September 2006 saw just about one out of every twenty US Internet visits hit a social networking destination. That activity had an impact beyond the social networking arena, with sites seeing a substantial runoff from the MySpaces of the world.
“In September 2006, 2.4 percent of visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites came directly from MySpace,” Prescott wrote, “an increase of 83 percent since March 2006. Other industries receiving increased traffic from MySpace in that period were Telecommunications, Banks and Financial Institutions, and Travel.”
Shopping & Classifieds subcategories visited from MySpace reflected the interests of its members. In September 2006, MySpace users visited sites for Music, Ticketing, Apparel and Accessories, Auctions, and Video and Games.
The gap between MySpace and Facebook, the top two social networking sites based on market share as measured by Hitwise, could not be much wider than what it was in September. For that month, MySpace took nearly 82 percent of the market share, while Facebook claimed 7.24 percent.
The next four sites, Xanga, Yahoo! 360, BlackPlanet.com, and Bebo, each managed a little over one percent market share. None of the next 14 networking sites could claim a higher share figure than Classmates.com’s 0.85 percent.
Friendster, which started the whole category back in 2003, now languishes in 13th place. It’s still doing better than Windows Live Spaces (15th) and Google’s Orkut (16th), but only by a few hundredths of a percentage point.
As the younger membership of social networking sites return to school, those sites see changes in their traffic. Dips they experience in late summer turn into October’s gains. Prescott charted trends for Photobucket, Youtube, Wikipedia, and Facebook to demonstrate this.
“Not only is entertainment consumption and social networking affected by the academic year, but so is photo hosting, a tool for social networking,” she observed. “Visits to Photobucket also declined in September, but recovered in October.”
Online video, the hot buzzword of today, had its trends illustrated by YouTube. The video sharing site not only drew Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition offer, which it accepted, but a vast market share of visits. From March to September 2006, the market share of visits increased 249 percent. It was the 26th most visited site in the US in September.
“There are currently many competitors to YouTube, but none has emerged to capture user attention in the way that YouTube has,” Prescott said.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
