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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

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Apple iTunes Beatles success driven by Facebook not search

November 23, 2010

Last week The Beatles finally came to iTunes after years of fans demanding legal downloads of songs like Hey Jude, Come Together and Let It Be.

As a result, traffic to the Apple website spiked dramatically, with visits from UK Internet users increasing by 382% between last Sunday and Tuesday, when the albums were released on iTunes.

Even though the chart only looks at visits from UK Internet users, it’s interesting that traffic initially went to Apple.com, rather than Apple’s UK site, which only saw a 10% rise in traffic during the same time period.

During last week searches for all Beatles-related search terms increased 30-fold. The top search term variations included nods to both iTunes and Beatles week on the X Factor, but iTunes proved the more popular of the two interests.

Looking at the websites receiving traffic from the top Beatles search terms it might be surprising to learn that Apple featured quite low on the list. Despite paying for 67% of its traffic, Apple was only the ninth biggest recipient of traffic for the search term ‘the beatles’.

Even for the search term ‘beatles itunes’ Apple was receiving half of the traffic that the BBC was getting from its news coverage of the event. This screenshot of a Google search shows how search engines were prioritising news results in their rankings which explains how the BBC received nearly 12% of all traffic for searches for ‘beatles itunes’.

People were clearly looking for information about the Beatles during last week, with the BBC being a trusted source of information about the new iTunes downloads. Having found the information they needed, Internet users then went to iTunes to download Beatles songs. Downstream traffic from BBC News to the Apple website quadrupled between 14 and 16 November.

So although Apple wasn’t directly benefiting hugely from search traffic for the Beatles, it was picking up traffic from trusted news sources like the BBC. One of the other areas which Apple picked up a lot of traffic was from social networks. The online communities were clearly spreading the message of the Beatles downloads and people were then encouraged to go to iTunes to buy their favourite tracks.

On the day the Beatles content came to iTunes, 26.32% of all Apple traffic came from social networks compared to just 16.59% two days previously.

Specifically, Apple saw a huge spike in traffic coming from Facebook. On the day that the Beatles content was available to download from iTunes, 1 in every 200 visits that left Facebook went directly to Apple.

Apple was the fastest mover of websites to receive traffic from Facebook last week. Of all the websites that Facebook sends traffic to, Apple went from being the 86th most popular in the week ending 13 November to the 20th most popular in the week ending 20 November. With Facebook receiving in excess of 40 million visits from UK Internet users ever day, that’s equates to a lot of traffic for Apple from the social networking site.

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In Categories Apple | Google | Search | Social networks

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