Photo Credit: muffet, flickr.

Online flower marketers experienced another great Mother’s Day season.   Traffic to these sites grew by a healthy 7% from May 2010 to May 2011. 

The online flower business is a great example of how small, mom and pop businesses might have been given new life thanks to the web.  A flower shop in a drab storefront can be re-energized thanks to sites such as Teleflora.

As you can see, the sites are hugely dependent on the Valentine’s and Mother’s Day holidays.  Outside of that, traffic is respectable but significantly lower.

One of the more fascinating trends to look at over this past Mother’s Day holiday is the range of cross-shopping that went on across online flower marketing sites.

FTD.com, which has the most loyal followings and largest volumes in the competitive set, saw it’s customer cross-shopping rate double this year.  Meanwhile, sites such as Proflowers, BloomsToday and 1-800 Flowers saw an improvement in customer loyalty during the Mother’s Day flower buying season.

You have to wonder just how much more these sites can continue to grow in their current form.  The seasonality issue is challenging.  Right now, the sites are all focused on delivering fresh-cut flowers and other gifts to celebrate a special occasion.

As a recent homebuyer, I would not mind seeing more attention paid to outdoor plants and trees.  The products are subtly marketed on sites, but the marketing is not prominently displayed.  Imagine being able to log onto 1800flowers.com and create a “gift registry” of plants and trees that you wanted for a housewarming gift.  Friends could log on and arrange to have them delivered the same day as a housewarming celebration.

What about ordering vegetable plants for mom’s garden during the upcoming summer as a Mother’s Day gift?  The opportunities are endless out there to either increase the average order value and to shift consumer mindset from holidays and birthdays to other life events / purposes.

If you were still wondering why Netflix chose right now to split apart its unlimited DVD and streaming movie plans you need look no further than the just released Q2 financial report. According to the numbers, 75 percent of new subscribers were picking streaming only plans, while the total number of people on the hybrid DVD / streaming plan had actually decreased slightly, even as it breached 25 million subscribers worldwide. Of course, it did notice the intense backlash to the new rates, but predicts that after the hit of cancellations by the end of the third quarter it will still have 22 million people subscribed to streaming, 15 million total subscribed to DVDs, and about 12 million customers with both. Waiting on that Facebook integration? Don’t hold your breath, while the new features are due to launch soon in Canada and Latin America, it claims ambiguous wording in the Video Privacy Protection Act is holding things back domestically.

Other details include confirmation it will not look into purchasing Hulu Plus, and that it’s still negotiating a renewal of its deal with Starz. While the DVD business may have peaked, it’s not quite dead yet and Netflix indicated it will start marketing that feature again in the fourth quarter. Click the source link to paw through the PDF yourself, we’ll be keeping an ear tuned to the investor call later to find out exactly what the company’s executives are thinking.

Netflix rises to 25 million subscribers in Q2, thinks DVD business has already peaked originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jul 2011 16:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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36 years ago, Stephen Spielberg released Jaws during a traditionally quiet time of the year for the box office. It took in seven million dollars that opening weekend, and became the highest grossing film of all time until Star Wars debuted two years later. What followed was a new era of Hollywood, a period in which the summer quarter would account for 40 percent of the entire year’s box office earnings.

It also began the era of extreme (read: shameless) Hollywood marketing. On May 6, 2011 Thor was released, grossing 65 million dollars in its first weekend, and going on to earn more than 430 million dollars worldwide. We’re now deep into the summer blockbuster season.

So it got me wondering: are major studios using their mega movies to drive traffic to their websites?

Over the last two years, it looks like they’ve rarely gotten more than a million unique visitors in a month, with one glaring exception: Warner Brothers, which consistently gets over 2 million UVs a month. Half-Blood Prince was the second highest grossing film of 2009 behind movie mammoth Avatar, and Sherlock Holmes was at number 8. Because these films were driving WB’s traffic up so much, why weren’t other studios benefiting from their movies’ hype? Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time, but it did nothing for Fox’s UVs in December 2009. I realized that unlike WB, other studios don’t host their movies on subdomains—they set up new sites specifically for each movie.

So how do these sites stack up? Here are five of the six top grossing movies domestically this year. Each has a significant spike in daily reach right around their release date.

After just a few days, though, the sites become almost obsolete. Even The Hangover Part II, WB’s subdomain, falls to almost nothing. So then what is it keeping Warner Bros. at the top of the internet game? If it’s not blockbusters bringing in hundreds of millions, what is it?

Ellen DeGeneres’ show seems to drive about half of Warner Bros’ traffic.

I guess daytime TV is a blockbuster, too.

36 years ago, Stephen Spielberg released Jaws during a traditionally quiet time of the year for the box office. It took in seven million dollars that opening weekend, and became the highest grossing film of all time until Star Wars debuted two years later. What followed was a new era of Hollywood, a period in which the summer quarter would account for 40 percent of the entire year’s box office earnings.

It also began the era of extreme (read: shameless) Hollywood marketing. On May 6, 2011 Thor was released, grossing 65 million dollars in its first weekend, and going on to earn more than 430 million dollars worldwide. We’re now deep into the summer blockbuster season.

So it got me wondering: are major studios using their mega movies to drive traffic to their websites?

