It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.
Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets – MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago.
Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period – at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.
There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on that next week.
Good ridance. Considering myspace from a pure design and development POV, it’s long over due.
Mike, when you first started reporting on MySpace/FB, ever think you’d make this kinda announcement?
From an Indian perspective, I see a lot of my friends on Facebook and this is a recent trend. Trends in India spread quickly and the number add up fast.
according to alexa facebook is getting more traffic than myspace since last april.
#3 – that tells us absolutely nothing
One day Orkut will overtake ‘em all…
i agree. but not for the time being. google is busy with chrome os. so they might not have time to think about something revolutionary to be added on orkut.
> There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are
> from an advertising standpoint.
Should they withdraw from the international scenary? like Hulu?
@4 — interesting that you didn’t ban them.
@3 — you’re insulting Hong Kong people.
113 – no, i don’t think they should abandon the international markets. But where users are located has a real impact on advertising revenue.
May mean more then you think since mySpace is more prone to spambot user registrations.
Harry “heaven help us” Wang
Michael – yes true.. but they should get more international advertisers as the real solution.. mightbe do it on a cheaper-per-click basis, or whatever, they know better.. and eventually, a bidding process in place when it becomes hugely successful and turns the supply-demand situation around.
I can see it with my own eyes. Amazing how many people I know that are joining facebook everyday. Older people that are not that techy are joining facebook. With all the utility, like events, and all the apps, they are going to make so many sites, such as evites, birthdayalerts, and etc. obsolete.
There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on that next week.
HUH?!
How can Humans not be valuable?
The intelligent solution would be to promote their new data to Advertisers serving the Euro market including global companies
therefore……..facebook is the killer app that everyone was looking for but couldn’t put his finger on!
that is really a big deal for SN’s, mysapce has a huge lead – and facebook has taken a lot of flack of late but at least they where doing things like adding features and staying relevant, myspace was the big player that no one likes talked about. I’m a bit surprised and really impressed that facebook has been maintaining this blitzing growth pace and is now all caught up.
What? But Scoobie told us it’s dead? How can it be number one? Doesn’t everyone listen to Scoobie?
Hahaha…… funny
That top graph looks like MySpace’s growth has flattened off. I’ll be curious to see if facebook’s growth continues or if that ’s about the saturation point.
Have never been a fan of Facebook. But, clearly this achievement is quite impressive.
for the really cool, you know, like the ones who would never be seen in a starbucks, because it just isn’t cool anymore, not being on facebook is cool
facebook is for mindless consumers of pap, in other words. like, the people who think hollywood movies are cool, or go to macdonald’s, or starbux …. eeyew, how uncool
I see there has been some talk about advertising in international markets. I can tell you for a fact that many advertisers have approached us here at adparlor.com looking to advertise on facebook and myspace, whilst targeting international users.
It’s interesting because they should probably be advertising on Orkut and Bebo, however it seems that facebook and myspace are the social networks which they have heard about and hence they want to advertiser on them. This International user base growth on facebook is great for advertisers – giving them a broader reach while advertising on a network they are familiar with.
What you wanna bet it’s the exact same 115 million people?
I have paying clients because of reconnecting with old friends on Facebook. I love when people think they’re too cool for it, and miss the point.
And most of all, people are ready to quit their job if they were denied Facebook access at work.
http://visionof...t-facebook.html
Isn’t Orkut the most popular social network in India?
15: I never said Facebook is dead. I said I wasn’t going to support it anymore, which is very true, until they fix a few things about it.
As long they are unique are important for my opinion. They can find advertisers from all over the world…
Long Live Facebook! Myspace users should all rot in H__L..;-)
There are just too many social sites nowadays.. can’t just they stick with one?
Friendster, Facebook, Orkut, MySpace..man..
Interesting. Here in the UK, almost everybody I know has switched over from MySpace to Facebook – I don’t know of anybody I know that uses MySpace actively anymore, aside from perhaps their music “artists” pages at which Facebook is still playing catch up.
