What was a bad situation in November 2008 is starting to turn outright ugly – Facebook is now well over twice the size of MySpace, according to recent worldwide Comscore data. And what’s worse, MySpace is losing audience while Facebook absolutely hockey sticks: MySpace lost 2% of users in just one month, while Facebook grew by nearly 40 million members in February alone. MySpace currently has 124 million monthly unique visitors, compared to Facebook’s 276 million.
That’s a 16.6% growth rate at Facebook in one month. This simply doesn’t happen with sites that already have hundreds of millions of users. It was less than a year ago that MySpace and Facebook were the same size.
Comscore says more than 1 in 4 people with Internet access visited Facebook last month. They’re sixth overall in terms of top sites in terms of unique users, and third (after Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) in overall page views.
MySpace continues to see executive departures, and it isn’t clear that founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson will be staying on after their contracts terminate later this year. We expect more defections by the summer, and a possible reorganization of parent entity Fox Interactive Media.
MySpace profiles always looked like a mess that could at best attract some teens and whoever wanted to be exposed to the teens. Eventually the mess bites them in the ass.
Facebook meanwhile has managed to attract an extremely wide audience including demographics that would have never dreamed of being on a scial network just a year ago.
On top of that there are a growing number of pre-facebook networks like http://www.nexopia.com/ that focus on the younger crowds because ther mom is already on facebook
To each his own…Where the crowd is the largest, spammers (and blackhat hat hackers) are soon to follow…
Goodluck FB ;-P
Myspace, friendster or orkut seems like already given up. There is always scope for 2 social networks in each country since people dont mind upto 2 profiles. Facebook’s lead is due to internationally every country it is in top 2 social networks, while others dominate in some regions of their own.
I’d be interested to see the demographic of Facebook’s growth. The problem with MySpace is they are sticking to their core audience, teens. Only problem is teens are fickle and move on. The site is problematic from pop-up and spyware perspective too.
yeah but users are spending less and less engagement time on facebook.
not really.
Engagement: an arrangement to do something or go somewhere at a fixed time.
I don’t know of anyone who uses the site and agrees to meet up at a certain time or do a certain thing there. Engagement should be left for face to face time, not for virtual world.
did you by chance get a high school degree?
answer truthfully
Don’t disrespect Adam! Not only does he have a high school degree, but he graduated top of his class at one of the best local community colleges!
lol
If you read my post again, you’d notice that I was basically agreeing with you, silicon, while adding my own two cents. If you read Michael’s response, he was disagreeing with you.
Adam, “engagement” on the internet basically means the amount of time someone is engaged at the service… i.e. using it.
Never heard ‘hockey sticks’ and I can’t guess what it means but it sounds strange. Govermentbook seems to be turning into a universal homepage, connecting us through the net more than in person. At least the kids aren’t doing crack.
Picture what a hockey stick looks like in your mind, and then picture a line graph. Get it?
Maybe it’s confusing people because they don’t know how to orient the metaphorical stick in their heads. Is it lying down? Standing up?
One metaphor, two wildly different sets of data depending on the mental visualization…
You could also say woody. Facebook woodys while myspace goes limp.
it’s a term we and lots of others use when growth occurs so fast that a line graph has to alter its direction upwards.
http://www.tech...y-stick-moment/
I am here in the ‘Heartland of Hockey’ and didn’t know what it meant either – in this case it’s not too hard to extrapolate what the message is about though
For some reason I think of Ned Flanders spelling the word “hell” when I hear “hockey sticks”
H-E-Double Hockey Sticks
Random, I know.
not ‘random’, word-association. same thing here, btw
lol… that was too funny.
Got it, Michael. Thanks. It had me thinking I was missing something about the rules of hockey due to the ’s’ on sticks which made it seem like a quasi-verb.
Hockey stick to the best of my knowledge was first used by Prof. Michael Mann in his paper on climate change , which was adopted enthusiastically by the United Nation IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report and Al Gore to drum up the hype of man-made global warming. Now, this IPCC hockey-stick has been discredited for being false and complete. The UN IPCC and Al Gore still believe this climate hockey-stick bullshit.
