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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America
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MySpace - Returning to Entertainment?
July 14, 2009
I was living vicariously through WSJ's Julia Angwin's Mogul-fest tweets last week (ironically throughout the week she tweeted that several moguls didn't see the future in Twitter).
While in Sun Valley, Angwin reported a brief interchange with Murdoch regarding the future direction of MySpace. Murdoch stated that MySpace needed to be re-focused "as an entertainment portal."
Having followed MySpace via Hitwise over the last five years, I was interested to see what user behavior revealed regarding MySpace's positioning in the online entertainment space. Clickstream (or what sites were visited immediately prior to and after a subject site or industry) provides an interesting angle on that question.
At one point in its history MySpace was the most significant contributor of traffic to Entertainment - Mutlimedia sites (YouTube remains the #1 site in that category) providing over 35% of traffic to the category. As the chart below illustrates, that percentage now hovers below 10%.
As I wrote in Click (and Angwin goes into much greater depth in her book), MySpace's initial growth focused on community and music. Here's a chart of MySpace's contribution of traffic to the Music - Bands & Artists category.
As a top 5 site with 3.45% of all U.S. Internet visits, MySpace remains a massive force to be reckoned with. However, as the two charts above illustrate, the site has become increasingly removed from Entertainment and Music traffic.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 04:25 PM
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Bill,
Fascinating seeing the decline in the stats.
Mid-2006, when Bands and Artists Upstream was taking off, was the same time I blogged: Will MySpace monopolise music marketing?
It was based on observing that London-based indie bands were suddenly all adding a MySpace URL to their street posters: http://tinyurl.com/mazpl9
MySpace could still do well with an entertainment-based strategy, given News Corp's massive video assets, but it's Bebo that has taken the lead with its Open Media approach of inviting media owners to establish a presence there and also in commissioning a wide range of original online TV shows.
Posted by Colin Donald, Director, Futurescape.TV | July 15, 2009 01:40 PM
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Bill, any chance of remapping Myspace's contribution to Entertainment over time in tandem with Youtube's contribution? Be interesting to see the comparison.
Cheers (and thanks for Click)
Tim
Posted by Tim | July 14, 2009 09:07 PM