MySpace a Better Marketing Opportunity Than MSN
- By: kidmercury [privmsg - website] On 31st Aug 2006 In
Or so says TechCrunch.
New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That’s big news, as it’s tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking is a market driver of serious proportions.
If that's true, it may lead to a few questions, like:
1. Has contextual advertising peaked? If social networks are getting more valuable than search engines, and if they're not conducive to contextual advertising...?
2. Can it last? Because spam follows opportunities, and while the search engines may have trouble combatting spam, they are at least attempting to do so -- MySpace, on the other hand, generally has its hands full trying to get its pages to actually work.
More Traffic?
>sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week
How well does that traffic convert?
Or is there a mySpace and HitWise link?
Awefully chummy. :)
<hat type="tinfoil" status="on" />
SB
Goign Going Gone?
I have long had issues in looking at the future of social networking. Between spammers and privacy dwindling, how long til a private network type of model emerges? The BLOG world is feeling, (spammers and redundancy) it and RSS and Podscasting never really took off (yet) outside of the GEEKDOM like pundits said they would.
I am not as convinced. Some of the money being thrown at social networking sites is getting silly and has echoes of the ‘DotBomb’ era…. The Jury is out.
As for MSN, who are they again?
Hitwise
When has Hitwise ever been trustworthy?
Hopeseekr, I don't think
Hopeseekr, I don't think that's quite fair. Hitwise is a source of good information, but same as any information source, you have to evaluate what that information really means. DG raised a good point : traffic is great, but what about the conversions? Hitwise aren't necessarily saying that MySpace has become some e-commerce powerhouse, if nothing else the MySpace crowd doesn't generally have enough disposable income to be that big a market yet.
It IS significant that they drive that many eyeballs though - it implies that the newer generation of WWW users may be looking elsewhere for their signposts on the web. Personal recommendation is always going to be a better guide to sites than any machine generated list like a SERP.
Maybe this would be a way of getting back to the human edited directories of yore, using a distributed, rather than a centralised model. Why do you think Google signed such a big deal with them? User data may be the next big thing in search, if anyone can figure out how to use it correctly
i'm not so sure the
i'm not so sure the conversion issue is central here, as i think social networks will need to find a way to innovate the idea of branding online. the environment of a social network is of course very different than that of search; search places the user in the mindset of active discovery and hence makes instant conversion/ROI tracking more relevant. social networks on the other hand are more about hanging out, which seems less likely IMO to generate good conversions based on most conversion tracking methods but more likely to help develop real customer relationships that if executed properly could lead to greater profitability over the long term.
along the same lines i'm skeptical of a CPC model working for advertising on social networks. i'm even a bit skeptical of CPM. IMO something new is needed here. the branded channels/profiles thing that youtube and myspace have might be it, although i'm not sure if anyone is doing it optimally at this point.
well said, couldnt agree more.