11
2006
MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites
Today Hitwise issued a press release reporting that for the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace’s growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.
The chart below shows the growth of visits to myspace.com compared to google.com over the last several months:
An even more telling statistic is the prevalence of MySpace search terms within the top 20 search terms driving traffic to all Internet sites. The table below shows those top terms for the four weeks ending July 8, 2006.
Top Search Terms Driving Traffic to All Sites: Week Ending July 8, 2006
Compare that to the table below, which shows the top search terms driving traffic to all Internet sites for the same time last year:
Top Search Terms Driving Traffic to All Sites: Week Ending July 9, 2005
While Internet visits statistics tell us where people are going on the Internet, search term data confirms what people are actually thinking about. It’s clear from this data that MySpace has the mind share of US Internet users. Stay tuned for more analysis as to how MySpace was able to achieve such phenomenal growth over the last two years.
Hitwise claims MySpace now top US Internet property in front of Yahoo
Reuters just relayed that, according to Internet tracking firm Hitwise, MySpace has surpassed Yahoo as the number one Internet property in the US. The piece does not indicate which metric is being used (unique visitors, number of visits, number of page…
Based on the simplicity of those terms – it would appear that those searchers are NOT savy searchers.
It would be interesting to find out WHICH search engines they were using for their searches.
It appears to be mostly MSN/ AOL
type people…for example why would someone search for YAHOO when they are ALREADY on Yahoo.
How can you say they are not ‘savvy’ searchers when you have no idea what they are searching for? When people search, they define, and then they redefine until they get what they want. They don’t want anything to fall between the cracks, so to speak. You my friend, are an idiot. OWWW
That is amazing, seriously. It is almost unbelievable.
Bill, what do you think about these numbers, outside of them just being numbers?
No matter which way you look at it, this is phenomenal growth.
Still I would have liked to see more insight into what the metrics being used were also, along with search starting points.
SEW:
According to the Hitwise site, this data comes from ISP logs, which would imply the data comes from all search engines, including Google.
I sense your attempting to find bias in the results by claiming the data doesn’t represent some sort of “savvy” search user, those you assume use Google.
I think your post shows just how oblivious the geek crowd can be when it comes to users. The vast majority of internet users out there are made up of your average Joe and Jane – exactly the type of user who types simple terms into search engines in an effort to find what they are looking for. Apparently, these people like to visit myspace, and navigate to sites like ebay, yahoo, myspace, and many others by first visiting a search engine and punching in a keyword. I think this is the most interesting aspect of this data, and shows sites that are tailored to meet the needs of the ‘average’ user will ultimately garner more search traffic.
I’ve watched my non techie friends on the web. Since their “home page” from their ISP has a search box, instead of using the address bar to go anywhere, they type in all addresses/site names into a search field on their homepage and use that to navigate everywhere.
Yes – they really do search for http://www.myspace.com – and there is no use of showing them how to use the web correctly, because they are unwilling to change because despite the fact they aren’t using the browser as intended, it works for them.
I just hope those visitors realize that with each visit to myspace they’re now enriching the parent company of Fox News (Clear Channel). It was an ingenious move on their part to occassionally send messages about board updates from “Tom” making it seem like a mom and pop operation.
I agreed to what nicole say, I seen that many time, you can’t imagine how many people go to yahoo, for example, when they want to visit a site, they enter in the yahoo search field, and then click from there… instead of entering it in the address bar. This are what we call, real internet users.. which whatever they do, will determine how the internet going to be, they are the 95% of people who’s not involve in anything related to internet and they are “users”, the most powerful crowd of the internet, just like most people think myspace ugly… who’s “most people” ? “Most people” are the smallest group of people in the internet, those involve in internet industry, geeks, designers, e-commerce, programmer, e-consultant etc.. and users in myspace are not from “most people” crowd. They are the greater sum or “more most” people, the users, they 95% of people who at this point, can only design / adding those ugly flashy things in their website. We all miss the point, myspace luckily catch all this 95% of the users.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the parent coorporation of Fox News, News Corp, not Clear Channel?
