Is MySpace Passé?
A Washington Post article over the weekend suggests as we did earlier this month that traffic to the main social media sites, especially MySpace is slowing if not falling.
Besides anecdotal comments from MySpace users, the Post did have some interesting data about how users are spending less time on MySpace than before:
One key measure of a site’s popularity is the amount of time a user stays on the site. Tracked over time, such usage data for older networking sites frequented by young people show how popularity gradually rises then falls, like an inchworm’s back.
Take Xanga, the hot social networking site before MySpace: In October 2002, the typical Xanga user spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes a month on the site, a figure that declined steadily, reaching only 11 minutes last month, according to Nielsen-NetRatings. Friendster, another older site, hit its first usage peak of 1 hour and 51 minutes in October 2003, and then hit another peak of 3 hours and 3 minutes in February 2006. But last month, the average user was on Friendster for a mere 7 minutes.
MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month.
This is bad news for both Fox and Google. Fox, because their property becomes less valuable as less people visit the site, and Google because less users means fewer eyeballs and less ad revenue.
So what does this mean for marketers? If your whole social media budget is allocated to MySpace I would suggest that some of that money needs to be reallocated. The Nielson numbers suggests that high school and college MySpace users are heading over to Facebook. If your target audience is younger (12-17 age range) then Xanga.com might provide a better opportunity than MySpace.
Filed under Brand Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : Oct 29th, 2006
March 7th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
I can feel the decline of Myspace. It seems that only Indie bands are “serious” users now…and even their use is declining.
O