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MySpace UK Update
June 23, 2006
Earlier this week I spoke at the Engagement Alliance event, What MySpace Means. David Tebbutt and Hillary Johnson provide a nice run down of the event. Anthony Mayfield sagely suggested that I post some of the charts from my presentation on my blog.
My role was to set the scene with some Hitwise data. The three areas I covered were MySpace in context, clickstream and search term data to understand how consumers are using MySpace, and the rise of "Me Media" my favourite phrase from a recent Wired article.
MySpace in Context
Remember the expression "content is king"? I poked fun at it by pointing out that only 7 of the top 20 sites based on UK visits are content creators. These include portals such as Yahoo! and MSN and news sites, i.e. the BBC. The rest are search engines, social networking sites, email services and auction sites (AKA eBay).
As you can see in the table below, last month, MySpace ranked #1 among Net Communities and Chat websites in the UK with 13% market share of UK visits. Bebo ranked #2 with nearly 12% market share. In the US, meanwhile, MySpace has a much more dominant position, capturing 45% market share of US visits compared to TheFaceBook, the #2 ranked site, with 5.14% of US visits.
Top 10 Net Communities and Chat Websites, Based on Share of UK Visits
MySpace continues to grow at a rapid clip in the UK. Some in the audience were surprised by this - seeming to believe that the site had reached saturation. Not so, in the past 8 weeks alone, the site has grown a further 32% in market share of visits. For a site that is among the top 20 most visited sites in the UK, that growth rate is very impressive.
I shared several other metrics to compare MySpace and Bebo in the UK and to explain why we have predicted that Bebo will overtake MySpace in share of UK visits before the start of the new school year. The gap in the share of visits between the two sites is closing rapidly - only 7% last week. Bebo has also overtaken MySpace on share of UK page views, average session duration and in the share of UK searches for the brand ("myspace" compared to "bebo"). In the interest of space, I have only included one of the charts below.
MySpace Clickstream and Search Data - How are Consumers Reaching MySpace
I presented a gap analysis of the search terms sending visits to MySpace and Bebo. I covered most of this on my previous post on MySpace Music and Anticipating Bebo Music. While highest volume search terms sending visits to MySpace are for bands and artists, the high volume terms to Bebo are for individuals with profiles on the site. I used this to explain why we believe that the audience is fragmenting. It is hard to leave a social networking site because you have to convince all of your "friends" to move with you. However, you can join multiple sites and we are seeing some evidence that people are members of multiple social networking sites and using them for different purposes.
MySpace seems to be the preferred site for sharing and discovering music, while Bebo seems to be favoured for connecting with classmates. Our clickstream data supports this as well. Last week, MySpace sent 12.43% of its traffic to sites in the Net Communities and Chat category. Bebo accounted for 1.75% of downstream traffic from MySpace.
For more on MySpace clickstream, you may want to read my post on MySpace Music from earlier this week.
Rise of Me Media
I ended my presentation with some thoughts on the fact that in thinking about what MySpace means, we need to think about other social or me media sites. I gave the examples of Digg.com which is the #4 IT News and Media site in the UK; TripAdvisor, the #2 Destinations and Accommodation website in the UK; Wikipedia the #1 Reference site in the UK; YouTube the #1 Entertainment and Multimedia site in the UK; and Second Life, a virtual world fast-growing in popularity.
Oh, and I also mentioned to attendees that I have a profile on MySpace and encouraged them all to become my friends. Hope you will do the same. The profile features a video from my recent holiday in Switzerland. If that doesn't entice you to my profile page - I don't know what will!
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 01:04 PM
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- UK Social Networks: MySpace, Bebo and Piczo in the Lead (Mashable*)
Hitwise just posted their latest stats on the UK social networking scene. The leaders have already been reviewed here: MySpace, Bebo and Piczo. MySpace is ranked first with 13% of the market, while Bebo is second with 11.98%. Third place Piczo ha... [Read More]
Comments
Jackie - I agree - content is important. The interesting point is that only 7 of the top 20 sites based on visits are content creators. MySpace, Bebo and eBay all appear among the top 20 sites and are content rich sites. The difference is that they leave content creation, for the most part, to their members.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | June 25, 2006 10:58 AM
Oh, I think content is still king - but it is not, as the suits assumed, the self-appointed 'content creators' who are coming up with the good, engaging, or just plain addictive stuff. The demand side is supplying itself, the implications of which are playing themselves out rather interestingly (and, in the case of net neutrality, rather scarily).
Thanks for speaking, Heather - your presentation was fantastic and a great, solid start for the rest of the presentations, which were more 'blue sky' and less MySpace-specific.
Posted by Jackie Danicki | June 25, 2006 05:53 AM