In a new study, online advertising network Chitika’s research department has broken down what users of the major social networks want. The results? Facebook and Twitter users want news, Digg users have more eclectic taste, and MySpace users want to hear primarily about celebrities and video games.
The study was conducted by looking at the sites in the Chitika network that receive the most traffic from the social networks and breaking them down by genre. By doing so, Chitika researchers hope to further their studies on user intent by traffic source by determining what people reading the major social networks want.
The top 5 genres receiving traffic from each site is as follows:
| Digg | MySpace | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| News | News | Celeb/Entertainment | Video Games |
| Community | Celeb/Entertainment | News | Celeb/Entertainment |
| How-To/DIY | Tech | Video Games | Business/Law |
| Shopping | Movies | Tech | Tech |
| Celeb/Entertainment | How-To/DIY | How-To/DIY | Community |
Interestingly, MySpace is the only traffic source of the bunch not to have the News category as part of the top 5 – all three other sites refer a significant amount of traffic to News. Celebrity/entertainment is the only genre in the top 5 of all sites, demonstrating a fairly universal interest in the lifestyles of the rich and fabulous.
About Chitika
Chitika, Inc., is a search-based online advertising network, leading the way in intent-based advertising and search engine insights. Chitika provides publishers with an innovative way to monetize search engine traffic, and advertisers a new way of generating leads with clear consumer intent. With over 80,000 sites and 2 billion monthly impressions, the Chitika network is the pulse of the online world. Through research and targeting, Chitika continually evolves its image as “the ad network that knows when not to show ads.” For more information, visit http://chitika.com
Contact
Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com
How do you define community here under Facebook and MySpace? Sounds like it could be synonymous with social network sites.
Good question, Doug. Community was a combination of other social network sites and sites dedicated to beefing up your social networks (MySpace templates and tweaks, for example).
What does Other include? It seems to be a large percent of all the channels. Can you further define this category?
@Jason – The “Other” segment essentially worked out to any genre that wasn’t in the top 5 (mostly for the sake of a legible graph). The genres I used overall were News, Tech, Celeb/Entertainment, Video Games, Movies, Music, How To/DIY, Medical, Business/Law, Community, Fashion, Shopping, Sports, and Other. Any genre that didn’t get a significant share of the traffic ended up getting lumped in with Other.
Slightly confused, is this what users came looking for on their social networks, or where they go from their social networks?
Facebook may be bringing some traffic, but the traffic is very low quality. Nothing that we do that involves facebook gets any serious traffic from it. Why?
Because sharing content on facebook generally means orphaning your video or images there, no one has to leave to watch or view it, and many times the headline and a snippet to a news story is enough of a bite.