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In our recent report on Social Media in Australia, ‘The Rise and Rise of the Social Network”, I highlighted Social Networking and Forums growth and predicted that it would overtake Search Engines in visits during the weeks either side of Christmas....during the week of Christmas (week ending 26 December 2009) the Social Networking and Forum industry category overtook Search Engines share of visits for the very first time. While this looked like a short term lead, we are now seeing continued growth of Social Networking and Forums to now sit just 0.4% share behind Search Engines in week ending 16 January 2010.
How will search be implemented
Will the really big boys IE facebook create their own search and moniterise or sell it out to one of the Search Engines, I suspect it will not just be revenue share that defines which major SE gets the game as much as integration into the social networking platforms both with results which will need to include the social networking own requirements .
I have seen very little about what percentage of Google's search is through the little search box on hundreds of thousands of web sites through adsense or without adsense .
This will be a very interesting time in the next two years between Bing and Google or even a Facebook own search and what we see today in market share could change dramatically because of the changes in user habits IE the growth of social networking.
IE the growth of social networking
Or the demise of social networking... I hear it all the time from friends who are sick of FB, Twitter, etc. Some go as far to delete their accounts just to get away from it all.
Yahoo was way ahead of the curve with all their forums, games, message boards, etc.
The only difference here is the more homogeneous Facebook environment and APIs that allow more things to be tightly integrated than in the Yahoo experience.
Heck, people never mention sites like Pogo but they peak at nearly 300K members online in front of advertising every single day.
So if Facebook acquired or integrated a search they would simply be following in Yahoo's footsteps, been there, done that.
Don't forget, Yahoo was the launch pad for Google so be careful what you wish for.
If someone says business from social media overtook search engines I promise to bungy jump into the Grand Canyon.
And i still can't see how all the social networking alternatives can be harnessed into a single offering - but , that's for someone smarter than me to work out. Maybe Google .
Astute webmasters will not dismiss the opportunities
I think most webmasters discovered the difference between users in buy-mode and users in time-waste mode and where to find them in and, regarding the ads pricing, advertisers discovered it too.
