Wednesday, January 28, 2009

MySpace Is Going Down

The signs are there: Facebook is slowly but surely overtaking MySpace and it's only a matter of time until MySpace goes the way of Friendster. While some claim that Friendster isn't dead yet and shouldn't be written off, the signs seem pretty clear to me that, at least in the US, Friendster isn't even on the social networking map. Just click on "share this" at the bottom of that post I just linked to--the one claiming Friendster is still a viable competitor to Facebook and MySpace. Do you see icons for Facebook and MySpace? Yes. Now how about Friendster? I rest my case.

I will give you that he's talking about global and I'm talking about domestic, so he makes a good case for Friendster's viability in a world-wide sense. However, I maintain that it's a no-contest here in the US, especially among the newly minted social media users--any mention of Friendster would most likely elicit a "huh?"

Rather than me taking the time to summarize the current demographics of Facebook, MySpace and Friendster, you can check out the results page for each in Quantcast. Quantcast is a site that allows you to look up demographic information for basically any site. (or maybe not every site--I guess you can try it and see.)

Actually, I take that back about the summaries and making you do it yourself: here are the total monthly US users (at the time of this post) for each of these sites:

  • MySpace: 68.2M

  • Facebook: 56.2M

  • Friendster: 2.2M


Yes, MySpace is still ahead of Facebook, but refer back to the first link in this post; the time is fast approaching when Facebook will overtake MySpace. Then read Danny Brown's post about job cuts at Fox Interactive Media, MySpace's parent company. Then place your bets about when MySpace will be swallowed by Facebook.

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