I can imagine that all the Facebook hype is a little annoying to MySpace - which is still the largest site on the Internet. That may be some of the motivation behind the press release going out Thursday morning saying, effectively, that they are still the King of Social Networking.
And they have some facts to back it up. MySpace is the largest site on the Internet in terms of page views, at around 46 billion per month (Facebook is around 15 billion and actually dropped about 1 billion between May and June). Nearly 25 million people visit MySpace daily (about 3x Facebook’s numbers), and just over 70 million people in the U.S. visit the site every month.
We’ve included some Comscore comparison graphs below that highlight the differences. Facebook is in the middle of its summer slump, but still has a long way to go to catch up with MySpace in terms of users and page views. And some of the trends show a greater growth rate at MySpace, despite its larger user base.
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using both and here’s my thought, the best is yet to come.
myspace - design sucks so bad.
facebook - rooms for improvements (user friendliness for one)
And now the horse has officially been beaten beyond recognition… new topic please
Actually, looks like YouTube just this week passed up Myspace.com in pageviews, according to Alexa. (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=youtube.com&site1=myspace.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&y=p&z=0&h=300&w=610&range=1m&size=Medium&url=new7wonders.com)
This has been a long time coming.
Also, its worth noting that page views may not tell the whole story with regard to Myspace vs. Facebook – Myspace has more page views, but arguably Facebook does a much better job of exposing quality content then Myspace, where users have to click around a lot to find the good stuff. This leads to more pageviews, but a worse experience.
I wonder how large community college enrollment is compared with private university enrollment?
@Tom
What relevance is there in knowing that? I would doubt if there is a discrimination from community colleges to private colleges. Besides, college students are becoming less significant within the user bases.
Haha, if you want to know why the pageviews are so high, try any action on myspace and compare it with facebook, it’ll take at least two times more clicking around. The interface is a mess, all these random options in different places.
I use both social networks and firmly believe that Facebook is the clear winner. Why? While MySpace.com/tom claims to have 189654277 “friends” this statistic fails to realize that a high percentage of these users are spammers sending useless porn to unsuspecting patrons. I only say this because I receive on average 2-3 “friend requests” per day from various “users” who say they are “kinda shy but their ‘friends’ keep on telling them its the place to meet cool, quality good looking guys…oh and by the way check out my nude pix!!!”
I know I could have placed privacy controls on my profile but this would disallow myself to optimize the social network. I want social contacts, not social spammers.
Facebook on the other hand is a focused network which has evolved into an ecosystem of social networks within the “social graph”. The fact that Facebook started with one demographic (academia) and perfected the model before expanding its markets has allowed it to grow in a sustainable fashion.
Also on big difference between the two networks is the profile development process. While Facebook may limit the user by making its design form-fed it does comply with w3c specs. In contrast MySpace lets the users build their own profile using amateur HTML coding (mostly copied from spamming sites). The result is littered profiles, low load times and a social ecosystem which will inevitably destruct.
Bottom line:
MySpace is nothing more than a Cluster F%$k!
I know you’re cranking these posts out as fast as you can type, but come on, the rule is simple: “it’s” = “it is” or “it has.” As in:
“Facebook is in the middle of it’s [sic] summer slump.”
Love the site, but you guys get this bit of elementary school grammar wrong almost every day.
This topic hits a nerve with me. I JUST left the comment below on Mashable:
While all the Big Boys fight it out with all the statistics, I wonder if any of them realize that maybe, just maybe it is how you treat the users that count. As a MySpace peon, who has been running 64 internet tv channels with active MySpace profiles for over a year, I am often amazed at the lack of communication or attendance to user concerns. We have suffered innumerable phishing attacks where the company responses are simply more pain. We have had accounts deleted without notice or explanation, and have yet to have even one of our multiple emails responded to. The difficult MySpace email system forces us to log into each account to both receive and send mail. These complaints are coming from a company that uses Snocap and actually brings value to MySpace, and has a network that has approximately 300,000 so called “friends.” I have to add that we live in fear of reaching out to our “friends” because our accounts may be deleted without notice. Add to this the total lack of respect that MySpace has been giving to the widget community, and it is no wonder we are all looking around to bail out from MySpace at the first opportunity. THEY (MySpace) are showing US that THEY see no value in US. I am hoping that Facebook’s refreshing approach will rub off on the folks at MySpace. I want them both to continue to be available as the revolutionary opportunities that they are. PLEASE realize that you (MySpace) are in danger of becoming identified as the enemy, and that would be unfortunate. Too bad that none of these types of concerns are adequately reflected in statistics or press release wars. Peace.
