Live.com velocity

Interesting eye chart from Compete.com which shows the "velocity" of Live.com relative to google.com and yahoo.com.  For those of you who don't know, Live.com is Microsoft's internet search engine.

Compete.com describe velocity as:

Velocity is an effective way to measure the impact of planned (or unplanned) events, such as new advertising campaigns, product/service launches or general site growth. Simply choose an event date as the starting point to see how it has affected a site's Attention over time.

Since this metric is derived from time spent on a site, it can be used to assess the quality of traffic generated by the event/campaign.

For instance, Site X could drive up its People Count by buying a lot of pop-up ads across the Internet. However, most of these people may leave the site immediately. Use Velocity to understand how much more or less time people spent on the site, or their level of engagement. If a site can garner and sustain more of an individual's time it should generally be considered a good thing.

The other graph which is quite positive is the pages/visit where the useful content with Live Images and Live Maps is starting to come into its own:

What's the big deal? Ad revenue.  Jeremy Crane blogged about the importance of ad revenue to Google and Microsoft (and Yahoo) and how their recent acquisitions of DoubleClick (Google) and aQuantive (Microsoft) are so important.  This stat really threw me:

"Four out of five people online in June saw a DoubleClick ad and more than four out of five saw an Atlas ad. When you consider the total ad coverage associated with these two behemoths you essentially have coverage over the entire Internet Browser Population. Considering there we’re just over 174 million people online in the US in June, that’s a lot of eyeballs. If we start talking page views then we’re talking over 20 billion ads served to people in the US by Atlas and DoubleClick in June alone."

This all links into our Software + Service strategy and in Microsoft Partner land (where I work) we are just starting to articulate our S+S message to our partners and how they can "get in on the action" when it comes to the opportunity we will create.  Microsoft's strength over the years has been its Partner ecosystem and it's not something we'll forget how to leverage, but the game will change for Partners and it will be those who are best setup for change that will come out riding the wave.

To find out more about what Software + Service means it's worth checking out Ray Ozzie's speech to the financial analysts about our strategy in this area.

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