Over the last year there has been a rather strong dispute growing between search engines and content producers. Content producers claim that search engines scrape their content without getting anything in return. Search engines, on the other hand, emphasize that they forward a lot of monetizable traffic to content producer’s sites. Both sides have a strong stake in the discussion, but who is right?
Here are some data sources that measure the upstream traffic that passes through search engines to content sites:
1. Hitwise
The market research company Experian Hitwise runs monthly statistics on global search engine use that are publicaly accessible. The upstream traffic for certain product categories are part of the statistics. Here’s the upstream traffic for October 2009 and November 2009.
| U.S. category upstream traffic from search engines and Google – October 2009 | ||||
| Category | Percentage of category traffic from search engines – October 2009 | Percent change in share of traffic from search engines – October 2008-October 2009 | Percentage of category traffic from Google – October 2009 | Percent change in share of traffic from Google – October 2008- October 2009 |
| Automotive | 30.21% | 18% | 21.22% | 19% |
| Business and Finance | 22.17% | 19% | 15.63% | 21% |
| Entertainment | 28.55% | 21% | 19.37% | 20% |
| Health and Medical | 42.72% | -5% | 30.98% | -3% |
| News and Media | 25.43% | 22% | 17.24% | 14% |
| Online Video** | 36.21% | 12% | 25.75% | 9% |
| Shopping and Classifieds | 27.27% | 8% | 19.06% | 9% |
| Social Networking** | 20.53% | 11% | 13.86% | 13% |
| Sports | 16.30% | 36% | 11.38% | 35% |
| Travel | 38.48% | 8% | 28.81% | 9% |
| Note: All figures are based on U.S. data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million Internet users.
**Denotes a custom category |
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| Source: Experian Hitwise | ||||
There is also a very interesting analysis of the upstream traffic Wall Street Journal gets from Google Search and Google News. According to Hitwise more than 25 percent of WSJ’s traffic originates from Google.
2. Alexa
Stats from Alexa.com are slightly less representative due to the fact, that the Alexa panel is based on self selection. But with Alexa’s Site Info Tool the traffic (including upstream search traffic) of every website worldwide can be measured.
3. Comscore
Comscore.com has also good stats on Search Engine Market share. I have not yet found freely available upstream statistics.
Let me know in the comments if you know any other sources.
