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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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MySpace and Bebo Replace Searches for Chat Rooms

August 22, 2007

I mentioned last week that we are working on some analysis for a report on how consumer search behaviour has changed over the past couple of years. Given the interest in the YouTube-Funny Videos post, I thought I'd share another example.

We found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for "myspace" and "bebo" with "chat rooms" and "free chat rooms" over the past two years. The charts below illustrate this nicely.
Bebo and chat rooms.png
myspace and chat rooms.png

One of our readers pointed out that correlation does not equal causation. True and thanks for pointing that out. It does seem howver that as consumers have figured out where to find hang out and chat online, they changed the language of their search queries to navigate to specific social networks. Stay tuned for more results from the analysis.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 12:27 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Social Networking