A press release from Hitwise shows the trend that community sites such as MySpace are increasingly driving more traffic to shopping sites and retailers. The report details MySpace.com’s phenomenal growth over the past six months increasing 67% to a 4.88% market share of all U.S. visits to websites.
But what was even more striking about the report was MySpace.com’s impact on upstream visits to shopping sites:
Social networking site MySpace.com accounted for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26, 2006, up from 1.28 percent six months ago (week ending February 25, 2006).
Compare Myspace.com’s upstream visits (2.53%) to the big three search engines, Google (14.93%), Yahoo! Search (4.69%), and MSN Search (2.33%) and it’s obvious that online communities have the potential to be just as important to retailers as search technologies in driving traffic.
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