31
2006
Social Networks & News – Another MySpace Phenomenon
In my daily blog reading this morning, I noticed Steve Rubel’s post regarding the Washington Post’s initiative to build reader comments and profiles into their site, a step towards social news networking. Just today, we issued a press release that commented on the percentage of traffic that search engines drive to our Shopping & Classifieds category (we have over 19,000 retail sites in this category). Within the release, we mentioned that MySpace was responsible for 2.5% of all visits to the category.
The juxtaposition of these two items got me thinking about the role social networking (specifically MySpace) plays in visits to News sites. Here I’ve charted the upstream percentage of traffic that our Print News category receives from MySpace as well as from Google News.
As you can see there is an increasing trend for visits from MySpace to the Print News category, which is most likely a result of the increased adoption of MySpace. Just for fun (yes I consider charting “lots of fun”) I’ve charted the same scenario for our News & Media – Broadcast News category. I was expecting a greater upstream percentage for Broadcast news given the TV-centric nature of the MySpace generation, the numbers say otherwise.
Finally, I took a look at the swings in age between the parent category of News & Media versus our Net Communities category (which contains the social networking sites).
The stats show a clear divide between the visitors to these two categories. With News sits capturing over 16% more of the 55+ crowd and 20% less than Social Networks in the 18-24 group. Perhaps as adoption of social networking becomes more mainstream, we’ll see this gap narrow in the future.
Hi Bill,
What do you mean when you say MySpace was responsible for 1.35% of all visits to the news category? Does that mean MySpace was the last site a person was on before going to a news site, regardless of whether a link on MySpace led the person to the news site? (An example of that would be, I’m editing my MySpace page, and then I click a bookmark to NYT.com). Or does “responsible” mean that 1.35% of all visits to the news category are coming from links embedded in MySpace web pages? If the latter, then MySpace’s contribution to news traffic seems comparable to Google News’s. If the former, then are they really comparable?
If you click a bookmark while on a site, that site will not show up as a referrer to the site you visit after clicking on the bookmark.
So, my guess would be that these statistics arise from traffic generated by people clicking on links/advertisements embedded in myspace pages.
“If you click a bookmark while on a site, that site will not show up as a referrer to the site you visit after clicking on the bookmark.”
I use a statcounter on my website that shows myspace.com click throughs. There is no referral id(because it is not a referral ad), but I can see the myspace originating domain in the stats.
MySpace has made its way into the mainstream, agreed, however it can not be the banner ads/links that are driving retail traffic — the ads on the site are rarely for the aforementioned product/retail sites. A more likely conclusion would be that visitors are stopping in to check their MySpace account the way older web users read the news and then venture on to their next site.
Additionally, MySpace prohibits non-paid advertisement links on the site – so profiles aren’t necessarily allowed (but are sometimes permitted) to link to other sites from their homepage.
Another social network. A lot of individuals who use that site emailed me to join it. To my amazement, some all ready signed up a darthoz on myspace. Glad I was able to obtain my url for Star Wars action figures and general information. I feel that the traditional “word of mouth” or “buzz” might contribute to the retail factor.