Over the last two years, it looks like they’ve rarely gotten more than a million unique visitors in a month, with one glaring exception: Warner Brothers, which consistently gets over 2 million UVs a month. Half-Blood Prince was the second highest grossing film of 2009 behind movie mammoth Avatar, and Sherlock Holmes was at number 8. Because these films were driving WB’s traffic up so much, why weren’t other studios benefiting from their movies’ hype? Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time, but it did nothing for Fox’s UVs in December 2009. I realized that unlike WB, other studios don’t host their movies on subdomains—they set up new sites specifically for each movie.

So how do these sites stack up? Here are five of the six top grossing movies domestically this year. Each has a significant spike in daily reach right around their release date.

After just a few days, though, the sites become almost obsolete. Even The Hangover Part II, WB’s subdomain, falls to almost nothing. So then what is it keeping Warner Bros. at the top of the internet game? If it’s not blockbusters bringing in hundreds of millions, what is it?

Ellen DeGeneres’ show seems to drive about half of Warner Bros’ traffic.

I guess daytime TV is a blockbuster, too.

NYTimes.com Declined in First Full Month With Paywall; Daily Deal Sites Continue to Thrive

BOSTON, MA–(Marketwire) - Compete, a Kantar Media company, today released its ranking of the top 50 websites for April 2011. Notable changes during the month included NYTimes.com, which saw unique visitors (UVs) decline during its first full month behind a paywall. Elsewhere on the list, daily deal sites thrived and video site Ustream.tv climbed more than 200 spots.

NYTimes.com Drops
NYTimes.com dropped 20.4 percent in April — a 24.9 percent decline from one year earlier; traffic decreased across nearly all of NYTimes.com’s subdomains. But NYTimes.com sports blogs were interesting exceptions in April: bats.blogs.nytimes.com (baseball), offthedribble.blogs.nytimes.com (basketball) and fifthdown.blogs.nytimes.com (football) increased traffic during the month, with month-over-month growth of 57.8 percent, 142.4 percent and 44.5 percent respectively. Readers, it seems, do not part as easily with their sports content.

Daily Deal Duel
As the race intensifies in the daily deals space, Groupon still leads the way with nearly 24 million UVs, increasing 5.4 percent M-O-M and 655.8 percent Y-O-Y. While LivingSocial.com only boasts half as many UVs at this point (roughly 11.5 million), its rate of growth for the month, 32.7 percent, was six-times greater than Groupon’s, and its Y-O-Y growth rate stands at 418.4 percent. It is catching up quickly.

One to Watch: Ustream.tv
In April, traffic to video site Ustream.tv grew 46.6 percent for the month (92.3 percent for the year). This helped the site shoot up more than 200 spots in Compete’s rankings, likely a result of the growing popularity of video sharing sites.

Top Ten Order Unchanged
The order of top ten sites remained unchanged in April and no site had a monthly traffic increase. While YouTube.com, ranked #4, stayed steady with no change, the other nine sites experienced drops in UVs during April.

Information regarding top 250 websites is drawn from the Compete PRO Enterprise edition on Compete.com. For more information on the enterprise offering, please contact Lauren Streisfeld at lstreisfeld@compete.com.

About Compete
Compete, a Kantar Media company, helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading advertisers, agencies and publishers rely on Compete’s products and services to create engaging online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns. Compete’s online panel — the largest in the industry — makes the web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people’s lives. Compete is located in Boston, MA, with offices throughout the U.S. For more information, please visit http://www.compete.com/.

About Kantar Media
Established in more than 50 countries, Kantar Media helps clients master the world’s multimedia momentum through analysis of print, radio, TV, internet, cinema, mobile, social media, and outdoor worldwide. Kantar Media offers a full range of media insights and audience measurement services through its global business sectors — Intelligence, Audiences, TGI and Custom. Kantar Media companies also include Compete, Cymfony and SRDS. Drawing upon the deepest expertise in the industry, Kantar Media tracks more than 3 million brands and delivers insight to more than 22,000 customers worldwide. www.KantarMediaNA.com/.

Seven in 10 (71%) marketers who use social media plan to increase their use of search engine optimization (SEO) in the near future, according to the “2011 Social Media Marketing Report” from SocialMedia Examiner. Furthermore, only 1% plan to decrease their use of SEO and 8% have no plans to utilize it, with 20% intending [...]<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/marketingcharts/~4/HkKTw3ENvIs" height="1" width="1"/>

LinkedIn is using the food truck phenomenon to publicize the launch of its new social news product, LinkedIn Today. In San Francisco and New York, LinkedIn has hired food trucks to give away coffee at locations around both cities.

The trucks, which you can follow on Twitter here, are emblazoned with advertisements for LinkedIn Today. Similar to the way that food trucks use Twitter to advertise their locations, the LinkedIn Today trucks will be posting their locations in San Francisco and New York, for the entire week on the account.

As we wrote in our initial coverage of the new product, LinkedIn Today delivers the top stories you need to know from your professional network and industry. The social news platform aggregates the most shared news from professionals in your network and allows you to sharestories with your network, specific professionals or on Twitter.

It looks like LinkedIn is ramping up its marketing efforts as it prepares for a public offering in the coming months. Last week, LinkedIn co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffman sent a personalized note to the network’s early users, thanking the first 100,000 and million users for supporting the network in its early days.

Social media is the top online marketing channel for small businesses after company websites

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