Unique visitors to leading daily deal sites Groupon and LivingSocial.com grew by triple-digit rates between April 2010 and April 2011, according to analysis from Compete. Groupon still leads the way with nearly 24 million unique visitors for the month, increasing 5.4% month-over-month (MOM) and 655.8% year-over-year (YOY).
Living Social Has Much Higher MOM Growth Rate
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%, was six times greater than Groupon’s, and its YOY growth rate stands at 418.4%, which Compete says means LivingSocial.com is catching up quickly.
NYTimes.com Drops After Paywall
NYTimes.com’s unique visitor total dropped 20.4% MOM in April, and also lost 24.9% of its unique visitor traffic from a year earlier. April marked NYTimes.com’s first full month behind a paywall. Compete data shows traffic decreased across nearly all of NYTimes.com’s subdomains.
NYTimes.com Sports Blogs Still Grow
Despite a general decline in domain traffic, NYTimes.com sports blogs were interesting exceptions in April. For example, 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%, 142.4% and 44.5%, respectively.
Ustream.tv Gains 200 Ranking Spots
In April, traffic to video site Ustream.tv grew 46.6% for the month and 92.3% for the year). This helped the site shoot up more than 200 spots in Compete’s rankings, which Compete says is likely a result of the growing popularity of video sharing sites.
Top 10 Order Unchanged, Most Lose MOM Traffic
The order of top 10 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 monthly drops in unique visitors during April.
However, the rate of loss for most of these sites was relatively small, #9 live.com had the highest percentage drop in MOM unique visitors at -4.69%.
8 in Top 10 Gain YOY Traffic
While most of the top 10 sites lost MOM traffic, eight of them gained YOY traffic, several at significant rates. Number five bing.com had the highest YOY growth rate of 48.43%, followed by YouTube.com at 22.42%. Also experiencing double-digit unique visitor growth rates were #2 Facebook.com (13.33%) and #7 amazon.com (12.71%).
Meanwhile, top site Google lost 0.34% of its unique audience YOY, while #10 eBay.com lost a more substantial 10.04%.
Facebook Gains YOY Visitors in March 2011, Yahoo Loses
Between March 2010 and March 2011, #2 site Facebook grew its unique monthly visitor total by about 14.5%, while number #3 Yahoo lost about 1%, closely trailing with roughly 138 million unique visitors, according to previously analyzed Compete data. Going back to March 2009, Yahoo held second place and Facebook and YouTube were essentially tied for third place in unique visitors behind Google.
However, Facebook began a notable growth spurt in May 2009 that has since leveled off and restarted a couple of times, while Yahoo’s growth has been relatively flat and YouTube’s growth has also been less dramatic until recently.
Bing did not appear in Compete site tracking until April 2009 and did not reach fifth place until December 2010, displacing Amazon.com. Bing’s two most notable growth spurts have been substantial month-over-month jumps in unique visitor which occurred in June 2009, February and March 2010, September 2010 (followed by a dip in October), and March 2011.
