Tuesday, July 10. 2007
The rumours are finally turning into reality with many industry experts predicting that Myspace will be replaced as the king of the social networking kingdom as soon as September 07. Facebook's growing popularity has pulled away a large chunk of MySpace's audience, with the number of British visitors to MySpace dipping to 6.5 million in May of this year - down from 6.8 million in April. Myspace, which has reigned supreme for the last couple of years, suffered the same trend in the US (it's biggest market) with traffic falling to 56.6 million in May, from 57 million a month earlier.
According to Nielsen//Netratings, the market researchers, Facebook's audience in the UK has grown at 19 times the rate of MySpace's over the past six months, surging 523 per cent. The new statistics illustrate the opening of the online social networking market as well as the lack of user loyalty amongst such sites.
Read more: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article2000500.ece
According to Nielsen//Netratings, the market researchers, Facebook's audience in the UK has grown at 19 times the rate of MySpace's over the past six months, surging 523 per cent. The new statistics illustrate the opening of the online social networking market as well as the lack of user loyalty amongst such sites.
Read more: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article2000500.ece
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
No suprises there then! In one of our workshops at markettiers4dc - see - http://www.markettiers4dc.com/workshops.html - I talk about the 'Cycle of Novelty' when it comes to UGC/Social Networking Sites - in that whilst I totally understand the huge impact they have had in our media diet and that marketers and PRs need to understand how best to engage with the users that are addicted to them, it is also clear that there appears to be a database of people that simply move from one Social Network to the next every 12-18 months. Think about it - When was the last time you visited Friends Reunited? In 1995 all the fuss was about Geocities, then it was Friends Reunited which led the way til 2003 when MySpace became the next big thing - that was until Bebo starting to make up ground when it launched in the UK around 2005. For a short while everyone was talking about Second Life and now it's all about Facebook.
Now, with the information above, not that I'd be one to question his intelligence, but if I was in Mark Zuckerberg's no doubt expensive shoes, I may have been tempted with the $900m that he's alleged to have been offered for Facebook, rather than turn it down. But hey, thats just me - I mean, how many millions do you need?
Now, with the information above, not that I'd be one to question his intelligence, but if I was in Mark Zuckerberg's no doubt expensive shoes, I may have been tempted with the $900m that he's alleged to have been offered for Facebook, rather than turn it down. But hey, thats just me - I mean, how many millions do you need?
Most interesting for me as an original Friendster user, then a myspace user, and now a Facebook user is the amount of people I know who are discovering social networking (via Friendster) for the first time. Its opening up this new world to my friends in their late 20s or early 30s who thought it was a little too 'daggy' before to be online posting pictures of yourself or writing on someone's 'wall'.
Slightly off topic, but very interesting from a sociological persective are these two essays from Danah Boyd, an academic who is very interested in social networking and web 2.0 stuff...
http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
The latter more controversially tries to understand the appeal of both sites to particular users in terms of their 'class' within society.
The rest of her blog is here: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
And some interesting 2007 predictions by blogger Fred Stutzman for social networking trends from the start of the year...
http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/01/social-networking-in-2007.html
Which ones will we see come true?
Slightly off topic, but very interesting from a sociological persective are these two essays from Danah Boyd, an academic who is very interested in social networking and web 2.0 stuff...
http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
The latter more controversially tries to understand the appeal of both sites to particular users in terms of their 'class' within society.
The rest of her blog is here: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
And some interesting 2007 predictions by blogger Fred Stutzman for social networking trends from the start of the year...
http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/01/social-networking-in-2007.html
Which ones will we see come true?