I would completely disregard these numbers if I were you, given that page views is a rather archaic metric for site popularity - even more so, with the increased use of Ajax on Facebook..
Get over the grammar issues! It’s people like you that ruin everything!
I think one thing that you are missing is that Facebook is more focused on making information very easy to get. MySpace built a social network on the premise of self expression, whereas Facebook built it to mirror social reality. This is where Facebook beats MySpace in the end, because no matter how popular MySpace is/becomes is irrelevant to the fact that MySpace is not a social utility. It is a means for one to express themselves, and yeah, that’s cool and popular, but it is a dead end.
People constantly talk about the “death of MySpace” and such; I think that will be very gradual. But Facebook will keep going strong simply because the connections that people have on Facebook are *real*, and it is a much more useful tool than MySpace will ever be.
Mark Zuckerberg talks a lot about making information much more efficient and publicly available to the people that need it, and that is what is making Facebook so valuable. He said one time when he was on a panel that he didn’t care much about page views or time/visits, he cares about users getting the information that is important to them and leaving. “Information efficiency” is the same reason why Google is so valuable. I believe that any company that can increase the efficiency of information will always be of exponential value compared to companies built on the premise of self expression.
But… Facebook users are more valuable in terms of purchase power (older, more educated, etc, etc.)
Pageviews??? The stats are pretty clear…
1. MySpace users visit the site 20% more often than Facebook users visit Facebook
2. MySpace users spend about 10 minutes more each month on the site than Facebook users spend on Facebook
3. MySpace has 3 times more minutes on the site than Facebook
4. MySpace gets 3 times more visitors on the average day than Facebook
5. MySpace is America’s leading and most trafficked website, and just crossed the 70 million active monthly unique user mark in the U.S.
6. Almost 1/4 of Americans used MySpace last month (compared to Census data)
http://mashable.com/2007/07/11.....-facebook/
Myspace rocks over facebook. You are 100% right.
No doubt that Myspace still rules and has the the largest population, but face book is now getting more accepted with its developers program which give a major opportunity to come back to the site not just to see their friends have been upto but also What the site has been upto….which is quite a nice thing as when the user comes across a nice application, he goes and does a lot of offline campaign. And the use of Ajax could also be a reason as well.
Here’s a thought, Facebook could be in its summer slump, because user are on there holidays. Being that Facebook attracts the more affluent users than myspace, they may have more money to go away, and once they come they’ll have a lot to say on FB………………
I agree too that MySpace’s pageviews are grossly oversized due to the amount of clicks and pages you go through to perform certain tasks on MySpace. If they introduced some AJAX functionality instead of requiring page refreshes I think their page views would drop to 2 thirds of that amount.
I also think that despite the fact that Facebook has a great API, widgets etc but I would say that a lot of users don’t care about that. MySpace still appeals to a lot of people who want to customise the look and feel of the page to be whatever they want. It’s still pig ugly, and a usability mess but for many people, it works well enough.
It’ll be interesting to see the stats change now that Nielsen/NetRatings have announced that they are going to change the way they rank sites to how long people view sites rather than page views. See Read/WriteWeb’s article about it: http://www.readwriteweb.com/ar.....e_view.php
I’m on vacation in the middle east and the growth rate of facebook over here is just amazing. Very few people even heard of myspace. I went to an internet cafe in Amman around 12am and about 30% of users were checking their facebook accounts. Hi5 seems to be popular over here as well but youngsters told me they are all switching to facebook.
Myspace is 10% spam users; creating fake profiles with naked pics to get 1000+ friends to spam the bulletins… etc.
When will mySpace die?!!!
Yes let’s hope MySpace goes away for good. Facebook is superior on all fronts.
I’m with Concrete Stain. My first question was “I wonder how much all of the spam inflates their stats?”
I assume most have watched this but here are some interesting and scary facts about Facebook.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU
Enjoy!
The Future of Online business networking…..today as most of you are aware…social networking has taken over the internet, or so it would seem. Every where you look these days there something about social networking from finding your friends to developing a social network concept.
Currently, MySpace gets 80% of all social networking traffic. Facebook gets 11% and the thousands of other social networking sites, including Ecademy, Bebo and so on, have to share the other 9% between them.
So what is this online business networking all about, well In the physical world you don’t socialize or hang out with just anybody, every body has a need or social belonging to certain group, all the many forms of Maslow hierarchy as one would say. However in business concept, social networking sites are money-making machines creating a need for added value among people causing them to spend all their pocket money on extra features such as VIP profiles, downloads, gifts for friends, in friends perspective world, social networking sites are places where people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.