Correction to my previous message:
…has been discredited for being false and complete.
should read:
…has been discredited for being false and incomplete.
Geez, now I’m confused, Falafulu…you’re speaking of a hockey stick that doesn’t exist…
Falafulu -
‘climate hockey-stick bullshit’ – you sir are a paid troll or are just confused. Climate change is real – http://www.glob...0505sinking.htm
Just ask anyone who lives near the ocean.
Wake up! time to get your head out of your a**.
you’re doing crack, tho’–and don’t disregard the role of whore-bag rupert murdoch @ myspace–already a stupid, stupid ‘tweeny name. fail-fail!
I think the internationalisation strategy has paid off really big for Facebook. Indeed, most companies forget the size of populations in places like China, India and Indonesia.
Perhaps myspace should focus on music and teens. Facebook does not have any built-in tools for musicians yet. I’d leave myspace in a heartbeat if Facebook made it easy to post songs and stuff like myspace does…Facebook could take even more marketshare if they start adding mp3 playability and hosting.
But they do.. it’s called Facebook Pages.
I hate MySpace – really disgusting profile layouts and the rest of the site is hard to navigate. I never click a single MySpace link.
I was expecting to see a vertical line
But damn they sure are growing fast!
Does anyone know the breakdown of Facebook and MySpace users by country?
myspace sucks now, it’s nothing but spammers and advertisements everywhere. facebook isn’t much better, they’re overloading everyone with new applications left and right.
Myspace seems to have reached its peak. Its monthly unique visitor count has flat lined.
Still, I wouldn’t mind those figures for my web site
First comment nails it – MySpace is a mess.
A little over a year ago, it was still MySpace’s game to lose. Had they made different decisions, perhaps this story would read differently.
Of course, MySpace appears to be clinging onto the last vestige of hope with the Comscore numbers indicating MySpace as having more US traffic than Facebook, but I wonder how long that will last.
And of course, one has to ask – once MySpace’s “Biggest Social Network in the US” claim disappears, how many advertisers will continue to spend money on the diminishing MySpace audience? Does anyone know how fast interest in Friendster declined?
Myspace has the benefit of having a huge parent company. This will allow the website to continue being profitable to Fox for at least a few more years to come. I’d say by 2011 or 2012 though….the site will be like what became of Friendster a few years back.
Yeah!
I guess facebook and twitter are the only two that are booming and myspace has to lose this game because facebook is introducing new and new features and I used both myspace and facebook and facebook is a whole lot easier and allows more features than myspace. I would really prefer facebook rather myspace to anyone.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
User hockey stick != revenue hockey stick.
in the long run, unless they come up with some crazy new business model, their revenue will pretty much be proportional to the number of users they have.
Totally love it.!
Unless you’re a musician or a porn star MySpace sux!!
Incredible growth, but did anyone not see this happening? Myspace broke the mold but is such a sucky user experience that Facebook would have had to been an abomination not to take over once it’s engines were revved.
Last month pretty much everyone I’ve ever gone to school with or partied with found me on Facebook all in a week period. That was amazing, statistically and emotionally.
And now it’s all lifestreamy like Twitter.
Where is the Tweetdeck client for Facebook?
Imagine how quickly you’d be a sitting duck if you were to use a Fbook tweetdeck app with API restriction similar to Twitter [Twitter has a 100 Req./hr limit ]
Wow, Yahoo is in third… Good thing they got rid of Jerry!!! Third sucks…
Surprised that they are even still in business? Right? At lease that is what all the sheep were saying a while ago.
You are so god damn stupid. No one though Yahoo would just poof and disappear. When’s the last time you heard of Yahoo having a quarter in the red, excluding random one time charges?
When will we find out if Facebook can really monetize that audience? If they can’t, what does that say?
Again we see much higher unique visitors count for Facebook reported by Comscore than Facebook says it has active users (275MM vs 175MM).
