MySpace is becoming a major force in online shopping, according to the latest data out of Hitwise. MySpace was responsible for 2.53 percent of all U.S. upstream visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for the week ending August 26th 2006, up from 1.28 percent in February. The top shopping sites visited after MySpace were eBay, Craigslist and Walmart. What's more, MySpace is gaining on the top search engines when it comes to shopping referrals: it's now ahead of MSN search, which was responsible for 2.33% of upstream visits to retail sites. However, MySpace still trails Yahoo Search and Google by a long way. Hitwise suggest that online retailers should now look to MySpace and other social networks for additional traffic.
It's also worth noting that the Google-MySpace search and ad deal will take effect later this year. These stats don't show whether the MySpace users are coming via ads, MySpace search or other routes, but there's no doubt that Google's superior technology will boost referred traffic from MySpace.
But the real power of social networks is in brand advertising. Look at the recent MySpace marketing attempts from the big guys - Dasani's promotion through custom MySpace layouts, for instance. YouTube, meanwhile, just launched a branding platform with the help of Paris Hilton. The users themselves are great marketers, too - Logitech, Diet Coke and Mentos all received a huge boost when their products were featured in YouTube videos.
In fact, MySpace is a huge referrer of traffic to all categories - Hitwise just released stats to show that referrals from MySpace to Print News sites are also up. That doesn't mean MySpace users are massive newspaper fans - it just means that MySpace is big enough to have an effect across the board. That said, MySpace is still a great place to sell stuff: the conversion rates might be low, but the user base is huge.