Yes, it is News Corp
Wow, this is something. MySpace on top of the world. Which makes me wonder, why is Friendster still popular here in the Philippines while MySpace seems to be hardly used.
MySpace on top but not in the Philippines
Friendster users wake up! MySpace has just made headlines when Hitwise has come out with a press release stating that “MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites.”
It has even surpassed Google and Yahoo! according to Hitwise. Spe…
How much of the MtSpace traffic is the own user using his or her own page?
Creating a MySpace ambassador Web page has been an important strategy for Strilka (see myspace.com/strilka). MySpace allows us to create a gathering area that introduces our company to new customers, surgically promote our brand with informal announcements, custom personal messages, and connect with people. MySpace has also
stimulated our affiliate programmes, co-marketing initiatives, banner exchanges (important for Google’s PageRank number), and even spurred
business development.
It would be a greedy mistake, however, to use MySpace as a funnel or meta advertisement board. There has to be give and take, so we prefer
to think of it as a two-way street and have several links to MySpace sites and YouTube videos that rotate from time to time on strilka.com.
The activities mentioned above, however, are hardly new since many artists, musicians, bands, record labels, authors, and companies,
especially Web firms, have promoted themselves on MySpace for years creating their own cultures and identities.
Despite rumours that MySpace is “teen trash”, or that growth rates are peaking (particularly with Friendster), leveraging ambassador pages on
key social networking sites can be an effective online marketing strategy that stimulates growth.
Judging by the humbling public comments that we have received, myspace.com/strilka has created a certain amount of goodwill for us. Outside observers have even instructed us to introduce a goodwill line item on our balance sheet (though that sounds premature to me). Strilka is a very small start-up, barely 1 year old, with no
resources. Yet, after creating a MySpace ambassador site in March 2006, our membership doubled.
William Szuch,
Co-founder
Strilka – The New Ukrainian Singles Network
And they use ASP.NET 2.0 for their technology. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/scottgu for more info on myspace and ASP.NET 2.0
Yes, you ae right Shandalar. Fox News owns MySpace now. Clear Channel is radio/entertainment only, nothing to do with News Corp. But this huge popularity of MySpace shows that the U.S. Web audience like communicating with blogs. This shows that Web 2.0 is really taking place. See my blog at sadbastards.wordpress.com.
It might be interesting to see a top 20, minus the noise. In other words, we know these sites are top sites that people are typing in to a search field instead of the address bar. But if you de-duped the top-100 search terms against the names and URLs of the top 10 websites, what results would you be left with? It would likely be a more interesting list.
Besides elightening us about people’s ill-use of browser software, the list above doesn’t tell us much that we couldn’t learn from a top 20 website list. If the intent is, to learn what information web-users are searching for on a weekly basis, a list that filtered out this noise would give an exceptionally more useful list of results.
i can honestly say i go to yahoo and myspace both at least 10 times a day. i have been keeping track of myspace at alexa.com since it first became an online presence. its amazing how fast it grew and it seems to me mostly by word of mouth. i dont remember any big advertising campaigns for myspace unlike the ebay super bowl ads, the constant monster.com commercials etc…
I’m so irritated with ebay stuff. They keep sending out those crappy letters to me. And I can’t imagine why a company that big will need this kind of promotion… Speaking about MySpace ..I think the success is tightly bound with underaged users who adore it.
I am still amazed at the fact that an internet site like Myspac.com has garnered so much money and fame. To me the whole internet is fragile…. internet can vanish any minute. Our life is so heavily dependent on electricity…. and if we have no power…. we have no servers…. we have no life…. life as we know it today will be so different. Modern life depends so much on electricity, and if we have no power we have nothing. I still have to give it to those innovators who have creatively came up with winning ideas like myspace.com, youtube.com.