Show me the money

I was looking through Netimperative this morning and saw a link to the Top 10 Financial Websites in the UK.

This data comes from the comScore Media Metrix series from September 2010. That sounds so, well, 2010 now doesn't it?

Anyway, the top 3 brands were moneysupermarket.com, BGL Group and confused.com.

Moneysupermarket.com were way out in the lead with over three million unique visitors that month. Like most of you I have seen a lot of advertising for moneysupermarket.com and also confused.com. The offline (can television ever have been accurately described as offline?) spend must have had a major impact on online traffic. I hadn't heard of BGL Group though. On closer inspection, one of their key brands is of course comparethemarket.com and traffic to that site, also benefitting from television advertising, must have boosted the BGL analytics considerably.

However, if I hadn't searched BGL more closely, would the comparethemarket.com brand have gained the visibility it deserved? I understand the need to group sites together for analysis but, assuming it is comparethemarket.com that is boosting BGL figures, wouldn't a straightforward brand listing of the top 10 financial sites have been more useful?

Perhaps I'm just a mere cat to the tigers who know what they're doing?

The inception of vuvuzelas

Following my post on Google's Zeitgeist report, I was interested to read the Netimperative piece on top tweets of 2010.

Even talking about 'top tweets' is itself a 'breaking phrase' or 'trending topic' as it would have been meaningless just a relatively short time ago. While the Gulf Oil spill dominates Twitter's charts, who would have thought that a word in common use such as 'inception' could take on an entirely new life becaue of the film. Great film though and loved the ending which, unsurprisingly, I didn't see coming!

Vuvuzela is, on the other hand, a word I'd never heard of until this summer's FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Couldn't even have guessed at the meaning of it, though the idea of it is permanently planted in my mind now. Probably could have guessed at England's underwhelming performance; a familiar nightmare squashing marketing dreams.

WPP revenues up in third quarter

Great to read in Netimperative this morning that WPP is reporting increased revenues for the third quarter of 2010.

It's also interesting to see that WPP's traditional advertising revenues have 'increased sharply' and that the company is cautiously optimistic about economic recovery. This is very much in line with the IPA's Q3 2010 Bellwether Report

It may be winter outside but

Russians are the heaviest social networkers on the planet.

This is according to a new study from Comscore, as reported in Netimperative today.

It seems that in August 2010 more than 74% of the Russian 'online population' visited at least one social networking site, ranking it top in terms of worldwide social networking engagement. Israel was second and the UK came fourth.

They've clearly discovered something to keep the cold out.