About the author and Hitwise

Here is Bill Tancer's bio on www.hitwise.com:

http://www.hitwise.com/who-we-are/bill-tancer.php

Here is the hitwise blog, which I thought was interesting reading:

http://weblogs.hitwise.com/index.html

Hitwise is owned by Experian, one of the credit rating companies. THAT is interesting.
http://www.hitwise.com/who-we-are/company-history.php

Looks like their "search" methodology is going to be trade secret, so we'll never know...

Questions from Group meeting on 2/24

We talked about the following points and questions during our meeting on 2/24:
- The author seems to be a subject matter expert.
- We'd like to know more about the data mining process and how the author obtains his information to document in the book.
- Does he have a personal relationship with certain ISPs and/or websites?
- Certain websites have counters for how many visitors see their site. Does the author obtain that informaiton somehow??

We also talked about how to access this blog and write to it. And...we discussed that we do not want the blog entries to be simply summaries of the chapters. Although a summary of the chapter will be nice to document in the blog (i.e. put one in), we also need to be looking at what Dr. Lohrke handed out to us at the beginning of the semester and focus on some of those aspects.

Don't be afraid to ask open ended questions in the blog. And don't be afraid to post to answer someone's question. But, in the end, we'll try to get all the questions answered for the presentation. OR...if we don't answer them...they will be good questions for our book review (i.e. "these are things that we wanted to know from reading the book, but weren't told").

Happy "Clicking" and Reading!!!

Chapter 1 - PPC: Porn, Pills and Casinos

To say the least, this chapter was an interesting way to start the book! As we all know the quick and dirty summary of the chapter tracks the habits of Internet users through porn, gambling, and perscription websites (though he spends an awful lot of time on porn).

Interesting facts I didn't know or think about:

• Online adult sector revenue is cited as high as $97 billion annually
• Porn consumers are hard to survey because no one really wants to give away their deep, dirty secret
• 40,000 top porn sites accounted for 10% of all Internet visits in August 2007, down from 16% in August 2005. Could this be that people aren't wanting their usage of porn sites to be tracked? Or, is the author right that certain social networking sites are replacing porn sites because people are meeting each other in person? [see theory page 25].
• Friday, then Saturday are the busiest porn traffic days; Thanksgiving is the least trafficked day-the author surmises that this is because there are too many family members around to get alone time
• 72.6% porn users are male
• U.S industries charge $10-15 for one Viagra pill; the pill can be manufactured for less than $2 a pill
• Viagra, Alli and Lexapro are the most search for drugs online

Other revelations brought out in chapter one:

• On what the author does for a living..."looking at anonymized and aggregate user behaviors for millions of U.S. Internet users" [19]. I for one am hoping he explains how he does this!
• Low and behold he says on page 31 he works for Hitwise and has for the past four years. Must research Hitwise.

Chapter Assignments

Chapter 1 - Erin
Chapter 2 - Melissa
Chapter 3 - Melanie
Chapter 4 - Jasmine
Chapter 5 - Erin
Chapter 6 - Melissa
Chapter 7 - Melanie
Chapter 8 - Jasmine
Chapter 9 - Erin
Chapter 10 - Melissa
Chapter 11 - Melanie
Chapter 12 - Jasmine
Chapter 13 - Erin

chapter assignments

Hi ladies. I hope your weekend is going great. Melissa, can you post the chapter assignments? I didn't write them all down because I thought we were going to post them. I can do my first post then. Thanks! Erin