Here’s a great example of how a competitive intelligence mindset can cause you to look at things from a completely different angle.
While the Blogosphere was buzzing about the MySpace outage on the weekend of 7/22 & 23, most posts discussed MySpace’s vulnerability, problems with redundancy, even connections with global warming. My first reaction was quite different. When I heard about the outage I thought, Wow! if a site with over 4% of all internet visits and over 17% of all page impressions in the U.S. goes down, where do people go instead? Better yet, this outage, while unfortunate for MySpace, gives us an excellent opportunity to understand its importance to U.S. Internet users by allowing us to study how people reacted when the site was unavailable.
First, lets compare a chart that shows us the market share of visits and page impressions for the main Myspace page, www.myspace.com around the time of the outage (red is the market share of page impressions, blue is market share of visits):

I was surprised to see that on the days of the outage, market share of visits to MySpace.com actually went up. Considering the over 30% decrease in market share of page impressions however, the most plausible explanation is that users were visiting the site more frequently then before in an attempt to get access to the service. The sharp decline in market share of pages, indicates that during the outage, users were unable to get beyond the initial page (and hence the overall decline in pages as well as session time (not shown)).
With the help of Ford Adams, our super-intern and honorary analyst, we asked ourselves, what would the MySpace populace do with all their time if MySpace was unavailable (other then use that time obsessing on when the service would once again be available)? In both of the charts below, I’m comparing the market share of page impressions of MySpace to market share of visits to Google and Facebook, to minimize the “zero-sum-game” effect of a massive decrease of pages caused by the outage:

Google, amongst top sites, experiences the greatest increase in page impression market share. Probably some substitute long-tail behavior in the form of recreational searches (I’m just finishing Chris Anderson’s book). Facebook, MySpace’s closest competitor on the social networking scene also demonstrates some lift during the darkness:

And the categories experiencing the greatest lift on July 22nd and 23rd: Dating sites had greater than a 10% increase, while Adult sites experienced a mild bump-up as well…