Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - US
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May 19, 2006
MSN and Yahoo! Analysis
My mailbox overfloweth with comments and suggestions regarding the Google Properties Analysis. The most common suggestion was that I produce a similar analysis for MSN and Yahoo! Properties. Both Yahoo! and MSN demonstrate a typical portal breakdown of properties with their web based mail products in the lead followed by portal front page and search properties.
Just to clarify, the percentages listed in the last column are the percentage of visits to the property versus total visits to the top 20 domains. To put each of these custom categories in perspective I've charted the top 20 properties for each player in the same chart. As you can see, Yahoo! properties are clearly in the lead with over 10% of all Internet visits, followed by MSN and Google. I included a collection of top Myspace URLs to once again make the point that, if we consider Google to be a portal, the biggest threat to the top 3 portal players (Google, MSN and Yahoo!) is consumer generated media in the form of myspace.com, which in aggregate is greater than the Google properties and tied with MSN properties as one of the most popular destinations on the Internet.
I'm in the process of working on another reader suggestion to put each of the main vertical sites in perspective (i.e. where they rank within their respective category) Look for that post later today. Thanks for all the comments, keep them coming.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 12:30 PM
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Comments
I knew that Yahoo & MSN email accounted for a lot of their traffic, but it's still surprising to see how much. The other thing I hadn't expected was that Yahoo's fantasy sports would get so much traffic (even after watching sports fans I work with refresh their browsers every 3 seconds it hadn't occurred to me how many of them there must be).
Thanks for throwing MySpace in there too. Even if MySpace will have a much lower than average ad rate their sale price looks like a bargain for that much traffic.
Thanks for the stats. And, if you want to keep this up as a series it would be really interesting to see detailed comparisons of competitive categories (ie: Yahoo News vs. Google News vs. MSN (front-page, I guess) vs. CNN) and so on.
Posted by: Mike Bijon at May 19, 2006 05:45 PM
So,
According to these Stats - YAHOO SEARCH is actually getting LESS visitors that MSN Search
and the Yahoo Business Directory is almost non-existent in terms of traffic
It would be really fantastic if a chart could be made available that archives the history of the Yahoo and MSN search traffic.
and perhaps Altavista from the 1999 to 2002 period - because they were really a factor in that era.
Posted by: Search Engines WEB at May 19, 2006 06:54 PM
SEWeb,
Actually no, the tables above are showing breakdown of traffic for Yahoo! Search within the top 20 Yahoo! sites (the same for MSN). Use the Portal Size-up post to compare between MSN Search and Yahoo! Search.
-Bill
Posted by: Bill Tancer at May 19, 2006 07:02 PM
...
anyone who uses all of these services, as I do, would realize that these results have to be scewed, for one reason. Yahoo and Hotmail open seperate pages each and every time you want to open a message, change view, or, for example, switch from junk mail to inbox. With GMail, you open each and every subpage in the same page, using something that i think is similar to layers. With GMail, all pages are opened in one page, and therefore the hitcount would only be one for someone to check their GMail, but around (at least) five or six for Yahoo and Hotmail.
Posted by: Razi Shaban at May 21, 2006 05:18 AM
Razi,
Hitwise uses the IAB definition of a visit in calculating market share of visits, so in the scenario you describe above, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail would each receive a single visit. I think, Gmail's lower market share is more likely attributed to the fact that a) it's a much younger service and b) it was in a closed beta for so long. Hope that helps.
-Bill
Posted by: Bill Tancer at May 21, 2006 07:27 AM
Bill,
I use Yahoo Mail and Hotmail. But I don't visit Yahoo home page or MSN as much as your stats indicate. Can you track the number of ppl visiting these website when they logout of mail ? I guess a lot of this traffic is a overflow of ppl logging out of these services, rather than ppl visiting on purpose. Just a thought.
Posted by: V at May 22, 2006 12:47 PM
