Wow. I love infoporn. I have a hunch that Mr. Murdoch is thinking hard about this graph:
From the Hitwise blog: The chart (above) illustrates the percentage upstream from myspace.com to Google.
Going back to the beginning of last year myspace provided less than 1% of all Google traffic.
While myspace.com still doesn’t have its own search offering, the shear volume of traffic sent to external search engines could be directed internally with the right acquisition and promotion of its own search offering.
There are a lot of other insights in the piece. I’ve had MySpace again on my mind after talking Weds with Jon Miller, CEO of AOL. My full interview with him will be up on B2.0 in about a month, but the thing that struck me was how Miller mentioned MySpace in the same breath as Google, AOL, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon. It had made it into the majors as far as he was concerned, because it owned the social networking space. And why, again, might Google launch Co-op, and AOL AIM Pages? Indeed….
How accurate do you think Hitwise can be with this info? What are they basing it on? It seems to me like Google would be the only ones with an accurate idea of where their traffic is coming from.
Or they could focus on their core competencies and make the money via AdSense for search.
Dustin,
The majority of the Hitwise data comes directly from ISPs. They also supplement this with opt-in user panel data. Here’s more details from their site:
http://www.hitwise.com/products-services/how-we-do-it.php
I can’t speak directly to the accuracy, but a LOT of companies (and investors) use their service for important business decisions, so I don’t think their credibility is an issue.
One of the ISPs Hitwise buys from is United Online who owns Netzero, Juno and Bluelight. United Online sells their data for around 500k.
Bill Tancer of Hitwise made a very interesting observation at a recent SES. He was imagining how much more powerful MySpace could become if they added search as a core app to the site. Bares watching…
I am still not sure anyone understands the MySpace crowd good enough to make much money from them. Just today, a 15-year old friend was giving me a tour and telling me why she liked it so much. Listening to her, I noticed how much it was communication related, not search, products, or even learning. I am not sure how much this interest in staying in constant touch with friends will continue as she gets older.
Another friend, who calls it MyWaste, is still trying to ween himself from it. But it is a crowd I think few people really understand, and they have in many ways been trained to avoid seeing or clicking ads. MySpace doing something like Ebay, however, that I could see. Or other things that build on the communication factor.
For the myspace demographics (16-26) google means search and i dont think myspace owning a search engine would change that behaviour.
So the best way for myspace to monetize this is just to put a google branded search box (plain old adsense for search) in its site instead of the current yahoo powered box.
This would instantly add a additional revenue of 128 million or so (80% profit share of 8% of google’s US revenue of 2 billion)
Rupert has mentioned to the market he would announce his search engine purchase or partnership in mid-May.
He also told the market last September that he was close to taking controlling interest in a search company soon.
Those talks stalled or broke down. He still has about 400 mil. of that 2 bil. he set aside for web acquisitions.
Who does he have in mind John?
Assuming these numbers are accurate, look at at this way:
Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace for $500 million. Google bough 5% stake in AOL for $1 billion.
Now, AOL accounts for about 5% of Google’s search traffic. MySpace Sends 8.2% of Traffic to Google.
So, the big question is: Was Google smart by acquiring 5% in AOL or should they have bought the whole of Myspace for half that price?
MySpace buying any old search engine won’t cut it, you are right. I don’t think it matters if they go with Google or Yahoo for their partner either though. The UI for their search results is utter crap for one, it barely looks like a search engine results page, so people won’t think of it as such. But besides that, what they need to do is learn how to leverage their audience to make a better search engine, and offer their users something unique. They need to acquire Dumbfind, we are working on that problem. http://www.dumbfind.com
The ambiquity was somewhat clarified on the HitWise Blog. The only confusion is the Word PRIOR
EXCERPT:
weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/05/myspace_is_1_google_traffic_so.html
I think DumbFind is a Great Search Engine, Great job guys. Check out our recent web portal Sprinko.com