xtramsn split – the results appear for the first time

We are told in the NZHerald that Yahoo!xtra gets 4-500,000 UB’s a week and 12-14m page impressions.

Could we see the source for that information? Yahoo!xtra isn’t on NetRatings and so we have no evidence that this is true?

Let’s graph it, and I stress, these figures are not at all comparable – the Yahoo! number may as well be made up. I’ve taken the lower of Yahoo!s range for UB and PI.

The UB’s chart shows Yahoo!xtra as an also-ran in the media market, well behind MSN, Stuff and NZHerald. This is not the Yahoo! of the rest of the world.

Net Nielsen data, and Yahoo!xtra via NZHerald
They do better, thanks to email, with Page Impressions (the scale is reduced as Trade Me is so dominant). I’ve added the PI’s together for Yahoo and msn, so we can compare it to the next chart…

Net Nielsen data, and Yahoo!xtra via NZHerald

which is one of the last week’s of xtramsn:

Net Nielsen data

Back then xtramsn’s page impressions were 6.5% of Trade Me’s, 198.6% of Stuff’s, 227% of NZHerald’s and 404% of Air New Zealand’s. They were 164% of xtra’s page views.

Now the combined pageviews of msn.co.nz and Yahoo!xtra are 4.7% of Trade Me’s, 164.5% of Stuff’s, 150% of NZHeralds and 342% of Air New Zealand’s. Tellingly the combined pageviews have dropped to just 129% of xtra’s.

So by splitting into two xtramsn has lost market position against every major competitor

Leaving a trail….

A wannabe social networking site releases some research (from the UK’s yougov, who ran some panels), and before you know it the WSJ, NET, and SMH are commenting on the perils of releasing too much information on the net. Apparently job seekers get Googled, and if you have a criminal record or drank too much at university then evidence may appear online.

No really?

It marks an interesting change of culture though, with the WSJ believing that norms will change, and drunken party photos will be ok for HR folk and voters.

I disagree.

While we can still  have wild times at university, a little discretion will pay dividends later in life.  That means that photos of you drunk and having fun are ok, but photos of you drunk and having fun with  sheep (or illegal substances) are not.

Indeed we all should be actively managing our profiles on the internet, right from the start. This means thinking before putting our name to something, whether it is a Myspace friend list of someone unsavory, or a rant about the politics of the day. Think – how will it look 10 or 30 years down the line?

Recent Fairfax developements

I cannot talk about these things much, but….

We at Fairfax signed a deal with TVNZ to use their video content. Stuff had a deal with TV3 that lapsed last year, and of course TV3 is now tied up heavily with msn.co.nz.
RugbyHeaven.co.nz will launch soonish, and we managed to bring across Marc Hinton and Duncan Johnstone from Yahoo!xtra/rugby, where they have been writing fantastic rugby content for some years.

and as you could imagine, there is plenty of other stuff going on at Stuff.  Bernard Hickey has officially taken the reins at Stuff now, and I look forward to watching what happens in the future. It is a great team, and the editorial product is second to none.

How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with..

Actually that’s a title of an entry of Marc Andreessen‘s new blog. He’s the sort of guy that gets 48,562 pageviews in his first 4.5 days of blogging. I imagine Sam Morgan would get a similar (NZ scaled) response if he started blogging.

I agree with Marc’s criteria for hiring good people – (Intelligence,) Drive, Curiosity and Ethics.

They are in fact curiously similar to the McKinsey criteria of

– problem solving
– drive and aspiration
– personal impact
– leadership skills

It is so much more fun to work with smart, motivated and curious people. These sort of folk we often call ‘interesting’.

I’ve also long been a fan of a very strong ethics acid test – any whiff of dodgy ethics and I really don’t want anything to do with an employer or potential employee. I’ve walked (and ran) away from that sort of situation before.

Trade Me and Fairfax are incredibly ethical places, and it shows in the sort of people that work there and how they are treated. It also shows in the results.

