Yahoo!, one of the world's most popular search engines, has lost its crown for the most page views on the internet to Fox Interactive Media, a group which owns social networking website MySpace, which was recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch in an attempt to increase the online presence of American media giant, Fox. The finding comes from a comScore report on US internet viewers, which concluded that page views for Fox sites had risen by almost a million during November 2006, to 39.5 million views. Conversely, Yahoo!'s had decreased by 3.6 million to 38 million in the same month. Amongst the other sites listed as top internet property by page view were the usual suspects, including Google, eBay, MSN and Facebook - the social networking site with which Yahoo! has repeatedly been associated in the last few months.
MySpace in particular has experienced tremendous growth over the past year as the popularity of social networking sites has continued to grow. This burgeoning trend seems to prove that Rupert Murdochs' business strategy - to gain online exposure for his products by acquiring a major online brand - has paid off in spades.
However, Yahoo! doesn't seem overly fazed by the news: since users must subscribe to MySpace to view the vast majority of content on the social site, Yahoo! still holds the number one position for unique internet visitors, with nearly 130 million in November. MySpace, however, comes in sixth place for this category.
Moreover, Yahoo! previously stated that the wide implementation of Ajax, a type of Java that works by asynchronously loading content without refreshing the entire page, across most of its domains and portals led to the expectation that page impressions would decrease. This is because Ajax is beneficial for users, content and usability, but bad for page impression statistics.
The stock market seemed similarly unruffled by the news. In fact, the NYSE seems to have reacted in an opposite way to expectations, with shares of Fox News Corp down $0.25 to $22.35 and shares of Yahoo! up $0.15 to $26.49.
What does this mean for search marketing and brands? It means that with MySpace growing at 565 per cent year on year, social search and social networking is becoming an increasingly important marketing medium - though one that's difficult to control. In this online climate, it's becoming ever more important to keep track of how a brand is being reported in this new area.
But don't send the Big Three (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) out to pasture yet. The cool kids and that elusive 16-24 demographic might be using MySpace, and thus buoying up the prospects for Fox, but the real money is still in search engines, with Google continuing to go from strength to strength and trading on the dizzyingly high plateau of almost $500 a share.
