Facebook Leapfrogs MySpace, But Not Completely

The word is out: MySpace has finally lost its crown as the king of social networking sites to Facebook.

According to figures released by comScore, Facebook claimed 70.28 million unique visitors in the U.S. during May, reflecting a 97 percent boost from the 35.6 million visitors it had in the same month last year.

MySpace had 70.26 million unique visitors in May, a 5 percent decline from the 73.7 million visitors it had in May of last year.

Twitter was third with 17.6 million unique visitors, a blazing 2,681 percent surge from the 633,000 users it had in the same month last year.

Classmates.com sites were fourth with 15.1 million visitors, a modest 2 percent increase from last year’s figure, while MyLife.com sites were fifth with 9.8 million visitors in May.

Windows Live Profile (9.7 million), Buzznet (9.3 million), Bebo (8.8 million), Digg (8.6 million) and Yahoo! Buzz (8.0 million) rounded out the list of the top 10 social networking sites in the U.S. in May, according to comScore.

Altogether, the social networking category boasted 147.0 million unique visitors in May, a 12 percent increase from 131.8 million visitors in May 2008.

The total U.S. Internet audience was 193.8 million in May, a 2 percent rise from 190.9 million last year.

Facebook may have won a big battle, but it has yet to win the war.

MySpace sites still dominate Facebook in terms of advertising.

In April, MySpace sites visitors saw 31.8 million display ads, or 46.9 percent of the total. Facebook, on the other hand, showed 25.0 million display ads to its visitors in the same month, a 36.9 percent share of the total.

Tagged (3.6 percent) and MocoSpace (1.5 percent) were the only other two social network sites to have more than 1 percent of the total ads viewed in the market.

According to eMarketer, MySpace stands to earn $495 million in ad revenue in 2009, more than double the $230 million Facebook is expected to earn in ad revenue.

Both figures are below 2008 revenue totals.

This advertising battle will become less lopsided soon, according to eMarketer.

“While MySpace still has a huge quantity of visitors, they are becoming less relevant for advertisers,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer.

Source:

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007145