market research

Online polling tools - demo at widgets conference.

Global index chart - average internet usage profile. the average user:

- Has one internet session per day.
- Visits 70 different web sites per month.
- Looks at 20(!) pages per web site

There are 300M web pages that people actually visit (as opposed to the stale pages on the internet that no one looks at anymore).

Other interesting bits on related pages:

60B ad impressions delevered PER WEEK.

Most popular ad sizes:
Leaderboard (728x90) 25%
Medium Rectangle (300x250) 17%
Wide Skyscraper (160x600) 13%
Full Banner (468x60) 7%
Skyscraper (120x600) 5%

Redotting Chris - we've used this to survey Blue Dot users.

Quoted: SurveyMonkey.com is a revolutionary new tool to create and publish custom surveys in minutes, and then view results graphically and in real time.

Cool way to see what's "hot" in the last week (by increase in Alexa rank).

Quoted: The Top 10 Sites moving up or moving down in the traffic rankings, as measured by the change in the number of users visiting the site.

November data:

MySpace at 38B pages views

10% of traffic coming from University users.

Monthly unique visitors:
MySpace: 70M
Yahoo: 130M
Google: 108M
Ask: 54M
Amazon: 52M
Wal-Mart: 43M
NYT: 42M
Wikipedia: 39M
CNET: 31M
YouTube: 25M
Photobucket: 15M

Quoted: The difference lies in whether the online activity of college students, which represents nearly 15 million people, is included in the measurements – a critically important detail when measuring activity at MySpace.com, which is included in the Fox Interactive property,” Flanagan added. “Other research company reports claiming that Yahoo! had remained number one in page views did not include the important university segment. comScore is pleased to provide our clients with the unique ability to measure the full breadth of consumer activity online – including the activity of college students.”

July 2006 top 50 internet properties.

Interesting report on trends in internet traffic for the month of July. Claim that the whole internet audience in 170M users seems low to me. American only?

Unique Users:
Internet - 173M
eBay - 75M
MySpace - 54M
Amazon - 46M
NYT - 38M
Cnet - 30M
Wikipedia - 28M
CBS - 20M
ESPN - 17M
YouTube - 16M
Facebook - 14M

Watched this show on marketing tonight on PBS. Notice how much of the BS marketing consultants try to sell, is still being bought by advertisers ... but they seem to be growing more wary and looking to measurable commercial results, rather than settle for fuzzy "brand building".

Quoted: FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar "persuasion industries" of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Through sophisticated market research methods to better understand consumers and by turning to the little-understood techniques of public relations to make sure their messages come from sources we trust, marketers are crafting messages that resonate with an increasingly cynical public. In this documentary essay, correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (correspondent for FRONTLINE"s "The Merchants of Cool") also explores how the culture of marketing has come to shape the way Americans understand the world and themselves and how the techniques of the persuasion industries have migrated to politics, shaping the way our leaders formulate policy, influence public opinion, make decisions, and stay in power.

This is one of the more actionable articles I've found.

Quoted: This page offers tips on creating questionnaires and designing a successful survey research project.

This looks like a good site for market research on "e-business" and online marketing. Many of the articles are free.

Quoted: eMarketer provides e-business research, statistics, demographics and Internet usage data for online marketers. Products and services include market research reports and online database subscriptions.

For e.g. I found the following at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004219

Quoted: As of 2006, 63% of the US population ages 3 and older uses the Internet at least once per month, according to eMarketer. That amounts to 180 million people.