MySpace still beating Facebook and Bebo in to the dust
It seems that despite the hype, and obvious growth in new users on Facebook over the last year, this doesn’t mean that the social network has come anywhere near overtaking market leader MySpace for visits in the USA.
We’ve all been guilty of it, with even me talking up the new kid on the block, and detailing five reasons I thought Facebook kicked MySpace’s ass, but it seems at the end of the day, or year in this case, web traffic shows that MySpace is still the king of the social networks, and by a surprisingly huge margin.
Traffic analysts Hitwise have released a chart showing the market share of U.S. Internet visits to the top 10 social networking sites.
It shows that despite MySpace losing visitors over the last year, and Facebook gaining, MySpace still dominates all pretenders to its throne with 72.32% of visits. Facebook is is a long way behind on second with just 16.03% of the overall figure.
That’s a shockingly large gap, and I almost choked on my cornflakes when I read it. I know personally that my friends have been leaving MySpace in droves, and visiting a lot less. In fact, some have renamed it MySpaz because it’s seen as so lame.
On the other hand, the number of people finding me, adding me, and of course, sending me spam and random crap on Facebook has risen steadily over the past year.
To get to the third placed Bebo, you have to drop all the way down to 1.09%, which is another huge drop.
1. MySpace 72.32%
2. Facebook 16.03%
3. Bebo 1.09%
4. Black Planet 1.04%
5. Club Penguin 0.80%
6. Gala Online 0.76%
7. My Yearbook 0.73%
8. hi5 0.63%
9. Classmates 0.55%
10. Yahoo! 360 0.54%
As Facebook grows though, it does seem to making similar mistakes to MySpace when it was on its way up. Not only have we had the whole privacy controversy, when Facebook was sharing supposedly private information over online shop purchases, and sharing it in people’s news streams, the latest is an application being asked to be taken off.
The app in question is the incredibly popular Scrabulous, which as you may have guessed from the name, is being claimed to be too similar to the Scrabble board game.
Hasbro and Mattel claim the game, which attracts over 500,000 users a day, infringes the copyright of the word based puzzle game.
So MySpace is still the popular choice, but for how long? Facebook is catching up, and I can definitely see a day when it overtakes the News Corporation owned site.
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