More bad news for MySpace as Facebook finally passed it last month to become the most popular US social networking site. According to comScore, Facebook totaled 70,278,000 unique visitors, up 97% from May 2008 to May 2009. MySpace audience shrank 5% over the same timeframe, falling to 70,255,000 unique visitors.
Obviously Twitter has seen some tremendous growth in the last 12 months, but I find it interesting that the 5th and 6th biggest social networking sites are MyLife.com and Windows Live Profile! Also, Bebo (an AOL purchase) is slowly making inroads into the U.S. market I would expect to see them continue to grow market share.
One area that MySpace continues to dominate Facebook is in advertising, not withstanding the recent layoffs at MySpace.
In April, MySpace visitors viewed 31.8 million ads, accounting for almost 47% of the total social network advertising space. Facebook was second, serving nearly 25 million ads and making up about 37% of the sector. In third place surprisingly was Tagged, which served 2.4 million ads, or 3.6% of publisher views.
MySpace is doing a good job converting those ad impressions in revenue as they are predicted to earn $495 million in 2009, more than double Facebook’s projected income.
eMarketer expects that the revenue gap will likely close in 2009-2010. MySpace entered into an advertising agreement with Google in 2006 that would pay the social network roughly $300 million a year, ending in June 2010. But TechCrunch reported that a new deal between Google and MySpace would be worth only $50 million to $75 million yearly, punching a big hole in the social network’s revenues.
“Facebook is becoming the go-to social networking site for marketers,” said eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “While MySpace still has a huge quantity of visitors, they are becoming less relevant for advertisers.”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
SMO on Twitter, FB is growing rapidly like fire, Many Brand mangers and Brand owners have very lil or no clue abt the same…
A Hybrid mix of SMO and SEO has worked like wonders for most of our clients….
Intelligent Applications on Facebook are creating a very loud voice too.
yep!! there exists an absolute gap for hybrid!! and that requires absolute focus