Are you still blown away by the comScore findings that had News Corp.'s (NYSE:NWS) Fox Interactive lapping Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) to claim the most page views last month?
I am. Even though I was quick to dismiss the value of a page view at Fox's MySpace.com, it was still a beefy showing. To help flesh things out, comScore dug deeper into the numbers with a new press release that spells out the traffic difference between the two eyeball magnets.
In a nutshell, the study looked at the impact that college campus traffic had on the numbers. According to comScore, university locations served up 34.9 billion -- or 8% -- of the 454.2 billion total website pages that were viewed last month. It may not seem like much, but social networking is a big deal on campus, and apparently, it's not all about Facebook.
12% of the traffic at MySpace.com -- and MySpace accounts for 98% of the Web traffic for Fox -- came from college computers. Yahoo! saw just 6% of its hits coming from establishments of higher learning. Back out the university data, and Yahoo! attracted 35.6 billion page views, while Fox drew just 34.9 billion.
What does this mean? I promise not to devalue the value of a college student. It's a desirable market. However, this may help explain why Yahoo! has been in talks to acquire MySpace rival Facebook. Even though it would be a mistake to overpay for a trendy site like Facebook, especially since MySpace is apparently a rising star in the coed community, it's a market that Yahoo! could use some help with.
But you wouldn't think so at first glance. Yahoo! Mail has always appealed to the thrifty. Yahoo!'s HotJobs has to be on students' minds sooner or later. The fact that Yahoo! is commanding a larger percentage of the non-college crowd than the college crowd should be pretty darn frightening for Yahoo!.
Over in China, the reason why many believe that Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has been smoking Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) over the past year is that it is strongest with young users, who in turn will grow up and spend more with the brands that they're used to trusting. Yahoo! needs to get back in touch with its academic side.
What are you waiting for, Yahoo!? If Facebook won't sell, do something relevant in this space. At the very least, enroll in a class or pledge a Greek organization.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz went to school back when social networking meant shaking a lot of hands. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. The Fool has a disclosure policy.