Currently marketers today are striving to keep this trend going, so is fair to say that the likes of MySpace, Facebook and Ecademy do. So, as Novelty of there site continues, is one of main reason; that financial support is currently seen in these site from advertising, sponsorship to TV stunts all milking this cash cow business grow, what Robert Murdock re-sights there’s never a great news till actually you sign on the dotted line just from networking, another; is the fact that the Internet is full of “early adopters” willing to try out new things; however how long can this go on, as the baby boomers out wait the young generation?
Just as MySpace operates as a service for musicians a never endless of raw talent, actually who can complain about myspace, where individuals are there own brand or superstar should I say. As Social network pioneers through the next 10 years, some question must be looked in to this fast paste change technology.
However one think is for certain, instead of the general social networking site, very soon will see the
Specialist group network individual who want to engage themselves in a manner where is a benefit to them in order to fo-front their own business interests a self social network investment.
Currently today, this young dynamic company called Highflya just recently launched wants to change this, boring toll by getting professional individuals to network with each other, As the saying goes it’s not about who you know … but WHO KNOWS YOU!! by this I mean where people can create their own vertical social networking groups devoted to any special interest they like. Instead of the simple root, Highflya seeks professional individuals to make their own social network or special interest. One think does remain with this company, the site wants users to connect based on interests or social professional nature. This is a good way of introducing people to one another, and so too, is the use of a number of icons like Vidmail
Regardless of how much traffic it gets, sure it makes a lot of people money, but from a quality stand point it’s the worst site on the internet. I think the state about people spending more time on the site is invalid and that it relates to the fact users of my space can’t actually find what they’re looking for…
Huh? I always throught that the hearts and minds of the people who count had abandoned MySpace for Facebook. I guess MySpace still has a lot of hearts and minds of people who don’t count, except to comScore, Nielsen, etc.
http://www.drama20show.com/200.....nd-coming/
Revised title: “MySpace - Still Sucks”
MySpace certainly has a lot of spam — members, messages, friend invites. I guess the reason for this is because there are a lot of users who are the real thing. Activity attracts spam and there’s definitely a lot going on over at MySpace. MySpace Music, for example…think about all the musicians out there, both seasoned and amateur, who are promoting their work on MySpace.
My Facebook account is practically on stealth mode.
2/3 of those page views come from having to login twice.
Revised Title 2: both stink.
Seriously. As sites and tools they are not very good at all. They have lots of members though and a system that requires lots of time and page views and that is the viral part. Then there are people like me who joined just to see what techcrunch was all in a tissy about. Turns out very little. Then again I do log in when people find me and add me as a friend. Is that quality traffic? donno.
I don’t understand why every news site seems bent on comparing MySpace to Facebook. Especially when it comes to page views. MySpace is built on full page refreshes while Facebook is Ajax heavy and so page hits will be drastically lower for facebook. Also the reason MySpace is getting so many paqe hits may be due to the number of “unexpected errors” they get which requires a reload.
Second, the demographic is quite different.
Third, MySpace may be king in content, but Facebook is king is usefulness. Facebook hasn’t even tapped into its maximum capacity and is an innovative company. MySpace is simply riding the wave and just reacting to Facebook.
Myself being a software architect, if the visual design is any indication of MySpace’s skills, then their software architectural design’s days are numbered. They will have to do some major overhaul if they ever want to increase the intuitiveness and usefulness of the site. I admit I was a member of the site for a couple of years because social networking was cool and new. But the site has since bored me and Facebook has offered to take over the reins.
My intuition tells me that MySpace is milking the cow as much as they can and willing to innovate as little as they need to just to keep the wave going.
this because face book has most of its uses in college. it started out only with college students. so in the summer months its going to slow down wait for aug. kids like to post pictures of them partying and what not and its way more used in the year. so your curves are true reflections of summer. myspace is quickly losing college students and soon high school. the age market of myspace will be lop sided. they both have huge design flaws but facebook is ALITTLE less bs so people are switching.
Someone else is going to come along and knock off facebook with a new closed universe offering to university students anyway.
I think that alot of the reason that MySpace is “less important” even if it has more “page views” is due to the demographic it targets. Theres alot of news about the demographics of Facebook versus MySpace, and simply put: Facebook users are wealthier and more technically apt.
