WILLIAM TANCER: So what we've learned from the recession in
monitoring our sample, and that experient hitwise we're
looking at a sample of 10 million internet users in the
US, 25 million worldwide and what they do every single day,
so this massive sample gives us incredible insight into
what people do online but, more importantly, how do
offline events affect what we do online and what does that
tell us about ourselves.
I'll give you an example of one of the really interesting
things that we saw in our data set somewhat counterintuitive.
We were doing a project with Forbes.
And we were looking at the most affluent segment in US
society and what they were doing online.
So we used a prism cluster, a group that was called the
upper crust. It was affluent in the US.
And we asked our data, what are they doing online?
We backed it up a year prior to the time we were doing the
analysis to August, 2007 going into August, 2008.
And we noticed that these most affluent internet users of the
top sites they visited were Schwab, Merrill Lynch, etrade,
all the brokerage sites, then sites like Google Finance,
Yahoo Finance, financial information sites.
That filled out almost the entire top 20.
We forwarded the data to September, 2008 when
everything went bad with the economy.
And what we noticed was all of those financial websites drop
to the bottom.
And what rose to the top was perezhilton.com, TMZ.com, all
the gossip sites, online game sites like pogo.
It was clear that this affluent segment of society
had decided to just put their head in the sand.
Things got so bad they didn't even want to
look at their portfolio.
And then as we progressed into 2009, they started to go back
to their portfolio.
But what we noticed was really interesting.
When we combined those users together and looked at their
search term traffic, they were searching on terms like how to
log into my brokerage account, how to find my account number,
how to find my password.
They'd been away so long they'd forgotten how to
actually get to their financial information.
It's that kind of learnings that really tells us something
about how the economy effects us.
If you ask somebody that same question on a survey, how's
the recession affected you?
Oftentimes, they'll answer in a way to put themselves in the
best possible light.
But if you look at their actual behavior, it tells a
much different story.
