25
2006
MySpace: Understanding the Impact of a Search Deal
Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that MySpace was in talks with either Google or Microsoft. As I reported previously in this post, MySpace was the #1 source of traffic for Google, providing over 8.2% of its traffic for the week ending May 6, 2006.
I took a closer look at MySpace and its potential impact to the search industry. Here are some follow-up stats (based on U.S. Data):
- 5% of all downstream traffic from MySpace continues on to the Search Engines category
- Looking from the Search Engines perspective, as a category, they receive 4.7% of their traffic from MySpace
- Google is the #1 downstream search site from MySpace, followed by Yahoo! Search, MSN and AOL Search
Here’s a chart detailing the top search engines downstream from MySpace for the week ending 5/20/06.
While some have argued that there’s lilttle money to be made in social networking, I think the above search impact data might paint a different story.
Bill – Can you explain why the fact that 8% of Google’s traffic comes from MySpace is significant? Isn’t it just a case of the younger generation on MySpace using Google as their preferred search engine? I mean Google’s unique user base is 10x that of MySpace, and Google seems like a logical next step to go from anysite, so it seems logical that there would be a lot of users moving in that direction.
Is there something I’m missing here that makes this special? If MySpace went away tomorrow, wouldn’t all those same people still go to Google in the same numbers (but from somewhere else?)
Exactly
Marketing Rapid Fire – May 31, 2006 Edition
Ok, I didn’t think I would have to resort to this again, but there are too many articles out there to let you readers know about. Plus, I have enough traffic to resurrect this.Marketing Rapid Fire – May 31, 2006