I don’t know how Comscore counts uniques, but could the difference be because Facebook users check Facebook from different machines (at home, work, school, etc…) and from their phones, each with a different IP?
The global hockey stick will arrive when cellular telephone subscribers in developing countries gain social networking tools, which should be within three years.
One example is the SMS social networking platform that Confiz.com [no connection to company] provides to cellular carriers.
Other examples will come from the identity management tools offered by .tel, which will free carriers from having to re-invent the wheel for cross-platform identity lookups and friending. Carrier participation will enhance the spread of social messaging services and IM services onto hand sets.
It will be interesting to see how autotranslation evolves with social media on mobile devices.
Its too bad Myspace didnt listen to its userbase and the world around it. Instead Tom and Chris thought they were much smarter than they actually were and started acting like rock stars, instead of execs.
They easily could have bought Facebook, or just tried to be as innovative as Mark was being. Instead, as soon as they had any success management stuck their heads up their asses and only promoted and took care of their friends, not the employees who actually stayed up all night writing the innovative code that helped them scale and beat Friendster..
All I can say is this is what you guys deserve. A moment of riches and fame and a lifetime reputation of being idiots.
Look for FB to drop off a bit in current numbers as users react to usability issues with the redesign. Or maybe they’ll continue upward as users have to spend more time searching for obscure features of the site, such as “Groups” and “Photos.”
not a chance.
Photos are obscure?
I would guess that all of the growth is coming from 30+ year old users AND International. I have been getting pinged the last 6 months with continuous stream of old high school & college friends getting on Facebook for the first time. Also – FB is rapidly replacing Friendster in S.E. Asia, and European social network sites (like Bebo). Its cleaner, controlled environment makes it safe for 30 somethings to engage, what they missed out in their college years (we only had paper Freshman Facebooks!)
For myspace to succeed, they need a complete redesign. I mean – the entire site needs improvement – a complete overhaul from the ground up.
Interface sucks. They need to do something radical like Bebo did in integrating its social timeline.
Isn’t Facebook still losing money on every visitor? I seem to recall estimates of them losing $200 million last year – with geometric growth won’t this simply make the problem worse?
Haha… Don’t worry, they’ll make it up in volume!
As I mentioned a month or so ago. FB is 2 years behind the MySpace curve. They’ll peak and then begin the inevitable downward slope. Do you really believe that avantgarde internet users will be on FB in two years. Not a chance. FB will have begun their decline and TC will be singing the praises of their ascendant successor.
There is one huge difference between the 2 sites that i see.
Myspace makes money.
Facebook does not.
I think this point is only relevant to shareholders (and employees).
I don’t think users can care less about how much money Facebook and MySpace make.
Seemed like last week you were hyping the crap outta MySpace Mike.
@Brendan : ~35% of that “money” is coming from Google who will likely walk away from that deal. Absolutely worthless.
And why is the deal worthless? Please elaborate.
MySpace still has more users where it counts. In US MySpace overshadows Facebook by far. I think it was here on techcrunch I saw an article suggesting that user base should be weighed in while analyzing the worth of any network. With that weighting MySpace is still bigger and worth more.
So only the US counts for numbers of visitors?
I’ve said this before, but the only thing that can stop facebook is users demanding absolute portability of their social graph and data. It may be too late for anything short of government action to create the competition necessary to allow other social networks to thrive. The network effect is too great, and the social graph is too tedious to recreate. Honestly, I’d be torn but wouldn’t necessarily oppose the government stepping in to force facebook to allow for competition. Monopoly charges are not but a few years away.
I think its all about time when all back together side by side,FB can win the community speed ,but I think at the same time use FB soon realize who there democratic way is more restricted with FB
Myspace is just a mess when you enter the site. It is to much garbage advertisng. The style and look is just messey compared to facebook. It is the style of the site that has benefit facebook. Myspace is in need of makeover.
reverse hockey stick is what most users over the age of 35 (the biggest growing demographic) do- they get all excited, catch up on all their old hs and college friends, start to get annoyed/get involved in their real lives offline/ find out what they are curious about & then move on. Average interest seems to be about two-three months then user time online drastically declines
kids are on it all day, but wait until they get jobs and more companies start to block FB at work
Mobile phones. That’s the plan, man.
