Season seven of American Idol started with lots of buzz and now we are almost ready crown our next Idol. But before we gear up for next week’s finale, let’s see who is buzzing more in the online world. Starting on March 9th, after the selection of the final twelve contestants, we see that a steady growth in search activity for David Cook during the nine week period with two spikes in between. Looking closely at the data for those two weeks, I found that a lot of the search followed his performance of “Billie Jean” on March 25th and “You Will Always be My Baby” on April 15th. On the other hand the search trend is pretty uneven for David Archuleta. The data is consistent with the fact that David C. started as a dark horse but eventually proved himself to be a strong contender, which might have continuously increased interest in him. Whereas, David A. started as the one to beat from early in the season, and continued to maintain his stature with some minor faux pas here and there. This might explain the initial interest in him, which eventually could have declined because of the predictably of his performance onstage, and even the occasional buzz surrounding his father was not enough to stir things up.

Now that we have seen David C. emerging as a favorite among the online community, it would be interesting to see if this is true among all age groups. Since David C is eight years older than David A, does that mean his fans are also adults? The data shows this is indeed the case, where we see David A.’s fans are mostly young, below 24 and David C.’s fans are mostly above 24.

Now, does the recent lead for David C. in online searches imply that he is going to be a sure winner? Not necessarily. A quick look at past years’ search trends will support this view. We see that the search trend for Blake Lewis lies above the trend for Jordin Sparks for almost the entire period with significant increase in later periods, but we all know how it ended. Interestingly, overall the search trends lie much below this year, which is not surprising; given that last season was one of the worst so far.

Conversely, this season both contestants are undoubtedly talented, thus the verdict can go either way. Although personally, neither of were my pick (Michael Johns was my favorite), I feel that David Archuleta is going to win. Having said that, I have no doubt that post-AI, David C will be successful; however, I am not so sure about David A. Even if he wins, since he is just 17, a lot depends on how he evolves as an artist.

But whatever the outcome will be, if our previous seasons have taught us anything, it is that winning the title does not mean much. We all know where season 5 contestant Chris Daughtry is today, but does anyone know where the season 5 Idol is?

PS. Stay tuned for a post-AI blog.

Twitter has made headlines for some amazingly powerful stuff lately; breaking the news of recent China’s earthquake; partnering with MySpace for it’s “data availability” project; even helping a student get out of jail! All of these speak to the growing popularity of Twitter, and also help to explain it’s recent scaling issues. But how big is twitter, who uses it and how?

Growth a tween would be proud of.

In the past few months, Twitter has grown rapidly. In terms of U.S. visitors, Compete has seen Twitter traffic nearly double from February to April, currently attracting nearly 1.2 million people per month. Looking at Twitter’s Attention share helps to further illustrate how fast the service has grown.

The chart above shows Twitter’s share of daily attention for the past 180 days, and reveals some interesting patterns.

• In terms of time spent on site as a share of all time spent online, Twitter has grown dramatically - more than quadrupling over the period.
• Twitter is a weekday event – While its difficult to tell in the chart above, the valleys in the chart below coincide with the weekend, while the peaks represent weekdays. On any typical weekday, Twitter is receiving more than twice the attention as a weekend day.
• The weekday skewed tweet activity makes sense in the context of Lee Odden’s Twitter usage poll - which highlighted twitter users affinity for networking and sharing content through twitter.

Its fun to hang with the Y.M.T.A

Who are these 1.2 million visitors, and how intensely do they use the site? We segmented visitors by intensity of use, gender and age for the month of April to get a better idea. Generally, users skew young, male, and addicted to twitter.

The data above shows that nearly one quarter of all twitter visitors to the site are heavy users (6+ visits/month), and another 25% are light users (2-5 visits/month). It should be noted that the somewhat lenient definition of a “heavy” user was a result of the many ways user can connect to Twitter.

