In something of a David and Goliath story, social networking site MySpace.com was the starting point in August for more online shopping trips than MSN, which has an audience of unique users that’s twice as large.
MySpace was the launchpad for the third highest number of people who logged on to a particular Internet destination and subsequently went shopping from that locale, or 3.9 percent of the online population, ahead of fourth place MSN, which sent 2.8 percent of Web surfers shopping.
In large measure that’s because MySpace is fast becoming a home base online for a growing number of teens and twentysomethings, and as such is the jumping off point for a number of cyber activities, from checking e-mail to going shopping. “For 15 years, everyone has talked about wanting to be the first place people go when they log on,” noted Phil Rist, vice president of strategic initiatives at Big Research. “At first it was Yahoo, then it was Google.
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“But for a certain age group, it’s MySpace,” Rist said of those in their late teens through mid-20s. To make various connections, he added, “They don’t have to go to Google.”
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Indeed, the five shopping sites drawing the most visits from MySpace are the same sort as those generally most visited online by adults in their late teens through mid-20s, observed Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Internet measurement service Hitwise. For example, in the week ended Sept. 9, Hot Topic was the leading shopping site visited from MySpace, followed by American Eagle, Hollister, Old Navy and Victoria’s Secret. (Roughly one in four users of MySpace are 18 to 24 years old, making them the largest age group visiting it.)
The trend of shopping online via social networking sites has also been spurred by peer curation — the collection of information from one’s peers, in this case at networking sites like MySpace, observed Kiwa Iyobe, a trend researcher at Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve. “We’re so networked with our peers, they’ve become the network of authority,” she said of information traded by word of mouth, including the most compelling places to shop on the Web.
The 3.9 percent of MySpace users who began shopping via the social networking site last month was up from less than 1.5 percent of the site’s users in August 2005 and 0.5 percent of them in December 2004. Fueling that rise, Tancer said, is the social networkers’ tendency to make repeat visits to MySpace throughout the day, which, in turn, boosts the likelihood of using the network to indulge in other activities.
Despite that growth, however, MySpace still serves as a starting point for fewer shoppers than Google and Yahoo, as 16.2 percent of Google users and 5.2 percent of Yahoo users went shopping from those online locales in August. MySpace had a unique audience of 49 million people in August, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, compared with 99 million unique users of MSN, 97 million different visitors to Google and 107 million individuals who went to Yahoo.