11-14-08

Cats or Dogs: Which is the most popular on the web?

After Jemima Kiss pointed us in the direction of some live puppies yesterday, so began a quick conversation about cats and dogs and their respective popularity on the web.

Bobbie Johnson quickly stepped in proclaiming that cats are for nerds and making sure we’d seen i has a HOTDOG and FailDogs. Robin reminded us of Upside Down Dogs too and Jimbob was quick to defend the dog faith and come up with a cunning theory that somehow Cats = Mac and Dogs = PC, after my claim that there was a direct correlation between a love of cats and a love of technology.

Katy even went on to question the relative ‘social media worth’ of other animals like parrots and Iguanas, then Grant threw a random one in the mix reminding us of Oolong the rabbit – a former internet phenomenon that’s now in a heaven-like hutch looking down on all this nonsense.

Anyway, I suggested that the ultimate Cats V Dogs Web-Off should take place to settle this once and for all and have spent a bit of downtime this evening listening to this rather good Kitsune mix (Nice one Phil) and deploying some crude research tactics to get the ball rolling – What’s the most popular on the web? Dogs or Cats?

Well in all honesty I thought cats would win it hands down, given the HUGE popularity of things like LOLcats, ICHC, StuffOnMyCat etc. But I was wrong. After checking Google, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious and Technorati – it looks like in terms of sheer volume of mentions – the dogs have it with 6 to 1 wins.

Or do they? Every time dogs seem to beat cats, apart from when you get to the ultimate test of all – pure unfiltered Google results. As this is surely a measure of the whole web and everything on it (sort of) – I’m declaring cats as being the winners. Not that I’m *cough* biased or anything.

Here are the results, blow by blow.

(Oh and today there’s even been some anti-cat propaganda being floated around the web, in a bid to skew the real results)

Google Trends (Search Volume, all years): Dogs 1 : Cats 0

Twitter (Twist, last 30 days): Dogs 2: Cats 0

Technorati (Any authority, all mentions): Dogs 3 : Cats 0

Flickr Results (Keyword search): Dogs 4 : Cats 0

YouTube Results (Keyword search): Dogs 5 : Cats 0

Delicious Results (Tag search): Dogs 6 : Cats 0

Google Results (Total hits): Dogs 6 : Cats 1

08-21-08

Top Pages on Facebook (minus all the entertainment stuff)

No Man’s Blog published a list of the top Pages on Facebook today. So, I thought I’d pull out all the Pages from the top 100 that don’t involve celebrities, bands, musicians, TV shows or films and have a little poke around. The list is pretty interesting.

Top Pages on Facebook (Excluding celebrities, bands, musicians, TV shows, films or generic things)

1. (5) Apple Students 560,568
2. (9) Victoria’s Secret PINK 480,854
3. (13) Facebook 442,529
4. (15) Windows Live Messenger 427,058
5. (18) Top Gear 411,455
6. (32) YouTube 334,889
7. (36) Coca-Cola 297,015
8. (37) OREO cookies 296,506
9. (41) PostSecret 282,332
10. (43) adidas Originals 276,125
11. (49) FERRERO ROCHER 251,529
12. (58) Red Flavour Pringles 231,864
13. (66) NBA 218,873
14. (69) Ferrari 217,841
15. (70) MTV 217,688
16. (74) H&M 210,098
17. (88) Wikipedia 185,205
18. (89) Red Bull 185,072
19. (90) Mcdonalds 182,787
20. (99) Coke 179,346
21. (100) Playboy 178,558

(Number in brackets is where they come in the Top 100 including all of the above)

(Image credit/link to the Ferrero Rocher Page, number 49 overall)

That’s it. Just thought I’d share. Might revisit with some thoughts in the near future – am going to have a look at them all and work out what the VALUE is in being a fan, if any. Plus – I want to find out the extent to which the Pages are driven by the brand itself or its fans.

Let me know if you have any thoughts/experiences etc, or just want to point out I’ve missed one.

02-25-08

More stats charting rise of digital

Jemima Kiss lists out the latest ABCes for the main newspapers. No surprises that the numbers are up year on year across the board, but as she points out, very interesting that more and more so lots of traffic is from outside the UK. More fuel for the fire in my mind which tells me that to try and split digital comms activity into US, UK and so on is getting even more ridiculous. We need to think about (and do!) things differently, fast.

“Even given meteoric online readership trends, January’s results from the ABCe are remarkable. The Mail Online’s unique user numbers increased 165% year on year to 17,903,172. In the same period, Telegraph.co.uk increased 65% to 12,348,706; Sun Online grew to 13,322,535, up 40% from January 2007, and Times Online increased 39% to 15,087,130. Guardian.co.uk remained the highest traffic website with 19,708,711, a rise of 26% year on year”

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