It would be interesting to see how many users are registered on both sites as people seem to use the two sites for different purposes.
Myspace is like a night-club for a younger crowd to meet whoever, whenever and ‘hang out’.
Facebook is more like a casual dining restaurant suitable even for your grandparents.
If we’re talking advertising dollars, the very same person may be interested in different things given the social groups they associate with on either site.
“MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques”
Just want to point out this grammatical mistake in this sentence.
The “is” shouldn’t be there.
*yawn*
Re: advertising, Facebook already offers a nice granularity of the users for the advertisers – as an Israeli, I only see local ads on the left (below the apps menu), and I’m pretty sure that happens in the ads in the news feed.
uau, strong fighting between this 2 social networks.
“MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques.”
is still dominates?
Yes, it is big but is it profitable?
#3- Does anyone take Alexa’s stats for real? apart from you???
I hope facebook goes down in flames
@25 Scoble
Who cares what you support?
I don’t particularly like Facebook, but it doesn’t seem to lack traffic…
You might want to look at http://www.deve...ranalytics.com/ – Facebook & MySpace dominate the global usage in Social Networking. But Orkut is having a steady rise and might even override if it attracts US & UK crowd in a large extent. dA also is a good site on learning statistics and usage pattern of users in various social networking platform with demographic details.
Has anyone noticed CyWorld.com – South Korea’s leading Social Networking site which has higher penetration that FaceBook and MySpace. The interesting fact is they work with better business model than the rest out there and income has been steady and twice as much FB is making!
I don’t find any reason hyping about FaceBook or MySapce, but global reach should include social networking platforms from all countries not just US & UK if I am right.
- iAnalyzr
Michael,
‘There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. ‘
Really? I’d love to see your discussion regarding this. With exchange rates the way they are, eCPMs and therefore yield can often be higher in foreign markets compared to the US.
Also bear in mind that large multi-nationals are seeking integrated global advertising campaigns. Facebook can meet this demand if it has a large international audience.
Online advertising spend as a % of total ad spend is still small in comparison to the US for many international markets however these markets have not reached the ‘tipping point’ yet in online ad spend that the UK and US did 3 years ago. In these smaller markets, online media consumption is on par with the US and UK yet online ad spend is not being matched. It’s only a matter of time.
What about Hi5?? It’s much more popular than both here in Portugal. I know it’s nowhere near as popular as Myspace in the US but I would like to have a way to compare both
Who thought of using red for myspace in the first chart and red for facebook in the second?
Now that facebook is #1 (worldwide), its only fitting that it will soon jump the shark if it didn’t already.
looking forward to the Second F8 Developer Conference. facebook will definitely do something to increase the level of their user activity (more this time). another boom in their growth!
These numbers interest me, but I wonder if we can say one or the other dominates right now when many users have two accounts–facebook and myspace. I’d like to know how many facebook users also use myspace frequently. If the numbers are high, then we have a co-usability status.
How many new users have facebook gained that have completely disbanded from myspace or never used myspace before?
Lies and statistics
Myspace has more than 300M unique worlwide
Fakebook barely 20M
Keep dreaming fakebookers!
Michael, remember something, Google is so powerful in the advertising area in part because they get so much money from International markets. For example I am a publisher from Dominican Republic and my adsense money are already north of 5,000 a month…and growing really fast everyt month. Yahoo, MSN didnt care about publishers in markets like this…
If you login to facebook with Dominican Republic in your profile you will get a lot of local advertising… That same thing I guess is happening in other countries.. So it is not a bad area to be strong internationally in the long run.
If my beloved yahoo can be taken down, facebook is certainly susceptible. And given that users on social networks are fickle, they have more of a challenge ahead of them to not “jump the shark”, get too corporate, or heaven forbid, be “uncool” or boring. I mean, my mom’s on facebook. I can imagine that’s not a good thing in many ways with how internet companies come and go.
I hope facebook goes down in flames