On March 31, 2006 the market share of visits to MySpace Video increased by 1,242%, sending it far ahead of YouTube and the other video search services. As I’ve written before, MySpace is the leading source of traffic for YouTube, accounting for 23% of its upstream visits for the week ending April 1, 2006. It makes sense that MySpace would launch its own video service and MySpace Videos began showing up in Hitwise data in January, shortly after YouTube began to take off in December. Now that MySpace is owned by News Corp, it has the perfect distribution mechanism for Fox content, and could be testing out its video capability with viral videos, which have been so successful for YouTube.
I’d like to know if anyone has insight into what MySpace did on March 31 to send MySpace Video’s traffic though the roof – our Clickstream data shows that before March 31, about 82% of traffic to MySpace Video was coming from MySpace, and on March 31 and thereafter it’s been at about 95%. So obviously MySpace is promoting their video capabilities within the site. MySpace Video is not nearly as robust in terms of content and functionality as YouTube – it appears to be mostly homemade videos, and searching is not as easy. YouTube traffic has not suffered this week, and it is still receiving the same amount of upstream traffic from MySpace. What has MySpace got up its sleeve?