Hitwise is running a report on the top search term in the United States for the week ending March 14, 2009, and interestingly the data revealed that “Craigslist” is the top search term for the week ending March 14, 2009. According to the Hitwise blog post, this is the first time that Craigslist topped the said report, finally overtaking MySpace which has been on the top spot since March 2006. This registers a 105 percent increase searches for the “Craigslist” from the same week last year.
If indeed Hitwise’s data is accurate, we couldn’t agree more when they say that this could probably the effects of the economic crisis, as more and more U.S. folks are turning to “Craigslist” for possible employment rather than wasting time on MySpace and Facebook. Facebook as the search terms ranked third in the search report.
However, the data received quite a good number of both positive and negative reactions from the crowd. Michael was quick to berate the Hitwise report and even presented his own search trending for the terms, Craigslist, MySpace, and Facebook using Google Trends. And in the said results, Facebook is at the top spot followed by MySpace then Craigslist.
Although both Google Trends data and Hitwise data may each have their inconsistencies, we’ll just take it to mean that Hitwise data is pretty accurate especially since the difference stood only at .1%.
Completing Hitwise’s top search terms are YouTube and eBay, with eBay topping list for the Top Paid Search Term based on U.S. clicks. Now, could the economic recession also be the reason for more people clicking on eBay paid links?
the comparison to MySpace is irrelevant for the conclusion; furthermore, the report uses search volume for the comparison and people search for “craigslist” and “myspace” for entirely different reasons. And MySpace continues to have 8X the unique visitors as Craigslist — so it is not that Craigslist is more “popular” than MySpace.
A sign of the times is that “garage sale” type sites are all seeing increases in traffic — e.g. Craigslist, OLX, Backpage, etc.
http://go-digital.net/blog/2009/03/sign-of-the-times-garage-sale-sites-all-seeing-increases-in-unique-visitors/
Very good anaysis – and also watch for growth in http://thrift.name registrations!
:) nmw
Very good analysis – and also watch for growth in http://thrift.name registrations!
:) nmw
Great post on the recent Economy crisis and quick facts about the increase in online usage, we have notices that over the last few months whynotad.com has seen a massive increase in online advertising for job positions and people searching for money making ideas.
Do you still believe at Hitwise to “see what is going on with “Traffic status of this world hits site?well read this thread ,I beleive you can read how “not convident it is hitwise make analytic to other website
Other niche classifieds sites are seeing an increase in traffic, as in the case with http://www.mydochub.com/classifieds/ a free health and medical classifieds site.
Thanks for sharing this information. I found it very informative as I have been researching a lot lately on practical matters such as you talk about…