Myspace will lose its crown by September

Recent reports claim that former favourite social networking site MySpace is set to lose its top position to Facebook by September.

MySpace has always been the firm favourite with teeny-boppers and their friends, but with the rise of Facebook and the increasing number of people it is attracting from the young professionals market, MySpace looks set to be toppled. Facebook now welcomes approximately 150 000 new members each week, and has in the range of 30 million users. This contrasts the membership patterns emerging from MySpace where British visitors to the site numbered 6.8 million in April of this year, but had fallen to 6.5 million in May. Similarly, in America, which is the site’s biggest market, the number of people using the site in April was 57 million, but by May this had gone down to 56.6 million. Reasons for this seem to be the hype associated with Facebook, and also its perception as a more grown up version of MySpace. Problems are also caused by the difficulty in keeping users loyal to only one site when all social networking sites’ services are free. This, combined with the so called consumer ‘promiscuity’ with users being members of more than one site, is what is causing the rapid decrease in traffic to the MySpace website. Nielsen/Netratings, the market researchers who have released these figures also presented findings that 444 000 users in the UK were members of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo in May 2007.

The findings from Nielsen also show that Facebook’s membership in the UK has grown at 19 times the rate of MySpace’s, surging 523 per cent in the last six months. This seems set to be the face of things to come as Facebook’s popularity continues to increase. Although at the moment MySpace is still the more popular of the two, experts warned that if Facebook’s spectacular growth continued it would excede MySpace’s membership by September. MySpace has attempted to stem this tide of members away from its site by launching its own version of YouTube, MySpaceTV which allows members to share videos. However, with the recent introduction of independent applications that can be used within Facebook, MySpace’s new feature does not seem to give it any great advantage over its rivals. Time will tell whether experts’ forecasts over MySpace’s future come to fruition, but many believe Facebook will easily overtake it in no time at all.

Sources:

Times Online