14 DAY TRIAL // There aren't many pieces of good news for MySpace these days. If it's not the drop in visitor numbers or the decline in time spent on the site, it’s massive firings in the US and elsewhere. Having been overtaken by Facebook in the US recently and with a looming revenue drop once the Google advertising deal ends, there's not much MySpace can be optimistic about, so new numbers from Nielsen showing a big rise in traffic to MySpace Music are sure to put some smiles on the faces of the social network's executives.
According to the data for June, traffic to the music.myspace.com subdomain has grown 190 percent since the service launched in September 2008. Meanwhile, year over year traffic has increased an impressive 1,017 percent but how exactly can you compare traffic numbers to those of June 2008 to a subdomain launched less than a year ago and how is that even relevant, you'd have to ask Nielsen.
Regardless of that, the site has now become the third largest online destination for music in the US, with 12 million unique visitors in June, having passed MTV Networks Music with its 11 million visitors and falling behind only AOL Music with 22 million and Yahoo Music with 20 million.
Not surprisingly, the most active users on MySpace music are from the 12 to 17-year-old group, who are 2.35 times more likely to visit the site than average Internet users, followed by those aged between 18 and 24, who are 2.2 times more inclined to access the site.
Video is also doing well on MySpace, with the social network having the most viewers in its category, 12 million, watching a total of 120 million video streams in June. But Facebook is coming strong from behind in this sector too, already having the same number of unique viewers but only 50 million streams last month.