Andreesson’s recommended hiring process is also good (he does tend to go on a little, but it is early days for his blog). Here’s his list:

Have a written hiring process
Use a basic skills test
Write down interview questions
Pay attention to the little things in the interview
Pay attention to little things in reference checks
Don’t be afraid to admit and deal with hiring mistakes
Pay top performers really well

not much to disagree with there. I would add to the list:

Use networks (especially current staff) to find interview candidates
Use a consistent interview process:

-Use behavioral questions and drill down to find evidence
-Use consulting-style cases (I used “value Trade Me” for a while)
-Use multiple rounds, and 1-1 interviews
-Put them in front of a computer and observe how they work while challenging them with increasingly difficult tasks.
-Help the interviewee demonstrate they have what it takes, not the reverse

Hire for quality – even if you don’t have a job for them yet
Call references, but not the ones on the c.v.
and, again, pay top performers really well

Shill bidder cops a $US475,000 fine

It’s good to see eBay fraud dealt with in the USA – though the scale of it boggles the mind. A jewellery company placed an amazing 232,000 ‘shill’ bids on their own auctions in just a year…

…and got caught. That’s the problem with committing fraud online – you leave a very easy trail to follow.

eBay took the case to the New York attorney general, but how on earth did they let the activity go on for so long?

In New Zealand Trade Me reacts to this sort of thing at a zero level of tolerance – just one more reason why their stats are so much better than eBay’s.

The NZMusic fade to black

It’s sad to see the gradual demise of NZMusic.com – a site that once had a commanding grip on the music scene in New Zealand.

Net Nielsen data

Traffic has almost totally dried up over the last two years to just 13% of record UB’s and PI’s.

Net Nielsen data

The forum, once the place for musos and fans, has been deserted, with the last posts hours or days ago. With a legacy of over 250,000 posts on the site, it’s a virtual ghost town.

NZMusic.com

Founder Aaron Dustin appears to have moved on, and the traffic and attention has moved to a little site called MySpace. If NZMusic had been up for it, this was their space to grab.

Maestro and Triplejump – more work required

Rod Drury points us to start ups Maestro and Triplejump. Good to see these new sites up and running – well done…

But please – go buy the book “Don’t make me think” and apply the learning to your websites:

Let’s start with Maestro:

maestro

now – quickly. What are you meant to do? What does the website tell you to do?

All I can see is to click on the “Read the blog now” button, but then I get confused, because surely the site wants me to buy some sort of financial product….

Now let’s look at Triplejump:

triplejump

Again – what are we meant to do? What should we click?

I’ve looked for a while and I still don’t know.

Neither of these sites is driving me to action, and both are making me think. It seems they have a good product, and a few simple changes (e.g. a big button saying “save on your insurance”) could pay dividends.

eCommerce is slow to launch in Australia

Right on cue (after the last post graphically showing the lack of a non-Trade Me eCommerce industry) comes a quote from the head of eBay Australia lamenting the same issue in Australia:

eBay Tells Retailers To Focus On Online Operations

“Major Australian retailers are falling behind their counterparts in other markets in the area of using the internet to boost sales. Simon Smith, eBay Australia’s MD, said the country’s largest retail operators had failed to embrace the internet the way comparable companies in the US and UK had, saying “I think they feel protected by the fact that 70% of Australians live within half-an-hour of a Westfield and that most Australian retailers tend to be national retailers.”

Same symptom here in New Zealand perhaps, along with the lousy boradband and lack of critical mass for market size.

“According to recent research from research firm Forrester, Internet sales represented only 9% of all non-grocery retail spending in Australia in 2006.

That’s a huge number – equivalent to NZ$3 to $4.7 billion in New Zealand terms (depending upon whether you call Motor vehicle retailing “retail spending” or not). Even given that AirNZ will do $1bn of spend, we would fall well short of those numbers.

eBay now claims five million Australian members from a worldwide base of 220 million users.”

While Trade Me has 1.66m active members, or about 40.5% of the NZ population – versus under 24% for the eBay Australia equivalent.

NZ Retail stats: How is Ferrit doing?

I’ve updated the New Zealand Retail site daily stats referred to in a previous post. Once again it is Nielsen NetRatings data, for domestic traffic.

First and foremost- Trade Me is still the only online retailer in New Zealand (aside from airlines)

Net Nielsen data

Let’s look at that by hours spent on site – this is Unique Browsers x Frequency x Avg Session duration, and is measured in hours per day. Trade Me received over 80,000 hours of browsing time in the last 10 days measured, while Ferrit received just 185.

Net Nielsen data

But the news is not all bad for Ferrit – traffic recently has picked up.

Net Nielsen data

That’s come from an increase in the number of unique browsers to Ferrit, probably from recent ad campaigns.

Net Nielsen data

Those UB’s have led to rising Page Impressions.

Net Nielsen data

but that increase in Page Impressions has not matched Trade Me’s natural PI growth rate.

Net Nielsen data

While Ferrit’s Page Impressions per Unique Browser has actually fallen since launch, as shown in this log scale chart. Time per page has risen by about 10% though.

Net Nielsen data