story you have to open it up…so here's chapter one. Because of the Facebook's design, it is essentially impossible to do anything as a non-member. While Facebook received over 26 million visitors in August, a little over 22 million end up signing in. The chart is a visual representation of the Activities that the Facebook community used in August. The size of each circle represents the share of total Facebook visitors who are involved in each activity, and the shade of color represents intensity of use (based on both visits per month and time per visit). For each activity, the number of monthly visitors, total number of visits and time spent during each visit is listed within each activity's circle. Of the 22 Million people who logged into Facebook in August, nearly 21 Million go on to check their profile or their friends. Beyond that, activities differ:
- 14 million people interacted with Facebook Applications in August.
- Applications are also highly engaging; capturing more time per session than any other activity on the site.
- Over 16 Million people browsed photos in August. On average, they viewed nearly 150 per month.
- Only 80,000 (or .3% of total active members) "poked" someone in August.
Facebook's story is far from over. With school back in session how will things change? What sort of implications will search indexing have on site growth, member privacy, and member engagement? We'll cover all this and more before we close this book. 
 Source: Blog compete
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