This makes targeting (and advertising) on the Facebook platform a better choice for many companies looking to get a message out. Mix that with targeted advertisements (Facebook knows your age, where you live and what you like *and can parse it*) and ads are simply worth more on Facebook.
This begs the question why Facebook has the worst click-through rates - somewhere on the order of 0.04% which means that even at the cheapest rate available (Facebook flyers) which are at $2/CPM, you end up paying $5 per click. If Facebook users really are wealthier and technically adept, they are also more likely to use Ad Blockers and also to ignore advertising.
Myspace is already commerical so users expect that. Facebook’s users use it because it’s not Myspace and I think it’s going to have a really difficult time monetizing its userbase. That being said, I prefer to use Facebook.
I understand that people go into business to make money, but the advertising on MySpace is overkill. I started using Facebook recently because of this very reason.
One factor in their differences that I think is critical to their product direction is that Facebook avoided getting swallowed up by Yahoo! whereas MySpace became part of the Fox-NewsCorp empire. And I think in small but strategic ways, you see that in the product updates and directions of these two companies.
Whereas Facebook still operates like a startup and makes major strategic bets like opening membership up to the public and this whole apps platform direction, MySpace has certainly stagnated in the product strategy and features department. As people above have commented, it is absolutely frustrating to actually “use” MySpace as it errors out 25% of the time, and every thing takes 5 clicks. I can just imagine the “product leaders” at MySpace having to go thru endless committee meetings, research, and bureacracy to change anything in their product, and certainly any major risky bets getting quashed since the main business is such a cash-cow.
You can also see in MySpace’s international sites (I read Japanese & Chinese) that their “globalization” efforts are purely functional - as they just machine translated the UI and launched it without any real consideration for cultural/social dynamics in those countries. I am willing to bet lots of yen that some ”not in the target demographic” exec at NewsCorp gave some strategic decision to enter those large Asian markets, without any consideration for the product aspects of entering those markets.
Anyhoo - hats off to Facebook & the Zuck machine for “just doing it” and a very wise decision not to get bought by Yahoo!
myspace IS king and will REMAIN king in my opinion..
It is just a matter of time, the exodus has begun…
Talking about “MEGA SITES”, whats up with Michael Arrington trying to take over the blogosphere with his MEGA-UNIVERAL-BLOG plan?
Just read this small article but it made some good points about on the topic,
http://www.aialex.com/2007/07/.....ogosphere/
I have only used facebook a few times.
But the differences are apparent.
I think there is room for both of them, at least for a while.
Hi, Mike. I thought maybe you’d want to use one of the new web 2.0 data tools to display your graphs. I took the liberty of redoing your graphs and putting them on our site, Data360, and also on our blog. What’s the benefit? All of these graphs will now be updated whenever the underlying data is updated. No need to redo in Excel and re-paste jpegs into your blog. You can also combine these graphs with other graphs into a slideshow of graphs or do calculations with this data against other data on the site. You can see the graphs on our site at: http://www.data360.org/adm_gg_.....up_Id=1002 and the blog charts at: http://data360.wordpress.com/myspace-vs-facebook/. Best regards, Tom Paper
Interesting stats. I have a MySpace account, but it exists only to connect with friends who don’t have accounts with Facebook or Xanga. I am sure many other people are the same way.
myspace.com is still and will remain the king of spam, bad interface, design and usability. Oh, lets not forget all the crapy bands that wants to be “your friend”.
What the media fails to understand when making the comparison is that Facebook represents a vastly more powerful and marketable audience.
A survey recently (cant remember from whom) basically told me what i already knew. Myspace is for low class, low income kids. The Facebook users are older, professionals with good finances. Who do you want to target??
Myspace will fade away and become ‘the 12 year olds sandbox’ while facebook will be the communication tool of the future.
My 2cents.
MySpace is still king for now…But really for how long?
Facebook has not been in the game as long as myspace but have grown more rapidly in a shorter amount of time.
It won’t be much longer until facebook catches up as their interface is much friendlier than myspace.
I’d say in about a years time b4 facebook is on par with myspace.
Facebook has less user minutes per session, or month, or whatever, because it’s so much better designed than MySpace. It’s sleek, easy, intuitive, and very innovative. MySpace is designed to confuse you some degree, so they can pound you with advertising - just like a big mall is architecturally designed to make it difficult to get out.
What an intrigiuing article! Personally while I have an account on both myspace and facebook I actually prefer another site a lot better which is a community only for adults.
In other news, McDonalds is still king of restaurants.
There many thing we can do on myspace. that why people like it.