I was living vicariously through WSJ's Julia Angwin's Mogul-fest tweets last week (ironically throughout the week she tweeted that several moguls didn't see the future in Twitter). While in Sun Valley, Angwin reported a brief interchange with Murdoch regarding the future direction of MySpace. Murdoch stated that MySpace needed to be re-focused "as an entertainment portal."

Having followed MySpace via Hitwise over the last five years, I was interested to see what user behavior revealed regarding MySpace's positioning in the online entertainment space. Clickstream (or what sites were visited immediately prior to and after a subject site or industry) provides an interesting angle on that question.

At one point in its history MySpace was the most significant contributor of traffic to Entertainment - Mutlimedia sites (YouTube remains the #1 site in that category) providing over 35% of traffic to the category. As the chart below illustrates, that percentage now hovers below 10%.

As I wrote in Click (and Angwin goes into much greater depth in her book), MySpace's initial growth focused on community and music. Here's a chart of MySpace's contribution of traffic to the Music - Bands & Artists category.

As a top 5 site with 3.45% of all U.S. Internet visits, MySpace remains a massive force to be reckoned with. However, as the two charts above illustrate, the site has become increasingly removed from Entertainment and Music traffic.

Bill Tancer

Note: This post originally appeared on Bill Tancer's blog here. Bill is the General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise. His bio can be viewed here

Image by mikegoat