The gender and age breakdowns indicate that users skew young and male. These two charts are indexed to the U.S internet average, where “100” is the average.

• Twitter users are 10% more likely to be male than the average internet user. This skew is nearly identical across all three Usage groups.
• Twitter skews heavily towards the college/twenty-something crowd. Twitter attracts 18-24 year-olds at nearly twice the rate of an average U.S website.
• Splitting age demographics based on usage intensity shows that heavy users tend to skew older than visitors who only hit the site once a month. This could indicate that while the younger segments are more exploratory, the 25-44 year old segments have found more value in Twitter and started to ramp up usage.

Twitter may be growing like crazy but it’s yet to go mainstream. Interestingly, Twitter’s strategy of letting developers re-purpose its data may help the service reach the tipping point by making Twitter’s value more accessible. Check back next week to see how these twitter based sites (like twitterlocal and summize) are building a loyal base.

I was recently reading a press release published by mobile marketing company HipCricket that talked about the Hispanic segment leading the way in mobile data usage. It said that this segment was watching more videos, sending more photos, and using SMS more than the general population.

Some wireless companies have taken notice and are running specific media campaigns to reach this segment. For example, Sprint sponsors Colombian pop star Jaunes, running a multimedia campaign earlier this year that allowed fans on the Sprint network to watch video mobisodes on their Sprint device and download Juanes content like ringers, tracks, and screensavers.

Last week we used Compete’s Behavior match to look at the young adult segment, and this week I used it to see which music sites Hispanic Wireless Prospects over-index on versus the general internet browser population. Not surprisingly they mainly fell into two categories: music video sites and sites to download mobile musical content. By understanding the traffic makeup to these types of sites, Sprint (and other mobile marketers) can make their campaigns even more effective at reaching and engaging the target audience.

So, where are these Hispanic Wireless Prospects hanging out on the web?

• Jamster.com (Hispanic Wireless Prospects are 6x more likely to visit than IBP) Jamster offers content from around the world including music, mobile games, and original content made exclusively for mobile phones.
• Imeem.com (5.4x more likely to visit): A social network where millions of fans and artists discover new music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends.
• Veoh.com (4.7x more likely to visit): An Internet TV service that gives viewers the power to discover, watch, and personalize their online viewing experience.
• Rhapsody.com (3x more likely to visit): Rhapsody is a digital music service that lets you listen to whatever you want for a monthly fee or download tracks and albums at an online store.

For companies like Sprint who are trying to make a play for the Hispanic segment, these four sites may be worthwhile media buys for promoting Hispanic initiatives. But how do you decide which one is the best?

From a numbers perspective, it appears that Imeem.com and Veoh.com would be great sites to place a targeted ad trying to reach the Hispanic Wireless Prospects – they got lots of traffic, and visitors are spending more time and looking at more pages. Adios!

Dodge is in the midst of launching their new cross-over-utility vehicle, Journey, and is depending on more digital marketing than they ever have before. The Journey is a competitively priced mid-size crossover utility vehicle that Dodge is hoping will attract a high percentage of conquest customers to the brand.

Early in April, Dodge took over the homepage on AOL, Yahoo! and MSNBC advertising the Journey with a tie-in to their new corporate campaign. The period during the home page takeover drove internet attention for Dodge.com to near period highs.

Dodge.com’s attention over those days was driven by unique visitors to the Journey model page –peaking on April 11th at almost 50% of the sites total unique visitors.

So it appears the advertising worked, it drove traffic (increased unique visitors) and awareness (attention) of Journey. But was Dodge able to get the conquest prospects they were targeting?

Compete’s Behavior Match can help auto makers target a conquest audience with their advertising. By examining the density of competitive brand shoppers on those sites in the month prior to Dodge’s advertising, March of 2008, we can see which site might offer the best reach.

