Your mom is leaving MySpace for Facebook (but you aren’t)
MySpace has been maligned for what appears to be stagnant if not declining traffic in its core U.S. userbase. But the story is more nuanced, and not so dire. Sure, MySpace’s overall traffic has taken a big hit over the last year — a 28 percent drop from 72.92 percent of the U.S. social networking market a year ago to 52.21 percent this past February, according to new numbers from web measurement firm Hitwise. And… Continue Reading
Roundup: Cisco’s mixed results, Hitwise election site stats, and more
Cisco does a little better than expected — Sales fell 9 percent in October, compared to a year earlier, the computer networking giant reported yesterday; the company expects sales to drop up to 10 percent this quarter versus the $9.8 billion a year ago. Yet “[i]n our opinion, the U.S. will be the first major country to recover,” chief executive John Chambers said. More at the New York Times.
Hitwise: Yahoo wins presidential election web site traffic —… Continue Reading
Hitwise: Facebook and MySpace see usage metrics go up and down, kinda
Some new social networking stats are in from respected analytics firm Hitwise, and as with any limited data set, there are all sorts of interesting possibilities one could draw.
For example, Is Facebook’s redesign slowing its growth? The firm is reporting that Facebook’s pageviews have grown 50 percent year-over-year from August of 2007 to August 2008, in terms of overall social networking market share in the U.S. But Facebook only grew slightly from July to August… Continue Reading
Roundup: Digg sending more traffic to print media, rogue SF IT admin holds city computers hostage, and more
Hitwise: Digg has been sending more traffic to mainstream media web sites lately — Take a look at the graph below, and read what the web research company has to say, here. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks recently published his own report anecdotally noticing the changes; he speculates that Digg may be looking to sell to a mainstream news company.
Intel announces a second-quarter record of $9.5 billion in revenue — More here.
San Francisco government computer system compromised –… Continue Reading
Google jumps into the website traffic comparison game with Google Trends for Websites
Services that compare website traffic are important to the industry because they provide context for how a site is faring. However, many sites claim these measurement services have incorrect data for them (here’s some sample criticism), and that’s not helped by the fact that all of the services seem to have different data.
You likely know the big players: Alexa and Compete. Then there are the premium services: Hitwise and comScore.
Now a new cowboy is riding… Continue Reading
Yahoo search ad deal may open more urban, blue-collar markets to Google
In light of the recent Google/Yahoo alliance, analytical company Hitwise decided to update a chart it did earlier this year that compared Yahoo’s U.S. search audience to Google’s.
The updated chart (found at the bottom of this post) is much in line with the original, but is potentially more meaningful now given this deal. Yahoo searches tend to be done by a younger audience than Google’s. More significantly however, Yahoo searches also tend to be done… Continue Reading
Marketshare report: All your searches belong to Google
Google continues its steady advance towards complete search domination, according to data released by Hitwise. The search giant’s marketshare increased to 68.29 percent in May, up from 67.9 percent in April and 65.13 in May 2007; year-over-year, that’s growth of almost 5 percent.
Naturally, Google’s success is at the expense of competitors like Yahoo and MSN, which fell to 19.95 percent and 5.85 percent, respectively. When we looked at comScore’s numbers for April, we noted that… Continue Reading
Hitwise: Myspace quadruple the size of Facebook in US, but lead is falling
Myspace received 72.32 percent of visits to the top ten social networks in the US last month, or more than four times the 16.03 percent share of Facebook.
However, MySpace’s lead is shrinking, according according to web analytics service Hitwise, which published the data.
Myspace is down from 78.9 percent last year. Facebook is up from 10.59 percent last year.
One would expect fast-growing Facebook to have more visits than these numbers suggest, however, because Facebook is much… Continue Reading
Experian buys marketing intelligence firm Hitwise
Credit reference and analytics company Experian, of Costa Mesa, Calif., has acquired internet marketing intelligence firm Hitwise, of New York, for about $240 million in cash.
Hitwise collects information about traffic to Web sites, getting it directly from internet service providers, and has done a good job marketing the information (they’re constantly sending us comparisons between Web 2.0 companies, for example, to help VentureBeat with reporting). It says it covers the surfing patterns of about 25… Continue Reading
Traffic measuring continued: Why Compete doesn’t work, and why Quantcast does
It sucks when your Web site’s traffic isn’t being measured correctly.
It also sucks when you’re trying to measure the significance of someone else’s site, and are getting conflicting signals.
Here’s what we’ve learned over the past few days, after our initial piece on the problems of Alexa, Quantcast and Compete, all sites that independently verify how much traffic a site is getting.
We’ve learned that if a measuring company doesn’t have a tracking pixel directly on… Continue Reading