Key Observations (Winners list):

• The Emergence of Content Sharing: 5 of the top 10 gainers having something to do with sharing content (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg).
• Traffic to Facebook.com has increased by 14.6M, but hold on…traffic to MySpace.com has also increased by 10.2M during the same time period.
• AdultFriendFinder.com continues to thrive with nearly 24M unique visitors (up 8.8M this year), but look out AFF, Fling.com is catching up with you quickly. Fling has gained a whopping 17.4M visitors in the past 12 months to reach 18.7M unique visitors in September.
• Rebranding of Cingular to AT&T helped out ATT.com. All Cingular.com traffic is now channeled to wireless.att.com
• Digg has been growing faster than Facebook!

Biggest gainers:	Sept ‘07 Unique Visitors	Sept ‘06	Change
1. youtube.com	47,417,527	25,860,510	21,557,017
2. flickr.com	25,278,501	7,382,573	17,895,929
3. fling.com	18,702,338	1,284,273	17,418,065
4. wikipedia.org	51,648,465	35,650,551	15,997,914
5. digg.com	18,401,139	2,854,646	15,546,493
6. google.com	124,544,834	109,080,418	15,464,416
7. att.com	17,984,849	3,221,543	14,763,306
8. facebook.com	24,211,448	9,545,359	14,666,089
9. turn.com	14,296,976	628,718	13,668,258
10. yahoo.com	130,078,549	116,961,340	13,117,209

 

Key Observations (Losers list):

• Traffic declined to only 8 domains in the Top 50 (Sept ‘07).
• Two Amazon properties on the list - IMDB.com and Amazon.com
• Two Microsoft properties on the list - Passport.net and MSN.com. My guess is that most of their lost traffic went to Live.com, MSN’s new portal. Live.com is up 10.2M unique visitors during the same time period.

Biggest losers:	Sept ‘07 Unique Visitors	Sept ‘06	Change
1. aol.com	62,201,981	72,859,584	(10,657,602)
2. passport.net	16,605,856	23,056,010	(6,450,155)
3. msn.com	72,402,712	78,701,909	(6,299,197)
4. geocities.com	16,086,159	20,300,659	(4,214,500)
5. amazon.com	42,420,889	45,417,807	(2,996,918)
6. weather.com	16,002,964	18,709,799	(2,706,835)
7. expedia.com	13,564,006	14,087,085	(523,079)
8. imdb.com	16,390,522	16,705,447	(314,925)

DATA Released by Compete.com you can find it here

StumbleUpon gets integrated into Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Flickr and MORE!

StumbleUpon, a fun Web discovery service, is getting a new feature, SearchReviews, that will take it beyond its historic role of hyperefficient time-waster. It could make it an integral part of the day-to-day browsing experience. SearchReviews pushes StumbleUpon ratings and other information into the search results pages on major search engines and content sites like Wikipedia, Google Reader, Flickr, and YouTube.

Users who run the StumbleUpon toolbar will now see little icons after search results on these sites that show them how popular a site is in the StumbleUpon community, the number of thumbs-up ratings it has, and who of their friends has rated the page.

 

The new SearchReviews features inserts StumbleUpon icons in your search engine.

It changes the way you look at search results pages. Now, instead of just looking at a sea of links in descending order based on what your search site thinks is most important, you also do a quick visual scan of the results for little StumbleUpon icons that indicate that actual humans have marked the page as worthwhile. If you happen across a site that a friend has flagged, you'll have an even better indication that the site is something that you'll want to check out.

If a page comes up in a results page that you've already flagged, you'll also see that rating (thumbs-up or -down) in the list of icons, reminding you of your own opinion of the page.

 

Other sites that get the SearchReviews feature: Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube.

This is better than the social search that Hakia offers, for a few reasons. Most importantly, it doesn't require you to change your search engine. The new StumbleUpon icons show up on the search pages and sites you're already used to. And like Hakia, StumbleUpon will link you to discussion pages, but unlike Hakia, you get other social data such as the list of users who liked the page, so you can see what else they also liked.

This new feature makes the StumbleUpon social network much more valuable, so StumbleUpon is also making it easier to add friends from your other networks to it: You can import your friend lists from popular online e-mail services, as well as from Facebook. The service is also getting an Outlook contacts importer as part of this update.

Ironically, while SearchReviews is being integrated in 11 high-traffic sites, it's not going to show up on its parent site, eBay. I got two reasons for this from Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon's chief architect. First, he said, eBay items are "temporal," and StumbleUpon is more about bookmarking long-lived Web pages. Second, the 18-person StumbleUpon team couldn't handle customer support for eBay's giant user base if eBay were to actively promote the service.