• MSNBC and AOL were both good sites for targeting competitive prospects, as they were more saturated with folks shopping competitive brands online than other sites.
• While yahoo.com had the largest number of people looking at all the brands, it indexed on par with the general population (98).
• By looking at the sites with the higher index, we see which sites were better locations for Journey to spend money. In this case, msnbc.com and aol.com had the richer vehicle shopping audience.

Targeting Journey advertising on msnbc.com and aol.com gave Dodge an opportunity to get the vehicle in front of competitive shoppers. If they are able to convert them into sales these are customers the brand will welcome with ”Open Arms.”

If any industry has felt the brunt of the internet as a disruptive technology, it’s the music industry, which has been dealt a heavy blow by the onset of digital music distribution. On the April 28, the RIAA again confirmed this state of affairs when reporting that CD sales, the mainstay of the business for the last 15 years, were down a whopping 20.5% in 2007. Then on May 2, a Federal Court ordered AOL, Real Networks and Yahoo! to pay $100M to music artists as back payment for streaming their music online, proving that it’s not just the Big Four labels who have been affected by this disruptive shift.

Apple, a technology company, has become the most powerful player, with sales of 2 billion songs last year. The iPod/iTunes combo, the default of cool in our culture, has freaked out the Big Four and sent traditional music retailers like Wal-Mart and web 1.0 giants like Amazon scrambling into digital music distribution. So far their nascent incursions have not had a big impact, despite offering DRM-free music and savings of a few pennies.

While Apple and other legal download options have somewhat offset declining CD sales, the industry carries far too much overhead from 60 years of jacked up prices to make the digital transition smoothly. Music buyers used to pay up to $18 for an album and rarely was every song a keeper, now they pay 99 cents a drink.

Moreover, many consumers don’t pay for music at any price. The chart below, based on Compete’s data on more than 1,000 music sites, shows how the most popular options for listening to music online are free.

Despite lawsuits against illegal download sites, the fastest growing category in online music last year was P2P downloads, which shot up 140%. Nearly ten years after Napster raged through college networks, online music piracy continues to grow.

Meanwhile, the largest category in online music in March, 2008 was streaming, which racked up 28M unique visitors. The portals have driven the category’s dominance for many years by plugging into their massive traffic bases. MySpace joined the top ranks in 2005.

Then in 2007, a new breed of Web 2.0 sites with sleek, bright graphics and deep search and social feature integration, began to spread virally through social networks and heavily-linked music blogs. The sites combine streaming music with community-based sharing (vs. the anonymous exchange at P2P download sites) and in doing so can skirt thorny legal download issues.

These social streaming communities have risen rapidly in popularity. iMeem recently overtook Yahoo! Music as the most popular streaming site on the web.

*The Hypem1500 presents aggregate traffic to the more than 1500 music blogs tracked by the Hype Machine, a popular blog aggregator. The Hype Machine itself is ranked separately from its network at #16.

Collectively, the social streaming communities are flattening out the curve of online music. Compared to a year ago, the distribution of unique visitors at the Top 25 Streaming sites has a more gradual drop-off and longer tail.

As the music industry seeks to reassemble in the wake of digital distribution, it should recognize social streaming communities as the fastest growing opportunity in its evolution.

Yesterday, a colleague of mine was searching keyword results on Compete.com and came across an interesting, albeit surprising finding. When searching for the keywords “pickup trucks” not one OEM appeared in the top 25 destination sites. That means that Ford, Chevy, GMC or any of the other more recent additions to this market, were not top destination sites for people searching for pickup trucks.

So what’s the deal? Based on the list it would appear that people are researching, and a lot. Among the top 25 destination sites were traditional 3rd party sites like KBB and Edmunds as well sites that offer reviews like consumersearch.com, rankingsandreviews.com and pickuptruck.com.

But are OEMs sitting back and waiting for the 3rd parties to drive people to their sites? Are they relying on their vehicles to drive traffic into the showroom and ignoring online efforts? Do they even know they aren’t making the top 25? They do now…