Hitwise recently released a report on traffic to the top social networking sites documenting trends since August of 2007. While MySpace saw a drop of 10% over the year next to Facebook’s 50% increase, what surprised me is how long MySpace is retaining its crown. Typically social networking sites come and go in 3-5 year periods (sometimes even less). MySpace is infamous for its slow loading, horrific user designed pages that are an eye sore to most sane people. Granted, there are some exceptions, but for the most part my very occasional trips to any MySpace profile is painful.
Last August, MySpace garnered a whopping 75.04% of social networking traffic against Facebook’s 13.68%. In the past year, MySpace’s grip has weakened to 67.54% while Facebook’s grasp has grown stronger to 20.56%. Even month to month, MySpace is consistently declining and Facebook is growing. The billion dollar question (especially for those who’ve invested ad dollars into MySpace – ahem, Google) is how long until an outright collapse of MySpace.
Marketing consultants including myself predicted a significant decline in MySpace traffic several years back after Facebook first came on the scene. But the transition from Facebook to MySpace hasn’t been a fireworks display. We’ve pushed advertisers heavily toward Facebook and veered them away from MySpace for some time now. But MySpace keeps chugging along and continues to hold a hefty grip on the social networking market.
I believe the real question is why hasn’t Facebook captured more of a market hold? I personally strongly prefer Facebook over MySpace. Many young people and those in their upper 20s/30s say the same about Facebook. But MySpace is largely public while Facebook is more private. And MySpace has implanted itself into the “character” of so many teens, young adults and 30s/40s that many are hesitant to abort the ship completely, and so they do double social site duty mixing their time between their MySpace and Facebook.
While I am concerned that Facebook isn’t stronger, there are some excellent indications that its platform (which is steadily being improved and with remarkably useful new features being regularly added, many through their unique relationship with outside vendors) is here for the long term. Along with a steady increase in traffic to the Facebook site, the average visitor stay time per month is also on the rise. MySpace average visitor stay time has held steady over the past year at 30.5 minutes per month. Facebook has seen some improvement – August of ‘07, they were averaging just under 16 minutes per month. Now they are up to 19.5 minutes. Maybe we’ll blame some of the MySpace time monopoly to the excruciatingly slow page load time.
The gradually weakening presence of MySpace and the less than phenomenal takeover by Facebook means one thing: there is hope for other social networking site entrepreneurs and their venture investors. The world is waiting for something even better, but that even better site is going to require an paradigm shift to be successful. While taking the best out of MySpace and Facebook will be essential, you’ll have to distance yourself as far away from the standardized “box” and dream up creative strategies to take social networking to an altogether new level. Good luck.
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