For future releases, the team is looking at a completely general version of SearchReviews that could evaluate (and display ratings for) every Web link on a page.

 

Turn on these options to enable SearchReviews

StumbleUpon makes money by selling sponsored Stumbles. The new SearchReviews feature completely bypasses the ad engine of StumbleUpon, so it won't be a direct revenue generator. However, since it makes the entire service more valuable, it could drive more users to adopt StumbleUpon, and encourage current registered users to use it more. Personally, I uninstalled the StumbleUpon toolbar months ago, but I'm turning it back on so I can use this new feature.
 

eBay Launches Social Networks for shopping...

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The most extensive list and resource for learning and perfecting copyrighting.

Blues icon B.B. King was once asked how he found his heart-warming, bone-chilling sound. "It's simple," he said. "I only steal from the best."

After publishing more than 2 million words — online and print — we're convinced that King was right. To become a good writer, one must first be a studious reader. (How else will you know whom to steal, er, borrow from?) So, in that spirit, we've compiled a list of some of GrokDotCom's favorite Web copy resources in hopes that copywriters everywhere will steal the best tips from our colleagues, friends, and staff. Enjoy!

Writing Headlines

1.) "Headlines: Do You Really Need 200 to Land a Good One?" — Attversumption.com

2.) "Are Your Headlines Missing These Precise Psychological Triggers?" — Ezine @rticles

3.) "Top 10 Ideas for Testing Your Headlines" — GrokDotCom

Readability

4.) "Nobody Reads Web Pages — But Everybody Engages Websites" — American Small Business

5.) "The Secret of Writing to be Read" — Seth Godin

6.) "People Really Do Read Online — Who Knew?" — Marketing Interactions

7.) "Fight the Bull" — Bullfighter software helps to eliminate jargon from web copy

Customer-focused Copy

8.) Test your customer-focus ratio with Future Now's 'We-We' Monitor.

Copywriting Techniques

9.) "Six Types of Words That You Should Axe in Business Writing" — Bizcovering

10.) "Going for Broca: Show Don't Tell in Action" — GrokDotCom

11.) "Time vs. Money" — GrokDotCom

12.) "What is Substance?" — GrokDotCom

13.) "Style vs. Substance" — GrokDotCom

14.) "Pain vs. Gain" — GrokDotCom

15.) "Intellect vs. Emotion" — GrokDotCom

16.) "Emotional Perspective Redux" — GrokDotCom

17.) "You Ain't All That! — A Marketing Copy Autopsy" — GrokDotCom

Trust & Relationship Building

18.) "Transparent Marketing: How to Earn the Trust of a Skeptical Consumer" — Marketing Experiments Journal

19.) "Inspiring Online Credibility" (a three-part series) — GrokDotCom

20.) "Screencast: Building Trust & Credibility Online" — GrokDotCom

Email Marketing

21.) Retail Email blog

22.) MailChimp resources center

23.) GravityMail — keeps your emails and newsletters from getting junked by sp@m blockers

24.) SpamAssassin — Open-source spam filter

Copywriting Blogs & Resources

25.) Copyblogger — Brian Clark

26.) The Copywriter Underground – Tom Chandler

27.) Grammar Girl — Mignon Fogarty

28.) ChrisG — Chris Garrett

29.) ProBlogger — Darren Rowse

30.) Attversumption.com (aka SpiderSecret.com) — Sean D'Souza

31.) WebInkNow — David Meerman Scott

32.) Visual Thesaurus

33.) Word Spy

Transcription Services

34.) SpeakWrite

35.) Casting Words

36.) AccuConference — Record interviews and conference calls, download them as MP3 files, and even have them transcribed for an extra fee. Great for podcast interviews, content planning and tutorials.

Copywriters

37.) Jack Forde

38.) Cynthia Williamson

39.) David Garfinke

40.) Chuck McKay

41.) Bob Bly

42.) Tim Miles

Public Relations

43.) "Podcast: David Meerman Scott on the New Rules of Marketing & PR" (a two-part interview on how to make the most of multi-channel public relations) — GrokDotCom

Blogging

44.) "Blogging for Beginners" — ProBlogger (Whether you're starting a blog or just thinking about it, this is the place to be. A great collection of must-read how-to posts from Darren Rowse.)

45.) "5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang" — Copyblogger (Finesse tips from Brian Clark.)

46.) "Write a Review — Rediscover Your Blogging Groove" — ProBlogger

47.) "How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic — The Ultimate Guide" — Copyblogger

48.) "The Two Most Important Words in Blogging" — Copyblogger

49.) "Lessons in Corporate Blogging" — Nicholas Carr for BusinessWeek

"If you have an hour, will you not improve that hour, instead of idling it away?"

- Quoted from Lord Chesterfield.