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Hitwise Intelligence - James Murray - UK
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Stumble Upon overtakes MySpace in social rankings
December 14, 2011
MySpace – once the most visited social network in the UK - fell out of the top 10 Social Networks and Forums rankings for the first time this November to be replaced by “discovery engine” Stumble Upon.
In the latest Hitwise search and social analysis MySpace was absent from the top 10 rankings for the first time ever. Stumble Upon leapfrogged into 10th place accounting for 0.31% of all visits to social media websites.
MySpace traffic has been in decline for the last three years. Since November 2008, MySpace’s market share of visits to the Social Networks and Forums category has fallen from 5.8% of all visits to just 0.36%, whereas visits to Stumble Upon’s have increased by 44%.
Despite numerous redesigns and efforts to diversify the site, MySpace is primarily still a place for music. Looking at the top search terms driving traffic to MySpace for the four weeks ending 3 December 2011 you can see that other than navigational searches for the MySpace brand, people are searching for music artists like Ben Howard, Two Door Cinema Club and Florence and the Machine.
MySpace is clearly still an important online portal for music, it was the top recipient of traffic for all searches for ‘ben howard’ for example, but the problem is that MySpace is now competing for traffic with so many other websites. Let’s take Florence and the Machine as an example, an artist that was one of the top drivers of traffic to MySpace in December 2008 and December 2011. If we look at the downstream websites receiving traffic from searches for ‘florence and the machine’ in 2008 MySpace is the clear market leader, accounting for almost 40% of clicks.
Fast forward to 2011 and MySpace has fallen to the eighth biggest recipient of traffic, accounting for just over 2% of all search clicks. YouTube and Facebook on the other hand, account for 6.9% and 5.4% respectively, more than twice as much as MySpace.
You can find out more about the latest search and social statistics by reading our press release which also went out today. Or you can follow us on Twitter.
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Posted by James Murray at 08:49 AM
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Comments
Great set of data for UK and amazing update on the changes.
Posted by Jerry | December 15, 2011 01:43 AM
well i personally really like stumble upon such a great community lunched by their owner.
such a cool web i have ever seen
Posted by anabolic supplements | December 22, 2011 04:22 PM
I've recently witnessed some excellent results from Stumble Upon, IMO it will continue to rise up the list.
The firefox broswer plugin is fantastic - The stumble team have done a great for stumble users finding content of interest, and the ability to bookmark on the fly - Go Stumble!!
Posted by Nathan | December 14, 2011 06:00 PM