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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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MySpace: Understanding the Impact of a Search Deal

May 25, 2006

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.

Myspace to search.png

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.

Posted by Bill Tancer at 10:58 AM | (2) | (1)

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Comments

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?)

Posted by Guest | May 26, 2006 05:28 PM

Exactly

Posted by Yossi | May 31, 2006 01:17 PM

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Bill Tancer

General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise.

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