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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America

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Google Properties Breakdown

January 31, 2008

We all know that Google's strength is in search - but how dominant is search compared with other Google properties and where is Google's growth coming from? The following table shows the top 20 Google properties based on share of US Internet visits last week. I created the table using a Hitwise Custom Category so the market share figure is based on the share of visits within that category of Google properties.
Top 20 Google Domains.png

As you can see, Google's online presence is still dominated very much by search, accounting for 70.10% of visits to the top Google properties last week. (I should mention that Google has changed their URL structure so that Google Product (Froogle) is now counted as part of Google.com.)

I took a look at what Google properties are growing fastest. I was amazed to see that Google.com and YouTube traffic continue to experience strong growth. Google ranked #1 and YouTube #10 last week in share of US Internet visits. Market share of US Internet visits to Google were up 20% year on year last week and YouTube's visits were up 19%. YouTube's growth is due in part to a corresponding decline in visits to Google Video (down 57% year on year last week).

A number of properties in this top 20 have seen their traffic more than double year on year, including Google Maps, Blogger, Google Groups, Google Calendar, Picassa Web,

Properties seeing a decline in traffic were Google Video (-57%), Orkut (-15%), Google Pack (-32%) and Google Toolbar (-31%).

(You can find out more about Google Maps' growth in my blog post from earlier this year.)

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:08 AM | (5) | (6)
In Categories Search

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Comments

Good analysis, something that might not be that evident to everyone.
Nonetheless, could you tell if these figures include the url change to google.com and back every time you login to blogger or orkut?
Whenever you login to orkut, for example, the url changes to google.com and then back to orkut.com. If this is accounted for, then Google.com is being far benefited from this, as all ohter entities are contributing to its market share.

Thanks in advance!

Posted by Gonçalo | January 31, 2008 10:46 AM

Hi Gonçalo, thanks for your comment. I checked this with the real experts in our categorisation team. When signing in to Orkut.com or Blogger.com the user enters their Google Account username and password, which records a legit session for www.Google.com/Accounts. This domain is broken out and measured separately and so there is no increased traffic counted for www.Google.com.

Let me know if you need more info. Thanks again for the comment.

Best,
Heather

Posted by Heather Hopkins | February 4, 2008 08:18 AM

Hi Heather, thanks for the info, as this is something that truly would influence the figures.

Do you have the figures for pageviews as well? When you cross these two indicators, I suspect that the difference in the properties wouldn't be this huge, as services such as Orkut (social biased) are very much pageview intensive - people login and then view lots of pages, and in this case, one visit accounts for much more pageviews rather than in search, where you have a ratio pageview/visit close to 1, I suspect.

Thanks for the time.
Best,
Gonçalo

Posted by Gonçalo | February 4, 2008 01:20 PM

What may not be apparent is that Google Reader does not refresh, which might explain why it's nowhere in the list. Add to that the fact that most blogs are read through an RSS reader, and you might see why Blogger is just number 4.

Posted by warren | February 7, 2008 10:23 PM

Hi,
Great analysis. can you elaborate on the numbers behind the %

Thanks

Posted by Menashe | May 15, 2009 08:53 AM

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Heather Hopkins

Senior Online Analyst, Hitwise

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