« Home | First Look At New XM Radio Ad Campaign »
Wired but weary of MySpace; Xanga now the cool place to be online
According to Hitwise.com, Xanga is hotter than MySpace as THE most searched personal or social web destination. By a 50% margin in the month of September (chart below provided by ClickZ.com from Hitwise data).
Xanga is a 6-year-old overnight success.
It was unthinkable a year ago, but that's how fast things change in the worlds of older teens and 20somethings: according to Forbes.com, MySpace has become passe for many. In fact, as teens and 20-somethings leave, MySpace is becoming, more and more, a social community for 35 year olds and older.
As of August, Xanga had signed up 27 million blog users...and it is still growing rapidly.
Viacom...are you noticing?
As a recent comScore survey shows, MySpace's member base of 12-to-24-year-olds has plummeted 44.3 percent over the last year, as a share of its total, to just 30 percent. "I think we're at the very beginning of them reaching a saturation point," Iowa State journalism professor Michael Bugeja says.
As the Jointblog write in March 2006, MySpace may be on its way to becoming a junkyard.
Of course, Xanga did have a problem with the FTC over marketing and security concerns for users 13 and under, forcing Xanga to pay a $1 million fine in early September. The good news: it did force Xanga to add more security measures.
In the Forbes article, one 26-year-old graduate student just canceled his MySpace account after realizing he had wasted time accumulating a bunch of acquaintances he knew little about. No kidding!
Perhaps kids of the tech generation are now rediscovering the value of face time, which would be a bad thing for News Corp. and MySpace.
It's that "face time" that is helping Xanga, too...as they recently added extensive free services and templates for "audioblogs" and "videoblogs", with massive amounts of free web storage space for members to use. On Xanga, these blogs allow more than just text and picture posts; you can post audio and video messages.
Call it Social Networking 2.0...a media trend to watch.
posted by Unknown @ Monday, October 09, 2006,
2 Comments:
-
At 3:32 PM,
said...
-
As Research Director at Hitwise, I cannot validate the data presented in this post. US Hitwise data does not show that visits to or searches on Xanga have increased in the past year - in fact they have declined. The market share of US visits to MySpace in September 2006 was 44 times greater than Xanga's market share.
Please contact Hitwise directly if you would like to cite our data in the future. -
At 4:56 PM,
Unknown said...
-
editor note:
Thank you, Leeann, for commenting on the post. The Xanga source information came from ClickZ' Stat's posting October 6 (http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3623623) tabulating the "Top 10 Search Terms by Category, Four Weeks Ending September 30, 2006".
In this post, they quoted Hitwise's report under the search term category "Blogs and Personal Web Sites", where they listed search volumes, with Xanga earning 2 of the top 3 and 3 of the top 7 items for a collected share percent of 2.31% of search terms under such a category classification:
1) Xanga (1.48%)
2) myspace (1.07%)
3) xanga.com (0.48%)
4) livejournal (0.47%)
5) perez hilton (0.38%)
6) myspace.com (0.37%)
7) www.xanga.com (0.35%)
8) yahoo 360 (0.35%)
9) 360 (0.23%)
10) yahoo360 (0.21%)
In the ClickZ post, they credited their results as coming directly from Hitwise. If their results are incorrect, I would be more than happy to make the changes accordingly, as we try to report, comment and reference factual material.
I welcome your further comments. Once again, thanks!
