It is all very well to imagine that social media is significant.
My question is: Is Social Media attracting the interest of Internet users more than traditional serach engine and consumer web sites.
I needed empirical evidence that would prove the point.
One way of doing this is to compare like for like data of page views (see note below) between differnt types of web site.
I examined data over a three year period. In this time the number of Internet users increased and home broadband penetration increased from almost zero to nearly 60% of users. This should mean that there will be a general increase across the majority of web sites.
I took information about site traffic from Alexa and looked at page views of the top 30 Alexa ranked UK sites.
This would indicate both comparative interest in these sites as well as growth of interest among Internet users.
The results are are as follows:
Page views among the sites with top ten ranked pages:
Search engines
Retail Sites
Social Media Sites
Page views among the sites with 11-20 ranked pages:
(note: there were no search engines)
Retail Sites
Social Media Sites
Page views among the sites with 21-30 ranked pages:
(note: there were no search engines)
Retail Sites
Social Media Sites
This evidence would suggest it would be interesting to see what reach these sites enjoyed comparatively and there relative Alexa rank.
My conclusion from this is that:
Social media is among the top rank of web sites of interest to Internet Users.
Social media is making considerable inroads into the pages viewed by Internet users
Search engines are not increasing their traffic in relation to the increase of Internet users.
Retailers are, mostly loosing share of page views
Social media is enjoying an exponential increase of interest.
If someone, at this late stage is looking for a dissertation subject, this one would be stunning.
Alexa Page views measure the number of pages viewed by Alexa Toolbar users. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the users visiting the site. The page view rank is a ranking of all sites based solely on the total number of page views (not page views per user). The three-month changes are determined by comparing a site's current page view numbers with those from three month ago.
Page views per million indicates what fraction of all the page views by toolbar users go to a particular site. For example, if
yahoo.com has 70,000 page views per million, this means that 7% of all page views go to
yahoo.com. If you summed the fractional page views over all sites, you would get 100% (this is not true of reach, since each user can of course visit more than one site).
very interesting analysis and it points towards the direction that retail/corporate websites are outside a lot of exchanges going on. More and more when seeking advice or purchasing goods online, search engines bring us to blogs and other social media - because, frankly that's where the most useful and balanced information can be found.
ReplyDeleteGlenn
THis goes along with the media and mtv. They are just teaching our youth that sex has no consequences and with all this entertainment on the internet it's just causing more youth to get raped and abused through the web.I think the number one hit is probally myspace.I like it only because I see relatives and friends who don't live near me..but the internet,t.v,music, and whatever they have out there is really influencing the youth today to dress more inappropiatly and it's kind've like the roman ages when all they cared about was sex and alcohol and it increased so darasticly that the whole roman civilization went down for not realizing their consequences...I think we need to find away for people to not be so mind corrupted by what the "media" thinks to the point of where reality fades in every once and a while...and now with our technology advancing further there are studies out there trying to see if they will get so advanced where people won't leave the house anymore and the human race could end....
ReplyDeleteSkye, I have no idea how these stats provide any evidence that entertainment 'on the internet' is causing more youth to get raped and abused through the web. The numbers do not even indicate the age of users so I think you need to come up with evidence before you can jump to any conclusions.
ReplyDeleteYour case is not served by frantic statements.
The evidence that I have in the UK suggests that the most users of the internet by demographic uptake is that the over 50's are bigger users of the Internet than 'youth'. Guess what? The Internet is more popular than gardening in this sector. As for young people? The ones that I meet are much more savvy than their parents and grandparents and are much more aware of the dangers online.