That’s right.
That’s a pretty limp hockey stick. This is a hockey stick. ___/
40 million new users. in a month.
Right. 40M is a lot of new users. I’d give you that it looks to be the beginnings of a hockey stick growth trajectory, but to complete the job, I’d expect continued accelerating growth (60M next month?).
TC is a broken record…Twitter this, Facebook that. Paid posts people, paid posts! This is the way the game is played, unfortunately.
When you or I get 40 million users in a month, TC will be “you or I” this and “You and I” that.
Amazing!!!.Gr8 going.Hope to see Mypace in the top ten soon.
In my opinion My Space and Facebook are very different , first of all My Space is a way for musicians to promote their music whereas Facebook is used to chat with your friends or share photos. My Space is really useful, it helps artists to share their creations ! Facebook is just a way to spy your “friends” and to lose time !
There’s so much more FB could be doing now. It should innovate in terms of groups, events, and music, and be less ad driven. Some ideas I had
http://intellig...ups-events.html
With the resources they have…dam. I’m sure you guys have more ideas to improve the experience.
Growth is impressive but certainly it’s not a hockey stick.
My money is on myspace anyway unless FB changes its management team and starts making money.
I know this will happen. Experts predicted this beforehand. MySpace is loosing space to facebook.
Facebook is dying too
They are running at extremely high spending
I hardly ever get visitors to my myspace site anymore. I don’t even like visiting myspace profiles because there’s so much advertising, exhibitionism, and drama. People on myspace just don’t seem to be on there seriously – or maybe they are just seriously trying to attract attention. There’s also a lot of cyberbullying on myspace. Who needs that?
hockey sticks?
GO LEAFS GO!
If I were working at MySpace, I’d be polishing up my resume. I expect massive layoffs there soon.
One poster was right on the money about MySpace “execs acting like rock stars”. I’ve never seen a company so full of “cool people” who didn’t know a thing about running a business.
shouldn’t you be polishing up yours. The last time anyone heard from you was 25 years ago on Buck Rodgers. Just kidding.
At the end of the day Facebook is just a more mature and robust social network.
Myspace’s functionality depends largely on you having to explore other folks’ often poorly designed pages. That loses it’s luster after a bit.
I’m going to pimp my Myspace Death Watch facebook group – http://www.face...t=1021984119090
I think you have the wrong link, is this it? http://www.face...gid=63829830655
I started out on MySpace and felt like there wasn’t anything “My” about it. Mess is a good description. I went to Facebook. To me, it seemed as if MySpace was designed for children and Facebook for adults. The few MySpace friends I had have come to Facebook. I deleted my MySpace account. Lets hope the last person to leave MySpace turns out the lights.
How much of Facebook’s growth is spammers? With mass scripts to add friends on facebook and little anti-spam measure, spammers must be going crazy. Plus all the Koobface junk.
http://www.goog...ok+friend+adder
I wonder what the growth is when you strip out the spammers scammers and strippers. My bet is one quarter of the comcast numbers
First of all, comscore is only an estimate, not actual figures. they survey a few thousand people and multiply it for the entire population, like tv ratings. It’s only an estimate.
Also, someone should ask Myspace why people can’t submit feature suggestions to them anymore because the form isn’t working.
All the teens in my town are totally against Facebook, they won’t even try it. They’re so addicted to Myspace. They claim it’s false when I tell them Facebook is growing much faster and has more users. Apparently, says my uncultured town, Facebook is boring and ugly, while Myspace is so much fun and ‘pretty.’ Seriously, my high school has absolutely NO concept of API’s, interfaces, easy navigation, nice page styling, or anything for that matter. I’ve even sent my friends bit.ly links that redirect to Facebook and they won’t do it.
On another note, I wonder if those Fox dbags at Myspace have ever heard of an oh-so extremely new concept called Ajax…*sarcasm*