MySpace Overtakes Evite On The Event Planning Totem Pole

MySpace has been taking quite a bit of heat lately for its stalling growth and waves of layoffs, but there are at least a few areas where the site has continued to do well, like MySpace Music, which still sees strong traffic. Now we’ve come across another under-recognized bright spot for MySpace: its Events platform, which has overtaken Evite, the web 1.0 startup that managed to gain a massive following despite a generally poor user experience, in terms of popularity. Evite claims to be the top event planning site on the web, reporting that it sees 25,000 invites per hour, or around 600,000 invitations sent per day. Now we’ve learned from a reliable source that MySpace is besting that by a significant margin, with around 700,000 invitations sent per day.

MySpace has been working to improve its events platform for some time, releasing a new application last March that was built by Slingshot Labs, MySpace’s secretive startup incubator. The new application’s biggest improvement was its integration of MySpace’s social graph — something that the older MySpace events application had largely failed to tap into. Since then the app has seen a number of improvements, including the ability for users to widely distribute (or ‘blast’) invitations to a single event to many of their friends, which has proven useful for the site’s many bands, and likely helped spur growth in the number of invitations sent overall.

Of course, the elephant in the room here is Facebook, which has a massively popular Events feature. But the social network doesn’t publish its stats, and when asked for comment it would only respond that the site sees “2.5 million events created each month”. This says nothing about the number of invitations sent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has far more than either MySpace or Evite (to give an idea, Evite says that it only gets 570 thousand events created per month — less than a quarter of what Facebook sees).