Friday, June 13, 2008

Facebook passes Myspace globally

Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook now has more global users than myspace - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/12/facebook-no-longer-the-second-largest-social-network/

Both are now sitting at 115m unique users worldwide.

The majority of Facebook's huge growth is coming from outside of the US - where myspace and Facebook are growing at a similar rate.

From the article: "Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market."

Myspace is fighting back with a redesign that is set to drop sometime soon, seeing the site remove a lot of the clutter and become a cleaner platform. They have also actively courted the developer community to bring some innovation to the site through third party apps ... a strategy well executed by Facebook.

2 comments:

Laurel Papworth said...

it might be helpful to remember that MySpace is a depth of content broadcast site (citizen journalist) whereas Facebook is a distribution (you can't BLOG on facebook) gated community site (citizen editor). So it's not exactly an either/or proposition, is it? :)

Ben Shepherd said...

I totally agree that it's not an either/or in terms of the capabilities of the 2 ... but I think for the majority of users across the 2 platforms it is sort of an either/or as they view both of them as connectors and will embrace the one that best allows this.

I love reading your blog btw Laurel! It's great.