Q. What do these sites have in common?
http://construction.dealsonwheels.co.nz
http://surfcamsbop.co.nz
http://everybody.co.nz
http://clubbizarre.co.nz
A. They all won best of category awards at the hitwise award ceremony last night in Auckland.
First of all as a proviso there were a large number of great New Zealand websites showcased at the awards ceremony last night and it is great to see the industry coming together to celebrate success. Well done to Hitwise for organising this!
I want to drill down a little bit into the format of the awards and talk about how sites with house hold names like trademe, tvnz, nzherald and xtra were placed next to niche sites in thin categories with no differentiation.
“The data samples featured are from the Hitwise Online Competitive Intelligence Service, which bases its daily insights on the online usage and search behavior of more than 460 thousand Internet users in New Zealand.”
Loosely translated… Hitwise gets their data from buying Internet logs from ISP’s.
With Xtra and Trade Me getting in excess of 3 million unique user visits per month you must place hitwise as polling ~ 1/6 (maybe slightly more) of the total NZ internet users. As far as I’m aware some of the larger ISP’s (like Xtra) won’t sell their data to Hitwise which leads to an interesting trend. Call it the “hits from the niches of the long tail of internet users in New Zealand” ;).
All this said I personally had never heard or visted any of the sites I listed above… I was interested to check some of these out on Alexa to see where they ranked.
If you check Alexa for trademe.co.nz it places it as the 608th most popular site on the Internet (not bad!)… myspace.com for example comes in at number 6.
If you do the same check for muckmouth it places it as the 6,621,229th most popular site (wow!).
Trademe won the Auction section, Muckmouth won the Skateboarding and In-line Skating section. Together these sites were treated as equals at the awards but in reality they couldn’t be further apart!
All in all it was a good evening and I had a chance to chat with a number of interestign people. It was interesting to hear Chris Bayley BDM from Google speak at the event but come on “This year our keyword is jobs… we are opening a local office go to google and type in “google jobs” I would have thought that those were easy positions to fill!”.
Also another thing I was interested was how Google was gathering their customer quotes in the NZ market. I have been involved in this process myself… and was amused by this one that google produced in partnership with seek.
“Our traffic volume really skyrocketed once we placed site-targeted ads on YouTube.”
I guess this must be what they are talking about :).
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