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).
Good for MySpace
i no myspace is good how do you sigin to 1
I’d say this indicates something worse, evite is just passing myspace on their way down.
MySpace should be proud. So should Facebook.
I just don’t think Evite should be that worried either. Events created in a social environment aren’t necessarily the same as those created on Evite.
People go to Evite to create invitations for organized parties and the like. But on Facebook or MySpace you might just create a simple event for a small get together with friends.
Also, most events on social networking sites are really events. Taking a look at all my events in Facebook, I notice that not one of them requires me to actually go anywhere. They range from things like “Free iPhone Giveaway” to “National Puzzle Day.”
Spencer – Agreed. I think we’re talking about apples and oranges here when lumping them all under “events”. Sounds like there are the National Bagel Days (just an fyi to get a bagel on your own), big open events (anyone can show up), open events where people are invited, events but you need to rsvp,….. and evite (you invite a limited number of contacts to a private Birthday or Superbowl party).
MySpace is dead
I’m pretty sure you can take Myspace’s 700k and multiply it times 3 to get Facebook’s number.
pretty sure you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Pretty sure I do.
If Facebook’s 2.5 million events even averaged just 2 invites you are looking at 5 million invites. Think about it.
You bring up a good point. I’m not sure if they count each event or each person invited to the event as an invite.
*per month
You can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd.
omg!
harhar
Ain’t that something..lol
Shameless plug for a buddy but Martha Stewart Omni Media signed a pretty significant deal with http://pingg.com – a Web 2.0 event planning site – and even invested about $3M to boot.
Have a look if you are interested in the space.
Best,
George
Hmm, interesting…
Never heard about that before.
When the hell is the much ballyhooed MySpace Webmail going to be launched?
Where is this event planning totem pole? I want to go see it
The number of invites figure is quite meaningless. I’d be more interested in the number of people who responded to those invites – that’s a real indication of user engagement. Anyone can spam their social graph with blanket invites. But, if those invites were targeted somehow, and the response rate was 90% because of that, then that’s something to behold.
TC writers: I would love to see a good article on what happened to Evite. They started out well enough, but it’s as if something has sucked the life out of them. I’d be a great case study.
Purely out of laziness, I use Evite once a year to manage the invites to an annual event I’ve been doing since 2002. Every time it makes me want to call them up and demand to be put in charge of the team for 18 months or so. There’s just no reason it has to be that bad.
Interestingly enough, I JUST wrote a column about this @ http://www.flashrelations.com
Myspace is far behind Facebook now as far as growing users and hits, but they are constantly reinventing.
For a site whose entire purpose is to create and manage events and invitations, Evite is an absolutely horrible site to use! Among my friends, I don’t know anyone that likes the Evite experience. I struggled for half an hour yesterday trying to RSVP to two events, but the site seemed to be broken.
I had no idea MySpace even had events! But if MySpace can overtake Evites, whose name is synonymous with online event invites, then it really shows how bad Evites really is.
Facebook is far superiour. Facebook, however, needs to improve the experience for non-Facebook invitees. Not everyone has Facebook and in events with lots of non-Facebookers, many people seem to link to an Evite event from a Facebook event. Once they do that, they’ll have that market on lock!
Myspace needs to choose which market to dominate.
I have never received a MySpace Event invitation. I didn’t even know it existed.
However, I receive Evites all the time. It’s all in the name. Everybody knows what Evite is. Just like MapQuest. It may suck, but it’s the “Kleenex” of the market.
Facebook events suck
bahaha. No one used evite anymore either.
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