When in the course of human events people lose their jobs and their ways to pay for bags of random stuff and close-out smoke detectors, it behooves all good men to approach shopping site Woot.com with trepidation and distrust. The result? A steady decline in traffic from the post-holiday period of 2009 until about May 2009. Now, however, that is changing. If I can draw your attention to this graph, you’ll notice that yes, traffic is going up. Everything is going to be OK.
The general trend at Woot has been heading down since 2008 and seems to be rolling back up this summer. Obviously none of this stuff is set in stone and absolutely accurate but it’s fairly clear that Woot is turning around. But what does this mean?
Woot is obviously cyclical and is a direct pointer to the pocket change of a certain technical class who may be interested in lasers and walkie-talkies from China that didn’t sell. That said, one would assume said walkie-talkies would be more desirable when you’re in a job than when you’re out of one and/or when you have a little disposable income.
So to recap: Woot traffic took a dive in January and is slowly creeping up. This means it is more popular. As it is a shopping site I suspect the folks visiting aren’t like street urchins in some Victorian novel, their noses pressed up against the glass of a sweet shop dreaming of toffees and crumbles. They are actually shopping.
In short, while I wouldn’t stake my dissertation on this trend, Woot’s ability to predict a financial rebound should not be dismissed and that trend is going up. Also they’re selling a Bluetooth headset with case right now for $30 clams. Not a bad price.
[Thanks, Thomas!]
This link did not work for me a few minutes ago. Wondered if TC broke like Twitter for a minute…
Forget about the stats, what I love about Woot is its presentation of products. The daily copy that presents every other product there is simply innovative.
The podcasts are often hilarious too.
This article reminded me to check the woots tonight and I ended up buying CIV IV for the mac over at sellout.woot for $12.99
I’ll probably never even play it. I am such a sucker :(
It will be interesting to see if the Woot factor is in sync with the rest of the economy. I’m still skeptical… in previous years we had a ton of new products and services…. now it seems we’ve reached a plateau of sorts… and Apple is fizzling out. Who knows… maybe Windows 7 will save the day. ha!
Very good observation.
Lamest disguised commercial I’ve ever seen on TC…
please hand over your nerd license. fuckhead retard.
Does compete show only data from USA?
or the world?
Compete’s sample consists of a panel of approximately 2 million (the last time I checked) US internet users.
luuk
Makes a lot of sense. disposable income for random crap.
I dont see any logic, woot should be correlated (negatively) with the unemployment rate, not the GDP growth rate, there is a lag between GDP growth and the benifits reaching the masses.
My guess would be that woot has started buying traffic from Google or Bing and thats why there traffic is up.
P.S: today’s traffic will be up for sure, thanks to this pseudo Ad.
Oh John Biggs you post here such a very nice blog, as per the graph i come to know about the traffic and the way you describe for the graph is such an awesome..
I’d also recommend sitting in on one of Gian’s comScore eCommerce reports if you have the time.
He typically brings up things that are eye opening, such as how in Q1 2009 the 45+ 50,000 – 99,999 bracket’s spending is down 11%, where as 18-44 is up 15%.
But here’s the thing, Woot is a shopping site (niche as it may be), and all shopping sites and stores based in the US peak in December, drop off in January, and don’t start to rebound until August/September.
It’s called the effects of CHRISTMAS on the Retail cycle.
Woot has also been stepping up advertising a good bit I believe in that time period.
All of us at woot are big fans of statistics and analysis so quite the enjoyable post here – we publish sales stats lower down on the front page in real time for each woot offer so we can be mesmerized each morning looking at woot purchases by US state.
We do not pay much attention to 3rd party web metrics indicators such as Comcast, Alexa, and Compete. We do happen to share visitation data with Quantcast via a pixel beacon as this is useful to share with advertisers. When it was brought to my attention earlier this year that Compete showed a massive drop-off for us, I did reach out to them to explore. We did not see the drop-off internally, so we felt it was likely we were being correlated with more standard retail metrics or some other flaw. (we’ve noted correlation adjustments on Alexa over the years as well)
The biased correlation or data source was confirmed on June 16th by Compete staff and an adjustment was made to correct. I suspect it is not their practice to alter historic data points and thus you see the top graph referenced here.
From internal data (and quantcast for that matter), Woot is experiencing all time highs in daily visits, unique visitors, pageviews and this is the usual monthly trend for us with steady organic growth (we do some spoof ads but we don’t otherwise pay for any traffic)
thanks all!
Snapster
aka Matt Rutledge
Founder & CEO, Woot, Inc.
minor follow up since I’m addressing inaccuracy: the Crunchbase data for woot linked below this article is annoying in it’s use of rumor blog Valleywag (via BusinessInsider) as a source. Woot’s series A was in 2006 (roughly 2 years after launch). There have been no offerings since.
so much for statistics..rarely do they indicate a trend so clearly, anyway thanks for taking the time to clarify.
Thank you Matt,
I was about to address this myself. It’s rather unfortunate when authors report traffic estimates when directly measured data is so easily available to the public. It really makes me question the credibility of the author.
If you’re going to conjecture about traffic trends, at least do some basic research on the sources available to you.
http://www.quantcast.com/woot.com
Or people don’t have any money so are looking for great deals.
Interesting, but I have another interpretation. Woot traffic climbs steadily until Christmas, and plummets for 6 months thereafter. I personally visited woot nearly every day of November and December 2008, but forgot about the (great) site subsequently. I’ll probably start visiting them again, soon.
Are you kidding me! How absolutely clueless are you Biggs? And to think you used to be my favourite.
Something as complex as the global and US economy which is currently fighting a liquidity, housing, public debt, energy pricing, aggregate consumer debt AND public credit crisis and all of that can be tossed aside because some marginal retailer is getting more hits on their website?
Honestly that is beyond dumb! Talk about getting caught up with useless noise. Go watch Cramer!
listen. i’m no charles einstein. I just thought it was an interesting correlation.
What ’spoof’ ads? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one! – and now I’m curious!
we let our writers loose on google adwords occasionally and sometimes sponsor new online venture launches. here’s one example covered here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/are-the-new-woot-ads-funny-or-just-offensive/
But where will I get the $30 clams? That’s pretty high end for sea food, even if you can trade it for a Bluetooth.
Ever think that fewer people wanted what they were selling. Remember they sell one item a day, if they hit a streak of stuff that thier visitors don’t want… you get the point.
The whole government is a ponzi sceme running
on moniez that are worthless.Watch the stock market take another huge dump in October.
Fukin joos….
Puke, take your anarchist views to Iran. Get out of America, we don’t need you. Better yet, let’s see how you do in countries like Iran. People like you are a waste of space in America. If you are sooo against American policy, why don’t you do something about it? Renounce your citizenship and move. Ohhh, noooo, “don’t take away my citizenship, my comfortability!” You know who you remind me of? Eco friendly people. “Let’s save the environment……but not at the expense of my comfort.” Douchebag.
lama1234