Last week Britney Spears made headlines with some unfortunate paparazzi photographs, and Internet users flocked online to search for the pictures: the share of searches for ‘britney spears’ increased by 930% for the week ending 12/2/06 vs. the previous week (week ending 11/25/06) and she ranked as the #5 search term out of the 1.3 million search terms Hitwise captured last week. More searches were performed last week for ‘britney spears’ than ‘mapquest’ or ‘craigslist,’ not to mention all the other keyword phrases people were using to find photographs of the unfortunate incidents that ranked just among the top 500 most popular terms. This puts her well ahead of new pal Paris Hilton and the newly single Pamela Anderson in Internet popularity. Last week searches for ‘pamela anderson’ increased by 235% percent and searches for ‘paris hilton’ were up 94%, but interest in these other blondes couldn’t come close to interest in the Britney debacle. As an aside, the share of searches for ‘craigslist’ was up 147% year over year (week ending 12/02/06 vs. week ending 12/03/06), but last week Britney captured a 60% greater share of searches than Craigslist.


Statistics are fun when we talk about celebrity searches, but what does this mean for online businesses? News sites are increasingly bidding on and optimizing for leading news and celebrity terms in order to attract users. Last week news sites received much of the traffic from searches for just Britney’s name, as you can see on the table below, but blogs and smaller websites received more of the traffic from the more specific search terms, and experienced significant increases in traffic.

The market share of visits to the Perez Hilton blog, which showed uncensored photographs of Britney, doubled for the week ending 12/2/06 versus 11/25/06. Celebrity blog sites The Superficial and Hollywood Tuna showed market share increases of 197% and 199% percent respectively in the same period. AOL site TMZ also captured a good share of the Britney traffic, but not as much as it received the previous week during the Michael Richards fiasco. Blogs have the advantage over news sites of being able to show uncensored material, and increased traffic could drive value for advertisers: Last week, Helio and iVillage, which advertise on Perez Hilton, received increased traffic from the site at the same time its visits doubled.