I read something interesting on Bambi Francisco’s blog today… she was asking what would happen if MySpace, the giant social networking site, had a a search engine.
First off, hats off to her for gathering some useful and interesting stats.
- MySpace recorded 19.4 billion page views vs. 13.7 billion at Google, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
- Google received 8.2% of its traffic partly from its search tools that appear on pages within MySpace, making the social network the No. 1 source of traffic to Google, according to Bill Tancer of online research firm Hitwise, who retrieved the data for Bambi’s article.
So she asks: “Rupert Murdoch is no dummy. Why would his News Corp. spend nearly $600 million on MySpace and not go after the most lucrative and biggest part of the online ad pie?”
Great question. First off, search engine drive traffic away. Sites like MySpace retain traffic and in particular with MySpace, force you to generate pageviews. As the number of pageviews increase, so should revenues, right?
Well, no, not really. Many sites do not sell out. They might sell out their prime real estate but on a site like MySpace, there is a lot of less savioury spots where advertisers dare not tread.
So even if the introduction of a search tool would reduce traffic and pageviews on MySpace, it would not really be a bad thing since MySpace will probably never be able to sell all of the impressions it’s got.
That being said, does a search engine make sense on MySpace?
In many ways, MySpace is a search engine. Rather, it is a directory, it is the largest directory of people. Before MySpace came around, when people wanted to search on someone, they would Google them. Today, chances are that the person has a MySpace page. I do not. I do not know why that is. I probably should. All the cool kids are doing it.
All to say, that while MySpace can adopt a me-too strategy and develop a search tool (or News can buy a search tool and integrate it into MySpace), a better bet might be to focus on developing MySpace into the largest search tool of people in the hopes that everyone have “their-space.”
But since everyone is assuming that News Corp. will be buying a search tool, we’ll be adding our two cents about who might be a good fit later on today.
For more on MySpace:
- FIM’s Search Strategy Soul-Searching
- Is MySpace a Fad? It is according to CNN/Money.com
- How much is MySpace’s search business worth, anyway? Part 1
- Did Google Overpay for Fox Interactive Media’s Search Business? Part 2
- Crazy idea of the Day: Should News Corp. spin off Myspace and IGN?
[Disclosure: MySpace’s sister company, IGN, is suing me in an unrelated matter. ]
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May 16th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
knowledge.
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:08 pm
[…] I first reported on this a few weeks ago, click here. I am not saying that it cannot / should not have a default, standard Web search function, all I am saying is that by forcing searching down the throat of MySpacers, it will lose its intrinsic value of being the most representative sample of the WWW’s population online. […]
June 7th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
[…] Despite the rumor that MSN, Yahoo or Google might power their search, those sites probably realize that a site like MySpace will drive down network CPCs, network CTR (click through rates on ads) and hurt their business and not help it. People are simply not on MySpace to search for cars, travel and anything else that yields high CPC (cost per clicks). To get a better sense of why that is, click here. To read on an alternative search strategy MySpace could undertake, click here. […]
October 5th, 2006 at 9:38 am
[…] Of course, in this case, Facebook is asking for a price tage of $1 billion (”down” from its original $2 billion tag that sent Viacom packing the first time around). One billion dollars is a lot of money, and roughly twice what News Corp. paid for MySpace. MySpace then was larger than Facebook is today, and at the risk of sounding like a Monday Morning QB, MySpace really had no cap on its growth, the cap is technically the entire Internet universe (I’ve always said that MySpace is the ultimate people search engine, or rather, directory of people, or human web); whereas Facebook’s cap is the high school and college crowd, which is a market that turns over quite a bit but limited. Facebook would argue that this crowd is far more appealing to advertisers… alas, the bottom line is that Viacom seems to have made up its mind to avoid going for the fences, opting instead to pick up small promising startups before they enter the bidding war stage. […]